I just read a post about how long it takes to see what others see and I thought this was a good topic to bring up on the forum.

Most of the time, we ask this question in terms of seeing the newer, smaller versions of ourselves but this is really about what we see or don't see whether we're bigger or smaller.

For me..I never really saw how large I was when I looked in the mirror. Then I would be shocked and mortified when I'd see a picture of myself because there was no doubt I was a very fat woman. What is it about folks like us who cannot see what is obvious? I don't know that answer, but it's an interesting question.

So...what happens when we lose the weight? For me, and many others, I had a terrible moment a few weeks after hip replacement surgery, and about ten months out of band surgery. I was about 170 lbs. at that time and down about 90 lbs. from my heaviest. My hair was thin and looked terrible...my face was saggy and I saw an old woman staring back at me when I looked in the mirror.

It was so bad that I found myself in therapy shortly thereafter. I needed to get help to recognize myself. Thank goodness I was seeing a professional because once I went back to work after being on disability for two months, no one recognized me in the office...because I looked so much thinner and was not on the cane much anymore. If not for my therapist, I might have gone crackers during this time.

So while she has helped me, I am even nearly a year later, still struggling with what I see versus what everyone else sees. I am surely getting used to the way I look now and my head tells me I am thin...pictures bear this out, and I do find that I can recognize myself when I look at my reflection.

What I still struggle with is that I feel like I'm still a fat girl who has managed to figure out a way to fake it. Because I look thin, people think I've always been this way and have no idea what it's like to be thinking about staying in control all the time when it comes to food.

Just yesterday, I was in an all day training going out of my mind. I found myself nibbling much of the day. A little bit here, a little bit there. I even had two Cookies after lunch and I never do that. What I was thinking though was that if I was still fat, I'd be embarrased to go for those cookies knowing that everyone would be wondering why I was eating them considering how big I was. But because I'm not big anymore, no one paid attention. The problem was....those cookies were as deadly for me yesterday as they would have been 145 lbs. ago.

I have my therapist tonight and I'm going to talk about this. I want to do everything I can to not put weight back on and that includes high calorie crap that gets past the band with ease. I may have lost all this weight, but I am still very much a work in progress and still need this site for the help and support you all give me.

Sorry for the length of this post...but would welcome your thoughts and comments.

Please keep us posted with what your therapist has to say on the matter

Great topic and responses. It's such an interesting phenomena. When I was fat, I didn't think of myself as fat as I was, but when I took a hard look I could see it. I was surprised sometimes when I did that. Now, I think I see myself accurately as others do, and I see that I'm normal/thin, but it's not so much what I see as what I know (or think I do). Even though as a size 8/10 and small/medium, I'm pretty sure I'm not fat, the number on the scale and my BMI say I am overweight and make me think I must be/look fat. So it's a never ending cycle of thinking I better lose another 20 pounds to not be fat, then remembering I look pretty good. I really feel like the fat girl getting away with something! Somewhere in the back of my mind I think maybe I actually DO look fat and I'm not seeing myself accurately, lol! OMG, we need a pill for that kind of crazy

Please keep us posted with what your therapist has to say on the matter

I sure will.

And thanks for the comments everyone. Obviously I'm not alone in the body dysmorphia. I figured as usual that if I was experiencing something, so were others.

My body dysmorphia always puts me heavier. I've lost 60 lbs so far and I DON'T SEE IT. It's maddening. I still won't take pictures of myself, maybe that would make a difference.../shrug

Last night as I was walking out the door from the office, (We have large long glass doors in the building) I noticed that I kind of look like a hobo in my too big jacket and clothes. Here I am this tiny woman carrying all these bags with her coat hanging off her...it's time to buy a new rain coat...but not just yet...

Lisa, a coat was my one "new" purchase. Other items have been Goodwill. A dear friend gave me a gift card to a store I like as a congratulations on my weight loss and I ran out and bought a winter coat! Like you I have no raincoat now so by spring I'll be freezing. But I hope to be approaching goal by April so I want to wait.

I have been a normal weight most of my life, and most of my adult life too. In my late 40's I started gaining. My thyroid decided to get lazy and that didn't help at all. I stopped taking pictures or letting others take pictures of me, and just didn't really notice how large I was getting until my health started taking a turn for the worse. My ex husband took a picture of me at my mom's funeral last year, and holy cow....I looked like a beached whale! I could not believe that person was me. In my mind, I was still the slender person I had always been. Intellectually I knew I was fat because the scales and my doctors let me know in no uncertain terms that I needed to lose a lot of weight, but I just didn't see it when I looked in the mirror.

Minus 60+ pounds later, I look in the mirror and I see the same person as always. I still see myself as slender, even though I still have a ways to go. Why does my mind see what it sees? I think it is a blessing that I never saw myself as fat, so I don't have to worry about seeing a fat woman in the mirror when I finally reach goal, but why can't my image in the mirror be truthful to what I actually am? I don't get it at all.

@@Rena's got this I can relate to this in a BIG way. I too never looked at myself as "fat" even though I knew better. I carried my weight well and I was evenly proportioned, I always dressed appropriately and I didn't carry myself or act like what to me a "fat" person would be/act like.

I used to tell my son when he was very chubby that he was a "typical" fat person. Lazy and living hand to mouth. Not thinking about what he was putting in just unconsciously consuming food. As I have gone through this journey, I am still me. I don't look at myself as fat or skinny and I don't stereo type those words anymore.

What I told my son, was obvious that I was doing this as well! I might not have been sitting on my butt eating cheese doodles and watching Nickolodian but I too was unconsciously eating. I wasn't thinking about what I was eating or what that was doing to my body. Not just in making me "fat" but in the way it made me unhealthy.

I drank diet soda thinking it was better then regular soda but I drank it like it was Water and that is the LAST thing it is. I could have drank gasoline for all the damage it was doing to my digestive tract. I would consume high fat high salt high sugar but low nutrition foods and thought nothing of it. We lived on fast food and soda.

Today I still see me as me. I am Lisa no matter my size, the difference in me today vs. 70 pounds ago is that I no longer eat unconsciously. I think about what I am going to consume. I think about it's nutritional content, what it will do to my body. I exercise to feel better, and if I want to eat that cookie, or have that piece of birthday cake, I have it and I don't sneak it. I just enjoy it for what it is, and I let those things be what they are "treats" something that doesn't happen every day, something that is out of the ordinary and not my every day choice of meal.

I'm not 10, so for me making these changes takes commitment and work to always be conscious when I put something in my mouth. I'm not perfect, and I can admit that it will often happen that I am distracted and/or stressed and I fall back into those old habits but as the years are passing, the old habits are being replaced by good habits and I find myself falling back on those and working every day to keep incorporating more and more so they become my old habits and the bad habits disappear from memory.

I also find it odd that as I lose more weight the sleeves on my jackets are getting longer. I might could get away with this rain coat through this fall with the buttons done up and the belt cinched if it weren't for the sleeves. Maybe worth a quick trip the tailor to hem them before it ends up in the donation bin!!

This might seem kinda weird, but when I look at pictures of myself pre-op I don't recognize myself. I also don't recognize the guy that is staring back at me in the mirror now. I am in a weird place right now. I haven't decided how to feel about that.

@@Seymour1971 thanks for posting the Brené Brown link. I'd seen it before but took this opportunity to watch it again. So many powerful statements there. "I am enough." Here's to wholehearted living, and to being seen. Here's to embracing vulnerability.

I still don't always see what everyone else sees. I have been able to finally realize how much of a transformation I have made. Someone sent me a picture from May 2013. I almost didn't know me in that picture. I was smiling, but I clearly remember that day and how miserable I was. The friend who sent me the "reminder" said "I want you to see just how far you have come." I realized then that I don't always give myself credit. I do the "I still have a ways to go" or "Stop it...I am NOT sexy." But darn it...I don't have a ways to go anymore...25 lbs isn't very far. And I am sexy I am a bad a*s, boxer chick who goes into beast mode punching a heavy bag. I rock my jeans and my new boots. Now, I just have to convince myself that the person in the mirror is really me...I'm getting there

I ran into a woman this morning who I got friendly with a couple of years ago. She and I are on the same train alot so we got to talking and have become pretty close.

So today she tells me after we're talking for a while that she wants me to write a book and she'll be the first one in line to buy it. I know she means that I'm so much more positive now so I agreed with that part of it and then she said something that literally brought me to tears. She said that I always was full of warmth and affection and care for others but the weight loss and less pain/better mobiity has taken me out of my prison and now I shine. No one ever said that to me before and I was overcome by that.

I really liked how she put the change in the way I look on the back burner so to speak and just told me how the weight loss just brought out what was always there, but hidden. I think alot of us are like that. We hide behind our large bodies and only after we shed the excess, can we become who we always were meant to be.

All I knew was that I wasn't embarrased by her praise because she was talking about the inner me...and not the outer me. I guess I have to really focus on that girl instead of the one I see in my head or my mirror.

Edited November 6, 201411 yr by gowalking

@@gowalking, she is right. And here's the nice thing about BariatricPal. Save off your posts and your book is already started. I may do that myself. A year from now I want to see where I was mentally and emotionally when it all began.

I was just discussing this with a friend yesterday. Obviously if I look in the mirror I can see my stomach has shrunk and I can almost reach my fingers completely around my thighs and I've gone from a size 16/18 jean to a size 4... but I still don't feel thin or "skinny" or even small. I went to get the size 4 jeans today because the 6's I bought about 4-5 weeks ago are sagging off my butt. As I'm pulling them off the rack I'm looking at how small they are on the hanger and thinking "there's no way I can wear these" but I can and I can still breathe in them. But my brain just doesn't think of me as being that small.

I think part of it is the number on the scale... I don't think of someone (me) weighing 145 pounds as being tiny... I think of someone in the 120's maybe as being "skinny" but not someone in their 140's. And I've started getting the "don't lose too much" comments and I think to myself my BMI just hit the high point of normal so I could lose more and still be in a healthy weight range.

I guess eventually with enough people telling me how great I look and when I have to keep buying all these small or medium clothes or size 4 (or smaller) jeans, my brain will connect with my eyes and the mirror.

Although I am getting smaller I still feel like a big girl. When someone I see has not seen me in awhile and they give a positive compliment, I feel I always shoot it down. If they say " You look great" instead of answering " Thank you", I go on this ramble like " Thanks, I still have 20lbs to go." I make more of a deal of it than anyone. I am going to just accept a compliment and move on. I overanalyze too much. I tend to gravitate towards large sizes when I go shopping. I never used to be in pictures( I did the fat girl face selfies only..lol) so now when I see myself in a picture I am pleasantly reminded that I have come a long way.