So It Begins...Again

I have been very blah this weekend.  I had a four day weekend from work that I have been spending alone, so I have spent a lot of time in my head.  This might not necessarily be a bad thing, because it is causing me to do a lot of self-reflection.  I think a lot of my feelings are that I am turning 37 years old in about a month and a half and my life is nowhere where I thought it would be.  I have had a vision for my entire life of what my adult life would look like.  You know it, the nice house, white picket fence, 2.5 kids, vacuuming my living room in my heels and pearl neckless greeting my husband at the door with a pot roast.  OK, some of that was never a dream of mine, but you get my point J  All of the dreams are what the world has been telling me my life should be ever since I was a little girl.  The problem with these goals are if I don’t feel good about myself these goals are still not going to make me happy because I do not feel good about myself.  Also, I’m not even really sure if these are my goals, or if these are my goals because this is what society tells me I should want. 

Everybody that knows me, knows that I have been overweight since about 4^th or 5^th grade.  The teasing started in 5^th grade, which led me to the first time I set a weight loss goal in 6^th grade.  The last time I was under 200 pounds was in 9^th grade when I went on a diet because my family was going to Disney World that year.  Being this overweight for over 20 years has had a strong impact on my life.  It has destroyed my self-confidence, prevented me from doing certain things in my life because I was worried about my size, and now that I am starting to get older health concerns are starting to pop up.  Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that I do have a good life.  I have a career that I enjoy (although this year is proving to be not that great), I own my own house, I just paid off my college debt, and I have a boyfriend who loves me.  I should be happy, but I am not because I am not happy with myself.

What’s the point?  It’s time to pick new goals.  It’s time to have a focus.  I can’t pick goals that involve me sitting around waiting for them to happen to me.  I have to pick a goal that I have complete control over.  My goal is to finally be happy inside my own skin by the time I am 40 years old.  This means I have three years to get healthy, lose weight, and to start feeling good about who I am.  This means eating better and getting back into doing 5ks. I already have a little bit of a start.  I have been walking every day after work, and I have lost 13 pounds since the beginning of the summer.   My weight loss goal is to feel good and to be at a size where that size does not dictate what I can and can’t do.  I am not tying a specific poundage number to this goal, because I don’t know what that looks like and I don’t want to over or underestimate myself.  Maybe this means I will lose 50 pounds, maybe it means I will lose 100.  The finish line is not a number.  The finish line is a feeling and I will know when I get there.  In the meantime, it is time to strap on my running shoes and fake it until I make it.