Oh, I do not agree. Some of my strongest moments of feeling motivated related to a) clothing and b) making my sisters jealous.
I wouldn't even know how to make weight loss surgery into some sort of virtuous pursuit, unrelated to the pursuit of beauty. ,. I was both anorexic and bulimic as a teen and I remember weighing 112 lb and feeling really really fat. I could not stand to look in mirrors. This went on my entire life well into my forties.
I was so sick and tired of being fat. I didn't cause all of the obesity I suffered. Part of it was malpractice, being put on a medicine that cause me to gain an enormous amount of weight and put my adrenal glands into a state of peril.
And yes, I'm actually one of those people who had thyroid disease and had to have my thyroid irradiated. It took years after that to balance my dosage. I had a pair of 30 / 31 Levi's 501's which I pinned to my wall at the foot of my bed. Every time I looked in that direction I saw those Levi's. I never thought I would ever be able to fit in them, but I did. And I still have them even though I can't wear them right now because of some COVID-related weight gain (10#) and edema.
I have several Spanx body shaping garments. They are really tight. Reminds me of being a young woman and wearing a girdle. They are the fashion industry stand for short appearances where you need to look firmer and maybe even thinner. They are very expensive but in my view, completely worth it. I haven't gotten the upper arms girdle but it is in my shopping cart, waiting for the day that I can justify purchasing it.
I was raised as a child to turn the other cheek. But that didn't seem to have a corollary effect on my family's criticism of my body, my stringy hair, my big nose, the fact that I walk like a boy, my days as a drug taking hippie, or just a general big paint brush they applied to my self-esteem, wiping it out like so much graffiti. I was hospitalized 5 times for suicide attempts.
They were just relentless. So, yeah, I did want to make them jealous, but more accurately I wanted to be who I really was physically and I wanted to find myself attractive and I wanted evenge. These are not all the things we'd like to admit and most of us would like to rise above it, but let me just urge you to love the fact that you still have all those clothes and that one day you're going to be back in them and you are going to find yourself beautiful in a physical way that resulted from weight loss surgery and you feel absolutely okay about that.
Physical appearance feeds into self-esteem. Self-esteem is a mental health issue. Your mental health is an issue already for a lot of other reasons or you wouldn't ever have gotten obese. In order to repair that nasty toxic message that you were fed chapter and verse, it is absolutely okay for you to take every moment possible to think about how pretty you are or how nice your hair is or how well you put on makeup or how pretty that dress is. It is all part of the same coin. Most of your life it came up Tails. Now it's going to come up Heads, every single time.
