In the course of a year - expanded

I've been thinking a lot about the last year of my life.  I could have never imagined how much my life could have changed in the course of one year.  Last year at this time I was without hope. I was in pain both physically and emotionally and I wanted to die.  This past year has thought me many things but the most important thing it has thought me is that you have to fight for what you want.

I didn't like how my life was going and I always thought about how I needed to change things but change is hard.  Shouldn't wanting things to change automatically make things change?  Yeah, not so much.  I talked about losing weight but I really had no idea what that meant and I think that is where a lot of people are who want to lose weight.  I looked at losing weight as exercising here and there. Dieting to lose weight but never really changing.  I never went into it with the thought that whatever I do will need to be a permanent change and with no real plan.  Last year I knew I had to do something.  I was killing myself with my unhealthy lifestyle.  I tried exercising but it never lasted. I tried dieting but I barely could last a month. I tried counseling but it too wasn't working.  When I decided to try this last time I knew that failure wasn't an option. I knew that I had to try something I never did before.  I knew I had to focus on the mind, body, and spirit.

What I see now is that I had to get past that initial push back.  Change is hard and I think our natural instinct is that being uncomfortable is bad and therefore we need to stop.  I have always fought losing weight luckily this time I had someone who kept pushing me not to give up because I wanted to so bad.  I didn't think I was capable of losing weight and really I didn't care enough about myself to care whether I lived or died. It also helped that for the first time in my life I turned to God and trusted that this was what I needed to be doing. I also decided to give it a real try. No lying on my meal logs. No skimping on my workouts. If I was going to do this I was going to be all in and for the first time in my life I was going to be honest with myself and with others.

This isn't to say it was easy after I made that decision because this has been the hardest thing I have ever done.  I doubted myself, I was frustrated, I was angry, I had backslides, you name it I probably experienced it.  The one thing I did differently this time is I never gave up. Quitting wasn't an option. A month long pause ok but quitting, nope wasn't going to do it.

Not quitting is the most important thing I have learned in this last year.  Diets don't fail because they don't work, they fail because the person doing the diet doesn't put in the effort.