Weight Loss - Time Travel?

 'When this baby hits 88kg, you're gonna see some serious fit!'

Not exactly a profound post today, more just an idea/realisation that I had, and thought I would share.

Part of the spreadsheet I use to record my weight every day is a 'notes' column, where I note down the weight at which I have passed each BMI point, each 10% progress marker etc, so I have a series of mini-targets to aim for each week (you can read more about it here). Included in this column are dates from the past when I can remember being weighed (and my recorded weight at the time), so I can congratulate myself on being lighter now than I was on that date. They stretch all the way from a doctor's appointment I had when I was 16, through a bungy jump I did in New Zealand, to an aborted attempt at weight loss just last year.

It's always nice to pass one of these markers. I can tell myself "I'm lighter now than I was at age 25!", and sometimes I even dig out old photos from that period, so I can compare.

The thing is, sometimes its more than just being lighter than I was at that age. When I record a lower weight than I could at, say, age 23, I actually feel as though I have lost all the accumulated years since that age, and not just the pounds. 

In many ways my weight (or my perception and paranoia about my weight) kept me from doing things I wanted to in the past, and I feel like I wasted a big part of my youth being scared, and nervous, and embarrassed. To now be dropping the pounds, and to look in the mirror and see my body the way it looked 5 years ago, actually makes me feel 5 years younger. I feel as though I now have the freedom and the ability to do things I wouldn't have dared back then. I feel as though the clock has been set back, and I have been given a second chance to live my youth, the way it ought to have been lived - to the max, full of confidence and excitement, passing up no opportunity.

I still have nearly half my target weight to lose, and those 48 or so pounds, once dropped, will take me back to a weight I haven't seen in about 10 years, when I was 16 years old. When I think of everything I have achieved since then I am amazed, because if I list everything I haven't achieved, all the things I was too embarrassed or nervous to do...that list is twice as long. So to be given a second chance now, another opportunity to do everything I want to do, with all the confidence I should have had back then, and all the knowledge and experience I have gained since then - well, I feel as though the world is my oyster.

I'm sure the Patent Office would laugh me out the door, but as far as I'm concerned, I have finally worked out how to travel back in time - lose weight!


.