No one ever knew how hard it was to START.
I don’t know if I wrote about THAT as much as I talked about moving forward. I talked about a lot of things, but I look back on the beginning of the health and fitness journey – and I just remember PAIN.
I remember physical pain.
But I remember real, emotional and psychological pain.
So much self-hate, negative feelings and thoughts… And so much “I just can’t do this.”
But something in me wanted to DO IT—it?
Just anything. To just be something (anything) other than what I was right then.
It took me YEARS to improve as an athlete. YEARS. I still have so far to go, which is amazing to me. But that’s what it takes.
It took me even longer to reach a certain peace within myself, where I can look at me and say,
“I am OK. Wait, even better… I am GREAT. And I am awesome.”
[Okay, so awesome is still a hard one to swallow. But I try.]
When people say, “You look great,” I have to pause, count to five and say two words: “Thank you.”
And work VERY hard not to qualify it. To stop at just “thank you.”
All of this journey has been a long road towards health and self-care. Weight loss has not even begun to tell ANY part of the story.
I am STILL on this journey, people.
And because I am a “fat girl” (forever, I will ALWAYS be that in my head), I will always struggle. And I am not saying that it’s bad to be a fat girl. PLEASE know that I am body positive and don’t care what ANYONE does in their body. Be happy at whatever place, weight you are. For the love, if you can… do it. Be a fat girl if you want to be a fat girl, I could care less. I did not want to be a “fat girl” – inside OR out. I didn’t want to have negative “fat” thoughts – because for me, in MY head, fat thoughts were bad thoughts.
IF I could have been content at my size, trust me, I would have stayed there. It would have been much easier. Being content would have been a much less hard journey than what I did.
But I wasn’t happy in my skin. As hard as I tried.
And there is NO SHAME in saying, “I am trying so hard to love myself, but I want MORE.”
I tried to love myself. Lord, did I.
But in saying “I want more” – I declared that I wanted more with my health.
And that later turned into “I can love me, because I am CARING for ME.” Then I dealt with an addiction problem—head on.
I just wanted to be the best version of ME possible—and I still do. And at the end of the day, THAT VERSION has VERY little to do with my size.
And yet—it absolutely does.
Because for me, being the healthiest I can be means that I am giving myself the best chance in health, and in life. Weight was not the goal here—health was.
When health lead the journey, which started TWO YEARS AGO, when I started to change my focus from WEIGHT… from FAT GIRL… to just HEALTHY GIRL. At whatever weight that was.
And that is when I really changed.
I don’t even care what the scale says now. I care how I feel. What I think, and how my life is working.
Once that began to be the focus, the rest has blown wide open. I have ALWAYS been HARDWORKING.
But for the first time in my entire life, I believe that I can be:
HEALTHY
and
HAPPY.
Wait. I actually AM: HEALTHY and HAPPY.
#JustKeepMovingForward
#NeverGiveUp
You. Rock.