selective vision

Okay, so yesterday I saw Dr. G, who told me that I have reached my goal weight and need to stop losing now.  I was like...Yeah, so, how am I supposed to do that?  I already eat all I can possibly hold every day.  He tells me I can now cheat a little.  Since I'm already doing that, I am having a hard time seeing it making a difference.  But the weight loss has slowed down to nearly a crawl, so I'm not going to worry about it overmuch.  I can still stand to lose 20 more pounds without even looking thin (I'll still be able to pinch several inches) so it's all good.  But the most interesting part of my visit yesterday was that I noticed, while the nurse was thumbing through my chart, that there was a picture of me in there that I had forgotten all about.  It was my official "before" picture that they take of every WLS patient and keep in the file.  I asked if I could see it and I still cannot believe that was me.  I took a picture of it with my cell phone because it is the only full-length picture of me at whale size that exists, to my knowledge.  Isn't it amazing that you can look in a mirror every day and not really see yourself?  Of course I knew I was a whale; I'm not blind, after all, and I do have to shop for clothing and I can read the numbers on the tags.  But still.  I guess I didn't really realize how I looked, and I especially didn't realize how my face had changed.  I think that's the truly mind-blowing part. I look at my face every single day and I don't think it looks any different.  Then I look at this "before" picture and I hardly recognize that face from the one I see now.  Amazing how over the course of 10 months my face has changed so much, yet I wouldn't have really seen it without this picture.  Naturally, there are lots of other things about myself that I don't see or that I see in a much different way than others see, but that's a blog entry for some other time when I have nothing else to do for a couple of months.  Changing my body was a piece of cake compared to changing my brain.

~k