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Celebrating Small Acheivements and Personal Development
I have a long list of things that I want to get done. Among them are to teach myself French, German, Spanish, and Italian. I've been wanting to lose weight for a long time now, but my family and I just moved to Michigan, so, needless to say, we couldn't bring many things with us. Unfortunately, one of those things was I could only bring one pair of shoes, and since it's Winter, I decided a pair of boots was my one pair. Now, sadly, I can't go out running or go on treadmill with snow boots, so I tried to figure out what else I could do. We live in a 2-story house, plus a basement, with four other people; people who are always downstairs watching tv. Or, sometimes not. But even when they're not, they're still sitting in the living room. And I have personal issues with exercising in front of people. So using my exercise dvds is out, too. I can't do sit-ups, in p.e., I failed every time I tried. Plus, most of the time it's way too cold to walk, and I have a 4 year old daughter that I need to take care of. So even if I went out there and braved the walk, I couldn't bring her along, she would get sick.
So, it brings up the question of what the hell should I actually do to exercise? My answer: I have no fucking clue whatsoever. So I've decided to take things a little bit at a time. I already mentioned that I have serious personal issues with exercising in front of people. It's different, say, at a gym, because the people there have better things to do than watch you exercise. But at home, it's different. So I decided to take care of that, first. This morning, I made a goal for myself. A bit of personal development on my part. Let's be honest: I hate my body. I hated it before I got pregnant with my daughter. In Middle School my own family always told me that I was too fat and that I should stop eating so much all the time. Now it should be dully noted here that my entire childhood, I lived off of bread, butter, milk, cereal, cup of noodles, and order in pizza once a month. So on the rare occasion that I would actually eat something with nutritional value (a family get-together, for example), I would eat a lot, I would eat too fast, and I wouldn't wait until it cooled down to eat. Most people know that all of those things put together is a recipe for a lot of weight gain. So, yes, I was overweight. I've been overweight my whole life, having my daughter, though I love her with everything I am, made me hate my body even more. I exclusively breastfed, so for a short time I had lost the weight, but because I wasn't eating healthy or exercising, I gained it all back and now I'm the same weight I was when I gave birth to her 4 years ago.
My weight has always been a challenge. I grew up in a poor family. My parents didn't work, they lived off of social security and food stamps. Every time I was asked "what do your parents do for a living?" I didn't know what to say. When I told the truth, people always either pitied me or looked down on me because of it. That is really hard for a little girl growing up. I was bullied all throughout elementary school and halfway through middle school. That was when I began starving myself. With my own family telling me that I was fat, what else was I supposed to do? My family wouldn't buy healthy food and they didn't have any money to buy me a gym membership of any sort, and I knew nothing about health or weight loss. I became anorexic, I fell into a deep depression, and had a never ending headache, I even attempted to overdose on Tylenol, which didn't actually work, obviously. I was staying with my sister-in-law to get away from it all, which wasn't healthy either because she was addicted to pain pills, Vicodin to be exact. Why didn't I use Vicodin? Because every time she would get a new bottle, it would be gone by the end of the day. I didn't have a chance to overdose on it.
But since I keep going off on a tangent, let me get back to the actual topic of this blog post. Because I had such low self-esteem growing up, and still do have low self-esteem (not quite as bad, however), I challenged myself. Every morning (or afternoon; probably afternoon since I don't wake up until around 12:30 anyway), whenever I happen to wake up first, I'm going to look at my reflection in the mirror and ignore every single flaw that I have (I have a lot). Then I'm going to tell myself, "Hello, Beautiful Woman. Make sure to have a good day today and don't stress out about the little things in life." Eventually, I'm going to move on to repeating it in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, to help me learn the languages and to give myself a little bit more encouragement. I know that eventually I'm going to begin to believe it. I don't know if that'll actually help me get over my fear of exercising in front of people, but I guess time will tell.
Another hurtle I need to get over is money problems. I can start some of this Atkins diet, but my boyfriend doesn't have a job, so we don't really have much money. His family is feeding us, so I can't really be picky about what I want them to buy. I have to eat what they tell me to eat. It's a big problem because this Induction diet is so specific. I won't be able to follow it precisely, so I don't think it will actually work. I have to lose 85lbs and I don't think I can do it. Cross your fingers for me.
Published Saturday, February 16, 2013 09:19 PM by magickalfantasy
Filed Under:
Weight Loss, Nutrition, Personal observations & lessons learned
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