nothing good ever does come easy.

I really do hate being anxious. I cant help my anxiety, but I can do so many things to help myself live with it. My anxiety has been the bane and blessing of my existence for as long as I remember. It has caused many good things (I right a mean paper under duress) and fights with my mom who doesn't understand it fully (she is a "just get it done" person) and my fiance who tries to understand. I don't even understand why I feel the way I do sometimes. The irony of all of this (other than that I'm a mental health professional) is that I'm a very logical person.
 

I have come to the conclusion that it takes courage to quell all of the 'no's. Telling years and years of anxiety about rejection and perfection that their time is up. 

For so many years I have let the 'no's win by telling them yes. Yes, I'll have the fast food. Yes, I will watch tv all day. Yes I will make endless other bad choices.
But I am done with letting my anxieties control me.
 

Reading past entries, I don't know where my drive went. It just..disappeared. Where did my spark go? My drive? The girl that moved to college 4 hours away without knowing a soul? The girl that walked into a hiring director's office and told her why she should interview me?

That's not who I am. I have always been a fighter and I'm not going to quit.

On another note; two posts in a row, say whattt? :)

anything could happen.

Long time no write.

Lately, I just haven't felt like myself.  I feel like I have kind of lost my fun side and am srs bsns all the time. I usually don't leave my apartment on the weekend, unless its work or sorority stuff. I have no clue if that's because I have so much going on, or what. I'm not depressed; I just feel as though I am exisiting instead of living. I have never felt like this before, so this feeling definitely is odd and I don't know how to...breathe.

Lets break it down, shall we?
My fiance has been out of work since late January, through no fault of his. I have really tried so hard to be supportive for him, and I still am. It's just hard for me to be a little cheerleader for him when I know that he isn't busting his ass looking for a job. Yes, it might sound harsh and a little unfair, but it's the truth. He is getting benefits and the other night I had to remind him to do his weekly job searching. He doesn't like being out of work (who would?) but I would just like to see more of an effort on his part. Idk. Maybe that's just me having high expectations again.

As of today, our wedding is 390 days away. So far we have been engaged for a little over 3 years. The wedding is stressing me out for obvious reasons; money. Since my fiance has been out of work, I have been stressing out about the budget. Our budget was fairly small to begin with, since neither one of us wanted to spend a lot of money on our wedding. Since our parents are not helping us pay for our wedding, I really do feel a lot of pressure to cut things out/down from the budget. I really am doing the best I can, but things are expensive here. I just worry that things won't be like how I want them to be.

Speaking of the wedding, I am having a really hard time motiviating myself to start working out. I'm not gonna go all "stages of change" on you all, but it is hard to change when you know that you should change. I could go on and on about this, but I won't...I'm already getting anxious thinking about it. Maybe another time.
 
It's really easy convince myself that I have to all together when in fact, I am just really good at hiding everything. But that's always how I have been. Anxious little me. Always hiding what really is wrong with my life because I don't want to trouble anyone. As  a result of this, I've never liked depending on anyone other than myself. It's really hard for me to break myself of this habit of being so independent. I think that I often tread the line

complications

     Surprise, surprise. My workout plans have stalled again. Only this time, it's not my fault. I swear.
I have no clue what I did to my shoulder/neck area, but I did something to it and it was hurting for the vast majority of last week. It felt better, but then it started hurting again this weekend. Ugh...I'll be taking ib for the rest of the week most likely. If it doesn't get much better, I'll have to go to the doctor...and I'm not in the mood to do that.

     Another complication that a lot of people don't think about is hair. I'm not a cute little white girl that can just toss her hair in a pony and go workout and wash it afterwards. I'm a black girl who spends a lot of money to get my hair chemically straightened and I cannot wash it every time I work out. I did a little research and found a sweat-wicking headband for cheap. I'm going to try and find it today so I can start working out tomorrow.

     Hmm...what else? Oh! I am really, fully committed to ww again. Meaning I went grocery shopping  so that I have real food in my house. One thing that I am trying my absolute hardest not to do is weigh myself every day. It's not healthy, it doesn't serve any purpose other than to frustrate me and it's a bad habit that I had gotten myself into.  Hopefully I can still try and lose 10 lbs by my birthday.

     xxxo.

2 months.

I've already weighed in and tracked my measurements for this week and here they are:
weight:172.8
waist: 33
hips: 38
thighs: 22.5
bust: 41.5  (side note: I'm not expecting this measurement to change much)
around belly (aka, love handles): 37.5

In comparision here's where they were when I weighed 177
waist: 33.5
hips: 40
thighs: 23
bust: 42.5
around belly: 38

So, there has been some change and I am glad that I've had a little bit of change. I keep a wall of wedding dress pictures up in my living room, hoping that it'll motivate me to want to work out. No one wants to look like  blimp on their wedding day. I'm getting married in two years, which means that I should have my wedding dress picked out and bought by next July or August. It's such a scary and exciting thought to me that in about a year from now, I will be trying on wedding gowns (finally) and making one of the biggest purchases of my life so far.

My 25th birthday is in 2 months, and so my new goal is to lose 10 lbs by then. Wish me luck :)

I am going to try and blog more regularly; at least once a week when I weigh myself. Which also means that I will stop weighing myself more than once a week. I feel like I never talk about the good things in my life, so next time I will do just that.

xxxo

noise

              I’ve always been a bit of an introspective person. My training in counseling psychology, for better or worse, has allowed me to have even more insight on my inner thoughts. In general, I have come to realize that I have an unhealthy relationship with food. This may sound obvious to some, but not everyone that gains weight has an unhealthy relationship with food. I live by myself and I don’t do much other than go to work. It’s much easier to find joy and happiness sitting on the couch with my bffs Ben and Jerry than to force myself to go out and run on my own.  (Again, also because of my fear of failure). I have used food as a comfort and to make myself happy and it’s really hard to break myself of those habits It’s so comfortable and easy for me. People make change sound so easy, but it really isn’t. If you’re someone like me that has deep seated issue, it’s really going to take a lot of time and failure in order for me to accomplish my goals.

                I feel that in order for me to really change on the inside, I have to be able to quiet the noise in my brain about food. To me, noise is anything that is preventing you from finding your happy.  To be fair, the concept of noise was first brought to my attention after reading “A Place of Yes” by Bethenny Frankel awhile back.  It makes absolute sense. You have to quiet the background noise of “no, you can’t do it” before you can proceed with “yes, you can do this and be successful at it.” I have a lot of noise with food because I have never been happy with the body that I was given. It all goes back to me never thinking that I was good enough. I need to realize that I am good enough; that I deserve to be happy, no matter the label on my skirts, or the number on the scale.

                I’ve technically been “back” on WW since this week, but I haven’t really. In fact, I’ve gained 1.4 lbs since I weighed myself last Sunday. But I really will be back tomorrow. I’ll be tracking my weight and my measurements, as usual, and I will be posting them tomorrow. I also took pics earlier this week and I may or may not post them  :)

Until next time.
tds.

Philippians 4:8

Weight watchers and I have broken up. We're still on speaking terms, but not as good as we used to be.  I plan on starting back on it soon (June 1), but I just felt like I needed a break. It sounds silly, but I am afraid of change. I've always been someone who needs to know what's going to come next, and with my weight loss journey, I don't know where it's going. I'm a very logical person and weightloss, to me, has not been a logical process.

I feel like my difficulties with losing weight have to do with my anxiety. I have generalized anxiety disorder. Although I do have a degree in psychology, this is not a self diagnosis. GAD is something that I've had since childhood, and it took a psychologist that I was seeing to finally put the pieces together. There has always been a constant aura of worry and what if's in my head. I worry all the time that what I'm doing isn't good enough. The whole concept of "good enough" is something that has guided my thinking as far back as I can remember. I've always been a perfectionist--remember that a perfectionist isn't someone who is 'perfect', but someone who strives to be such. In striving for perfection and trying to be good enough, I've been so hard on myself. Nothing that I have done has ever been good enough for myself.  Anyone who knows me intimately knows that I'm like this--in grad school I've had both of my advisors comment on this. We had to take a comprehensive exam in order to qualify for graduation. I scored 10 points higher than the qualifying score and 15 points higher than the national average, but I still thought that I could have done better.

I'm not a religious person, but this Bible verse really speaks to me (if you're a member of my Sorority it should mean something to you too!) :
whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4:8)

I say all of that to say, I really need to channel my energy and frustrations into more positive things. It took me about 5 years to gain the extra 50 lbs, and it's unrealistic to expect to lose it all in the course of four months. I just need to get out of my head about it and stop beating myself up over it. Easier said than done, right?

xxxo

obsessions.

We've got obsessions. I want to erase every nasty thought that bugs me every day of every week.
We've got obsessions. You never told me what it was that made you strong and what it was that made you weak.


Long time no post, as usual. I just really felt the need to post because I feel myself slipping back into the old version of me. The version of me that I have tried so hard to change. I feel like the old me is coming back because I stopped making progress on my weight loss, and once that happened I got unmotivated.  I know that I didn't put on all these extra pounds in 3 months, so I shouldn't expect to lose it in 3 months. But I am very impatient and I get stuck easily. I feel like it has taken me so long to decide to do something about my weight because I got stuck emotionally. It's so easy to go through the motions of your everyday life without realizing that there's a problem until something happens. I had to realize that I wasn't putting myself first. It's funny, I always said that I could never afford to go to the gym here (avg membership is about 70 month), but I'm pretty sure that I could easily spend that much eating out during a month. In order to live a healthy life, you have to put yourself first and realize that it's not about how you look in your clothes. It's about how you feel and how your body performs. You shouldn't get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or after a quick sprint to catch the bus or train.

While I'm on that thread, I'd just like to express my frustration with people trying to lose weight by unattainable methods. I don't want to sound all high and mighty because I'm trying to do it the "right" way, but it just pisses me off for some reason. It's totally reasonable to expect to lose weight by only eating fruits and vegetables, but it's not reasonable to expect that weight loss to be permanent. Counting my points is a pain in the ass, but I have learned a lot from it. Mainly that my portion sizes were way out of control. It's a struggle, but I know that I am worth it.

I don't think I ever revealed my weight here. I think I've made mention that my training is in the mental health field. I've always been a big proponent of using self-disclosure as a means to make meaning. Currently I am 172, but the lowest that the scale has gone since I've started my weight loss has been 170.8. The highest that I have ever weighed has been 181. So I am progressing. I just know that I can't expect perfection.  And giving up that idea of perfection is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

xxxo.
tds.