My weight and me.

What happens when you believe that you're failing to live up to people's expectations of you? Is it really other peoples expectations that you're failing to meet or could it actually be your own?
About 18 months ago I joined slimming world and started to turn my life around. I'm not sure how or why I did this, I guess I just reached a point where I was so desperately unhappy with myself that I had to do something, and dealing with my weight first seemed to be the natural course of action. Actually joining slimming world was a mission in itself because it took me about 3 attempts just to get myself through the doors and into the group to even join. At first I didn't tell anyone I'd joined slimming world, I had several reasons for keeping this to myself. You see, when I was younger I had been raped, on more than one occasion, and my initial coping mechanism to deal with this was self harm. I blamed myself, my God did I blame myself, and the guilt of that was literally eating away at me. Somehow at that time, I managed to come to the conclusion that if I was fat then no man would look at me, so therefor I would be protecting myself from ever ending up raped or hurt again. It made sense in my traumatised mind, I mean, what man would ever want to rape a fat, disgusting woman? So the weight piled on, and my safety blanket grew, my protection bubble, my failsafe method of keeping myself protected.
Over the years I made many attempts at dealing with the trauma of being raped, I'd been left with PTSD as a result, and it took a long time to try to change my coping mechanisms and somehow rewire my traumatised mind into thinking a bit more logically. I finally realised that the guilt I was carrying was not mine to carry, and that I was worthy of love, I learned that it was not self conceited to love or even like myself and I was enough just as I was. This was when my slimming world journey began, because I finally felt ready to let go of the last coping mechanism I was holding onto, which was my weight.
In the past every time I'd decided to tackle my weight I had started out initially well, then as people began to notice the changes in my body, I would go into panic mode, if people could see a difference then it meant that I was no longer safe, loosing weight meant that I was putting myself at risk again, at least that's what my brain kept telling me. So over the years I would drop a bit of weight, then panic and regain it again. This time though, I knew had to be different, it was the final piece of a jigsaw I'd spent years carefully constructing, and I was determined that this time I would finally put my life back together.
As the weight started to drop away, my confidence and self esteem in turn grew. I was literally becoming a new person, what I believed to be a better person. People began telling me how amazing I was, how fab I looked, compliments came from all directions and at first I thrived from everyone's positive words, they gave me the courage to continue, to spur myself on. Hearing so many lovely things made me feel like I was worth something finally,  I felt good for the first time in forever, I felt like I was doing something right for once.
That didn't mean that the demons had gone completely though, they still popped in from time to time, taunting me, telling me I was wrong, doing their best to convince me how risky this weight loss thing was, how everything that had happened was my fault. Anxieties would grip me, and I would wobble, some weeks I fell completely, but I was strong enough to get back up, to push the anxieties aside and quiet the guilt that kept threatening to rear its ugly head again.
In my previous blog I talked about being betrayed by a close friend and how it shook me up, made me question everything in my life, all of a sudden I wasn't sure who I could trust, I wasn't even sure I could trust myself any more and that was when the guilt came crashing back into my life again. The thing with guilt is that it works it's way into every corner of your life, it consumes all of your thoughts about pretty much everything. Guilt is an emotion that once you allow it to affect one thought, it creeps across and taints every thought, it can be incredibly debilitating, at least it is for me, because once I've allowed guilt in, it consumes almost every thought I have. I end up feeling guilty for everything and anything, even things beyond my control suddenly become my fault somehow, and my brain makes it seem so logical to me.
So that's where I am right now, consumed with feeling guilty, because every week that I don't loose weight is a week when I feel like I'm letting everyone down, which I then feel guilty about, then I loose weight, and I panic, so I gain weight and I feel guilty, so I loose weight and I panic, it's a vicious circle.
 I feel like I'm under so much pressure to go back to the weight losses I know that I am capable of, but I think the only person putting pressure on me is actually me, I'm the one with such high expectations of myself, then when I fail to live up to them I feel so guilty. I wish I knew how to lay these demons to rest finally otherwise I'm going to go through the rest of my life overweight, in fear and constantly beating myself up over things beyond my control.