The Strange Part Nobody Talks About When Your Body Starts Changing.

The Strange Part Nobody Talks About When Your Body Starts Changing.

There is a large mirror in my bedroom. Enormous, actually, at least two metres wide, sitting on top of my dressing table. I cannot get out of bed without appearing in it.

And somewhere along the way, without really deciding to, I learned how to not see myself in it.

Not metaphorically. Literally. I would look in that mirror every single day, checking what I was wearing, sorting my hair, putting on makeup, and somehow managed to not actually see what was there. I don’t fully understand how that’s possible but I know it’s true, because of what happened the other day.

I did a double take.

And in that moment, my brain caught up with something my body had apparently known for a while. The version of myself I’d been carrying around in my head wasn’t accurate anymore. It probably hadn’t been accurate for some time. But I’d been so practised at looking without seeing that nobody had told me.

Here’s the thing about living in a body you’ve felt uncomfortable in for a long time. You develop strategies. Quiet, automatic ones you don’t even notice you’re doing.

I rarely leave the house. That’s partly chronic illness, partly the accumulated weight of years of not feeling confident in my own skin. When I do go out, I spend a significant amount of time selecting what to wear. Not what’s appropriate for the occasion. Not what’s most comfortable. What makes me feel the least fat.

And then I leave the house carrying the knowledge that it probably doesn’t matter anyway. That people will just see what they see. I’ve never played a video game in my life. I don’t eat rubbish. My house is not unkempt. But I can’t walk around with a sign explaining any of that, and if I did it would need to be billboard proportions. So I just carry it quietly and get on with it.

Recently, my husband and I went to my sister’s house to celebrate his birthday. We sat around the table, and mid-conversation my sister stopped and said, “You look so lovely tonight. I can see the changes are really suiting you well.”

I went quiet. I didn’t know what to say.

It was a sincere compliment from someone who meant every word of it. And it stunned me completely. Not because it wasn’t welcome, it was, but because I genuinely didn’t know how to receive it. I’m not used to compliments that land like that. The throwaway ones over the years, the “have you lost weight?”, “your face looks thinner”, the well-meaning comments that never quite knew what they were trying to say, those I’d learned to deflect or ignore. A real one, from someone who actually saw me, was something else entirely.

And that’s the part nobody really prepares you for.

There’s plenty written about losing weight. Meal plans. Protein. Calories. Medications. What surprised me most wasn’t any of that. It was how strange it felt when my body started changing but my mind hadn’t caught up yet.

The brain holds onto versions of you. All of them at once, sometimes. The younger version. The thinner version from years ago. And if you’ve spent long enough feeling bad about yourself, the worst version too, probably exaggerated beyond anything that was ever really true. My brain had been running on a picture that was out of date in multiple directions and I hadn’t noticed because I’d gotten so good at looking in a two metre mirror without actually seeing anything.

Confidence, I’ve come to think, doesn’t arrive with a smaller clothing size. There’s no montage. No moment where you look in the mirror and everything clicks into place. What actually happens is slower and stranger than that. You do a double take one morning. Your sister says something real and you go quiet because you don’t know how to hold it yet. You stand in front of your wardrobe and realise you’re choosing differently than you used to.

Small moments. Not a transformation. Just a gradual, slightly disorienting process of becoming more familiar with yourself again.

The more I talk to people going through significant weight loss, the more I realise this experience isn’t unusual. We expect our bodies to change. We don’t expect our relationship with ourselves to change too. Yet for many people, that’s exactly what happens. The physical changes are often the easiest part to measure. The identity shift is harder to see, but just as real.

As it turns out, the mirror wasn’t really the story. The story was how long I’d managed to look at myself without actually seeing myself.

After that, I couldn’t stop noticing it.

The compliment from my sister suddenly made more sense. So did the way I’d been choosing clothes lately. Even that moment in front of the mirror felt different once I’d realised what was actually happening.

I wasn’t adjusting to a changing body nearly as quickly as I thought I was.

Eventually I realised there was a whole side of changing size that nobody seemed to be talking about. So I wrote The Identity Shift: When Your Mind Hasn’t Caught Up With Your Body.

It started with a double take in a mirror, but I suspect it will feel familiar to a lot more people than just me.

Which is what The Size Shift is really about, for me. Not the number on the scale of the before-and-after photograph. Just the quiet, complicated and occasionally surprising business of catching up with yourself.

The Size Shift

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