I am proud to announce that I have lost three more pounds. This makes a total of ten pounds in three weeks. I realize this news should be coming to you tomorrow on "Weigh-In" Tuesday, but since it will be Tera's turn to blog I thought I'd weigh myself today. I've dreaded weigh-in's my whole life so I think I may be on to something since I'm willing to step on the scale a day early. I feel very positive that I am moving in the right direction, but there are still so many defeating thoughts.
I have a confession to make- this ain't my first rodeo. About eight years ago I had lost one-hundred pounds. I did it through extreme diet and exercise and managed to keep it off for about four years. I had become a bit of a celebrity. Everyone was amazed at how I had done it. I wasn't amazed because I knew how many hours I had put into the gym to get that body. No one knew I was starving inside. I would go out for a night on the town and if I had anything more than a cup of ice, I would come home and go running for an hour. It didn't matter if it was 2 a.m., fourteen degrees outside, or raining cats and dogs, I wasn't about to let this weight thing get the best of me! Little did I know it already had. It was controlling my life- this obsession with being fit. As good as I felt and as good as I looked, I knew at some point I would not be able to keep up this pace. What I never expected was that when I stopped starving myself and working-out three hours a day, I would gain back every single pound I lost and then some.
I had corrective surgeries to remove excess skin and thought I'd never find myself in this place again. Here I am. A little less than ten years later my weight has skyrocketed to be forty-five pounds more than what it was before I had started dieting back then. You CAN NOT imagine how defeating this it! All that hard work, all that deprivation, and all that money to fix stretched out skin damaged from years of yo-yo dieting, is down the tubes. Though I've had much bigger weight-losses in my life, I can't tell you how proud I am of the ten pounds I've lost this month. I'm proud because I know I ate reasonably and exercised moderately to achieve this. I've gained and lost weight more times that Oprah, yet I never give up! This time I believe I'm gonna beat this once and for all. Anyone who's ever lost a significant amount of weight knows how much you learn through that process. Well imagine how much you learn when you've done it more than once!
I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert on the matter. Addressing the insulin issue has been a big win for me because I don't think it's normal to have to spend that many hours working-out, just to maintain a healthy weight. I can remember feeling the symptoms back then- the extreme sleepiness after I ate, despite having eaten nearly nothing. Silly me, I thought the extreme carb cravings and the crash of energy was just the result of some hard workouts. Now I know better. Still, with all this knowledge and insight, the one single thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night is..."what if I go through all this again, only to fail again, and find myself gaining all the weight back plus fifty pounds more?!?" I really do not want to spend my life this way. Always working towards a goal but never long-term achieving it. A constant state of deprivation. What if I never even achieve the goal this time??
What I try to tell myself is that everything happens for a reason and perhaps we are meant to have do-overs until we learn the lessons we didn't absorb the first time. I've done it before, so I have to believe that I can do it again. I just pray that this time I can cross this goal off my "To-Do List" once and for all. I will not give up until this mission is complete.
“Many of life's failure are men and women who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”- Thomas Edison
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