Okay, now I’ve got the reason for my weight gain and constant fatigue (major sinus infection), I’ve started my medications and lovely twice a day sinus flushes, and I’m changing my diet so decrease the crap that got me fat in the first place. I need to rephrase that, the crap I ate too much of and got fat because of I ate it in the first place.
This process is slow and can be very frustrating. For anyone who’s started an improve my health plan, the beginning is the most difficult. It’s not the “I’m going to get healthy beginning” its the starting-excercise-changing-habits part, that beginning. This is when I set my long and short-term goals and make sure I don’t plan something ridiculous like losing 70 pounds by New Years. (Then I can eat crap because I didn’t meet my goal–go self sabotage!)
No, this time I tell myself 1-2 pounds a week is a good pace. If I keep that up, I could be to my goal weight by my birthday (11 months from now). I know that’s the reasonable thing to do, the smart thing, but I feel overwhelmed by the journey, by the beginning. If I can start, just start any sort of routine it will help. Monday cardio, Tuesday weights, Wednesday jelly donut–wait, that’s a horrible idea–donuts aren’t until Saturday. No, not really, but don’t believe for one moment the idea of ditching this entire plan and going to Krispy Kreme doesn’t have some appeal because it would be so much easier.
I know part of these feelings of being emotionally bombarded is from being sick for so long. It helps that I understand why, but it doesn’t change the fact that I chose to eat all that stuff, that I ate larger than needed portion sizes and didn’t move. Now that I’m beginning again, I’m praying, hoping for that kick in the butt, that motivation I had so long ago. I used to be so motivated, so driven, but in the past year, I felt I’ve lost a lot of that. During this process, I kept waiting for that epiphany that “Ah-ha” moment as Oprah calls it, when everything fell into place, the fire in my belly was lit and didn’t burn out. It became the moment when I loved salad at every meal and getting on the treadmill for three hours a day for the rest of my life felt like home. It’s not going to happen that way. It’s going to be me, making myself get up, get moving, and get focused on what I’m eating everyday and how much I’m moving. Waiting for that perfect moment to appear, well, I’ve already been doing that for the past year and all it’s gotten me is fat(ter).
One way to really drive this home was in the form of real big reality slam. I got on the scale and body calculator at the children’s museum last Friday. It recorded my BMI at 38. Quite distressing really to think I’m in the morbidly obese range. I don’t consider myself morbidly obese, obese yes and that in itself is annoying, but morbidly obese? Crap. As if I needed any more adjectives describing my weight and health and that comes along. I jumped off the scale, but not before it printed a read-out. Then I had two options. Ignore the printout or take it and have to accept my readings. (There wasn’t a trash can near by so I couldn’t just toss it.)
Thank goodness my daughter can’t read yet or that she was even paying attention. She was too busy trying to place the magnetic organs on a skeleton and doing quite well I might add.
Hence I begin, again, but this time, I’m planning day by day instead of month by month. Smaller increments will yield small, steady victories and inch by inch, I’ll get there. At least, I’d better. There are too many people out there rooting for me for me to fail.
