A couple weekends ago I stayed over at my gal's sister's house. In the morning I walked into the bathroom to take a shower. I took off my sleeping shirt and turned on the light and... ugh. Apparently the lights in my bathroom are of the softer, slightly yellow variety. Hers? Harsh, bright white.
I wanted to cry.
I literally stopped in my tracks, as though I was a cartoon character. I did a double-take. "What?" I thought. "What's wrong with my stomach?"
The stomach's front had all these... lines. Folds. Not deep, and not long, but lots of them. I thought back to one of my favorite blogger's posts - my stomach's lost fat, but the skin hasn't disappeared along with it. While it was once distended, it was also firm fat - stretching and pushing against the confines of my body, insisting on growing the available real estate. Fat as I was, the stomach was at least taut still. No longer is that true.
I feel like I've currently got the worst of both worlds. I'm still wildly overweight. 255 is pretty goddamn big, regardless of how much I've changed my lean muscle poundage, or how much fat I've lost. At the same time, my body looks more disgusting to me than ever before. My belly is soft. It now jiggles as it's not locked into place by my straining skin. My arms have more definition then they've had since I was a sophomore in college, but between the shoulder cap and the biceps, there's a nice big flap of sagging skin. I don't even like flexing my new muscles, because I just see this area that I know isn't going away anytime soon.
The insides of my thighs tell the same story. They sag. You can literally see the sag lines as gravity pulls the loose skin downward, notching elongated U shapes in my skin.
Mentally I almost feel like I need to stop losing weight for awhile. That I need to give my skin an opportunity to catch up. Because it's probably at this point that if I continue to drop weight, the skin issue will only be exacerbated. At the same time, I realize that losing weight is still the single most-important activity in my life at this point.
I was reading a post from Tony the other night. I hope that my skin tightens like he says.
I hate the way I look.
256.2
Where I've Been and Where I'm Going
10 comments:
It will get better with time. You are 100% right in saying you still need to focus on loosing weight. I am at 196 now and still not happy with the man in the mirror. Mentally and physically I am no where near being done. Stay strong man!
Been there. It took a while before I was able to stop focusing on the skin and go back to focusing on the weight. Either the skin will resolve itself (my doc tells me it takes 18 mos for your skin to shrink back if it's going to), you can deal with it, or go for surgery. Any way it goes, it's a ways off, and your health is more important anyway.
I feel the same way now.
At least when I was bigger I was filled in more... now it just hangs and drags. YUCK!
People keep telling me it gets better with time. Let's hope so!
loose skin happens. Hopefully it gets better with time. I generally like to focus on the health aspect of losing weight and ignore the flab.
Awh, loose skin, that is soo frustrating. The company I work for has something that helps with that. I hope you find something that improves the skin in that area.
I have read blogs from people who have lost 150+ pounds and they have said that the more they worked out, the better the skin got. Keep going - and if it doesn't get better - maybe think about saving up for surgery - but it is definitely better to lose the weight. (which you know, obviously)
It broke my hear to hear you hate the way you look. All that hard work and you hate the way you look?? I am sending good thoughts your way!~
I think as we lose weight we get more self-critical - you probably do still look better than you did before, but as we are aiming for change, we have expectations and at this inbetween stage, those expectations aren't being met (yet).
I agree with those that say, keep on keeping on, you have no idea just yet, what your skin is going to do and improved muscle tone will generally make your body look much better no matter if you have a bit of loose skin. Good health is what it is all about - your looks will follow!
PS: I have funny wrinkles on my knees!
I'm exactly where you are right now--not done with losing, but not happy with how having lost weight looks. I didn't think about what I wanted to look like until the reality was so...saggy. I guess I was under some kind of misguided notion that losing weight would be like a time machine, rewinding me to a younger, tauter body. Not so much. But hopefully what everyone here has said is true, and that it will get better over time. I don't know. I look better in clothes, it's just still a train wreck in the bathroom mirror--just a slightly different one than when I was at my heaviest.
This is a creepy-ass, nasty feeling, isn't it? I started waaaay higher than you at 440, and now that I'm at 300's doorstep, I'm starting to see the stretchy flab myself.
While my stomach and man boobs haven't started looking too funky yet, I've got big flaps of skin that hang down from my triceps like flying squirrel wings. And then I've got some looseness around my thighs that I probably notice more than anyone would ever pick up on.
But I guess on the upside, is that I hear skin is supposed to have some basic sense of elasticity and we, as fat dudes, just don't have because our skin gets stretched out to its breaking point.
Still sucks, though.
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