"You're always tired"

Here I am at my highest weight ever. This picture is not very clear but it gives you the idea of how unhealthy I have become.
While you might be curious as to what I weighed at this point…I am not quite ready to tell you just yet but I will say I have a LOT to lose.

I have gotten to the point I am just functioning in my life. I get up go to work, come home, and think about how many hours I have until I have to do it all over again. I am so tired and sore all I can think about is crawling in my bed or sitting in my recliner for the evening. I never have energy to keep up with my children anymore. One day my son asked me “what was wrong?” and I said, “I don’t feel good today, I am tired” His reply was, “you’re always tired.”  I realized he was right, I am always tired and have no energy to get things done. It made me realize I needed to get myself healthy not just for my family but for myself. I knew I needed to find that person that was hidden under all the weight again. The person that had confidence in herself and was able to accomplish anything she set out to do.

Ok, so you have decided to take on this journey once again of getting healthy, how do you plan on doing it?

My first step was to figure out how I could keep better track of my food intake and exercise (or lack of). A friend introduced me to Myfitnesspal.com which allows me to enter my weight and where I would like to be. It will then calculate the amount of calories I should be eating each day in order to achieve the goal I have set for myself. I have found it can be daunting to go and enter my food intake for every meal but figured it would be the only way to see how much I was actually putting in my mouth.  My children were so nice to buy be a fit bit to keep track of my steps each day. The recommended daily amount is 10,000 steps. (Wow have I got a long way to go, but as they say baby steps).

Now that I feel I am ready to start it seems overwhelming to me. I know my past history is I will be all on board in the beginning and then start to falter off. A bad day would make me think there is no point in continuing so I might as well keep eating since I messed up already. I want this time to be different. I know for myself in order to succeed I need to see some victories along the way, not just the big one at the end. So I have decided to break my weight loss goal into phases. This way I will not get overwhelmed and think I will never make it to the end.  My goal is not to be at the weight the “charts” say I should be but to be where I feel healthy and active again. This will be different for everyone.

I am committing myself to lose 80 pounds by next August 2016.  My first goal is to focus on losing 40 pounds. The average, healthy weight loss per week is 1-2 pounds therefore I have made a goal to lose 8 pounds per month. If it is more that is even better. But knowing there will be ups and downs I feel this is realistic for me.  Knowing the scale is not always my best friend I have decided to also measure myself once a month. Even though the scale may not be showing progress does not mean the inches are not coming off.  The plan is to weigh myself weekly and measure once a month. The measurements include neck, arm, chest, stomach, abdomen, hips, thigh, and calf. The weekly weigh in will be every Saturday morning.
So stay tuned for my next blog where I will let you know how much weight I have lost including any inches.
So stay tuned until next week :)  Here’s to good health.
 

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