Just a little background:
I've been steadily gaining weight over the past couple of years. This winter I hit a point I never thought I would hit. It's gotten to where I don't want my picture taken, just not where I want to be at all. I have a membership at Snap Fitness in town and haven't made much use of it (which is silly, because our insurance company reimburses me if I go a certain number of times per month). Anyway, just lately I have a renewed motivation to go to the gym and try to make healthier decisions for myself. So tonight was night #2 in a row of going to the gym. :)
I burst into tears tonight after I was done working out.
This has NEVER happened to me before. I usually have a pretty positive view of myself (sometimes overly so - more than might be realistic, even) and I'm usually able to focus on being happy about having had a good workout and feel the effects of the endorphins coursing through my body. I also usually pay very little to no attention to the other people at the gym. I don't know any of them anyway, and I'm there just for myself.
I don't know what happened tonight.
I had a really good workout - went to town on my upper body and abs, then did 20 minutes on the elliptical to round it out. Physically I was just feeling really "up" and like I might be on the right track.
There were 2 girls at the gym - late teens, early 20's, somewhere in there, just as skinny as you could want to be, cute and giggly and perky. They were at the gym the entire time I was there and I never saw them do any kind of exercise or weight lifting at all. I kind of thought it was stupid to go to the gym and then not do anything, but meh, whatever.
So as I finished on the elliptical, feeling decent-to-pretty-good about the workout I'd just finished, I glanced over at these girls again for some reason. Then I looked at myself in the mirror, and all hell broke loose inside of me.
I felt like a joke. Like a fat slobby joke.
I felt like what I was doing was pointless because there is no way in a million years that I will ever look like those girls.
I felt like the "me" from 15 years ago would have looked at the "me" now and thought, "Lady, you better work a lot harder."
Try as I might, I cannot get that fat, ugly feeling out of my system. I've been crying for about a half an hour now and I still just feel fresh pain in my heart when I think about that view of myself in that mirror.
I don't have an answer or a "conclusion" to this post, but I thought it might help to get it out. We'll see.
