Now vs. Then

I'm caught in a love triangle with between fitness and pizza. Seriously. So far pizza has won my affection! I'm frustrated with myself for giving in and playing the whole beating myself up game. I try to tell myself normal people eat pizza for lunch and then go on to have dinner, normal people eat! You have to eat to survive. But I still have to work through all that stuff.

Losing the weight this time around has been so much more difficult. When I made the first steps to my new lifestyle years before, I truly didn't think that it'd work. I'd tracked calories before with no success. And I played Dance Dance Revolution because I enjoyed it, not because I considered it exercise. I wasn't aware that I'd lost weight. About six months after tracking my food and playing DDR, I noticed that my pants were a lot looser. I didn't realize it was due to weight loss though! I remember telling my mom that I needed to go clothes shopping because all my waistbands in my sweatpants had dry rotted. We went to Sears to buy new clothes, and I'm picking size 24s off the hanger and my mom is grabbing clothes she thought I'd like too, the only difference is she could see that I had lost weight and she was picking a much smaller size. When I pulled on a pair of pants in the dressing room, they fell right off me. I assume I made a total shock face with my mouth a big O shape, because my mom started laughing and said, "Try these." It was the smallest size I could ever remember wearing. I think it was size Large, but I was a XXL before. Doing something I truly enjoyed, and tracking my calories (no special diet, just sensible eating) and finally, I was seeing results. And I wasn't even trying because I didn't realize it was working! Losing the weight was hard, but then again, it wasn't. I didn't even realize it was happening the first six months.

This time around, I'm definitely trying. I'm super impatient, too. I had completely forgotten that it took me almost a year to lose 61lbs, too. I was reminded of that when I went back and looked through my old blog posts! And then I went back checked Facebook. My uncle passed away in 2013, and I went to buy clothes for his funeral because I had nothing nice to fit me. A friend I went shopping with took a picture and put it on Facebook congratulating me on a 40lb weight loss. That was six months after starting my journey. It's hard to remember that it takes time! It was all so different the first time. I had ignorance on my side the last time. This time, I'm just so hyper-attuned to EVERYTHING, I have a lot more knowledge and that's both good and bad. The first time I went through this, I still would eat a cupcake, track it, and be like, "Oh well, that's okay!" I don't do that now; if I eat a cupcake, I immediately start to get mad at myself. Eating pizza today - I want to get back to living life. Living life healthily but also living. Having a slice of pizza or a beer or whatever, and not feel like I'm completely derailing myself. So I miss the ignorance factor then. I don't miss that first-go me felt like like I needed to add and add and add more hours of exercise if I wanted to make a change rather than switching up my routine. I know now that if I experience a plateau that you don't ADD to your routine you CHANGE your routine!

I'm trying to be healthier overall and in the end, this may result in a much healthier loss, one that I can maintain even when crazy things happens (I don't plan on burning down my house again! But thinking of getting sick, or power outages or whatever; one of those freak things). I want to be healthy for as long as possible.