the different me in the mirror

As mentioned yesterday, I've been sabotaging my own weight loss.

I think the root cause of this is actually something that I've been thinking about for a while now, in that I look different.

As I discussed in my set of posts about how the weight loss was planned and started a few weeks ago, part of the reason for loosing the weight is a desire not too look so bad. I don't want to be a fat blob any more - or, at the very least, I don't want to be a morbidly obese blob anymore; I'll decide if I mind being a simply fat blob when I eventually get there.

Anyway, the point is that loosing weight obviously changes how you look and this is a part of why I want to loose the weight.

Back when I was in uni doing my Physics degree, one of the subjects we covered was something called Fourier analysis. I won't try to explain this, but the prof explaining it mentioned that he had a theory that we all have mental Fourier filters.

These filters act on the image we see in the mirror, in order to kind of "smooth out" the bad bits (clearly this is for normal perceptions, not those with things like Anorexia). This he suggested was why most people can look at themselves in the mirror, but instantly hate seeing ourselves in photos - in a mirror your image is reversed, so your filter is based on that reversed image.

A simpler way to think about it is that the things we see in the mirror every day we get used to.

Now as I mentioned a few weeks ago I've been fat for most of my life, so my filter is processing out that fatness. I don't see a blob in the mirror, but I do in photos (oh boy do I).

Having lost what amounts to around a fifth of my entire body weight these filters have therefore started to be presented with a similar problem when I see myself in the mirror. I keep catching my reflection and seeing parts of my body that didn't used to look like that and because my filter isn't adjusted yet, it's oddly alarming.

You know, this is actually proving really difficult to explain, because I'm also fully aware that my initial blobness is entirely self-inflicted. If someone is injured and gets a big, nasty scar on their face, it's a whole different ball game to if you spent your life sat on your arse eating pies.

My point is that even though those bits that didn't used to look like that are the beginnings of the changes I want to see I think they've also been alarming me in a similar way that the face-scar would. You can understand the face scar thing, because it's your brain alerting you to something you need to pay attention to - something could be wrong that you need to sort out. It's just my brain is doing that even though the underlying change is a good one that I want.