Is ninety-nine failing?

The real truth is that the perfectionist that lives within me is really cruel sometimes. There are times when her relentless pursuit of achievement helps me push beyond my limits. But most of the time her demands are so intense and the burden of her expectations so heavy that I am crushed by them. For all the evidence of hard work that people can see, it’s the inner battles that are much harder fought. In fact, those battles rage endlessly and many times I fight the same ones over and over again – overcoming the demons once doesn’t put them to rest for good.

For instance, as I sit here nearly paralyzed by the anxious question of “what if I don’t make it to 100 pounds by September 26”, I can hear her in my head telling me that 99 pounds would be a failure. Really? Is that really what I’m going with? Ninety nine pounds… failing? I would never let anyone say something so demeaning and cruel to anyone that I love. Yet I realize just how often those horrible internal tapes play and I don’t even HEAR them.

I wasn’t going to write about this because I didn’t really want anyone to know just how hard I still fight. The perfectionist in me wants it to look easy and effortless. But I got to thinking about how many other people, especially women (I understand them a little bit better, a very little bit), have those same kind of tapes playing in the background. How often do we look in the mirror and say something hateful to the reflection? I can’t even count the number of times I have started a conversation about my body with, “I wish I wasn’t…”
So this week I’m trying something new. I made a commitment to not say anything negative about myself for the entire week. Why not an entire lifetime, you ask? I need the success. A week I think I can do. Maybe I can string a lifetime together one week at a time.

I started this weight loss journey because I woke up one morning and I was done: done being tired, done being sad, done being lonely, done being afraid. I was just done. And I knew that I would stay the same, my life would stay the same, unless I made a change. Perhaps it's elementary, but if I wanted to be different, I had to be different. The same old worn-out, tried-and-true behaviors and thought patterns weren’t go to get me a different result. And now I’m done hating myself. Really. It’s been a lifetime. It doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t serve me. I’m moving on.

It will be challenge for a while to stay true to that – my patterns are deeply ingrained and frankly, horribly reinforced by a culture that’s constantly telling me that I’m not beautiful unless… - but I want my daughter to wake up in the morning and the first conversation she has with that growing girl in the mirror – someday too soon a growing woman- to a be a loving one. And she’s taking her lead from me.