I like the way I look at a normal weight.
I don’t walk past a mirror or reflective glass
without taking a look and admiring my handiwork.
Most of the time when I look in a mirror, 
my reaction is “Damn, I look good!”

I could offset that paragraph by telling you
about the imperfections my body still carries.
But I’m not going to.
I believe in focusing on the positive.
I’m not going to let the “flaws” negate the positive traits. 
 I love my body just the way it is, the way it was,
and the way it is will be.

I am no longer waiting for perfection that will never arrive
before I decide I can love myself.
If I could give one piece of advice
toward the goal of accepting your body,
it would be to let go of the idea of Perfection.

Let go of the idea that there is something wrong with you.
Let go of the notion that if you could look just a little better,
you would be able to love yourself.
Realize that self acceptance is a choice completely independent
of your physical appearance.
Realize that Perfection does not exist.

It has always been my choice what food I eat and how much.
It has always been my choices that created the shape of my body.
I have to choose to eat the right amount, not too much and not too little.
The hardest part of learning this was admitting to myself
that all the mistakes I had made were choices I made.
It would be really easy to place blame on outside factors,
but that would be false.

 I can’t control the circumstances of my life
or the actions and words of others.
I can only control my reactions.
I accept that many negative things that have gone on in my life
have been due to my own choices. At the same time, I forgive myself.
This comes back to not expecting myself to be perfect.

There is a huge difference between accepting responsibility and placing blame.
Yes, I’ve dealt with some difficult situations in my life in less-than-healthy ways.
But it was not the difficult situations that caused this.
It was my own choices in how I dealt with them.
By saying this I am not saying that everything is my fault.
I am only acknowledging that it is my choice to make changes.

It really is 99% mental.
Is losing weight or maintaining weight loss really difficult?
Yes.

But the actions to take are pretty straight forward.
Eat less. Move more. Everybody knows it.
Deciding to do it, believing you deserve it,
sticking with it… those are the hard parts.
Not because we don’t know how, but because we have
so many mental and emotional barriers in our way.
 We can love ourselves
and still desire to change our body size.
Let’s be mentally kind to ourselves while we deal
with changing the behaviors that determine our body size.

At present I have a broken wrist
which causes the temporary loss of activities that I enjoy.

My injury is healing, which makes my situation temporary,
but all of us experience losses that are permanent.

Some of them are enormous losses, others are small.
People move away or die; relationships and jobs change;
children age, time passes and our own bodies begin wearing out;
favorite stores close; even favorite TV shows are canceled.

When we recognize we have lost something that was valuable to us,
and that it is gone forever, we feel sad.

When we can turn our thoughts to the future
and leave the past behind, 
we have accepted the loss and can get on with our lives.

Hope is the belief that things will get better.
Hope is the antidote to despair.

A positive way of looking at the losses in our lives
is that the loss helps us see more clearly the value of what we have lost.

When we suffer a loss, what remains after the loss
is the essence of that which we have lost.

If we have lost a person through death,
we have lost only the physical sense of that person.
What we will always have within us is the essence of that person.

Or if we have lost something that seems like a part of ourselves,
such as a job or a relationship, or a place etc.,
what remains within us
are all the experiences and memories that we gained
through that work, that relationship, or that location itself. 

During my endless search for the Positive,
it recently occurred to me ...

One great thing about using a computer software
food journal similar to DietPower is
that even if one didn't want to count calories or control portions,

...someday in the future, you could still be able to look back
at your personal data, and learn your accurate food amounts,
nutritional values and/or your eating patterns.

I have been making daily food entries into my DietPower journal for the past 6 years,
and I can access any day's food information from the past 6 years.

For Example, suppose I wanted to know exactly what and how much I ate
every Christmas Day or every Birthday or every Vacation for the past 6 years,
I can pull that data up and compare it.

I find this ability to access personal information to be very compelling. 

 There is some type of technical computer code glitch between Internet Explorer, DietHobby,
and YouTube that occasionally keeps a daily blog from working properly with embedded videos. 

So, when this occurs while I'm posting an article,
I've decided to deal with it by posting that video as a second separate blog,
as I did here today.

I call it living in the solution, not the problem.

Many people believe that all the obese have to do
is go through bariatric surgery
and they will magically became "Naturally Thin".

No calorie counting.
No food monitoring at all.
Just eat what they want
because their body can only tolerate a limited amount of food.

More than 18 years ago, BEFORE my weight-loss surgery,
I knew that I could NEVER become "naturally thin".

Even then, I knew that such a wish was merely a "pipe dream",
a totally unrealistic fantasy...
on a level with a wish for the ability to sprout wings and fly;

I was aware I would still WANT
to eat far more food than my body could tolerate.
However, the reason I went through what was, at the time,
a very serious Experimental open surgery, 

which was quite a costly procedure;
which caused Immense pain for several months and long-term discomfort;
which required a 2 week stay in a distant city, for both myself and my husband,
........since we were aware of only one surgeon in California performing them at the time;
which required 6 weeks off work without pay,....and during that time
........I still had to pay my office overhead expenses including my staff's salaries;

....was due to the belief
that I would never again need to closely monitor my food intake, 

and I would always be able to eat only small amounts of what I wanted
because my body could only tolerate amounts that made and kept me slender.

I believed that this One Choice
would make all my future eating choices easier,
and that it would become a form of automatic,
involuntary portion control,
requiring little effort or thought from me.

Time proved this to be UNTRUE,

It is amazing how frequently and consistently
one can inadvertently make oneself sick, via one's eating choices,
and no matter how painful the experience, repeat it over and over again.
That personal gluttonous characteristic is not changed by surgery.

However, for me the experience was an extremely valuable one,
and, as does almost everyone else who has ALSO had a similar surgery,
I can honestly say that I would make the same choice again.