I had planned to write a post about how much I hate this plateau I’m stuck on. I spend each week putting so much effort into losing weight – tracking calories, staying under a set amount, exercising with a mix of strength training and cardio – that it’s really frustrating to step on the scale at the end of that week and see no change.

I’m so close to a goal weight and yet so far from it. Plateau must be French for torturous insanity.

Then I went shopping this weekend for a new pair of dress pants and a few new shirts. I still had my usual experience of hating nearly everything I tried on myself. But I also discovered I was comfortably wearing a size 10 in my pants. Not skin-tight, suck-in-to-button, but slightly snug with some room for movement.

There, in the dressing room at Kohl’s, I suddenly came to two realizations. First, that just because I’m not losing weight doesn’t mean my body isn’t changing. And second, when I look in the mirror, I still see the fat girl who used to be me.

The last time I was at 169 pounds, I didn’t comfortably fit in a size 10. I was usually a size 12, and occasionally a size 14 to some cruel-hearted designers.

So either Lee is trying to make me feel better about my weight through some generous vanity sizing, or these legs and hips are part of a 169 pound body that has more muscle than before.

Yes, I still have tree-trunk legs, they’re just firmer tree trunks.

Which brings me to my second realization. Losing weight doesn’t mean you automatically lose the self-loathing that can continue to weigh down the perception of how you see yourself.

In my case, my brain has turned the mirror into a funhouse mirror – I look into it and where I should see myself smaller and healthier, I instead only see fat and imperfection. I feel heavy. (Which of course begs the question: how in the world did I manage to move around when I was 50 pounds heavier? Or 80 pounds heavier?)

The most frustrating part is that I KNOW I’m smaller! I see the numbers on the scale, I can wrap the measuring tape around me and see inches gone, I can put on jeans that used to be tight but now fall off of me without unbuttoning…all of these are indisputable evidence of losing weight. So why do I still see the fat girl looking back at me?

Maybe a plateau isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe my body is giving my brain a chance to catch up and realize all I’ve accomplished?

Working on shedding the heavy self-image may be even harder than losing the physical weight, though. You don’t find nearly as many guides for that sort of thing – is there a diet for losing a negative self-image?