Finally Choosing Me

There wasn’t one dramatic moment when I looked in the mirror and suddenly decided to change my life. No inspirational music started playing. Nobody handed me a motivational T-shirt.

I was just tired.

Tired of my joints hurting. Tired of feeling tired. Tired of knowing exactly what I was doing and continuing to do it anyway.

I’m 5’4”, and when I finally got real with myself, I weighed 240 pounds.

I had tried losing weight before. Of course I had. I knew sweets and fried foods weren’t exactly health foods. I knew portions mattered. I knew I should probably make better choices.

Knowing wasn’t the problem.

Actually doing it—and doing it consistently—was a completely different story.

So I went back to Noom.

I had tried it before, but this time I made a decision that seems ridiculously obvious in hindsight: if I was going to pay for it, I was actually going to do it.

Not sort of do it. Not track breakfast and conveniently forget that the rest of the day happened. Not eat something standing at the kitchen counter and decide those calories somehow didn’t count because I never put them on a plate.

I bought a food scale. I pulled out the Instant Pot. I started planning and prepping my meals, snacks—everything. I weighed my food and tracked every bite that went into my mouth.

And because I work 12-hour night shifts, preparation mattered. A lot.

Going to work without food already planned was basically an invitation to make questionable decisions at 2 a.m.

There was also the break room.

And, perhaps more dangerous, the mental-health candy drawer.

I learned pretty quickly that willpower was a lot easier when I wasn’t standing three feet away from a drawer full of chocolate trying to convince myself that one piece wouldn’t hurt.

So sometimes choosing myself meant something incredibly profound:

I stayed out of the damn break room.

The biggest difference this time was that I stopped treating certain foods like they were forbidden.

I didn’t swear off carbs forever. I didn’t decide I would never eat dessert again. There wasn’t a sad little list taped to the refrigerator of everything I was no longer allowed to enjoy.

I ate real food.

I just learned how much of it I was actually eating.

And let me tell you, nothing introduces you to reality quite like putting something on a food scale and discovering what an actual serving looks like.

Apparently, my previous definition of a “serving” had been based largely on optimism.

I weighed my food. I measured portions. I planned meals and snacks. I tracked everything—even the little bites that would have been very easy to pretend never happened.

And I weighed myself every day.

Not because every morning brought good news. It absolutely did not. Some mornings that scale apparently woke up and chose violence.

But weighing every day helped me stop treating one number as a judgment about whether I had been “good” or “bad.” It was information.

Some days it went down. Some days it went up.

What mattered was what happened over time.

So I kept going.

Not for two weeks. Not until the first burst of motivation disappeared.

For more than a year.

And eventually, that consistency added up to something I once wasn’t sure I could do.

I lost about 100 pounds.

But losing about 100 pounds changed more than the number on the scale.

My clothes changed. My body changed. Moving around was easier. Eventually I found myself buying a size small, which was something I never imagined would be part of my vocabulary.

But here’s the funny thing about changing your body:

Your brain doesn’t necessarily get the memo at the same time.

I could look at the tag in a piece of clothing and see the word small, but there was still a part of me shopping for the woman who had been 240 pounds.

Then came PMHNP clinicals and the words business casual.

Apparently, after years of scrubs, yoga pants, and whatever else was comfortable, I was supposed to know what that meant.

I did not.

Suddenly I was trying to figure out what looked professional, what actually fit, what was flattering, and whether something was appropriate—or whether I was about to walk into clinical looking like I was headed somewhere entirely different.

There were impulse purchases.

There were shorts that turned out to be considerably shorter than they had appeared in my imagination.

There was an ongoing negotiation with the belly pouch that had apparently decided it had survived this journey and earned permanent residency.

But something else was happening too.

For the first time in a very long time, I was figuring out what I liked.

Somewhere along the way, shopping stopped being about hiding my body and started becoming another way of figuring out who I was.

I discovered that I actually liked business clothes. I loved summer dresses. I already knew I had a weakness for shoes and purses, but apparently weight loss was not going to cure that particular condition.

I started wearing colors other than black.

I even wore a two-piece swimsuit.

That might not sound particularly revolutionary, but for the woman who had spent years trying to make herself smaller—not just physically, but in so many areas of her life—it felt pretty damn significant.

I also learned not to rush out and replace my entire closet every time the scale moved. My body was changing too quickly, and buying a whole wardrobe halfway through the process would have been an expensive lesson in poor planning.

Eventually, though, the weight loss slowed.

I plateaued.

Later, I needed some help to continue moving forward.

And I think that matters enough to say out loud.

Because I don’t want to tell this story as though I discovered the secret formula, lost 100 pounds through sheer determination, and then rode off into the sunset wearing size-small yoga pants.

That isn’t how real life works.

My body has continued to change. Getting older has brought its own surprises. Maintaining weight is different from losing it. Confidence still has good days and bad days.

But when I look back at the woman who stood 5’4” and 240 pounds, what makes me proud isn’t simply that she eventually lost about 100 pounds.

It’s that she finally decided she was worth taking care of.

She bought the food scale.

She packed the meals.

She avoided the mental-health candy drawer when she needed to.

She kept showing up on the mornings when the scale was nice to her and the mornings when it was an asshole.

And little by little, she started choosing herself.

The smaller clothes were nice.

But becoming someone I was finally willing to care for?

That was the real transformation.