Back on track.......

Overweight and on the home stretch for 39 years old..........

Recipe for disaster. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, & diabetes all run in my family. Which one do I want?

No, really....either I pay for getting healthy now or I pay for it in medical claims later. I already pay to exercise...sort of....since I pay the Ranch each month for my skate pass. I really thought when I started skating this year that it would help me lose weight, but it hasn't. I guess when you've really worked out, you tend to eat everything not nailed down if you're not careful. I've been really good at offsetting any good that skating has done me in that way.

I've always felt like I was bigger than most people my age from when I was a little girl. I grew in height really fast so in my preschool class pic, I'm a head taller than everyone else. It wasn't until maybe my pre-teen/teen years that I became "average tall".....not the tallest, but not average either. About this time, thanks to adolescence, my appettite kicked in and I was a little pudgy in 8th-10th grade. However, by the time that I graduated high school, I think that I weighed 145 which was normal for a high schooler who was 5'6"ish. That's not how I felt though. I always felt fat.

Finally, in college, I probably felt as normal as I have ever felt. I had skinnier friends and I had larger friends so I felt like I was somewhere in the middle. I had lived long enough to learn that there was some one for everyone, regardless of their size. Therefore, I learned that my weight was not the single factor that could be used to calculate my chances of getting a date! Then, again, my dumb ass college boyfriend used to tell me that I was the biggest (ie fattest) girl that he'd ever dated. Well, thanks a lot, dickhead.

When I started my adult life, I was right around where a person my age/height should be. However, after a particularly long, drawn out first bout of depression in the late '90s, I put on 75 lbs. Ick. I had really given up then that I would ever find anyone to spend my life with......so why did it matter how big I was? Upon getting my life spark back in the early '00s, the weight began to peel away as I began to live life again. By the time that I met Andrew in 2001, I was about 10-15 lbs lighter than I am now.

In January of 2002, I started bellydancing which did WONDERS for my body image. I embraced my body and women of all sizes. I immersed myself in the beautiful bellydance community and wasn't ashamed to let my belly hang out.....like women of all sizes so commonly do in bellydance circles.

In early 2004 with a year until my wedding day, I joined Weight Watchers (WW) at work and lost 40 lbs that year. It was incredible. I was nearly in a size 14 by Christmas. I have good wedding pictures & good honeymoon pictures to look back on, but in WW's eyes, I still had 20 lbs to reach the *top* of the range for my age. Regardless, I was happy, and I didn't understand.....get this----> I didn't understand *why* people ever gain weight back. Har har. Well, I figured that out as the months passed after the wedding. Of course, I quit WW because I thought I could do it myself. Well, I couldn't. By my first anniversary, I had gained nearly all of my hard earned pre-wedding lost weight back.

Eventually, I definitely gained ALL of the hard earned, pre-wedding lost weight back, and unfortunately, in the process I had lost my positive body image. I haven't been happy with my body ever since. And I guess as I continue to struggle with derby, I've zeroed in on the fact that if I was lighter, I could skate faster and longer without being so tired. If I were lighter, it would make my knees happier. I have muscles under all this fat from the months of skating so I know that this fat isn't doing anything good for derby. Somehow this was the last straw..........

Last Tuesday, I rejoined WW, and tonight is my first official weigh in. It's been a good week. I've done really well attempting to retrain myself to eat better foods and watch my portions. I really, really feel better about myself for getting "back on track" like they like to say in WW.

I'm writing this blog partly to motivate myself and partly to share this with those I care about.

Here's to getting more healthy!