Being fat is hard. Losing weight is hard. Maintaining is hard. Choose your hard.

When I read that, I thought: This here is a not-so-pretty slice of truth. I still come back to that nugget of wisdom from time to time.

Many websites I enjoy are very empowering to read because the writers are cheerleaders for all of us. Unfortunately, I have never been much of a cheerleader. I do support people, and get excited for their successes, and want all of us to do well. But for some reason I also feel compelled to point out how hard losing weight can be. I haven’t reached maintenance yet, but I’m 100% sure that’s pretty tough too.

One thing I pointed out in an earlier post, The Cost of Weight Loss, was that being overweight costs us, too. Like Lyn says, we can choose our “hard,” but there’s really no way around that aspect of life.

I also believe there is redemption for us in the hard times. People are so beautiful to me when they are being brave and trying their hardest and persevering in the face of obstacles. It’s an amazing side of humanity that simply can’t shine on the “easy” days. Please know the next time you are going through something tough and doing your very best despite the circumstances, that I think you are freaking gorgeous, more so even than on the days when the sun is shining and everything is going your way and you are being recognized right and left for your achievements.

I posted a new progress photograph last night, and I’ve received some incredibly kind compliments on the changes I’ve made. That feels wonderful! At the same time, I have to acknowledge that for every progress photo you see here, there are about 60 non-progress-picture days where I am just plodding along, doing my thing. And it takes every single of of those days to make a progress picture.

You may be in between progress photos of your own right now, and I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that where you’re at is vital. You are making your progress photo happen. It’s in the works, and every day that you keep up your good work is another day closer to that unveiling.

Today I’ve been eating normally again; well, my new-normal, with the calorie budget. I am just feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and little electrical wires are crossed in my brain or something. It will pass. But it’s hard sometimes.

I think that setting a formal Challenge for myself may have triggered some of my stressed-out feelings. Also: giving up diet soda after an almost-two-decades-long love affair has been rough. I haven’t cracked, but I just feel rotten this week and I guess my body is going through withdrawal.

Today I totally cried at boot camp. WAH. I get really flustered whenever we have to do something more complex than squats, push-ups, sit-ups, etc. If the exercise involves coordinating multiple movements, I just am lost. Today that fact was very pronounced and I felt on-the-spot and embarrassed at my lack of coordination. Before I knew it, I had burst into tears. Coach talked me through the steps for the umpteenth time and I pulled myself together, but my nerves were just raw tonight. Ugh.

I’ll keep trucking, but I’m rethinking this whole challenge thing. Sometimes life comes up with it’s own little challenge for us, no assistance needed. That being said, this isn’t an excuse to run back to the sweet toxic embrace of Diet Dr Smack; I’m still firm on my new no-soda stance.

There MUST be a way out.

*claw, claw*

No one will care if I come back with a post tomorrow about what a demented idea it was.

*scratch, scratch*

You are going to lose your mind if you haven’t already. Seriously. Go home to M and the Bean. Continue with the old way of doing things, and accept the likelihood of mediocre progress. It is your birthright!

*yowl*

At this point I had reached boot camp and it was really too late to turn around. Sometimes this will happen.

Throughout boot camp, I was in considerable gastrointestinal distress. I swear it was the Lean Pocket I ate for lunch. (When I mentioned this to M, he wasn’t surprised. “No one really knows what’s in those things.” It is true that the “chicken” in the pocket resembles meat plywood more than anything else.)

The upshot is that I had a bad stomach cramp and felt like puking off and on throughout the workout—especially after the sprints! Still, I did my best to keep up with the exercises and avoid Coach’s evil eye.

As I limply dragged myself back to my car afterward, I reflected that boot camp must have something in common with childbirth. They say that the only reason women have more than one child is because they are blessed with forgetting the excruciating pain of labor, remembering only the joy of holding their new infant. Driving home, I knew I’d be heading back to boot camp for my Thursday night session, despite the fact that I had spent much of the last hour on the verge of vomiting over the edge of a parking garage. It’s all very strange.

In short: I am still committed to my 12-Week Tiny Glow Fat Loss Challenge. In fact, I am getting my initial body comp analysis done tomorrow at 8 AM!

Both of these pictures were taken today within minutes of each other:

It’s all about angles. Someday I hope to reach a point where the angle is irrelevant to me. All of the angles are a representation of me, and deserve to be accepted. At the same time, there is no single angle that holds the truth.

These days, I will not accept being less than I can be in terms of fitness, but I find it easier to achieve this when I feel more relaxed about how others view me. Going to the gym, fumbling around with dumbbells, taking a walk in the neighborhood . . . all of these are so much simpler when I focus on how I am feeling (strong, purposeful, on my way) and less on what angle someone might be viewing me at.

Admittedly I plan to reach a weight and body-fat percentage where none of my angles have multiple chins. But in the meantime I will continue to work on not giving undue importance to what everyone else may or may not be thinking about me as I pursue my goals. Because the angle is more about who is holding the camera than it is about the subject of the photograph.

But like a storm, I blew myself out eventually. After a while, we went and got vanilla cones at McDonald’s (150 calories) and came home and I sat on the couch with the Bean on my lap and ate my vanilla cone, and when I had finished I was just so tired. It was time to call it a night and hope for a better tomorrow.

Which today has been! I woke up at 8 AM, ate breakfast, did my SparkPeople 15-minute abs video, and headed to the gym to do my 30 minutes of cardio and meet up with a co-worker who taught me how to do some free weights and mat exercises. I rarely interact with the outside world on the weekend aside from necessary errands, so for me, meeting up with someone to work out is real progress.

Also progress: getting more familiar with the weights area of the gym. Having someone there with me made me feel less like an intruder, and I came home from the workout feeling great. I went to Borders with M and picked up a few magazines, and then we came home and walked the Bean at a leisurely pace in the neighborhood. The sun was out, I felt the simple blessing of life on me, and my faith in the passing nature of the bad nights on this journey was reaffirmed.

Which is not to make light of the bad nights. They are very real and very painful. But they pass and if I make it through without doing anything major to spite myself or anyone else, I am so glad.

Although I hadn’t planned to take another progress photo until I lost 7 more pounds, I was inspired today and decided to go for it a few weeks early:

I really empathize with Ali as she describes what it felt like to totally “lose herself,” a feeling which both led to and then was perpetuated by her increasing weight through her late teens and twenties. I don’t know if I ever really had myself in the first place, but I definitely relate to the sensation of feeling like you are just drifting through life, letting it happen to you, trying to just get by and protect yourself.

I got a lot of pleasure out of reading about how she reconnected with family members and some close friends as she worked to drop the weight and live more purposefully. For a long time I have felt pretty disconnected from almost everyone but M, and that is pretty much all my doing. Ali touches a little on her reasons for disconnecting, such as not wanting people she loved to see her feeling so lost and call her on her BS. What I think is great is how some of her relationships changed but were strengthened as the family member or friend was able to become part of her life transformation. She included them, and most of them seemed to really rise to the occasion.

When will I open up and give relationships (besides the one I have with my boyfriend) a try? What is holding me back? Everyone wants to feel human connection, right? Why do I hang back and not make the effort?

I don’t know exactly, but somehow I think the root of it all is fear.

Ali’s philosophy is that if you believe you can become the person you were always meant to be, then you can manifest that belief, you can be that person if you keep the faith.

Do I believe I can abandon my fear and my protective, isolating outer layer? Can I be a strong woman?

I remember being a little girl, telling my grandfather (who once published a novel) that I too wanted to be a writer. I did want it, with all my heart. He smiled his wonderful smile and said to me, “But wouldn’t you rather be happy?”

He was referring to the heartache and the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to be an artist of any kind . . . but the truth is, the only thing guaranteed to make me unhappy was not doing something I truly cared about. For years and years I have felt so incredibly far away from that girl who knew what she wanted to be. By shedding this excess weight, part of me is hoping I’ll strip away all my preconceptions about what I should be doing with my life and get back to what actually has meaning for me.

Weight loss will not make me feel normal. I may feel more at ease and less self-conscious in some instances, but it will not turn me into someone else. Weight loss will not make me less emotional or less squeamish. Weight loss will not make me suddenly acceptable in certain circles. Weight loss will not give me back the years I spent obese, or help me to forget certain things, or give me a sudden penchant for public speaking.

Nevertheless. Weight loss will take weight off of me. I carry a heavy bag to work most days, and today as I hefted it, I thought: I have probably already lost this much weight. It’s heavy! How am I carrying so much around every day? I have many more backpacks to lose still.

Weight loss, the journey, will boost confidence in my ability to work consistently and faithfully toward a valuable goal.

Weight loss will spare me certain anxious doctor’s visits and costly medications that would be part of a parallel, alternate future—the one in which I did not lose the weight.

Weight loss continues to reinforce the value of physical activity in creating a balanced life. The movement is good for my head, heart, and body.

Don’t give up. This is still my mantra.

In the past two days I experienced a major mood slump that threw me totally off-kilter. I simultaneously contemplated eating my previous words and re-joining Weight Watchers, eating three tubular tacos from Hula Hut at a time, reinventing my entire life, and what the bloody point of my existence on this earth is, if there is one. Unfortunately, this will happen to me periodically. It’s like stepping unexpectedly into a swampy pit, thrashing around violently, choking on the mud and detritus, gasping for breath, and then being unceremoniously tossed back up onto solid ground again covered in grime but still alive and kicking. You wipe your face off and cautiously peer around to see if any irreparable damage has been done while you were flailing.

I’m okay, things are okay, and so is my weight loss commitment. We made it out okay, if a little nauseous.

I think that if I do re-join Weight Watchers despite my previous declaration of reporting to no one but myself, it will be with a different motivation than usual. If I seek out weekly meetings again, I will be doing so not as an excuse to quit my current plan, “live it up” eating lots of junk for several days, and then “start fresh,” but rather to supplement my current plan with a new element.

Truth be told, although my weight is no one’s responsibility or business but my own, and although I have lots of amazing online support for my weight loss . . . sometimes I get a bit lonely doing this thing. Especially when I’m battling depressive dips in my mood. Lately it seems that, particularly at the office, weight loss can be a lonely road, simply because of the abundance of off-plan food that makes its way to the break room this time of year.  Maybe regular face-to-face encounters with fellow weight-loss warriors would make me feel less isolated in my daily determination not to give up or give in to being less than I can be in this facet of my life.

I do not know. But I am admitting the possibility that I need people, the humanity of their inane comments alongside their more insightful and revealing moments.

I still have some mud on me from my time in the swamp, but I stayed on plan the whole time, and I managed not to do myself any real harm. I worked out during my lunch break today. My hair was still damp from a shower when I returned to work and my face was pink. I am not a perfectly groomed specimen of humanity. But I am trying to be a better me, one who doesn’t give up on herself.