Here it is – my blog from several months ago that started to explore the contents of my head on my way to 321lbs.  You’ll see some repetition – starting to identifying that I monitor everything and actively replace my negative with huge personality positives.   I’ve said some of this on this blog too – but, well, it’s pretty much the hugest of conclusions for me and the pieces of this are what I’ve met in the mirror many times – so, it’s pretty much why I’m here.  Here’s the repost…

“Let’s start further back:

I am very, very proud of and very, very grateful for my family.  My childhood has been described by many people as Pollyanna – and it’s easy to see why.  Two functional, smart, loving parents with 3 healthy girls, the requisite cat and dog and single family home with money enough to get by with good management.  We communicate and express ourselves well.  We have good ethical and moral upbringings.  We are untouched by significant disease, injury, disability, abuse and hardship.  We had chores, curfews and expectations, camping trips, good grades, a home church, manners and scrapbooks to document it all!  And, today, we are successful, interesting, active people.  My parents have crafted their retirement beautifully and are truly present and engaged with their own lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.  Us girls are happily and healthily married and successful in our fields of medicine, theology and the arts.  My niece and nephew are healthy and beautiful.  My dogs have a perfect dog life.

I don’t feel this as Pollyanna – because that word smacks of artificiality and this has all been my real life.  Not fake.  Not crafted.  Just hugely fortunate.  And still, somehow, I managed to get to 321 lbs and not really be able to effectively deal with that until I was 30 years old.  I find that I can’t say a whole lot (I don’t consciously know a whole lot) about where/how the failures happened in that process.  I could probably make a decent record of what programs we tried, but that’s the logistics, not the emotion. There is probably more exploration there that would be useful – looking at scrapbooks and trying to remember how I felt as I grew up and grew larger.  I know we talked actively about it through the years and struggled with the attempts fairly openly – at least while active attempts were happening.  And I know some of the last triggers that led to reversing the process:  not physically being able to keep up with my impression of myself or all that I intended to experience and having the stability of schedule/job/home to have it take over with full intensity and support.

When I sat down to try and say what I could about my teens and twenties, I started with what was obvious to me.  In short, for a long, long time I have been very mindful of how I frame and present myself.  I choose when and how to look at my reflection.  I often balance negative feelings and thoughts with good counters or with plans and resolve to fix them. I started to list some of the self-dialogue that I know has been with me for these last 25+ years.  I thought, at first, that these were just the expected things – comparing myself to other overweight people, being aware of myself in space – fitting in chairs, holding my posture, etc.  But pretty quickly, I realized that my inner dialogue goes WAY beyond a healthy awareness and observation.  It goes WAY beyond my physical weight.  And way beyond equipoise.  I leapt on the word equipoise earlier this year – the mind’s ability to serenely monitor one’s thoughts and actions and correct for bias and shortcoming.  There is not as much serenity in my usual monitoring as I’d like to think.  To repeat some of what I find that I *constantly* have thought about: