Balance Is Key

Sorry for the long delay in updating, it's been a crazy, what, week and a half, almost two weeks? Jeez, I need to get better at setting aside time to blog. In any case, I'm still alive and I'm still working to get healthier. The biggest thing I've been striving for since I last posted is balance; working to be healthy, but also not feel like I'm depriving myself. I found out the hard way on Memorial Day that working out is great, but I need to be careful to pace myself. I joined an hour and fifteen minute group workout that morning that turned out to be very high intensity. I was exhausted after it was done, but my trainer happened to catch me as I was leaving and asked if I wanted to do our session then rather than having to come back later that afternoon. Despite feeling tired from the workout I'd just completed, I said sure because not having to drive back and forth was appealing, despite the fact I live a grand total of five minutes away from the gym. We did a fairly easy session but I went home feeling shaky and totally drained, laid down, and then promptly had to make a run for the bathroom to throw up. I was miserable. I felt like crap for the rest of the day and worst of all I didn't really feel like going to gym for the rest of that week.

The fact that I'm actually enjoying working out is awesome, but I have to be careful to not overdo it and make myself sick and discourage myself. With the heat, it takes a huge effort to get myself out the door, I don't need any other reasons to make me second guess going to the gym. I did still make it to the gym a couple times last week, but definitely not every day. And it wasn't all just lack of energy that made me choose not to go, I was really struggling with the heat and with headaches and not feeling great and I really didn't want to make myself feel worse since I do have work and classes to focus on.

Repeat Everyday

Two years.  It has been almost exactly two years since I abandoned this blog and basically gave up on ever losing weight.  It's honestly been a rough couple of years.  I quit my job at the bank very shortly after my last blog post because I hated it so much.  In October of 2014 I ended up attending Extreme Weight Loss Destination Boot Camp up in Denver, Colorado for a week.  We were given meal plans, recipes, exercise plans, and a whole lot of other really great info.  I met some really awesome people, but honestly found it a little hard to connect because there really wasn't anyone else there my age.  When I got back home, I really tried to make things work, but I really didn't enjoy a lot of the food which I felt lacked flavor and could take quite a while to prepare.  So I soon fell off the wagon and returned to my old habits.

At that point I basically stopped caring about my weight and resigned myself to being overweight.  I tried going back to UNM in the spring of 2015, but ended up having to drop all but one class because I was failing them all.  I started a new job in March of last year working for at a dry cleaners.  I've been there for a little over a year now.  I continued to struggle with severe depression to the point that I was suicidal and cutting again.  The binge eating and bulimia also continued and my weight spiked again back up into the 320's.

And that brings us to the present.  I returned to college this past spring at my local community college and for the first time since graduating high school, I was actually very successful.  I passed all five of my classes with straight A's and really enjoyed myself.  I found that I was a much happier person and I think I went through a lot of mental and emotional changes.  I stopped getting so down on myself and stopped caring so much what people think of me.  There are a lot of days that I look in the mirror and think, Hey, looking good, girl!  I'm not stupid, I know that I'm still morbidly obese, I know that by society's standards I look like crap, but I'm learning to be comfortable in my own body, to put more stock in the words of those who love me than those who don't.  Honestly, if someone started talking bad about me, rather than getting depressed and feeling worthless now, I'd be more inclined to flip them off and tell them to shut up.  Um, just to be clear, I don't go around flipping people off, but in that situation, it would be very tempting.  If I was a better person, I would ignore them and move along, but I'm really bad at being passive and ignoring things that piss me off.  As my best friend recently commented, I'm not an indecisive or passive person at all.  I can be very passionate which means that sometimes I react or say things without thinking it through.  Something else to work at, I guess...