Thursday, May 31, 2012

Motivation Picture

A great motivator for me is to remember what I looked like once upon a time and to see how far I've come.  This picture was one of the few times my camera was turned on me and I remember being horrified that this is what other people saw when they looked at me.  I was 240 pounds and had recently had my third child.  THAT DAY I started walking at lunch time, every day.  Each day I got a little further in the time I had but I always walked for an hour.  At first I could hardly do much distance at all and it was flat ground.  By the end I was hiking to the top of the small butte near my office and back down in that same amount of time but it happened gradually (the first time I walked to that butte I got as far as reaching the bottom before I had to turn around at 30 minutes, much less getting to the top).

The first time around I lost 80 pounds in about 7 months.  But I did some of it wrong :(  I walked an hour 6 days a week (smart) but ate too little in order to lose it faster (dumb).  I really screwed with my body and it bit me in the ass in several ways, the worst being what it did to my cycles.  This time I'm trying to be a little nicer to my body so I don't hit those ugly road blocks again.


Eventually, I ended up gaining about 50 pounds back over the next several years and last Christmas it hit 210 pounds.  The main reason for that is that I just stopped putting in the exercise and after I got married I started eating too much.  I ate lunch with my husband (I never ate lunch before because I had larger dinners) because he was hungry and wanted company but I didn't make my dinners any smaller.  It happened in such small amounts (5-7 pounds a year) that it took a while to hit me what was happening but when I ran across this picture I knew I never wanted to be there again.

So here I am, back under 180 and still falling.  I'm aiming for about 155-160 (The counters are based on 160) and I plan to be there sometime in late July/early August.  But this time I have to keep the activity going.  No, it probably won't be quite as intense as it is now but it won't stop either.  I'm always going to have to be more active than I was but that doesn't scare me like it did 6 months ago.  Now I can actually look forward to it a little bit.  Hopefully, if you are on the same kind of path, you will be hit that place where you can look forward to it as well :)

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