The Evil Truth of Perception

How many mornings do you wake up look in the mirror and think "There is nothing I would change about myself?" We are pretty sure when most women look in the mirror they think several things negatively. Well, needless to say we are no different. As we look at our time of weight loss over the last year, it's still difficult to get the we are unhealthy mentality out of our heads! Many times when we look in the mirror all we see is the girl who was 50-70 pounds heavier. Or we see the 20-30 pounds we are desperately trying still trying to get off.


Several mornings of inner dialogue with the following conversations. 

We step on the scale. "Damn you scale. I will throw you out the window." "You are a liar scale!" "WTH! There is no way!" (Either good or bad! Hahaha!) Or perhaps..."Yes! Starvation was a success for the last two days. I will never maintain it but I'll take it today." (Side note: Neither of us have starved ourselves during this process, neither should you 😉.) The worst is when you feel as though you have done everything right, you've worked out, didn't have a cheat day (yet, we save those for after our weigh in days) or you are just plain feeling really good and then the number is higher than you've seen in a while.

Clothing issues: "I have nothing that fits! Everything I own makes me look fat. I'll send a pic to Andrea/Tegan to ask if I look ok." Clothes are difficult because as we lose weight we don't have an abundance of clothes! As we all know, the bipolar weather of Kansas doesn't help this situation either. So when we find that magical outfit in the morning the angels sing and we rejoice. Or we put on our tents and decide we are eating 5 chocolates for breakfast instead of our protein shake. Sometimes you've got to feed the raging inner fat kid. Ours have been getting fed a lot more than they usually do here recently.

We realize this all perception and it takes a change of mindset to beat this inner dialogue. This is easier said than done and we want to say it's OK and it's normal. The important part is that you need to take a step back every now and again and put your perspective into reality. What's it really like? So we might have to ask "Do I really look like a cow? Is it possible to gain 50 pounds back by eating unhealthy one day? Am I going to survive emotionally?" Though we could probably argue with ourselves to say yes or no, however it applies to the above, the truth to all of these answers is opposite of what we normally say!

This week we challenge you to take perspective of what you are doing. Count the little successes and be proud of yourself. Maybe you ate a smaller meal or maybe you walked an extra mile or maybe you finally compared those before and after pictures to realize your small victories are actually adding up to a large one! Whatever it is keep in mind you are doing something just by reaching out for encouragement from us or other friends. 

Remember no matter what size of clothes you are, you're beautiful just like we are! Do what makes you feel good inside. Also a pictures says a million words. Take those before and after pictures or progress pictures. Our favorite thing to do is go digging through your old photos (FaceBook can be really helpful for this) and find you at your largest. You will have an Oh goodness please tell me I didn't really look like that moment. Nothing makes you feel better on a "fat" day then running across a picture when you realize your successes. We both kind of needed this for this week as we continue our health journey. Perception really can be our worst enemy and a picture can help to win the battles over it.




You've got this!
The Fitster Sisters