The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

How to accept your body after significant weight loss.

There are many meaningful reasons people go primal. They want to improve their fitness, increase their longevity,

feel younger, reverse lifestyle conditions, heal hormonal imbalances,

enhance fertility, get off prescription medications, and lose fat.

With regard to losing fat, some want to lose a good

deal of it to significantly alter their body composition. This goal, while it has the power

to shift one's entire health trajectory, not to mention life experience, may also be the most likely

to come with unforeseen, even undesired results. I'm talking particularly

about those who undergo dramatic transformations, the kind that can leave them feeling incredible,

enjoying vitality, and in particular looking substantially different. To be sure, there is much

to celebrate when we meet body transformation goals,

the impressive discipline, the new strength, the renewed health, the added energy, and so on.

But for some people, they can also be an uncomfortable gap, between how they saw themselves

before and how they have yet to see themselves post-goal. Once the major push to the objective is done

and they relax into a new normal, the striking incongruence can bring up surprisingly ambivalent

or even critical feelings. How can such extraordinary success become a Pandora's box?

I've heard people describe this post-goal experience in terms of

everything from emotional struggle to serious letdown, from identity crisis to reality check.

Some people may feel unsettled by not fully recognizing the person in the mirror anymore,

especially if they've not been close to their new body composition

in a number of decades. Others may suddenly feel they've exchanged body image issues, losing the fat,

...