I feel for all of you and I don't have any good advice, but,,,,,
I have a friend, who is very overweight and she is the most self confident, ambitious woman I know!
Stef has part time job as a nurses aid, she is a full time college student, working towards her RN degree, she is married, she has tons of friends, when she has time, she parties, she is an animal lover, and former vet tech. Her house is immaculate, she spends time with family, her bank account is always balanced, etc. etc.
When you meet Stef, you don't see the "fat" girl, you see Stef! You see young, ambitious, family oriented, caring, compassionate, fun, organized, well adjusted woman.
Once in awhile she will bring up her weight, she would of course like to lose some weight, but her weight is not who she is.
On another note, when I'm out running errands, at the grocery store, or gas station or whatever, I don't pay that much attention. I'm busy, I have my own agenda. Most of us don't pay that much attention to anyone else because we have our own day to day stuff on our minds. What's for supper, gotta get home and let the dog out, when am I gonna squeak in the time in my work day to liscense the car, I need to see my insurance agent, gotta get a BD present for my DIL, MIL, is mad cuz we haven't been up to see them for week, Mom, needs some help moving furniture and on and on.
You should be really proud of yourself for saying 'enough is enough' in the first place! It takes a lot of guts to admit you want or need to change something about yourself.
Everybody in the entire world has down days. Days where they have NO CLOTHES, or look bad, or whatever. Sometimes circumstances are unavoidable, but the way you react to those circumstances is down to you. The first thing you have to do is take yourself out of the position of 'victim'. You're not a victim, you're great and you should remind yourself every day. Overweight is not all you are. We can't be categorised as people just on how much we weigh - that's ludicrous!
You definitely you shouldn't feel like you're wasting or ruining anyone's time when you go out - if your friends and family didn't want you there then they wouldn't have invited you in the first place!
You also shouldn't feel self-conscious. Even if you feel that people are looking or saying things about you, you know they have no right to because you're doing something about it! You should only feel embarrassed if you're doing nothing. Other people's opinions don't matter, it's what you think of yourself that counts.
When I was having a particularly bad day, one of my friends said to me 'do your hair, put on your favourite dress, hold your head up high and on with the day!' and I've really kept that with me. If you just keep on keeping on, then you'll start to see even better results.
Don't listen to that voice in your head that says you can't do it because that voice is a liar.
Wow what a really great and supportive thread. I believe that always spoke universally for so many of us. All of the advice given is great.
I just want to add, however short. That if you look at my ticker, I've "lost" most of my weight, although I keep bouncing between that weight and like 153...and I still hate myself. Weight loss changed nothing. I still want to be able to go out without feeling like I'm not worth other people's time. I feel like a huge inconvienence and well, pretty much the same as how I felt 60 lbs ago. I realized that behind "fat" was a laundry list of reasons I don't think others want to be around me, nor should they be subjected to my presence.
I've heard over and over losing weight does not solve low self esteem problems and I thought that was the biggest load of crap...well, it turns out its true. For me anyway.
Love yourself now.
I also can relate to this...My friend recently lost all her baby weight and she looks great...me on the other hand totally different story. She always wants me to go out with her and when I actually do go out everybody tells her how great she looks and I feel like everybody looks the other way when I walk in. I also go to other towns to grocery shop so people in my hometown dont see what im buying.
