A week flies by so fast! I am already taking my week 3 photos this Thursday and I don’t even have my week 2 photos up yet! And so without due, I am rapidly putting them up to show you the comparison.

The changes are more obvious in the actual photo…but as you have read in my previous post, I’m a little too self conscious to show myself running around in my birthday suit. I certainly have less fluff around my middle in week 2, although I wonder if it’s because I’m less bloated. During week 1, I was enjoying that special time of the month that is reserved for females only, which turned me into a bit of a balloon. Not to say that I’m not losing fat, but I think it will become more apparent over the following weeks (I hope!).

Ack! Eek!

The thing I am struggling with the most right now is seeing only little changes every week. I realize that as I get older, the faster I want to lose weight. When I first started trimming down in my youth after a year of depression, even doing competitive martial arts it took 3 months to drop about 15-20 pounds. Now, I expect myself to drop 10 in less than a month, which is ridiculous in some sense unless I train 8 hours a day. It probably contributed to why my weight yoyoed so much over the past year. I would restrict my diet to ridiculous standards and exercise a ton, and then the moment I treated myself, it was like “BLAM!” binge binge binge cause the body was screeching at me. If I had to be dead honest with myself, I might have been bordering on bulimia…and that is an awareness of myself that I am devastated to admit.

I always prided myself on my strength, and how fit I was…and my weight gain last year made me feel ashamed, because how can I possibly prove that I am a fit and strong woman when I looked like a couch potato? I also attach many stigmas to how I look when I’m overweight (“Oh, of course she’s a geek/nerd, look how fat she is” or “Fat Asian girl=super unattractive”), which is awful because these thoughts are clearly products of  media and society’s pressure. Nobody should ever feel that way. I always preach against it, and yet I made myself a victim of it.

So a shoutout to everyone who is reading: It’s super hard, I know, but NEVER judge yourself based on how you want social norms to see you. Change  if you…YOU…are truly unhappy with something, but not because you feel unhappy because of how SOMEONE ELSE sees you.

I am currently making the effort to change because I want to feel healthier, and because I personally want to return to a level of fitness that I used to represent. I also want to train my body to eat when I actually need to eat, and not pig out just because I am stressed or because I like the food. I am still battling the “outside voice”, and I know it will always be present in my life especially given the industry I work in, but I try not to make it the prominent reason why I want to become trimmer. As I roughly paraphrase Geneen Roth (and she’s brilliant!), losing weight will not solve life’s problems.

Speaking of stress, it seems like I cannot make a transformation in my career without suddenly making myself ten trillion times busier! Upping the number of auditions I get, the number of places I volunteer at, the number of networking events I attend, the number of one-on-one meetings I set up. Suddenly, I can’t get my ideal 8 hours of sleep…I am not eating on time, and I am on the go go go.

I still practice mindfulness as I go through the day, and other things like yoga…but enter supplements! Almost every supplement I take is some sort of brain booster or stress reliever…adrenal drops, magnesium, B-complex vitamins, liver care…to name a few. When my body and brain is going through so much, it needs the extra help. Regardless of how healthy I eat, stress depletes many of the major nutrients in the body. My sister is concerned that I should not be relying on supplementation to manage my stress, and should cut back and dedicate more time to rest.

The struggle is choosing how to balance out my life. Do I want to work less, and therefore slow my career growth in favour of resting more to manage my stress…or do I want to work hard and have external aid (aka supplements) to manage my stress. Either way, the end result is about the same, my body achieves a stable state. Obviously, there are many more factors, but I’ve broken down the bare bones. What do you think?