Live like who you want to be

Last week was a tough week for me.  I've been struggling and after much thinking, I believe it's due to stress.  Since my younger daughter is growing up some and getting bigger, she can now fight back, and it seems there is naught but constant screaming, fighting, yelling, and crying coming from my girls.  They do great when they are separate but they have been terrible the past several weeks when they are together.  I can pinpoint it to one event: daylight savings.  Oh how I hate daylight savings.  The kids now get up at 6am instead of 7am and they go to bed at the same time, so they get less sleep at night now, and I can tell that it has taken a toll.  It has been incredibly stressful and I have not adapted well since I am also getting less sleep and then dealing with more stress during the day.  My emotional eating has been way out of control and I have been avoiding the scale (which always happens when I get off track).  In my mind I had gained a ton of weight and I thought everything was lost.  I decided to face reality this morning and step on the scale, I decided it was time to get back to work, and take charge again instead of letting myself drift and be defeated by my own kids and my own mind.  This morning I braced myself for the scale to flash as high as 160, but it seems our minds are good at exaggerating and blowing things totally out of proportion.  My weight was 150.4, a whole ten pounds less than I thought it was.  I wasn't seeing straight that is for sure, and I didn't know what to write about or how to write it when I was floundering and my own thoughts were twisted and confused.  Maybe though those are the times I should be writing because those are the most critical times.  But it is always easier to write about it after the fact than when you are living through it.

This past week I made another realization.  I was thinking back on my weight loss a year ago, thinking about how I was living.  It was hard for me to choose to be active with the kids.  I would have much rather put on a movie in the evening or stayed inside during the summer instead of playing in the pool.  It was hard for me to choose to do activities that benefited them.  I'm not talking about taking them out to the park, or taking them to the zoo.  I'm talking about the nitty gritty day in and day out everyday activities.  What do you do EVERY single night?  What do you do EVERY single afternoon?  You can plan on day trips, morning trips, activities and events.  Those are easy, its every other moment that is hard.  But I chose to fill those moments by playing with the kids, dancing to music, and being as active as I could.  It was hard then, and guess what, It's still hard now.  I had hoped it would get easier as time went on, but it hasn't yet and I hit a wall and I stopped doing those things.  I started giving into my natural lazy self, and letting the kids watch more tv and play more games so I could go do something else.  But that isn't who I wanted to be.  I don't want to be a lazy person who is consumed by food, and always chooses to be sedentary over being active.  This is definitely a prime example of "fake it till you make it".  I'm not who I want to be yet, but every day is filled with choices.  I see the person I naturally am now, the things I naturally desire to do, or maybe a better way to describe it is the things my body want to do.  Because mentally I want to be that person who lives a active, healthy lifestyle, among other things, but physically I want to sleep, be lazy and eat food.  There are two halves of me that are constantly battling and every day I make hundreds of choices, but they are my choices and I can choose to live like the person I want to be or I can choose to live like the person I was.  It will not be easy to make the choices to live like the person I want to be, because that requires effort, work, change, and most importantly time.  The hardest thing for me to accept is that I will not be perfect.  We are only human and we can't be perfect all the time.

So let's start choosing today to live our lives like the person we want to be.  If you want to be more generous, then make choices that lead you to be generous.  If you want to be more active, then make choices that lead down the path to becoming a more active person.  Every day, hundreds of choices, and not all of them easy.  It's hard to change, there will be setbacks, challenges, mood swings, but if you persevere then you will eventually arrive at your destination.  It might take a lifetime, but that is the greatest test of all isn't it.  Endure to the end, hold on and enjoy the ride.

   P.S. thank you to anonymous who left a comment on one of my last blog posts and pulled me out of my anti-blogging streak. (I wrote this blog post within an hour of seeing that comment!)  I am glad that I can help others and inspire others and motivate others.  When I struggle I tend to forget about blogging, and it does help to get my thoughts all out there so they aren't so jumbled up in my head.