To date, I have lost the weight equivalent of a 2-year-old toddler (25.8 pounds).

And while this is an accomplishment of which to be proud…it also skirts the perimeter of dangerous thinking.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m crazy excited about this milestone. The beauty of losing 25 pounds is that you can actually feel and see the difference. I literally feel smaller. I feel more powerful. I feel triumphant. And you can see for yourself some slight changes in my physical presence (smaller belly, less fullness in the face).

And while I need to appreciate all of these new feelings and accomplishments, I have to be careful to not let them blur my sense of reality, which is that I still have a long road ahead of me.

That’s the deception of losing a significant amount of weight…you feel so much better that complacency can oh-so-stealthily creep in.

Actually, that’s the whole deception of being overweight. I have never met another obese person who truly sees themselves as obese. I mean, we know we’re fat. We do. But no one ever expects she won’t fit in a chair…or that her rear end is sticking so far out that it requires its own zip code…or that she won’t be able to fit into clothing she just bought a month earlier…or that she’s twice the width of most people. These things don’t seem like a possibility until they are actually staring you down with the ugly truth of reality.

For example…scroll back up and look again at the picture I posted. The truth is…I don’t look all that much different. I can see that as an intelligent person. However…the difference of how that woman on the left felt back in January as opposed to how the woman on the right felt just last night is tremendously different. I already feel like a different person..like I look amazing…even though…let’s face it…I’m still terribly obese.

It’s not that I choose to see myself as thin. I just don’t see myself anything more than just…Shelley. That is…until I happen past my reflection or see a photo or am confronted with tight pants or realize that I’ve knocked a laptop off a table with my big butt (true story).

But I’m not feeling sorry for myself. It’s good to realize that…hey…maybe I need to be more aware of what my unhealthy lifestyle has wrought my body. I need to realize that on a daily basis, instead of just reacting to a “bad” photo (which is truly a misnomer…more often than not…photos are simply an accurate depiction of how others see us, whereas a “good” photo is really how we want others to see us.)

Getting healthy is truly a balancing act that takes both physical and mental discipline I want to be proud of my accomplishments thus far, but I don’t want that pride to lead to complacency. Nor do I want to be defeated by the fact that 25 pounds is but a drop in the bucket considering I still have more than 150 left to lose.

So…I’m stopping right now and giving myself one big high five…

*CLAP*

And now…I’m moving on and turning my attention back to the task at hand…the next pound.