Weight Loss & My Self-Esteem

I have lost a big amount of weight since my highest poundage 20 years ago. I was nearly 400 lb. back then. Now I am over 140 lb. less.

As I was walking toward Trader Joe's yesterday, I caught my full length reflection in the window, and I saw myself full length. What I saw surprised me. I was actually good-looking.

This realization is actually groundbreaking in that I always thought of myself as ugly. I know that the source of this belief was that I as raised to see myself as having no value, i.e., ugly, stupid, lazy, bad.

I remember when I had lost a lot of weight before, in the 70s, and I could not look at a full length image of myself and see myself as anything but ugly. I have been doing a lot of work for improving my self-esteem in the past decade. And instead of buying into the impoverished view of myself, I can actually see that I am not ugly, stupid, lazy, and bad. Paradigm shift is an accommodative learning; it requires a total readjustment of all I had previously believed about myself, and then adopt more accurate concepts about myself that I am now ready to embrace.