Sibyl, I am not an airline, so you can hijack space here anytime, and I agree wholeheartely with what you said...
Dru, self esteem, not to sound too cliched, is an "inside job"... It is often the external things like numbers on a scale, looking in a mirror, or looking, in your case, at a photo, that we look towards for validation that we are doing well, but they are very misleading, and often will show more of the negative stuff than positive...
When I started NoS, I think it took me from Sept to around April to lose about 3.5 inches from my waist... My weight was, I thought, somewhere around 200? I really didn't know because I smashed my scale sometime around October, during a heated Shovelglove session!!! But before I smashed it, I think overall, it took me about 4 months to lose around 7 lbs... Yeah that doesn't sound so great compared to diets that will promise you that in one week... And to be completely honest, I was a bit frustrated at the pace myself... But I kept reminding myself, and Reinhard and the group helped me too, that if I wasn't *gaining* during Winter, that in itself was something to be happy with... So I relaxed a little more, and got away from that panicky state... The thoughts that I had were really bad... I kept thinking "I love NoS, I want it to work for me... But maybe it's just not going to work... etc....What else is out there that could possibly be better? I don't want to keep changing my direction, but will this work..."
I now
know, (with a little retrospect,,,,)There's
nothing better out there...
I will be a Nosser till the day I die, and I am proud of that!
It turns out that I just really needed to up my exercise, and a few months later I started to lose again... Back to your photo thing and my mentioning how external stuff shouldn't totally make or break you... When I got my job at NY Health and Racquet Club there were scales in every place you looked.. I avoided them for a long time... Then one fateful week I decided to see what my "real weight was"... Okay, I was expecting to see something like 200, since that was what my last (demolished) scale probably would have said... Well it said I was 213!
For a day or two, I was so down from that... What I had known as a positive experience for several months all seemed to just fade to nothingness for a few days... But then I "snapped to" and decided not to let it bother me, or make me feel bad... That number wasn't going to eradicate 8 months of hard work, and it also wasn't going to nullify the fact that I felt better, and looked better, and lost 3.5 inches...
I guess I may have been alot heavier than I thought when I started out...
Whatever... I just turned it around and kept working towards my goals...
Incidentally, it did help to have people around me say "What???? You *can't* weigh that much..." I also know that a lot of my weight is muscle... Since then, by combining NoS, Yoga, some strength training with SG and some cardio elliptical stuff (which I do if I don't have a client and it's a quiet day at the club) I have gone down another whole inch, and I am down about another 6 or 7 lbs....
Keep trying and be patient and loving to yourself... If you don't like how you look in a picture, avoid them until you feel good... Before NoS I actually covered up my mirrors in my home because I was so miserable looking at myself...
I took a drawing Richard had made me when he was in pre school and taped it up to my mirror, obscuring the reflection... Instead of seeing a sad face, I saw this message:
"Dear Mom, You are the most beautiful mother in the Universe, Love Richard and Rosalie (my mom) Feder".... It had a big crayon colored rainbow over the message...
Whenever I looked at that, I felt beautiful and I felt loved and appreciated...
Who needed that mirror?! And anyway, why be all narcissistic all the time, staring at myself! LOL...
Do whatever it takes to put your focus on your inside feelings... When you change inside, you will be able to look at the outside with a different sense of yourself...
Love yourself Dru! Don't give up! Focus on what you are doing and how you are feeling... If you know you are doing your best, whatever that is for now, no one and no scale and no picture can take that away from you!
PS... Thanks everyone for the really nice remarks about my photo!
Reinhard, I'm not sure if I'm strong enough yet to post a before pic, but a friend of mine who got married last year did have some professional ones done with Richard and myself, and maybe I'll post those....Other than when I was pregnant, they are certainly the heaviest I've been as an adult.... I think I'll be taking a new one this weekend when I go and hear my friends bands at the Riverhead Blues Festival on Friday... Let's see what happens...
PPS... If your husband wants to take your picture, he must think you look nice! Why else would he take it?...