Spring is here! And with it comes Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, and all the other rich, sweet foods that have always been my Achilles heel. I had gotten pretty sloppy with my eating, but after all those cookies, candies, and pies, I knew I wasn’t doing as well as I should be. Whenever I get anxious about my weight, I do that thing most people do: stop weighing myself. But if I don’t know the truth, I’m free to imagine all sorts of worst-case scenarios.

And that’s exactly what I started to do. Because I wear leggings a lot, my shape is right there on display. Leggings may be able to even out a bit of cellulite or smooth a silhouette, but they can’t disguise the extra pounds you may start to pack on. I would look at my calves and think that they looked huge. My stomach looked bigger. Everything just started looking like I had gained at least 15 pounds, and I was panicking.

Once the orgy of Easter gluttony was over, I needed to get back to some discipline. I went back to recording my food intake (one of my main tools), and weighing in.

The first time I stepped on the scale, my heart was pounding. It was first thing in the morning, I had just peed, I was completely naked, I had even taking off the three rings I habitually wear. If I could reduce a 15-pound weight gain to a 14.8 pound weight gain, I’d consider it a victory. The little digital numbers started at zero and went up, and….I had lost two more pounds.

This is part of my dysmorphia. At my heaviest, I couldn’t tell what I looked like, and often thought of myself as much thinner than I was. Now that I’ve lost over 100 pounds, my brain is still telling me I’m fat, even though I exercise every day, and I mostly try to stick to foods I know will work for me – salads, chicken breast, Greek yogurt, fresh fruit and vegetables. But I haven’t said no to treats, and spend a decent amount of time planted on the couch, and all my past experience tells me that if I’m not starving myself and working out 10 hours a day, I will never lose a pound, and in fact might actually gain weight.

The knowledge that most people stop automatically losing weight and start having to be more mindful of their habits 12-18 months after bariatric surgery is always at the back of my mind. My surgery was at the end of October, so I’m right at that 18 month mark. I don’t know what it will look like when the honeymoon period is over. My weight loss has slowed from a high of 10 pounds per week (the first couple of weeks right after surgery) to about half a pound per week for the last six weeks or so, but it’s still heading downward.

How is it that, even as I continue to lose, my perception of my own body is that it’s getting bigger? Now I have two competing feelings to muddle through. Even though my clothes aren’t any tighter and my measurements continue to go down, all I see is the fat. At the same time, even though I’m still more than 20 pounds away from dipping below a “normal” BMI, I worry that I’m never going to stop losing weight. That I’m going to dwindle away into a sack of bones. My desire to keep to a healthy diet and exercise routine is always at odds with my desire not to disappear.

All this is to say that losing weight is great and solves many problems, but getting the pounds off is just the start of the process. Understanding how to take care of a body that’s changing all the time – with age, with the seasons, with stress – and how to feel good about the body I’m taking care of is a much, much longer journey.