Motivation

The biggest thing, for me, on getting started on this whole losing weight journey, has been "where do I find the motivation?"  I have spent years sitting around wishing & hoping that I could lose weight & feeling sorry for myself that I wasn't as skinny as this person or as active as that person, but I wasn't doing anything to change it.  I continued to eat the way I was eating, continued to do nothing active & stayed miserable for a long time.  There were short time frames here & there where I would convince myself that I was ok with the body I was in & that it really didn't matter what I look like on the outside, but they were far & few between.  So, last October, I decided to do something different.  A friend of mine is a coach for Team Beach Body & was promoting Shakeology & how wonderful it is for you & how it'll produce results for weight loss & general improved health, etc.  I was looking for something to get me started, so I signed up.  Shakeology is a wonderful meal replacement shake that really did fill me up for that one meal I was replacing & since I was replacing one meal a day with something healthy, I decided that my other 2 meals needed to be healthier than what I was doing at that time.  And let me clarify something here, for anyone reading this & myself; I am a food addict.  I mentioned in my intro that I'm a recovering alcoholic & drug addict, but I am also absolutely, 100% a food addict.  I love food.  I am an emotional eater.  If I'm upset, depressed, happy, sad, bored, whatever, I eat.  I am a choco-holic.  Anything to do with food, I love.  That's my problem.  If it tastes good, I eat it.  And for most of my life I associated "good tasting food" with unhealthy things.  I also don't seem to have a "full" button.  In most cases, I eat whatever it is that I'm eating until it's gone.  So if that's a party size bag of peanut butter M&M's, it's not just a handful of them, it's the whole bag.  Having said that, once I started with Shakeology, I knew I needed to adjust my other meals, and by that I mean preparing them myself the night before, taking it with me to work and eating ONLY what I brought with me.  And this worked!  Amazing, right?!  Over the course of 2 or 3 months, I stuck to this "plan" and was able to lose 20lbs!  Unfortunately, Shakeology got to be a little too expensive for me to continue to purchase, and since I stopped doing that, all the rest of my healthy eating habits went down the drain as well.  I also didn't get into a regimented exercise routine at all while I was using Shakeology.  I would walk for 30 or 45 minutes here & there, but nothing that got me into a habit of doing something daily, like I should've been doing.  Therefore, yup, you guessed it, I gained back about 10 of the 20lbs. that I lost.  :(  In the middle of all of this, I started dating a new guy.  He's the same height as me, but, at this point, weighed pretty close to 100lbs less than I did.  Obviously, it wasn't an issue for him that I'm overweight, but it's become a HUGE (no pun intended) issue for me.  As we continued to see each other (and are currently still together) I noticed how dedicated he is to working out, going to his JuJitsu classes, walking everywhere, riding his bike, etc.  And let me just tell you all that he can eat whatever he wants and it doesn't make a difference.  So, between watching him eat a gallon of ice cream at a time & it having no effect on him, hanging out alone watching a movie while he's at the gym, & hearing him tell me about the weight that he's been losing, I decided that I needed to make a change.  Again.  Again, let me clarify; I am NOT doing this because he wants me to.  He could really care less about my weight, he loves me because I'm awesome.  :)  It's ME who's uncomfortable with the way I look.  Me.  I am doing this for ME.  I want to be able to walk into any store in America, pull something off the rack, take it into the fitting room & not be frustrated or disgusted with myself because it doesn't fit at all or looks horrible on me.  I don't want to avoid having pictures taken of me anymore because I can't stand the way I look in them.  I want to be able to chase my daughters around a playground without getting winded after 5 minutes.  The healthier I get, the longer I'll live.  So, for me, the motivation to change came from within.  I have to, however, also give my brothers some credit here.  Both of them have been avid athletes since forever & in February, my older brother signed me up for my first 5k.  And then we talked my little brother into doing it with us.  It was such a great experience, I finished in just under an hour, my little brother stuck with me the whole way through, encouraged me, etc, but I wasn't physically able to run hardly any of it.  If I had to guess, I'd say that I actually ran less than a mile (a 5k = 3.1mi).  As we got close to the finish line, there was a girl running towards us and I said "I want to look like her" to which my younger brother quickly replied "Then you'll have to run like her".  Motivation.  Some days it's hard to find.  But I try really hard to focus on this process just like I have on my addiction recovery process: One day at a time.  Just for today, I'm going to stick to my plan.  I got this.  I can do hard things.