Twenty-three…

Dear Me at Twenty-three,

I’m sorry. You worked really hard to get the weight off of this body and the me from twenty-seven to thirty-one hasn’t been keeping up our end of the bargain. We’ve allowed greasy fast food, cakes with decadent amounts of icing and laziness to take precedence over keeping the fat off that you worked so hard to remove. You would spend an hour or two every day (even on weekends!) at the gym, focusing on cardio and the weight machines. You wouldn’t leave the elliptical machine until you had hit five miles. Now, I get winded after walking one mile.

Thankfully, I didn’t let all eighty pounds come back, just the same thirty pounds that we’ve been fighting with since I got out of grad school. We did manage to get it off for almost nine months in 2007 but then decided a sedentary lifestyle was much more conducive to doing nothing.

And the food issue, we know how wonderful fresh vegetables from the farmer markets taste – the glory of produce that was picked the day before being consumed in it’s natural state, as God intended. But now we don’t allow that type of food in the house, the Oreos needed their place of honor on the counter.

And the soda. It’s a bad addiction that’s going to be hard to break. I realized this morning that I drink almost a two liter of diet soda a day. I can only imagine what I’ve been doing to the body you had dedicated to drinking 100 ounces of water, every day, for two years straight.

But today, I would’ve made you proud. Today, I realized the harm I was doing to my body by trying to hide the food I eat from myself. My distorted thought pattern was that if I hid the food from B, I was hiding it from my body as well. Those calories weren’t going to count because I devoured it in secret where no one could witness my downfall. Also, I stopped the soda, put it down and picked up the water glass instead.

Our next step, on this side of thirty-one, I’m going to cut out sugars. Only natural sugars will prevail on a daily basis with something ‘bad’ on occasion and in moderation.

I know that these promises have been made many times to our self but today feels different. Today, I realized what you did and accomplished – how hard it was to work for that goal and I appreciate what you did, reminds me that it is possible to go back to that body. I know it’s going to be harder because we’re no longer in our early-twenties but it’s not insurmountable.

Thank you for being there twenty-three. Now, it’s time to embrace thirty-one.

Love,

Jen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Food, Love, Pleas of Desperation, Random Thoughts, Shrinking, The unknown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.