Public Perception and Soulllllllllll Cycles!

Tonight, I went back and looked at my photos from my trip to Monterrey, Mexico for my lap band surgery. It's amazing to me to see how far I've come since October of 2008, and it's hard for me to believe that I was ever as heavy as I actually was.

Photo on the left is me, two days after surgery. The one on the right is from last weekend.

A few interesting things have happened this week. For starters, several months ago, I randomly ran into a guy (Jason) who I used to see when I was in law school. He was extremely good looking, was a graphic design student at the Corcoran School of Art in D.C., and lived in my apartment building. My friends and I used to call him "the dirty hottie" before we got to know him because. . well, he was so cute that he made our minds wander! :) In any event, we met, wound up seeing one another for a few months while I was on hiatus from my relationship with my law school boyfriend, and we became really good friends.

When I ran into Jason, I was having dinner with a friend at a pub near my office. It had been 10 years or so since we'd seen one another, but he came up to me, and I recognized him right away. We exchanged information and have been trying to get together ever since (he lives elsewhere, but gets to NYC regularly for work). Anyway, last night, he e-mailed on the off-chance that I was free, and we wound up having dinner at a cool restaurant in Soho where he knew the chef and half the staff. They kept bringing out all sorts of wonderful things for us to try, and we were given some serious superstar treatment.

It was great to see him (he is still ridiculously cute) and to catch up (don't get too excited. . . he is married. . has two kids and he and his wife just separated and are living apart. . too messy for me). It was great to be able to pick up as though no time had passed. For me, this was really funny because Jason has no idea that I'd gotten so heavy in the intervening years. I'm kind of like (internally): "Hi! I've looked this good the whole time!" He said that he thought I looked just the same, and said something about how good it was that I was in such good shape. (I was like. . "Oh, if you only knew the long road it's been!" -- though I didn't say anything of the sort!)

In other news, tonight, I finally made it to this new spin studio near my house. It's a really cool studio (you can see the name below) and the class was fantastic -- great music, a really motivating instructor, and a challenging full-body workout (we even did a segment for the upper body using weights).

When I got to the studio, I started thinking about Gilly's recent post about the annoying "fat-checker" Zumba instructor at her gym. That made me think about what these people would think of me, coming in to do this challenging spin class -- and I realized that, to them, I probably read as a fit, athletic person. That was kind of a surprising realization, maybe because I hadn't thought about it before. Even in Boot Camp, I was about 30 or 40 pounds heavier when I started, so they know more about from whence I came! After more than a year of Boot Camp though, I have some muscles (to be said as "musckles" a la Popeye) and am in good enough shape that I can do any normal gym's classes without keeling over.

It's also kind of surprising to me -- someone who avoided working out for so long, who NEVER, EVER thought of herself as athletic, and who was just not self-motivated about the gym -- that I found this new gym through word of mouth, followed up on my own, and went to the class all by myself. That, my friends, is an NSV beyond anything on my wish list. It did not occur to me that I would become someone who would be that self-motivated.

It's amazing, but all those workouts have had such a great impact on how my body looks, and how I feel -- health-wise -- that I want to keep them up. If you look back through this blog, you'll see a bunch of posts through the months about how I felt badly about the fact that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to on the gym front, but I did eventually pull it together. So, if you aren't feeling motivated, don't give up. Just keep trying to motivate yourself and keep trying different types of exercise until you find something you like.

So, there is a theme to my post tonight, which just popped out at me. It's about getting used to the different way we are perceived once we get to goal. For me, it's a real pleasure. I like it, and it tickles me that, after 20 months of working with my band, people who don't know me assume that I've never been seriously overweight.

I am so overwhelmed by the feelings of gratefulness and happiness that I have about finding a tool that would let me get to this wonderful, healthy and extremely positive place. The burden that this has lifted from me is so much greater than the 78 pounds I have lost, and I love it that I finally am able to live my life appreciating how I look, instead of feeling like sh*t that I am not flawlessly perfect.