Ready to fight

Nine years ago, when I completely changed my lifestyle and lost a bunch of weight, I swore I would never go back to the way things were before. I honestly believed that I wouldn't, but I was underestimating life. Grief and stress basically used me as bowling pins and continually knocked me over when I was just trying to stand there looking sleek and curvy, the same size as everyone else.

I just went back and read my entire blog. Every post. And while I enjoyed my humor and appreciated how far I've come in just knowing what's good for me and how to eat and the fact that running won't kill me (why was I SO terrified of running?), I noticed that for that last 6 years, I've barely written anything, and like I said in one of those past posts, if I'm not writing, I'm not doing well. Period.

I've known that I was unmotivated for the last 6 years, and I didn't care enough to do much about it. When I was on a weight loss show in 2016, and doing a cross fit challenge at the end of 2018, my heart wasn't there. I went through the programs, because I knew they would help and I was trying to force my mindset, but because I wasn't truly motivated, once they were over, I didn't stick to them. And I couldn't even muster the strength to care that much.

But now I'm 39, and Tim and I want babies, so I know I have to get my life in order and my butt in gear and do something about my health. We haven't gotten pregnant in the three years that we've been hoping we would, so I went to the doctor to figure stuff out, and to get my body to a place where it can carry a child. I'm scared it won't get there, and we want to adopt regardless as well, but while I plead with the Lord to give us babies, I have started to put the smack down (and the snacks down) and do everything in my power to make it possible.

Starting at the end of March, while the world began to isolate and it would have been really easy to stock up on candy and soda and pizza and ice cream, Tim and I committed to a 40-day sugar fast, and I am half proud, half unbelieving, and wholly grateful to say that we stuck it out and finished strong. Weirdly enough, I didn't even have any sugar cravings most of the time, because before we started I was just feeling so gross and done with junk food.

Coming out of the fast, we knew we had to have a plan in place, or we would just end up diving right back into our old habits, and neither of us wants to feel or be so sludgy and unhealthy again. So after some discussion, we agreed on an allowance of three items per week, which means that if we want a soda, that's an item. If we want a donut at church (once that becomes available again), we have to budget for that and have a maximum of two items between Monday and Saturday. Not only does this plan limit the amount of sugar we're putting in our bodies, it also makes us think about what items are actually worth it.

For example, I've never been a huge cake fan, but if it's there, I'll eat it. I don't want to have that mindset, because then "I'll just eat" everything. Where do you draw the line? On the other hand, while I do actually like water and don't mind drinking that most of the time (after my morning vat of iced coffee has been consumed), I really REEEEAAAALLLY love coke and root beer. So one of those bad boys is absolutely worth an item for me, and the limit on items causes me to take my time and actually enjoy the item I have chosen.

For whatever reason, while the eating has been under control for a while, I haven't been working out or even walking almost at all, and I can feel my body slowly turning into one of the White Witch's stone statues Tim and I are currently reading about in the Chronicles of Narnia. I know how dangerous this is, and yet: it remains difficult for me to put on the workout clothes and initiate some type of workout. A couple months ago, I came across a dance-based workout called Figure 8 with Jaana Kunitz, and it looked like so much fun that I bought it. I love dancing, and I need my workouts to be fun if I'm gonna stick with them.

But even with a fun workout, it took me months to start. I bought the workout (streaming from an app that you can play on your smart tv or your phone or tablet, along with the DVDs, in case anyone is interested and wants to go get the workout and do it along with me! Accountability is the best way to do everything, so join me! Buy the workout HERE) on April 5th, and just did Day 1 tonight. They give you an 8 week workout schedule and I am PLEDGING to finish the whole thing. Tomorrow I'm taking beginning body measurements and weight and pictures. For now, I'm just posting this picture of my red, post-exercise cheeks accentuated by this adorable kitten. In 8 weeks, I will be smaller, and he will be bigger. Can't wait for the side-by-side!

Farewell to the season of temptation

PHEW!!!! That was a giant sigh of relief as Christmas comes to an end. Don't get me wrong... I love Christmas as much as the next person. I might even love it more. I love the warmth and the atmosphere, the time with family and the friendliness of strangers, the celebration of the birth of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the singing of carols, dressing up for all the festivities, the spirit of generosity, the giving and receiving of gifts... if I wrote my list on a roll of parchment, I could probably wrap it around the world a couple times before I ran out of reasons why I love Christmas. Okay, maybe not the world, but at least a smaller replica of the world. Like a globe. My list could absolutely wrap around a globe at LEAST twice! I know, I know... my Christmas zeal is impressive.

I really do love giving gifts, too. Often I will make people open their presents early because I just can't wait until Christmas day! My cousin Gillian is due to have a baby girl on March 1st and I bought her some clothes while shopping for Christmas gifts. I almost wrapped those clothes and gave them to the unborn Avery, or "Choo Choo Woo Woo" as her brother Eli has dubbed her, for Christmas. To calm my urge to give, I brought the clothes with me on Christmas Eve and showed them to Gillian, and now she will get them for her baby shower, and I won't feel the need to buy more stuff since I already have her shower gifts. I have a problem.

I also have another problem. It's called "I ate way too much in the last couple months, AKA the Season of Temptation, and gained ten pounds back."

Yep. Ten pounds. Do you have any idea how many calories that is? 35,000. Thirty-five thousand calories above and beyond the necessary calories one needs to survive each day. Holy bajillion calories batman! Is that even possible? What did I eat, a literal cow? Two cows? A cow and a giraffe? A zebra with icing? My GOSH! How am I not in a food coma right now???

Let's just do some math... (Oh, and speaking of math, I totally got 98% in my math class this semester. Yeah, I'm awesome at the calculations. Shout out to all you math nerds out there, one of whom is pictured below.) I started giving in to the food and sweets deception in the middle of October with the introduction of Halloween. What can I say, I love candy corn! So, two and a half months of indulgence. That is approximately seventy-five days. 35,000 calories *shudder* divided by 75 days is 467 calories/day. Broken down like that, it's not as sickening, but still disturbing. And I can see how I wracked up all those extra pounds.

The good news? I hate how I feel, and I have no desire to continue to exist in this calorie induced state of grossness any longer. My digestive system longs for healthier fodder, and my energy level is begging to rise back up to meet its potential. I have been lethargic as a hyper sloth these few months, and it's driving me insane.

The REALLY good news? I know I can lose these extra ten pounds in no time. Much less than it took to gain them, even. I am not overwhelmed at the task before me, only excited! My small immediate goal is to lose what I have gained back, but then right after that is my goal of reaching 199 pounds. My brother and sister-in-law gave me the digital scale I requested for Christmas and now I can track my weight down to the tenth of a pound. This is an important aspect of weight loss for me.

I've been saying that I'm gonna start running for over a year now, with no actual running having taken place. I keep saying, "I'm gonna start running and then I'm gonna do a 5k." Ha. I need a change of strategy. I need to just sign up for a 5k and then I HAVE to start running to get ready for it. There's a color run on February 4th that I want to register for, but it costs $40, which I don't have. So I am on the search for a free or cheap 5k that I can do to get me running. Meanwhile, I really do have to start running because I signed up for a soccer class for nest semester. It will kick my butt. It will be wonderful.

So farewell, Season of Temptation. You were fun. You tasted delicious. You provided opportunities to dress up and eat lots of junk with my friends.

The Bel Air Christmas tea with my friend (and fellow math nerd) Andreawesome. Or just Andrea, but she is awesome, so I'm not really sure you can leave that part out. I ate WAAAAYYYY too much at that tea.

Even with the return of the evil ten pounds, I have continued to get compliments about how skinny I look. I don't feel like it right now, but when I look at pictures of myself, or catch a glimpse of myself on a security monitor at Target, I know that I do look thin. Not necessarily according to world standards, but in comparison to my previous self. I look at myself and think, "Wow! That's ME!"

Because the LAST time I went to the Bel Air Christmas tea, in 2006, I looked like this:

Collarbone check and that jacket again

I need to talk about my collarbones again. I love them. It has been so much fun watching the definition increase over the last several months, and I constantly catch myself touching them. I just did a side-by-side comparison picture with the picture I posted back in November:



And maybe I went a little crazy on the picture taking and the goofy faces:



Excuse my insanity.

Another thing I would like to revisit is my post entitled Why do I want to eat crap?, in which I lament the craving of sugary items and other healthfully detrimental habits. I was re-reading this post recently, and I suddenly became aware of just how far I have come. While I definitely still have a desire for sweet things now and then, it is no longer something I think about all the time, and beyond that, if it is sitting in front of me and I am not hungry, I don't automatically start to eat it anymore! I also stop eating before I am full, every single time. I know when I have had enough, and I no longer have an irrepressible urge to keep eating. I also now tend to favor the taste of more healthful foods.

This is a GIANT breakthrough!!! Food has become a non-issue for me! I can't even remember when that was the case before, and it doesn't make sense to me why it was the case for so long. Why, when there were issues to deal with on the inside, did I turn to food? I don't get it, and yet, it ruled my life for the last ten years or so. But food always masked whatever problem arose for a short time before just adding the misery of being fat and self-conscious, and not being able to control my eating. How could I have let that deceptive "comfort" be what I ran to instead of relying on God to bring me through? As I have deepened my relationship with Him, I have come to depend on His comfort and grace to get me through life. Not that all of life is hard... a lot of the time it is quite fantastic! But there are always difficult times to deal with, and they will continue to occur.

For instance, my biggest struggle is the fact that I am still single. More than anything else in this world, I have wanted to be married and have a family since I was a little girl, and I never imagined that I would still be single at 31. And I also don't understand how I hear from a large majority of the people I know how awesome I am and what a great wife and mom I'll be, and yet, here I am, alone. That was a huge driving force in my eating in the past, and not only did it not help, but it made the situation worse as I became incredibly unattractive and miserable. Nobody wants to be with a miserable person! At some point, I started turning to God instead of the food, and that has made all the difference in my contentedness. I know that He has an amazing plan for my life, and as He is the one that made me the way I am, with this incredible desire for a husband and family, I believe that He will bless me with that in the future. And I'm guessing, since God has been filling my heart with a desire to go visit different countries to work with orphans, that the man God has for me will have a similar passion, and that is so exciting to me! I wonder how much of my life I have wasted, when I could have being working in that field already, all because I was focused on myself and food! Being miserable really sucks the life out of a person. So now when I start to get overwhelmed with sadness that I am not married yet, instead of having a pity party complete with a mound of junk food, I pour my heart out to God and let Him deal with it. And I have peace. And visible collarbones.

So to lighten up this suddenly heavy post, I will end with a fun story and my new favorite picture. You know my green jacket that I wrote about here? Last Friday it was pouring rain, so I wore it. I was at my brother Brian and his wife Sarah's house, and when I put the jacket on to leave, I zipped it up and pulled it away from my body to demonstrate how much extra room there was. I said, "I feel like Sarah could almost fit in here with me!" so she tried. At first she wanted to see if she could get in while it was on me and closed, but she shimmied up as far as my waist before there was a pause followed by, "Oh. I forgot about your boobs." We all cracked up and we tried again, this time by opening the jacket. I believe there was only a space of about four inches that prohibited the closing of the jacket, and it used to fit me perfectly. Now that's what I call progress!