nobody warned me about the identity gap once the thing that organized your life for a year is just... gone
For over a year, "losing weight" was a structuring project. Tracked, planned, celebrated milestones, had a clear direction. Hit goal, and there's genuinely a weird flat feeling where that project used to be. Not regretting it for a second, just wasn't prepared for the gap.
best — the order this archive was captured in
this is the single most underdiscussed part of this whole process and I think it's because it sounds ungrateful to say out loud. "I got the thing I wanted and now I feel weirdly aimless" is a hard sentence to post without a caveat attached to it.
exactly why I hedged it three times in the post itself, felt like I needed to prove I wasn't complaining before I could even describe it
you don't need the hedging with this crowd honestly, this is a completely normal thing to feel and naming it plainly is more useful than the caveats
my own log went from daily obsessive entries to barely-monthly ones around this exact point, and I remember it feeling like losing a hobby, not gaining freedom, at least at first.
same shape here with the spreadsheet, 61 tabs of active tracking during the loss phase and now it's mostly dormant, and dormant felt bad before it felt fine
the tracking itself was probably part of the "project" feeling for a lot of us, not just the weight loss, so of course it feels like a loss when the tracking winds down too
hadn't separated those two things before, "the tracking was the project" is probably more accurate for me than "the weight loss was the project"
this thread just quietly reframed something I've been feeling for months without a name for it, thank you both
this thread is doing something genuinely valuable just by existing, a lot of people are going to read this in six months and feel less alone in the exact feeling you're describing right now
Good discussion, staying honest without turning into anything that reads as regret about the outcome itself. This is the kind of nuance this community should be able to hold.
counterpoint that might be unpopular: some of this "identity gap" talk risks romanticizing the disorder-adjacent obsessive tracking phase a little, losing that intensity might just be healthy, not a loss
that's actually a fair and important point, I don't want to romanticize the tracking-obsession part of it either, the two things can both be true, it's a real gap AND letting go of some of the obsessiveness is genuinely healthy
appreciate you taking that seriously instead of getting defensive, that's a better answer than mine was a question
one person's identity gap isn't universal, but the number of people agreeing in this thread suggests it's common enough to be worth naming properly rather than treating as an individual quirk
fwiw this is one of the more genuinely reflective threads this community has produced in a while
saving this for the future, not there yet myself but this seems worth remembering ahead of time
- 1my own log went from daily obsessive entries to barely-monthly ones around…5 comments in this branch · started by u/dose_diary_dana