The Mirror Lies

First of all, I'm excited to announce that I've been awarded top prize in the contest for World's Worst Blogger.  Okay, so it's not official, but I do realize I've been absent for a very long time.

The truth is that I had a really difficult year and gained back a lot of my weight, got depressed about it, came out of my funk and got back on track, then got back off track, blah-blah-blah.  So here I am again, after a weigh-in today that reinforced my need to get back on track.

I do have happy news though.  My friend Mandy (I've mentioned her before) reached her LIFETIME goal at Weight Watchers today!  Yay, Mandy!  I wish I had known it would  be today, because I had planned to make her a sash and crown for the occasion.  Since I missed it, she'll just have to settle for this sad little substitute. Here you go, Mandy, a crown for your achievement!

Ta-Daaaa!!

I've been thinking about how we let our thinking mess us up so often.  Mandy just returned from the beach, and she mentioned that even though she was at goal weight and thinner and healthier than she has been in a very long time, she still looked in the mirror and saw a fat girl in a bathing suit looking back at her.  (I might add that when I saw her at the meeting today, I immediately noticed how thin she looked.)  We discussed this quite a bit in our meeting, and as expected, most of us confessed to feeling this way even when, in reality, we're looking our best.

I thought of that discussion when I saw this:

Source: http://themetapicture.com/page/42/

How true is that!?  I wonder why it's sometimes so hard for us to see the reality of our achievements rather than the  tiny so-called flaws that make us human.  My hope is that I will be able to look at myself in the mirror and see someone who can do this, once and for all, realizing that goal weight is not the end by any means.  I think that accepting my looks - good and bad - is a large part of loving and accepting myself as a whole, even if I'm nowhere near my healthy weight.  And my hope is the same for all of us, that we can see our own beauty without comparing ourselves to the images of perfection that are impossible to attain, whether we're at our best size or not.