If I Ever Get Out of the Hole

Weight 310.6


I've been around 310 and such for weeks now. I'm in a funk. It sucks. The spirit is willing, but the body and mind aren't working together. Suffering from depression is really something that will make your whole life cloudy. You literally don't want to do ANYTHING. I want to get back out there, but you get so depressed and so down that you just are devastated about what you see in the mirror and you think you can never change and you can never get any better. You will never be what you see in your head and feel in your heart.

You feel hopeless, helpless. I'm looking for a job, I'm trying to deal with school and a spouse that is miserable and wants to leave his job, I'm trying to eat better, to do this exercise thing, to train for this 5k and all the while all I think about is how I'm worthless and lazy and unhappy...

I've been trying to read my Bible more and pray to get some help, some answers. It's about all I can do at this point.

But tomorrow is another day to try and climb out. And trying that is just what I shall do.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Weight: 310-ish


I always loved this line from the song "Closing Time" by Semisonic, it's true, very true. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

We start things a lot. We start and we lull and we start again. We backslide, we get down from one thing or another. It happens. Sometimes we give up but then find a reason to start again. We get discouraged we get depressed, we get down...and then we get up again, we try again, we start again, we get back on the wagon.

It's hard to see people who have done it and you think to yourself, "what is the difference between them and me?"; "why can they succeed and I can't"? The thing is we are human. We deal with depression we deal with setbacks, we deal with discouragement. It happens.

Changing your body has to start with changing your mind and maybe even changing your heart. I struggle with depression. I have for a number of years. My problems started in that bad relationship. I became depressed, I started to suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. It sucked then and it sucks now. What I need is to be back on pills. The pills were good, they helped. Unfortunately we lost our insurance and so I can't get back on the pills. :( My hopes are that will change eventually. But so here's the deal- I can start on something, anything, that I really want and I enjoy and before I know it the life is being sucked out of me. The desire to do this to do anything is just zapped out of me. I have no hope, no desire, no gumption, nothing. It sucks. It sucks ass in fact.

And so, you get stuck in this downward spiral, this circle of hopelessness. It's like swimming in a whirlpool. You want to get out, you try to get out, you swim and swim and swim and you just keep getting sucked down. That's how I feel all the time. It's like there is a disconnect between who I want to be and how I am and who I keep falling into being. I don't think I'm crazy, but I feel like it a lot of times.

I like to consider myself a spiritual person. The bad thing about that is that I don't often practice what I preach or what I know to be true. I talk about trusting God, I tell people to turn it over to God to trust him with everything, but I rarely do that myself. So I start to reflect on why. Well, I think for a lot of time in that bad relationship I wondered where God was. Why He was letting this happen, why he wasn't helping me or stopping this. I guess in a lot of ways I lost, not my faith, but my trust. I forgot that I can TRUST God to take care of, well, everything.

I know that I need to get back to that childlike faith that we all so desperately desire. But it's hard. It's hard to just sit back and be like, "Ok, God take care of this thing." But you know maybe that is what I'm lacking. Maybe that is what is holding me back maybe that is what keeps me hopeless and helpless. I know that I have the desire and the ability to do this thing, to be this thing but I have been unsuccessful.

So I guess it's time to let another beginning end, and a new beginning begin. One where I will try to heed my own words and really just turn it over 100%. Will it be easy, no. But all I can do is try...and all you can do is try. You will get better, even if just a little better everyday.

Life really IS like a box of chocolates

I haven't weighed in a while. I have no desire to....



     You know, life really is like a box of chocolates. You never really do know what you are gonna get. Well, unless you get one of those boxes with a "candy map" on it that lets you know what is where in the box. But even then it's pretty much a crap shot because you have no idea what the crap half of the stuff means (what the crap is Roman Nougat anyway??). So you still end up with bitten into pieces of saliva covered gross chocolate in the trash, on your hand, a napkin, the floor, whatever. Seems like just when you get all excited that you have a box of chocolate, you get the gross piece of candy, and that sucks.

     I have gotten to where I can feel it coming on. Those depressive times. I know that they are coming and try as I may there is little that I can do to stop them. Eating healthy, exercising, and depression are not friends. They do not go together at all. I don't think that I am bi-polar because my manic isn't that manic, but I know when the depressive state in setting in.

I eat.

Like, everything! Partial to junk, but will eat, and eat, and EAT. I don't care about carbs, calories, fat, or that it was meant to serve 6. I will eat it.

I don't want to shower.

Look, I know that is gross. I'm not happy about it. But when I'm having these episodes, showering seems like such an undertaking. I have ZERO motivation to do it. I want to sleep, watch TV, generally do NOTHING.

I don't want to exercise.

This includes pretty much everything. Running, walking, yoga, working outside. Nothing seems like something worth doing.

So you can see where this cuts into any type of get healthy program. I eat and I don't exercise. I dread when I step back on the scale. I will have to try hard to not let the number that I see get me depressed even more to the point that I really give up.

Sadly depression is a part of my life and it has been for a while. How can you describe to someone who has never had to deal with it the feelings of hopelessness and lifelessness that overcome you. I mean there is literally NOTHING that seems enjoyable to me when I'm going through these times. The worse you feel, the worse you feel. Imagine being chained to a wall in a dark room. The more you pull on your chain, the shorter it gets and the shorter it gets the more hopeless you feel that you will never get out. This is what it is like.

Slowly but surely I start to get out of it. I start to get back into the old me. I get back some motivation to you know, live. But it's not easy at all to get there.

There are people that say that its the Devil trying to get me down and I would say that I agree. Because it seem sometimes that it happens when I feel the best. Anytime things start to go good, something will get you down. It's a way of life for many people friends. I'm one of them.

Life really is like a box of chocolates, you finish your Tampico (the toasted coconut cup things) and it is great and then you get a caramel and it is really good too, but then you bite into some gross nougat thing or a chocolate covered cherry and you gag. See it means that things are going really good, pretty good, and then something bad can come along and turn you off from chocolate (at least for a while...) But you eat chocolate again. Life has to be like that. When things are going great and then get pretty good and then bad, you can't just stop having life...you have to treat life like a box of chocolate and just get out your map (the Bible, perhaps, or whatever you find guidance in) and find a better piece. Sometimes you may have lost your candy map, so you just wait for something better to come along.

But things will change. You will get yourself back. I'm not going to quit just because things have gotten hard this time. I'm not going to just fail and wallow in my failure. It may take a while, but I'll be back to me again.

You Can't Be a Bird All The Time

Weight: 311.0

     When did we make the word 'diet' synonymous with what we aren't eating? Your diet I what you do eat, but we have made the word diet stand for not eating certain things. It's strange to me. Dieting is not a way of life. We weren't meant to be on diets keeping things from ourselves for our whole lives. I mean, what fun is that?

     There will be days on you journey called life and on your eating better/healthier journey when you, you know, don't. There will be days when you want a Great American Cookie Company Cookie while you are out with your sweetie, there will be days when you just want to eat tortilla chips and cheese before you eat your burritos at the Mexican place some days you won't be on a 'diet'.

     I guess though you need to be aware of when those days are. This morning I was pretty bummed to see that I gained weight. I mean I did eat some fast food yesterday, it was carbalicious, but I also drank a gallon of water and did my C25K. It was only a few tenths of a pound, but I was still upset. So all those things I just talked about, I did them. How do I feel now? Pretty much like garbage. I can't imagine what the scale will say tomorrow and I don't want to. I know that it will be devastating. Tomorrow is a run day, tomorrow will have to be a strict eating day too it appears to try and make up for today. It seems that this is the game that I play. One day I'm a rabbit and the next I'm a hippo.

     That seems to be the most frustrating thing for me. You can't be a bird all the time. You can't be restricted all that time (at least I can't). Maybe that is my problem.

     I'm always playing catch-up; make-up with myself. I have a really good day, I have a bad day when temptation is bad, or when I'm feeling down and I over eat or eat garbage or woolf things down and I act like I have no cares in the world with food. It's not a good way to be, I understand this, I know this, but it doesn't seem to matter to me because I still do these things.

     I am starting to really believe and know that I can't do this on my own. I will have to have God help me with this because it is a battle that I have been trying to fight and I have been failing miserably. I want, no, I need to get a handle on myself. I want the outside to fit the inside. I'm tired of feeling like garbage and not being able to live my life on the terms that I want. Who' with me on this? Who else is tired of feeling like you have to be a bird all the time?

     There has to be a happy medium, there has to be a place where you get in your mind that you can have it both ways. That you can have that cookie, but don't have three; where you can have chips, but not a basket full.

     As far as birds go, I'm more like Big Bird than a finch. Humph, I'm more like Snuffalupagus than Big Bird, but anyway. One step up two steps back is the story of my eating life. I'm always don't good and making up for doing bad. I get so frustrated and I know that many of you may feel this way too.

     Just remember that you can't be a bird all the time. You will have days when you eat things or quantities of things that you shouldn't, but don't be like me, don't let those days get you down because those days will come. Maybe you will feel depressed, maybe your best friend will be getting married and so you will have cake and her reception candy buffet and all the free drinks that she is serving, but one day doesn't have to get you off track. One day when you don't have a loss doesn't have to send you into a tail spin. Remember that our bodies change from day to day and those changes can show changes in our weight that aren't even due to anything that we did or didn't do or eat. Your life is full of one days, of new days. So treat each one like a new day and instead of being upset about what you did or didn't do or lose yesterday, be positive about what you can do or lose today. Today is a new day to start over, today is a new day with new decisions. I can't take back eating those cookies (well I could puke or something I guess but who wants to do that. I mean, I don't enjoy barfing let alone barfing up pecan cookie and Starbucks) but I can control what I do tomorrow.

     And tomorrow.....I will be a bird. (or at least be more like one)

Tell it to Move

Weight: 310.4


Yeah, so I took a few days off...big woop. I did that from my eating habits and things too, my backside is STILL hurting. You know, from falling off the wagon.

Look, I have realized that the time for excuses needs to be over. I have made excuses for a lot of things for a long time and I need to get over it. Face it, sometimes eating right can get laborious. Especially when you are just trying to change our eating patterns. Pizza is delicious, cookies are like Pringles (you can't have just one), sometimes eating out is soo much easier than cooking, and sometimes you just want some pancakes!

I think I dealt with all of those the past week. Hey, it happens.

But, I have gotten back into my C25K training and, gasp, even signed up to take part in a 5K. Well, I figure that since it cost money I would feel bad for not doing it. I even told people about it so now I have some accountability. So I guess my training starts now. I have confidence that I will definitely be able to finish, I mean I have hiked farther than 3.1 miles. I have never jogged/ran that far, but we will see how it goes.

Also I have been feeling like garbage, so thirsty I could hardly stand it. So I did some research. According to my weight, I should be drinking like, over a gallon of water a day. Sooo....I got me some gallon jugs and I marked them with times so I can be sure to get in at least a gallon a day. I pee 800,000 times, but a few days in and I already feel a little better.

See when you are making a change in your life, be that eating better or learning to trust God for things there will come times when things get in your way. When worry sets in, when Ben & Jerry's is on sale B1G1, when what may be a molehill becomes a mountain to you. I heard a song on the radio the last two days, a Christian song, that says, "This is only a mountain, you don't have to go around it, tell it move, it'll move, tell it to fall, it'll fall.." or something like that. It's a lovely song. That got me to thinking, you know the Lord tells us that if we have faith even the size of a mustard seed (which is VERY small) then we have faith enough to make the mountains move.

But we don't believe that. We think that miracles are things of the Bible. Now healing doesn't really count because we don't do that directly. We pray to God and God handles the healing if it is in his will. I'm not sure that I believe that anyone can be healed if it isn't in His will for them to be. Why don't we still believe that we can move mountains?

Why don't we believe that we can tell ourselves that we don't need that candy bar or that we don't need to eat again at 11PM. Food can be your mountain. I guess in a way it's mine. It's that one thing that has always gotten in my way because I turned to food, and I love food. I love good food, cooking it, eating it. There's nothing wrong with that, but you have to know when it becomes a hindrance for you, when it becomes a mountain and not a bear claw.

So I challenge you what I challenge myself. Tell it to move.

I believe that the Devil can and will use ANYTHING to destroy you if he chooses to. I believe that he will put desires or fears or thoughts in your way. He can make anything a mountain to you. He can make food or alcohol or internet games or plastic surgery...anything, anything. So when we get those mountains in our way, why don't we just tell them to move! Say, "Get behind me devil!" "Move mountain!"

Now I know, I know that is easier said than done. I mean if it was easy would I be big as a house? Umm, no. But you can try, and maybe your faith will move a pebble one day, a stone the next, a boulder the next.

If you have a mountain in front of you today, whether it is addiction to drugs or food or whatever, if it is facing unemployment or divorce or loneliness; tell it to move. Maybe you will have to say it two times or ten times or ten thousand times, but try it. I will, and lets just see how many mountains we can move.