So I have finally made it through my first 'month' of lighterlife. I lost 3lb on Wednesday (I got my scientific calculations completely wrong, I will admit that!), which means I have lost 1st. Hooray. One month down, about eight more to go.
On Wednesday we learnt about 'strokes'. Bearing in mind we had no idea what strokes were, when the DVD came on and people started talking about asking for strokes and stroking themselves, we were all in fits of giggles. Basically a stroke is a unit of acknowledgement. So when someone says 'That top looks lovely' or 'your hair really suits you', that's a postive stroke. Someone saying 'you did a really shit job' is a negative stroke. According to the shrink on the DVD, strokes are the most important thing in the world and if you don't get strokes you die or something. At this point, I was thinking this was all abit silly and far fetched. I thought that in this day and age, you'd be lucky to get even one nice thing said about you a day because people are too busy or too self consumed.
I asked the LL locum (yep, our regular guru wasn't there) what happened when someone said something that was a positive stroke but you knew they didn't mean it. The group started rallying round saying that it wasn't that the compliment was false but it was the way I was taking it. They said perhaps I didn't think I deserved the compliment. To be honest, the person that I was thinking about originally does have a habit of spitting up random compliments to anyone just as a way of hearing her own voice (which she loves) but when the group asked what they would prefer the false compliment giver to say and I said 'I would prefer if she just didn't notice me at all', it dawned on me that maybe I wasn't accepting the compliments I was receiving.
So when someone told me my face looked thinner the next day, I just said 'thank you'. Later when I looked in the mirror in a changing room, I thought 'yes, actually it does look thinner'.
The locum asked if we felt more confident since we have lost weight and I said 'no, I don't feel any different. I don't feel like I've got smaller'.
I tried on a lot of clothes yesterday and it is fair to say I have lost a dress size. Some blouses still pucker around my boobs but I think that says more about their cut than my body. I don't have huge boobs compared to my body, so they must just be rubbish.
A lot of my current tops are starting to get abit baggy and where the majority of them are empire line etc anyway, I'm ending up being draped in swathes of fabric. I'm just a bit fed up with it, so I tried on the top I bought in March that I mention before. It is the same size as the tops I was trying on last night but for some reason it seems smaller. I think it's because, as I've mentioned, it's not an empire line. Well, anyway, it fit! So I'm wearing it right now! =D Finally, finally, finally I am able to wear it.
So there we have it. Proof that I am getting smaller to dispell my feeling of 'nothing has changed' that I was expressing at LL on Wednesday. I can't deny obvious proof. So there, self, you are great. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
