New Beginnings

I have been following a Facebook friend’s transformative blog for the past month or so. This person has lost 120 pounds in the past year and a half, just by doing things the old fashioned way, e.g., changing eating habits and learning how to exercise. I have been reading along, knowing I need to make a change in my own life, but not feeling ready to commit to what I know I need to do. I need to lose 90 lbs. That is a LOT of weight. It feels overwhelming at this point – like I just don’t know where to begin. But I guess the best place to start is at the very beginning. So I sent my friend’s trainer, Adam Freeman, an email this week and laid it all out. “I am a fat, middle aged woman who basically can’t stand to look at herself in the mirror any more…..”  Adam responded almost immediately, leaving me no time to chicken out and/or change my mind, and we set up an appointment to meet. Our first meeting was yesterday. Oy. Don’t get me wrong – Adam is great. The “oy” is my reaction to how I felt after having my fatness confirmed by the scale, complete with body fat statistics (49%). It was SO hard to walk in that gym. I know that Adam talked to me for the better part of an hour about how I can do this, how WE can do this, and he provided me with lots of information about weight, body fat, percentages, and so on. Truthfully, my head was spinning and I don’t really know that I took in much of anything he said. What I do know is that I begin my training with Adam on Wednesday morning at 6:00 am. I will be training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from this point forward. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am not now – and have never been – a morning person. But I looked at my calendar, and between my private practice clients, and my in-home therapy clients, there just is no other time of the day that I can work out. So it looks like I am going to become a morning person, haha. I am excited to start, but I have to admit that I am also terrified. Terrified that I won’t stick with it (I have started and stopped more diets/work out programs/lifestyle changes than I care to admit), terrified that what has worked for so many others won’t work for me, terrified that I will fail….. I want to have positive thoughts, I really do. I want to be excited, I want to be hopeful, I WANT to be successful at this. So, as I learned so many, many years ago during another period of my life where I was making a change for the better, I am just going to “act as if” and trust that the process will work for me, as it has worked for countless others before me. I am committed to getting healthy. As I told Adam in my email, I value integrity in the therapeutic process – and in order to truly feel good about helping other people live their truth, I need to live my own. For me that means being healthy – emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I have the first two – but now it is time to work on the third. So here is to New Beginnings. My own transformative journey, one day at a time. I don’t know that I will write every day, but I will definitely write about the journey, as I experience it, in all its glory, the good the bad and the ugly. Day 1 and counting!