Exercise, Energy, and an Experiment

Continuing on the thought of exercise, lifestyle, and eating, I have always wanted to be able to have enough energy to do activities with my kids.  That is one of the main motivators I have for losing weight and continuing to eat healthy.  Over the past two years I have had the mindset of "when I get to my goal weight, then I will be able to count cleaning, and playing with the kids as exercise.  But for now I need to make sure I do my official exercise and then any other activity is just bonus movement and maybe it will help me lose weight faster."  I am now beginning to think that I was wrong to think that way.  What I have been doing is when I am working towards losing weight I will work out like crazy, either doing zumba then swimming or doing body pump or body attack and I will walk out of the gym completely exhausted.  Then I have to go home and get the kids something to eat, and even thinking about cleaning the house makes me want to curl up in a corner sobbing.  I use up all my energy at the gym and I hardly have any energy left for the rest of the day.  Playing with the kids is hard, cleaning is hard.  Pretty much doing anything for the rest of the day is hard because I'm so tired.  Some days I just push myself through it.  Remember those days I was getting in 25,000 steps every day?  If I kept up that pace for a few days, usually Monday-Wednesday, I would then crash the rest of the week and not be able to move for three days.  On my good days I would try not to eat any additional food because I wanted to lose weight faster, and I believe that contributed to my binge eating because I would just get so hungry, and I would get so stressed and then I would crash and be tired and feel terrible about myself which lead to emotional eating and binges.  Obviously this is not a favorable way of life. 

Now I am interested in managing my energy levels and spreading out my activity better.  Instead of spending all my energy in the first half of the week, take my activity level down and then see if I have energy for the rest of the week.  Spread it out more.  Today I didn't exercise, and I almost always do on Mondays, in my old way of thinking I certainly would.  I spent the day playing with the kids and cleaning the house.  We went to a friend's house in the morning, and then played in the backyard.  After lunch the kids watched a movie while I swept and mopped the kitchen floors, and cleaned the downstairs bathroom and the kids bathroom.  Then we went to the park.  Afterwards I took a shower because I had decided not to exercise after all, played with the kids, made dinner, cleaned the kitchen, put Chloe to bed, played board games with Lily and then put her to bed.  It was still a very busy day and my fitibit gave me about 500 extra calories which I didn't use because it wasn't official exercise and I didn't feel like I needed to eat them (of course I way over ate the past four days so maybe that is why).  I didn't need to add an official exercise in today, although I would have if I was still focused on being good or being on plan.  No.  I need to find a better way of life.  I can't expect myself to exercise and clean and cook and play with the kids.  I can't do it all, and that is exactly what I have been expecting myself to do and I burned myself out very quickly.

So I am trying an experiment for the month of April.  I will weigh myself on April 1st and then on May 1st and I will take my measurements too for good measure.  I am not going to weigh myself in between those days and I am just going to focus on living my life and making good habits and changing bad habits.  It's changing habits that really makes this a way of life.  You can't diet forever.  Well I guess you could, but it makes maintaining really hard.  It's changing your habits and creating a new life for yourself that leads you to success in maintenance.  I never really understood that until now.  Since this post is starting to get lengthy I will be posting my habits I'm focusing on tomorrow.  Hopefully with some work I can get this figured out at long last and find peace so I don't feel like I am struggling so much and so I don't get so bent up with "I just wish I were done losing weight".  If I focus on living life, and changing my habits, hopefully weight loss will be the happy side effect.  My goal is same, only my methods are changing.  Heather from the half size me show always says "If you do the same thing over and over again, expect to get the same results.  If what you are doing is not working then you should try something else."  there is another quote by someone that goes along the lines of "Craziness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results".  So I'm going to change, and the exercise I do with my kids will count as exercise.  I'm not going to try to overexert myself in order to speed up weight loss.  I am searching for a well balanced life.  I want to go into maintenance knowing that I can and will succeed because I have truly changed my habits, I have truly changed myself.  I don't want to always be dieting back down to my goal weight. 

Here are some happy pictures of Chloe drinking the green smoothie I made for lunch. 

Your kids watch what you do.  Will you teach them good habits or bad habits?  My kids are one of my biggest reasons why I want to live a healthy life.  I want to be able to teach them how to eat well, and live happy.

Energy Monkey

I've been reading a book recently called "The Running Revolution" by Dr. Nicholas Romanov.  Since I'm going to be starting my running training soon for my triathlon I wanted to pick up a book and see what I could find.  This one drew my attention because it says on the cover "how to run faster, farther and injury free for life."  All of which sounds good to me.  The book talks about technique, and gives a training program on how to train you to run in a more natural style, the way we would run if we hadn't grown up with shoes.  It's the way the Kenyan's run and if anyone has read the book "Born to Run" that is based on this running style.  I'm going to give the program a shot, no sense in starting running and setting myself up for more injuries, we all should know by now that me and injuries don't get along.  Anyway, that's not the point I want to get at for this post.  At the back of the book Dr. Romanov talks about an experiment done with monkeys.  They studied spontanious energy activity and they saw basically three variations of activity in monkeys that was then deemed that individual's base activity rate.  Some animals were very sedentary, some were moderately active, and some were very active.  The scientists then placed the animals in various situations sometimes limiting their activity, sometimes increasing their activity.  What they found was that if an animal's activity was controlled, either increased or decreased, that animal would spend the rest of the day making up for it to achieve activity equilibrium.  Basically if an animal was confined and unable to move for half a day, the second half of the day they would be much more active and at the end of the day they would even out their energy expenditure to what it normally was for that animal, either low, medium, or high.  If they increased their activity for the first part of the day, they would make up for it the second half of the day by reducing it's activity and by the end of the day that animal would again reach it's own personal base line.  This pattern held true for weekly tests as well so at the end of the week, the animal reached it's average weekly activity rate.  This whole research experiment is brought up at the end of the book because Dr. Romanov was talking about how to gauge how much exercise you should do and how often you should train.  You have to figure out if you are a small energy monkey, medium energy monkey, or a large energy monkey.  If you try to train beyond your energy limits your body will backfire on you, you will hit plateau's and your training will actually hinder your progress instead of improving your performance.  Some people train three times a week, some people need to train 4-5 and some rare people thrive on training 7 days a week.

You can increase your energy levels and your activity levels but there is a certain limit for every person that their body can take.  There is only so much improvement that you can attain.  As you lose weight and get more fit your energy levels will increase of course, but you will eventually have to find that happy medium of what is right for you.  Not everyone can exercise two hours a day 6 days a week. 


I'm now going to jump to an email I received from the Half Size Me Community earlier this week where she was talking about the relationship between binge eating and exercise and how to know if you are exercising too much and if you have a healthy relationship between the two.  In this email Heather talks about how she was working with a client who would push herself to her limits and beyond at the gym until she was so exhausted she wanted to collapse, and she left the gym starving and ready to pass out.... (I know you've done that too- I've done it many times).  This was a wonderful email and I will only highlight a few parts of it to make my point.  Here is a direct quote from the email "if you are like my client and struggling with binge eating, too much exercise can make it worse. When you are already tired and still force yourself to go to the gym and run on the treadmill for an hour, then stumble into the house, only to clean, cook and do all the other chores you feel you “should do,” before you know it, your body will drive you to the kitchen to refuel on whatever is there.  You may end up eating a carton of ice cream, bowls of cereal or handfuls of chips or cookies. Your body is sending you signals it needs a break, but you keep pushing it like a taskmaster until you hit a wall where your body says no more, and demands food and a break."

These two stories coming pretty close together along with my recent injuries hit me like a brick in the face.  I've been trying desperately to stop binge eating, I've also been trying desperately to exercise a lot more in order to lose weight leaving me exhausted for the rest of the day and starving.  I can keep it up for a few days but then it eventually blows up and I crash.  I noticed this cycle a few years ago and now I wonder if it could be as easily solvable as laying off exercise.  I want to be a big energy monkey, I always wished I were a big energy monkey, but I know I'm not.  I'm probably not a small energy money either, but maybe, like most things, somewhere in the middle.  When I was doing really good and losing weight in 2013 I was exercising three and sometimes four times a week.  It wasn't until I tried to exercise 5-6 days a week that I really noticed the pattern with binge eating, and energy crashes.  I'm not talking about the afternoon crash that happens, I'm talking about two to three day crashes where I'm so exhausted I just want to sleep all day.

Obviously my activity level was way too high over the past several weeks and my body broke down because it couldn't handle the stress.  I need to be kinder to myself, kinder to my body and just focus on living life, not on getting the weight off as fast as I can.  I'm going to pull back on my exercise and see if that helps me keep my eating under control longer, see if that helps the cravings, helps the energy crashes, and helps the intense hunger that comes around every three days or so.  Four days, that's it.  I will not allow myself to do an official workout more than four days a week and no longer than one hour.  I need to let go of trying to workout for two hours a day 6 days a week.  It's not healthy for my body, my mind or my spirit.  Hopefully I will discover my sweet spot, and I can keep my eating under control for much longer than 4 days.  It's a marathon, not a sprint but the sooner I can figure out a happy way to live, the sooner I will be able to be happier and move on.  


There is more I want to talk about on this topic but this post is long enough already so I will leave you with this super awesome picture of me at the park.  I bought a new shirt and I love it!!

I don't do Injured Well

So if you've read my story you may have figured out that I don't do injured very well.  I don't deal with it well, and I'm not good at resting.  I like to ignore the problem and hope it will go away.  So of course this is what I have been doing with my back.  I've been trying to lay off the more intense workouts like Zumba that require higher impact and twisting and bending, but I have been doing swimming, which has been the best for my back but also walking the treadmill.  Which turned out to be a mistake since I was walking for over an hour in my cross training shoes.  I haven't yet bought running shoes and since I was wearing the wrong kind of shoes I ended up with some pretty severe blisters on my feet, which of course I ignored and then made worse.  The past few days I've been pretty depressed because I'm exhausted, in pain, injured, and I just want to sleep.  The kids have been getting up multiple times every night for the last four nights or so.  And by multiple I mean at least three times.  Highly disrupted sleep, my back hurts, my foot hurts, my knee I injured several years back hurts.... It's been awful. 

Yesterday I crashed pretty much all day on the couch, and for the past two days my eating has been out of control.  I realize now I was pushing myself too hard and I should have laid off sooner but I wanted so badly to reach the 140s again that I couldn't let go, and now it's backfired on me.  And it all happened because of a number on the scale.  The number on the scale drives us to do crazy things.  I'm tired of being a slave to the scale, tired of letting it denote my success, tired of defining whether I'm a good person or a bad person based on whether my weight went up or down.  The scale cannot tell me who I am.  If I have a good eating and exercise day I know it.  If I have a bad day I know it.  I know it when I am doing what is right and I know it when I am doing what is wrong.  If I wake up in the morning feeling good and then step on the scale and it doesn't reflect what I think it should I then feel like a failure and my day is ruined.  That's not a lifestyle, that's scale obsession.  Dieting to please the scale isn't maintainable, happy, satisfying, or fun.  So I'm going to do something scary and take the scale away.  Measure my success based on how I feel, how my clothes feel and how well I am living my life.  I want to live my life, not be a slave to the scale, not say "when I reach this number then I can start living my life" I want to live now, not at some unknown date.  I've lost enough weight that I can move well, I enjoy hiking, I enjoy walking with the kids, going to the park, going to the zoo, I enjoy a lot more activities now that used to be laborious, torturous, and hard.  Am I at my ideal?  No, I am still going to track, still going to exercise, and keep working.  Because it is a lifestyle, and I'm not going back, I'm going forward.  I'm going to keep progressing, focus on loving myself, focus on exercising so I can live, not living so I can exercise (more on that in tomorrow's post).  Liveable and loveable..... What lifestyle will you choose?  

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At First I was Angry

A few weekends ago my brother who lives in a different state flew in and stayed with my parents for a few days while he was auditioning for the local Symphony.  He wasn't expecting to get in since he still hasn't graduated with his bachelors yet (getting his degree in performance trombone) but he wanted the experience.  So he flew in and stayed with my parents Sunday, auditioned Monday, didn't make it to finals and flew out back to school Tuesday morning.  I found out about all this Monday night when I was doing my Mom's nails (that's when she told me about it).  I was shocked to find out my brother was in town and he didn't tell me he was going to be in town for a few days.  He chose to go visit our grandparents Monday night, which I suppose is a good thing.  I can't really fault him for that.  The thing that bothered me was that my older sister and her husband drove down and spent Sunday evening with him.  My whole family gathered together and ate dinner and enjoyed the evening..... without me.  Of the 5 other members in my family, no one bothered to call, no one bothered to text.  Family gatherings are getting more and more rare as everyone in my family grows up, gets married, and moves away.  I was hurt, why was I the ONLY person in my family who didn't know my brother was going to be in town?  I wanted to shout out, stamp my feet, send a text message to the family demanding to know why I wasn't notified.  In short, I was angry.  Perhaps I had some right to be, after all it would have been simple to let me know about the family dinner.  We weren't doing anything that Sunday night and could have easily gone over.  We could have even brought extra food.  But then I started thinking about my own actions.  I haven't really been very good at keeping in touch with my family.  When was the last time I even talked to or texted my brother?  A month ago?  When was the last time I talked to or texted my older sister?  Too long.  I hadn't made any effort to reach out to them, so why should they reach out to me?  Perhaps being left out was really my own fault for lack of putting forth any sort of effort.  How hard is it to send a text?  We are more connected today than we have ever been, and yet I go weeks, months, without talking to my older sister and my brother.  I realized that if I don't want to miss important events I am going to have to be the one to do something about it.  I can't change my family, the only person I can change is me.

As I was thinking about this experience I saw this same pattern reflected in my weight loss.  Sitting at 211 pounds I was angry.  Angry at the world, angry at skinny people (how can they eat whatever they want and not gain any weight), angry at the society (why does our society make it so easy to get fat anyway?) Angry at my culture (why do we have to incorporate food into everything we do?  And it's never healthy food, it's always junk food and sugar) Angry at myself (what is wrong with me) Angry at my body (Why did my body do this to me?  Why can't my body be more like my sister's body) Angry at my metabolism (Why can't my metabolism be faster so I can eat like my husband.)  In essence I was angry at everything for making me fat.  But guess what, I can't change all that.  I can't change our culture, I can't change society, I can't change skinny people, or (for the most part) my metabolism (at least not without a lot of hard work and effort which I wasn't willing to put forth).  I wanted to be skinny and now, but I didn't want to do anything about it.  The only thing I can change is me.  I can only change my own actions, and nothing will change unless I choose to do it.

I also realized this a few years ago when it came to friends.  I moved here and I did try to make friends, but I had a really bad run where all my friends I made moved away a few months after we became friends.  I was left miserable, and alone with a husband who worked practically 24/7 in school and work just to make ends meat.  I was upset and angry that I didn't have any friends.  Until I realized that really I wasn't trying.  I didn't know my neighbors, I didn't call people from church or attend play dates.  This is still a struggle for me.  I tend to get so caught up in my own life I forget to reach out to others.  I have been working to change this.  I went out on a meet and greet a little over a year ago and met my neighbors and now I am good friends with my next door neighbor, the neighbors across the street and also a girl who lives just up the street.  We all have kids about the same age so it works out great.  Still, I'm not as good keeping up with my friendships as I should be.  I want to make it a goal to meet up with someone at least once a week.

So my question to you is this.  What are you angry about?  Is it something you are trying to blame someone else for?  Is it something you need to just accept and ask what can you do about it?  Can you change anything about what is making you angry?  If not then you need to drop it and focus only on what you can do to improve or change your situation.

I found a bunch of great quotes on anger by Buddah.  I hope you find them as inspiring as I did

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Loving myself

I am really focusing on changing my thinking and last week's episode of Half Size Me was really timely.  I would highly recommend everyone listen to episode 162 of the Half Size Me show.  It's called "The Key to finding happiness with Trish Blackwell".  She talks about how the hardest and most important thing to overcome is body hatred and self hatred.  You cannot be successful on this journey and be happy if you hate yourself.  What I love about this episode is that she talks about how to start to overcome body hatred.  She says the first thing she does with her clients is come up with a list of 10 physical things they love about their body.  At first it is really trivial things, but as you continue to change your thinking and retrain your brain you realize that you really do love your body and eventually it turns into self love instead of self hatred.  So I decided to give it a try.  It took me three days to come up with 10 things I love about my physical body.  But here they are

1. The freckle on my toe
2. My nose
3. My belly button
4. My fingernails
5. My hands
6. My toes
7. My wrists
8. The veins and tendons on the back side of my hands
9. My elbows 
10. My Hair color

I figured if it was good to come up with a list of 10 things you liked about yourself physically it would also be good to come up with 10 things you like about yourself.  Here is what I came up with.

1. I love my children
2. I am willing to change and try to be a better person
3. I am Honest

That's it.  I could only think of three things over the course of three days.  That is how negative my thoughts are towards myself as a person and who I am.  I've hated myself for so long that to give myself compliments and to say that I actually like something about myself  was really hard.  That is why I have been so stuck.  That is why I haven't been able to overcome binge eating or to overcome emotional eating.  Because deep down inside I still hate myself, and I will not be able to continue in my journey until I change my thinking.  I am trying very hard to retrain my brain to think positively.  In the app I mentioned a few posts ago called "Way of Life" you can make notes for each day for each habit you are trying to create.  I have three positive thinking slots and one self esteem slot where I have to tell myself something good about myself for that day.  I make notes each day, four times a day.  The best thing is that I can go back and read all those notes at once to remember the good things that are happening in my life.  To remember my blessings, to know that I am loved and that I am worth loving and there are so many good things going on in my life and also to remember all the good things I am doing and all the efforts I am making.  There is good in the world, there is good in my life, and there is good in me.  I just have to be able to see it, bring it into focus, and throw all the bad mumbo jumbo out of my head.  Tell Satan to take a hike because I'm reclaiming my happiness and he can't keep me down any longer.

I do plan on finishing my list, even if it takes me months to do it.  Hopefully it won't take that long. I am going to try to think of one good thing about myself per day.  One good attribute that I have, and hopefully I will be able to think of many more than 10.  I hope you do to.  I hope you make a list of things you like about yourself, about the good you do, and about the good in you.  It's time to stop berating ourselves for not being whatever ideal we think we need to be.  It's time to do the best we can every day, dwell on the positive things and tell the negative things to take a hike because they aren't worth our brain space.

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Gone Hiking

I woke up this morning feeling pretty good.  I think I have built up enough antihistamines in my system to keep the allergies at bay.... at least for the moment. This is the first morning that I have woken up and not been utterly miserable.  The time change really threw me off track, combined with allergies... it hasn't been pretty.  But today I woke up on the good side of the bed.  I made poached eggs and toast for breakfast.  It's a little higher in calories than my usual breakfast (500 calories with three eggs, two pieces of toast and some pure fruit jelly).  But I knew I was going to be going to the gym and then going on a hike later in the day and I didn't mind having the extra calories.  The plan was to walk on the treadmill and then go swim laps at the pool, but this morning the gym was hosting an indoor sprint triathlon and the pool lanes were reserved for the triathlon until noon.  I was really bummed because my swim cap and my new swim goggles came in yesterday and I really wanted to try them out today.  So I settled with fast walking on the treadmill.  I'm not running yet, my back isn't fully recovered and I'm not planning on starting the running phase of training until next month.  I'm going to download a 12 week triathlon training app... I guess I could just find a free one online, but I'm kind of a tech junkie.  (Speaking of which, the new apple watch is totally on my wishlist.  When my current fitbit breaks I think I will be upgrading.  Although I hope my fitbit lasts a good long while because the apple watch needs some battery life improvement.  I really try not to buy first generation anything due to all the tech kinks, second and third generations are usually a lot better and cheaper).

After my fast walk (I stayed on for a hour to feel like I got a good workout. My pace was 4.4 mph through most of it) I went and sat in the hot tub for a while.  I love the hot tub at the gym, they have them in the locker rooms so they are female exclusive and I don't even have to leave the locker room!  It's great.  Afterwards it was time to go home, a quick lunch and we were off to the mountains for our first family hike of the season.  It was about 66 deg out today, super nice.  In an interesting turn of events Chloe did better than Lily!  My 2 year old was running up the mountain as my 4 year old was shouting behind "wait for me!"  I was just shocked.  Chloe did amazing the whole time and when it was time to turn around, we turned around because Lily was tired and wanted to go home.  Chloe wanted to keep going!

Hike is over

 Chloe makes the exact same face as I did when I was her age.  I should find a picture of me pouting and compare it next to Chloe for a throwback Thursday sometime.  Chloe fell asleep in the car on the way home and slept for the next several hours, which was great because I got to go out and buy pants!  I've been surviving off of old pants for several months now and I'm tired of it.  One pair is dangerously close to splitting the seams down the butt- half the stitches have already split it is only a matter of time before the other half spit and that is not something I want to happen while I am out and about!  I tried Ross first but there just wasn't anything there.  So I went to JC Penny across the street and I found too many things!  I talked myself down from 4 pairs to 2.  I really wanted to stock up on pants because I always feel like I never have any pants, probably because I never do.  I usually have 2 pairs, which is what I have now and apparently what I will have over the summer too.  I bought size 10s.  I was happy to see I only went up one size.  I knew the size 8s were not going to fit since the size 8s I have at home don't fit. 

The reason why I wanted to buy more pants was because I am so tired of always being on a diet and never buying pants because soon they won't fit anymore.  I've told myself that my whole life and always ended up dangerously understocked on pants (generally following the 2 pairs of pants method).  I am really serious about finding a way of living and I am seriously considering taking the scale out of my life and just focusing on how I feel.  If I'm not stressing to hit a number I am less likely to binge.  I have been stressing that I won't be able to do a triathlon unless I am a certain weight, but I saw several people heavier than me at the gym today doing an indoor triathlon!  I beat myself up for eating a few too many chips, but really in the end it doesn't matter because I am under calories at the end of the day.  This whole crazy diet mentality has got to stop.  I'm tired of it.  I've been doing it my whole life and I am ready to really figure out this whole lifestyle thing.  Today I had a 110 calorie frozen yogurt and late at night I had an 80 calorie special K brownie.  I did a lot of exercise today, and my total calorie intake was about 1,900.  But I earned 900 in exercise so I was still way under according to MFP.  I think if you workout more, you will need to eat a little more.  Your body needs to recover.  For the first time, I am really thinking about the long term.  I will know I'm making progress because I will feel better, I will perform better, and I will fit back into my size 8 pants some day.  I just want to stop obsessing over myself, strive to love myself, and live a happy life.  Is that too much to ask?

Throwback Thursday

I have never done a Throwback Thursday post before, but I was going through some pictures of the past 8 years and I found plenty of pictures for several Throwback Thursday posts!  I would love to get some from my younger years as well, but I will have to go through my parent's stash to get those. 

Today I'm going to give you a visual timeline from the time I met Matt to present day, and you can see how my weight changed.  There are some holes in this timeline, I didn't come across the pictures from the year we were in Korea so I will have to dig those up and post them on another day.

Here I am when we were dating:

This was taken in late 2006.  It was my favorite picture of me for a very long time because it was the thinnest I was since I knew Matt.  I met Matt at 155 pounds.  Today I'm around 153 so I'm about the same weight now as when this picture was taken.

 This was right after we were married in June 2008.  I think I look pretty good in this photo regardless of my 165ish pounds.  My clothes and my pose must just hide it well. 

This is in the airport right before our honeymoon!  I actually have a whole post planned for our honeymoon, maybe I will post it next Thursday.  This was also before camera phones so I had to hold the camera out in front and take the picture.  Multitasking ;)

This is our first Christmas together in 2008.  I'm making Crapes.  I am about 175 pounds in this photo, you can see I adopted baggy pajama pants and I believe that's one of Matt's shirts I'm wearing.  I gained 10 pounds over the summer we were married due to record heat waves that came through, I pretty much hid inside by the air conditioning.  I Crocheted Matt a blanket that year for Christmas.  Notice how his weight really hasn't changed over the years.  Totally unfair, but onward!

Here is my super awesome selfie before camera phones existed.  It took a couple shots to get it right and I had to laugh at myself when I saw all the messed up shots.  This is on our vacation to the slot canyons and Goblin Valley in Utah in Spring 2009.  I can definitely tell my face is heavier in this picture.

This is 2010-August when we moved back from Korea.  I'm pregnant with Lily but I think I just look fat.  You know those people who are normal weight and really pregnant and all they have is a baby bump?  Craziness, most people just thought I was fat when they saw me :-(  I'm sure you know my pain.  That's our cat, she doesn't look too happy to be picked up at the moment.

Early 2011 after Lily was born, I had lost some of the baby weight but I'm pretty sure I'm still somewhere around 190 in this photo.

Now we get to the photos where I got really large.  I am just amazed at how big my butt looks in these photos.  Lily is there on the chair.  It looks like we are making whipped cream, I have the heavy whipping cream and the sugar out on the counter. This is mid 2012

Here is another butt shot, I'm not sure what my husband was thinking.

This is pretty much as bad as it gets.  This was taken in late 2012.  Could there possibly be any better picture to depict my relationship with food?  There are two forks on my plate!  TWO!  I believe I was trying to eat half a breakfast burrito and I piled the food on too high and couldn't fold it up.  Matt was trying to take a picture of my failed attempt to fit all the food inside the tortilla. 

I have come a long way since then.  Even though I am not at my goal yet I am thankful for how far I have come.  I would much rather stay forever at this size than go back to the size I was.  Sometimes you don't realize how far you have come until you see the pictures and I think to myself "did I really look like that!?"  Yes I did and bless my husband for loving me from thin to fat to thin again (although he never knew me in a "healthy" weight, when we met I was 155 which is still 10 pounds overweight).  Anyway that's not the point.  The point is my husband never said a word through it all.  He just loved me, and I love him even more for it.