Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Excuses are like armpits....everybody has them and they all stink

So every now and again I get asked how I lost all the weight, and though I know it is a natural question, its always hard for me to sum it all up.  I think many times people want to know what "magic pill" it was or a specific fad diet.  The truth of it is that it took me many many years to get healthy, it took me trials of different fad diets, nothing too extreme, but nothing I could keep up for the rest of my life.  Ultimately I did lose weight because going from eating in excess of anything and everything coupled with little to no activity meant that I could just go for walks every day and lose weight, or decrease my calories a tad and lose weight, when I was so overweight the minor changes I made at the beginning made a huge change, for instance I cut out soda and switched to diet (I don't advocate diet soda, but I drank it for a number of years to avoid regular soda...lesser of the evils I guess?), not drinking regular soda I dropped over 10 pounds alone. 


Eventually though I hit a plateau and guess what I had to step up my A game and work harder.  I guess what I am getting at is that what I did to lose the weight and get healthy was to make a decision, the decision that for the rest of my life I don't want to wonder what it feels like to be healthy and love my body, I want to live in that healthy body everyday.  Sounds cliche I know but really that's what it boils down to.  Everyday we are faced with decisions, some little, some big and some that if left unchanged become part of a bigger problem down the road. 

What I really want to tell people is that losing weight and getting healthy is hard work.  There really is nothing more to it.  I mean nose to the grindstone, type of hard-work.  It's not easy to stop eating frosted flakes for breakfast instead of eggs, its not easy to carve in time to workout or walk into a weight room and be the only girl there, its not easy to make a meal plan, shop then prep the food, it is not easy to budget your money so you can buy more nutrient dense food...it's not easy, at first anyways.  Eventually with HARD work and consistency, and persistence this way of living becomes second nature and you look back and wonder how the heck did I live any other way?  Because once you know what it feels like to be healthy its sad to think of the time you lost, you know like the time you didn't go on that kayaking trip because you thought you would not be able to physically fit in the boat let alone actually row for miles, or the time you couldn't go flying in a small airplane because of the weight limit, or running even 5 ft freaked you out?  I don't take those things I can do for granted now because I know at one time they were not possible.

I made a decision one day to be alive for my kids for as long as I possibly can, and to try give them the best of me every day.  Once I made that decision I immersed myself and obsessed over anything to do with becoming healthier eventually things fell into place.  I made meal plans, I got a gym membership, I made better decisions every day, month, year that went by and eventually have gotten to a place where these things I do to be healthy are normalcy in my life.  Now I adjust our budget so we can afford higher quality more nutrient dense food, it might mean forgoing fancy handbags or bigger tvs, but my body is worth more to me than those things.  I just want to emphasize how making changes did not come easy at any point, it was and continues to be hard work, but let me just say and hopefully this too does not come out as a cliche, the reward of choosing to be healthy and fit is so unbelievable and fulfilling that you just start seeing life for what it is...."a gift."

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