Throwback Thursday: Goal revisited

If this entry sounds familiar it's because it mistakenly published before I finished editing it... I took it down, and now I'm re-posting for real.

I recently posted about my struggle to figure out my goal weight for this process.  I mentioned in that post how Susan Thompson refers to living in a “right sized body,” but I'm not sure exactly what that means for me.  After I published that post, I stumbled upon SPT’s video blog entry entitled “Goal Body” from December of 2018.  In it, she talks about abandoning the weight number as a goal, and focusing on what you want your body to be able to do. Thinking about a “goal body” also ties in with my previous post about why I’m even doing this. 

My main reason for trying to get my eating and weight under control is to see if it will make a difference with my back pain.  For the past eleven (11) months, I have been dealing with almost debilitating back pain. I say “almost” because it has been much better since I had a rhizotomy in December.  I can manage to get through each day, and I’m still able to work, but I feel like I have the body of 65 year old with the amount of aches and pains I deal with daily. I’ve been doing yoga classes 3 or 4 times a week, and I have a short yoga/meditation routine that I do each morning right after I get out of bed. Doing Yoga has helped, but I’m still in quite a bit of pain all day, every day.

I’m certain my doctor recommend that I lose weight in response to hearing me complain about my back.  There are plenty of articles like this one correlating weight loss with back pain reduction. Since I'm having trouble with the scale, I thought I would document some "goal body" ideas. 

As I mentioned, to be pain free is my number one goal. That goal seems lofty at this point, so maybe I should dial that back to seeing an overall reduction in pain, but that won't be satisfying. Along with the pain free goal, my second stated goal is to be able to walk for 30 minutes straight without pain.  If I ever reach that goal, I'll raise the bar to something else in a similar category.  My third goal is to improve my yoga practice and get back to doing Vinyasa classes on the regular. 

The fourth goal I have takes a little more to explain. In essence, I want to get to a point where I feel proud and confident with my body, regardless of what number shows up on the scale.  SPT talks about being a "good representation of yourself."  For me, that means looking as good as I feel about myself. Reading that aloud, makes me sound, I don't know... egotistical? In my role as a prosecuting attorney, I deal with so many different kinds of people, and I think outwardly I present myself as pretty well put-together and somewhat confident in my abilities. It's taken a LONG time to get to this point, but I finally like myself.  I am not perfect, in fact I know there are plenty of people who don't like me or my personality... I have a short fuse, I can be tenacious, and I've been referred to as pit bull in court on more than one occasion (I take it as a compliment regardless of how it is intended). I also can't stand defense attorneys whiners, beggars or people who won't take no for an answer. In short, I'm fine with who I am, and I don't care anymore if everyone likes me because I know not everyone does or will like me no matter what I say or do. What I'd like is to feel about my body the way I feel about myself.

I think I have the opposite of a bad body image.  You know how some people who are thin, look in the mirror and see only their flaws? I think it's called body dysmorphia.  I don't think I have that per se but sometimes the image I have of myself in brain is much better than the one I see reflected in the mirror or especially in photographs. Sometimes I'll see a picture of myself and think: "That's what I look like?!  No, way!  I'm prettier than that or I can't possibly be that fat!"  And that's what I'm hoping to change, I don't want to look in the mirror or at photographs and think "Eww, Ick!" 💖