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...

It's Time

"Eat less and work out."  If I ever mention my struggle with my weight, that's generally the response I get.  It sounds so simple, so straightforward, but for me, it's really not.  Food is comforting, its something I can rely on to taste good.  And working out?  I wear flats or flip flops perpetually because I have trouble breathing when I bend down to tie my shoes.  The idea of walking for any distance let alone trying to run is daunting.  The majority of my friends are thin, weight is not something they've ever struggled with.  A number of them even enjoy exercising, running a mile is nothing for them.  For most of them, my struggle with weight is probably quite perplexing.  But for me, it's something I've been dealing with my whole life.  In elementary school and middle school, I was the "loser", the one everyone else liked to make fun of and tease because I was weird and a different size.  I just didn't quite fit in at school or the church my family attended.  But while I loved food even then, I was constantly active with a required PE class and playing volleyball and basketball.  But when my family moved and my mom started homeschooling me, I became less active and the weight started piling on.

My lowest weight as a teenager/young adult was in my sophomore year of high school when I weighed 160 lbs.  By the time I graduated I had gained over 40 lbs. College was a nightmare for me.  From morning to till evening there was an all you could eat buffet in the cafeteria and most of it was about as unhealthy as you could possibly get.  Despite the fact that at that point I could be considered more curvy than anything, I felt fat and I wasn't comfortable working out in the gym which was usually filled with with toned and trim football and volleyball players.  My boyfriend wasn't much for working out and didn't generally want go with me so my exercise consisted of walking around the relatively small campus which wasn't much exercise at all.  I broke up with him in my second semester of college.  Despite the fact I knew it was the right thing to do, it was an incredibly difficult decision.  What made it even worse is that afterward I found that I had been so caught up in the relationship with trying to make things work out, that I hadn't really made any friends and I was completely on my own.  I quickly became depressed and food became my comfort.