Fat Kid

I'm sitting in a doctor's office with both my parents. My dad is sitting to my right in the chair and my mother is standing next to me sitting on the examination table. I remember the doctor explaining to my parents if my weight continued to increase at the rate it was going I was looking at a lifetime of obesity. I weighed 83 pounds and I was 8 years old.

Well that man was right, partly. I am obese, but it is not my lifetime. It's no secret that I have been diligently strapping on the restraints of a vision for my health for the last year. I had to get really real, and really raw. If I was going to tackle this in my life I had to really look at the truths causing this behavior.

I am an emotional eater. I either can eat or not eat depending on the type of emotion I am feeling, being really upset can evoke either outcome for me. I never know which it will be, either one is detrimental to my weight.

Recently, I felt that I had hit a level that was requiring me to get deeper into the lifestyle change and today it's making me cry at my desk. I have started texting everything I eat to my accountability and with every text I send I get a response with tweaks to the eating habits, but today it's overwhelming me. Today, I want to quit because it's hard and frustrating, but this is what I am learning in the midst of my whiney bawl-fest!

I have a vision and that vision requires things. Those requirements are hard and cost me a LOT. They cost me dinners out, embarrassing conversations about my weight and my health; it costs chocolate, sweet coffee, soda, sweat, sore muscles, a LOT of time, and mental reconstruction!

The lifestyle that I had as an 8 year old, which carried me into adulthood, didn't stay because I wanted to be the funny fat kid with a pretty face and a great personality, but because I didn't know any better. I was living in the culture I had always known. Even when I would make attempts at all the fads and diets that would come out, I had no vision for what a healthy life-long lifestyle looked like. Now as the shift comes there are days when I honestly want to quit or say "I'm going to do this my way." However, my way doesn't work. I am still the funny fat kid right now. I am getting better and though this may not have been my fault getting to this place of obesity it is my fault if I stay here.

There are consequences to events and lifestyles that shape us into the people we are and sometimes they are not our fault, but we still have to deal with it. My parents did not set out to have a fat kid. They didn't conspire to make my life harder by keeping unhealthy food in the house, or not addressing what was missing within me that was causing me to have an eating problem. I honestly believe they didn't know any better themselves and they did the best they could to let me know no matter what size I am they love me and I am theirs.

I am an adult now and it's my responsibility to take control of my health. They can't do it for me now anyway. I have a vision for my life and my health is a very big part of that. At some point in my life I told God that I would do whatever it took to have life of purpose. He gave me the purpose and this is part of that cost. I have to work it out cause at the end of the day I want all of that vision more than I want to eat a box of chocolate – and I want to eat chocolate everyday if I could! Instead, I want the clear head that likes who she sees in the mirror and isn't bound by the guilt and lies that swim within my self-deprecating brain screaming defeat. It keeps my mind healthier.

I want to be a woman who is comfortable in my own skin, has a life that is attractive, and has a healthy lifestyle: mind, body, and spirit. So I can have my baby cry-fests but at the end of the day I’m going to put more cardio in, I’m going to keep increasing in my weight training, and I will only have one day a week where I can have ONE moment where I can have a chocolate.

The end is always better than the beginning. I’m setting my gaze on the future and every day I will see what I really look like emerge.

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