I get it now

Losing weight is a funny thing. You're body changes in many ways. It shrinks, it gets stronger, fitter, faster. Some bits get firmer while others get wobblier. Friends and family start to comment on how good your looking but your brain is struggling to comprehend it all.

After talking to a few others ladies that have lost significant amounts of weight I can see I'm not alone. My brain still "sees" me as fat. I still walk into a clothes store an head for the large or plus size clothes. I shake my head if someone picks up a size 12 as I don't think it will go anywhere near me, even though they now do. 

Trying to re-teach the brain is going to take time.  You become conditioned to being a number and it gets ingrained into who you are and it weighs you down. I'm still working on not thinking about the numbers but to be honest it's not easy.

Its only now when I see a recent photo of myself that I realise how far I've come. It doesn't really make sense but I still see a much larger person when I see myself in the mirror but if I see a picture it hits home.  I saw a couple of pictures of me taken on the weekend during a workout and it took me a while to actually comprehend that the legs I were looking at were mine and even when I look in the mirror today I have trouble believing that they are one and the same. Sound's strange doesn't it?

I could never understand when watching something like Bronte's Story how someone that was so thin could actually see themselves as fat. It's only from starting to comprehend what's going on in my own brain that I now actually have some understanding of what's going on in the mind of someone with an eating disorder like anorexia.  While I'll never truly understand it I can start to sympathise with the internal battle that our brain gives us.

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