Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Finding My Motivation

I’m starting down the road to weight loss again.  I started that very same journey a little over a year ago.  At that time, I weighed it at around 235-240.  That was the heaviest I had ever been in my life.  When I stepped on the scale at the doctor’s office and realized just how big I was, I wanted to cry.  It was the lowest point in my life.  It didn’t help that I was trying to recover from the worst end to a relationship I had ever gone through.  Last year was not a good year for me by any stretch of the imagination. 

I’ve been lost in a sea of serious lack of motivation this year.  I struggled to lose the 35 pounds I did manage to lose, falling short of my original goal by 25 pounds.  I had set out to lose 60 pounds.  I felt like a failure when I went to the gym every day I was off work and worked out with cardio and weights for an hour and a half each session and I didn’t lose a thing.  I didn’t see any change in my physical appearance either…or in how my clothes fit.  So I let my gym membership lapse and ended up canceling it because it had become a waste of $50 a month.

I’ve been searching and searching for something to motivate me.  I’ve watched the Biggest Loser in the past.  An episode here, and episode there.  I wasn’t committed to watching it to say the least.  I didn’t really watch it this past season because I was too busy being enraptured by Dancing With The Stars.  The new season of Biggest Loser starts next week and I plan to watch every episode.  I feel that with as emotional as I get watching the few episodes that I have watched, that it will help motivate me.  It will show me that it IS possible and that I CAN do it.  I can achieve my goals.  I can finish losing that original 60 pounds…plus another 10.  I have second 35 pounds to lose ahead of me…and I want to do it by this time next year.

I will look for things to motivate myself in the coming year.  I will do my best to keep myself as positive as I can.  I will do my best to stay active.  I will do my best to add variety to my workouts.  I will do my best to make it fun so that I will keep doing it.

Staying positive with myself is one of the hardest things for me to do.  I’m extremely critical of myself.  When I look in the mirror and I want to tell myself I’m disgusting, I have to change gears and tell myself that I’m making progress and I’m doing great.  If I can do that, then I can succeed.

Something else I want to do this year is to compete in a half marathon, but the only thing is that I won’t be able to run it.  See, earlier this year, I tried to start being a runner.  I *wanted* to run.  I truly did.  I even was able to achieve a runner’s high most of the time and it felt GREAT!  I didn’t want to lose that.  I wanted to run and I didn’t want anything to get in the way.  However, after only a month, I was experiencing extreme pain in my shins.  When I was in the Army, I got really bad stress fractures in both of my shins and I was afraid that I had refractured them.  So I went to the doctor and he told me it was just really bad shin splints.  He told me to stop running.  So that was the end of that.  That’s when I went and got the ill-fated gym membership.  So, I will be walking the half marathon.  I know I can do 10 miles in 3 hours, so another 3.1 miles should take me another 50 minutes which seems like good time.  I want to do it with Team In Training and they train on a somewhat regular schedule, so I will have to wait until I can get switched to 8 hour shifts at work.  I’m on 12 hour shifts right now and my schedule is a bit wacky.  The days I work one week are my days off the next week and vice versa.

I have an acid reflux problem.  It doesn’t bother me too much on my days off from work, but on the days I work, my belt hits me in such a way that it pushes on my stomach and causes the acid reflux to act up.  I wear a uniform to work (I’m a corrections officer), so the waistline on my pants is higher than the pants I wear outside of work.  I am afraid that I will have to go to the doctor and have him put me on Nexxium until I can lose the weight and get rid of the acid reflux the natural way.  I have to be comfortable and, right now, I’m not.

I will do this.  I will succeed.  I will not let anything stand in my way or deter me this time.

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