This blog post was going to be about my anxiety around getting rid of clothes that don’t fit me. I had thought I would take some of them in at the waist, but I’ve lost enough inches across random parts of my body that, umm, there’s really no point. I was going to be a bit witty about my angst.

I got an email today from a colleage – a local charity is collecting clothes for women who are returning to work. And here I am, with a 2 foot stack of clothes that are too large, in a pile in my office. Trust me, I can donate. Truth be told, I had always planned to donate my clothes – at some long off point.  I hadn’t actually planned on that date being Friday.

So, that’s what I was going to write about. I was going to tell you all that I was a bit anxious about getting rid of clothes that didn’t fit, in case I needed them again.

I went to the gym tonight and there was this skinny little thing next to me. Since I use my office gym, way after hours, it’s truly rare that I see anyone at all. But there she was, with a tiny top, running twice as fast as I was, using a huge incline.

And there I was, dying on the machine next to her.

And here I am, staring at my laptop and a pile of clothes, and sighing.

It’s funny. Sometimes I go back to SparkPeople and I look at the downward progression of the line since I really started this diet in earnest. I look and I see how I am making progress. There are some weeks without anything, but there are lots more with loss. I can see a downward  sloping line – I am loosing weight. I do this and I remember what I have done – and then it goes all out of my head. Oh, I didn’t forget 24 pounds on the treadmill  – I remembered the fact of it. What I forgot was the emotion of it, the work of it. I forgot what 24 pounds really means. I forgot how many times I said no to the wrong food and yes to the healthy stuff. I forgot that was a lot of salads and not a lot of fries. I forgot that was Crystal Light and not milk shakes, sugar free jello and no chocolate.

There is fact and there is emotion and it is still terribly difficult to seperate the two. The fact is that I am losing weight, I am outgrowing clothes, I am running further, I am eating better and I am looking thinner. Those are facts. Whatever else may or may not be true, I can prove those things. Facts.

It is an emotion that I feel incompetent and slow and ugly. I am, if you wish to be technical, still morbidly obese (Indeed, I have another 40 pounds before I am merely “overweight”), so it is a fact that I am fat – but it is not actually possible to feel fat. Fat doesn’t feel like anything. Emotions.

It is a fact that the old clothes don’t fit. It is a fact that I, and only I, can make sure that I don’t ever need to buy larger clothes. No one is going to come along and force feed me corn starch in my sleep. If I don’t want to gain weight I need to eat properly and exercise. It is not a fact that I will never be skinny. Indeed, evidence proves otherwise – continuing on what I have been doing for almost 3 months will actually result in something resembling “skinny” at some point.

Of all the things I am learning on this diet business, the process of separating fact and emotion must be the hardest.

(Is anyone interested in having a low calorie recipe exchange? If you email me yours, I’ll put them all in a word document and email them back – including the low calorie potato soup extravaganza – to anyone who sent me a recipe.)