Creating self-love after unhealthy weight loss

Rapid Transformation

Flame emoji/flame emoji/flame emoji.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be THRILLED to get that kind of feedback as an Instagram comment. But there was a sheepish gnawing on my insides, And this weird internal jab I had to ward off. Because I knew why all of a sudden I was getting said flame emojis and “you look GREAT” comments. I’d lost thirty pounds in a span of 6 months. To the outside eye, “I was killin’ it”

I was, indeed, back at what numbers would dictate as a healthy weight. I looked the way I looked in my lightest of days, and when I say lightest I’m referring to lightness of spirit, not just poundage. I looked the way I looked before I’d begun roller coaster circuits of anti-anxiety medication, before I’d had difficult school year after difficult school year, before life threw a succession of batting cage curveballs at me at a breakneck pace. I looked the way I looked from pictures on Big Sur hiking trails and teaching my first ever lesson as a student teacher. But on the inside, I was miserable.

Double-Edged Before and After

This time around, my weight loss wasn’t attributed to training for a half marathon for breast cancer research. It wasn’t attributed to eating healthier foods. It wasn’t attributed to walking to work every day (I’d stopped doing that.) My weight loss was directly related to equal parts: Secondary Traumatic Stress from September through February, neglecting self care from September Through February, and then accelerated by my first major depressive episode once the pandemic merged on our global landscape and it was too much for my achey breakey little head to handle.

I looked better than I’d looked in YEARS, but I felt less like myself than I’d ever be able to conceive. I lost touch with many friends, felt myself become incapable of expressing gratitude with my family, and I felt like I was moving through quicksand.

But here’s the catch. Because I’m now healthy, and happy, and enjoy the taste of food again, and don’t have 90-calorie days, I started to put a modest amount of weight back on. My first thought? Instead of “Thank GOODNESS I’m reaching equilibrium again”? It was rather a flood of thoughts: People won’t like you as much when you start gaining weight again. You’re not going to look very good zoom teaching when you start gaining weight again. You’re definitely not going to have any luck with dating once you start gaining weight again. Everyone who complimented you on your weight loss is going to change their minds about their compliments.

Even though my weight loss was a symptom from one of the most tumultuous periods of my entire life, I felt so backwards-validated by the body-image-feedback that I was terrified of the healthy moves my body was making to restore itself. Awful, right? The thing is though, I bet I’m not the only one who talks to themselves like this. Y’all. We need to be nicer to ourselves. But we already knew that. So how then, right?

My self-love challenge

My challenge to myself, and to everyone out there, is to ask yourself: what about you can a scale NOT measure? The twinkle in your eye? Your sense of humor? How much you care about your loved ones? Even external ones are fine, too: your ability to pick the perfect outfit for any occasion? Your dimples? It is our responsibility to not attach our self-love to image standards that have been arbitrarily assigned by society and which, in ourselves, will inevitably ebb and flow within our lives. Even seasonally.

It is also our responsibility to not attach our self-love to others’ response of our physical appearance. And that takes WORK. It is also our responsibility to ourselves to create a deep, deep love for all parts of us. Even if we know that as humans, we’re not going to be wild about all of our attributes all of the time. But allowing ourselves to live by beliefs dictated by numbers going up and down on a scale measured by mass and tissue and muscle and hormones and periods of life? It’s up to us to get a little more creative and compassionate with how we create our belief systems related to our self-worth and identities.

A few Starting points

So how do we do this? To be honest, I’m still creating my practices of self-love that detach myself from body image. But here are some strategies that I’ve been able to use:

1. Make that list of qualities that you love about yourself that a scale simply cannot measure. Put that list somewhere you can retrieve whenever you want. Look at it, frequently.
2. Accept, accept, accept. The first step to loving myself regardless of the number on the scale was knowing that it was going to go back up again. Suffering is, by any other phrase, the rejection of reality. If I’m being real with myself, I don’t WANT the number on the scale to reflect days when I only had coffee and a banana, left dozens of texts unanswered, and stared out the window for hours on end. The minute I accept that I’m not going to look the way I did in May, the less my inner critic is going to rear its head during future opportunities to do its thang.
3. Do your darndest to attach exercise to health, not weight loss. Yes, as moving breathing beings we are built to stretch and run and strengthen. But nowhere is it stated that it’s synonymous with looking like Peleton commercials. Congratulate yourself on the ways you’re keeping yourself healthy and thriving, rather than on numbers that only tell you so much.
4. Treat yourself with gentleness and care. Make sure to keep tabs on your own wellness. If you notice a surge or decrease in weight or any other vitals-related details, do a metaphorical temperature check. Is everything okay? Am I getting what I need, physically, emotionally, and mentally?
5. Practice gratitude towards your body and what it can do for you. What do your legs allow you to accomplish? What does your smile, and your mouth, allow you to convey and express? What do your arms allow you to reach for? How does your one, precious, human body allow you to engage with the world around you?
6. Create self-love through the act of self-compassion. Self compassion is the act of giving yourself the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend. It’s acknowledging that it’s messy to be human sometimes, that we’re all connected by shared experiences, and that we’re not going to get it right 100% of the time. When we begin to treat ourselves with the same compassion that we would treat a loved one, it creates impactful buy-in from ourselves to love ourselves, as well. You can read more about it at https://self-compassion.org/. I swear by it.

The Creative Process of Cultivating Self-Love

The point of this isn’t to imply that loving ourselves should be as simple as waving a magic wand. We all know it’s not that easy. But while self-love isn’t something that’s achieved overnight, it is something that can be created through a series of practices. I’m actively working on it on a daily basis. And it may be a lifelong practice, who knows! But I urge you to try along with me. Because if you only knew how “WOW” you are, you’d be absolutely floored 🙂