Out of Body Experience

Haven’t blogged for a while so I thought I should check in.

I’m still trying to get my head and body around this Hashimoto’s thang. For over ten years I’ve been extremely content with my size and weight, I didn’t even own a scale. My size/ weight fluctuated but what remained constant was my emotional balance. Prior to coming to my happy place I dieted and exercised for 20 years with NO results, except emotional despair, guilt and self loathing. I was accused of lying by family members, doctors and acquaintances when asked about my eating habits and physical activity. Time and time again I was brought to tears by the frustration of it all, not the frustration of the hard work without any results but mostly by the frustration of nobody believing me. My body and I were at odds, completely disengaged, I was so done attacking myself that I finally gave in and just LIVED. I kept going to the gym and shaking my bon bon but NEVER thought of a scale or my pants size, what mattered was that I was out and about, NOT what my body looked like. We could live separate but equal, I would keep doing what I was doing and it could just keep doing nothing. Now that we were on the same page I could manage my expectations (which were nil) and all was rainbows and unicorns.

Fast forward a few years. While in grad school 3 years ago I dropped 20 pounds with no effort. I was totally underwhelmed and emotionally detached for I knew NOT to assign any gravity to this weight loss. My body has a history of untrustworthy behavior so I refused to allow my head to buy into this morph. Looking back I am confident (thanks to my superior self diagnosis skills and google) that due to the16 months of extreme stress I mainlined my thyroid with all those wacky hormones it was lacking thereby turning me into normal person who burns and stores. Now with the addition of my thyroid meds my body is totally changing, pounds are falling off as well as my pants… but… I can’t get roped in. I don’t want to become attached to this loss because I am so frightened that something will snap, my pants will tighten up and I will be left in the gutter broken hearted. It has taken me so long to be happy in my head, detached from the physical, yet I feel that with each fraction of an inch off my hips I am setting myself up for emotional failure. I started weighing myself at the Y, just once a month, but even so I went into a total tail spin a few weeks ago when I discovered that I had gained a HALF a pound. Poor Swason had to text me off the ledge when I feverishly typed out my crazy into my blackberry. Turns out it was a fluke, I actually lost weight, but still…. I HATE that I care. My body is like a mermaid summoning my head into the cold deep waters, I know it’s dangerous in there…but I’m just so curious…oooo sparkly… maybe something good is there… I’m just gonna take a shallow dive under…