10/24/2012
Mirrors are often mean spirited. I am learning not to listen to the voice in my head that says I am only valuable if I am thin.

I have spent my whole life not liking who I see in the mirror. I have wasted years on self-destructive weight-loss methods. I look at my pictures from high-school and want to shake that girl and tell her to wake up! She is so beautiful! Why on earth does she not value herself????

If anything good can possibly come from ...

10/24/2012
Mirrors are often mean spirited. I am learning not to listen to the voice in my head that says I am only valuable if I am thin.

I have spent my whole life not liking who I see in the mirror. I have wasted years on self-destructive weight-loss methods. I look at my pictures from high-school and want to shake that girl and tell her to wake up! She is so beautiful! Why on earth does she not value herself????

If anything good can possibly come from regret, it will be waking that girl up now and telling her she is beautiful. She is right there in the mirror every morning when I brush my teeth and comb my hair. Yet I avoid looking at her because the bitterness of regret keeps me from it.

I want this pattern to stop. I don't want to look back after these next forty years and see that she has vanished completely. Can you see her? Look. She's standing right there. Say something!

1/23/2013
At the beginning of January I took six pictures so I can mark my progress on the DDP Yoga program. For the first time in my life, I look at those pictures and don't cut myself up and actually find good things to say! THAT, my Friends, is a major non-scale victory! Praise God!

The fact that I am workig toward making healthy changes in my life helps me to feel good about where I am in my journey. Whatever I don't like about any picture now is only something I have the power to change. I am not using crazy fad diets or gimmicks ever again. They are deadly and destructive for me.
For the first time in my life, I don't feel like I am on a diet. I am living life. PERIOD!

3/1/2013
I got derailed in the latter part of February and learned some valuable lessons along with adding six pounds back onto my frame. I simply made the choice to return to old habits. It was a very deliberate choice and a bad one. I even ate wheat products and sugar for a week. NOT a good plan! What I learned was one of my biggest eating triggers is feeling like I have no way out. When I feel trapped, I self destruct. No More! I will be ever on the lookout for this emotion and work to do something other than food to cope. Another valuable lesson was discovering that my old habits are no longer a comfort. This is a HUGE non-scale victory! I have made enough healthy changes in my lifestyle that they are becoming the norm for me. THAT makes the six pound lesson worthwhile.

April 8th 2013
Is it really April already? Yes. The past ..............Oh my, can it have been that long? Yes, it has been SEVEN weeks since I got off my plan. In seven weeks I managed to put back all the weight it took me 3 1/2 months to lose. I can honestly say that the small quiet voice that tells me I will try again tomorrow is the only thing that keeps me from giving up. That and all my wonderful friends on the Calorie Watchers team. I did get good news from the doctor that I am no longer considered pre-diabetic but the depression and anxiety have really been winning since late February. I leave for Jamaica on the 10th of this month and get back on the 16th. I am unsure of what will come after that. I know that I have got to find a way to come to terms with my present if I am ever going to reach my future. I think my issue with not being able to get out of the 200's has been the simple fact that I am trying to get to a place I can never go to again. That place is my past. When I lost 112 pounds in 2010, I thought I had reached the goal of getting back all those years I had wasted being fat. The truth is, I am not the same person I was back then and really don't want to be again. That is the trouble with histrionic thinking. Romanticising the past is a dagerous thing. I have to be who I am today and live in TODAY if I am ever going to make it to tomorrow. Having the ultimate goal is good but unless I ask myself," What can I do TODAY to get there?", it makes no difference having the goal in the first place. Looking back simply makes more obvious the futility of regret.
No more regret and no more teling myself that I have to do it this way or that way and then considering myself a failure because I didn't stick to my own unrealistic goals. God, give me strength.
I am really good at pretending to be strong. I want to BE strong. pretending can only go on for so long.

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