Body Confidence.

Hello everyone, 

Did you all see my last post about my weight loss? If not then you may want to have a look here as during this I'll be referring back to the things I said as I had to overcome a lot of body confidence issues and I still face issues daily. So here we go.

As you all probably know last year I lost a lot of weight and felt so much better for it, I thought brilliant I've lost weight so I can go about my daily life with much more confidence..but that weren't the case. I became so accustomed to being overweight that I just dealt with it and pretended I was fine with the way I looked, I became so good at convincing other people that even I began to believe my white lies so I gained a lot of confidence but that never stopped me staring in the mirror and hating who I was and what I looked like. I've never felt comfortable in my own skin and I know that there will always be days where I'll look in the mirror and see some sluggish, overweight girl..even if I was skinny my old body would still be on my mind! 

Going from a size 20/22 to a size 16 in a little space of time, in the photo the ages were 5 years apart but I lost the bulk of the weight over 3 months last year, was a big change for me. I thought I would try anything on and fall in love, this has happened in some cases, but there's always the worry of "Do I look fat in this" where before I accepted there was no point in trying to look slimmer so I wore what I wanted. The only reason of this now is because I want to feel more comfortable in a tight fit top as it would show off my hard work but my brain just thinks that clothes are clinging to all my lumpy bits, trust me there's a lot! Where I've been big pretty much all my life it's almost like my skin has outstretched itself as in certain places skin just sags now where there's not as much stuffing, I wanted my skin to shrink not sag but after researching on various websites I've read a lot of people go through this. Now I'm not talking about that much excess skin that you see on the tv where they need to go and have an operation to get everything cut off, so with a lot of dedication and the right training my skin will hopefully start to tone up and I'll feel more comfortable.

My body confidence has changed so much still, before I would walk around pulling clothes over my stomach with my head down now I'll allow my clothes to move how they should with my head held high. People probably still see a plus sized girl walking around but to me I'm the version of me that's always been waiting to break free..so hello world, it's the real me! I didn't think I'd be able to go to the gym and have a good workout, without being paranoid of what people would be thinking, but look at me now going to the gym on my own, unleashingmy arms in no sleeve and embracing all the bits of my body that would always make me feel insecure..my underarms, stomach and thighs!

Now I wish I could tell you how I changed from being shy and having no confidence to a more of an out-going person with real confidence..but I can't. I'm not really sure what changed, apart from the physical difference, but I'm not sure what changed in my mind. I just sort of woke up one day and because I was finally starting to get happy with my physical state my mind just followed, I was proud of myself for what I had achieved so I thought I should show that more!

I'm not sure where I wanted to go with this post and I've just been rambling on without any structure but basically if there's something you can take away from this then remember to always be yourself and confidence is key to that. When I was shy I would worry if people liked me, now I just think if they don't like me for who I am and what I look like then that's their loss.
Let your confidence shine, because you are awesome!