All About Me...

So this is my very first blog post ever. It's going to be totally lame because I haven't figured out how to do all the cutesy stuff yet, like add pictures or fancy backgrounds and such. I am also exhausted because I've run 18 miles in the past three days, 10 of them this morning, and right now everything in my brain is kind of mushy and all I can muster is bluh.

The reason I decided to do this is mostly because over the past 18 months I have been on an epic journey to better myself through improving my health. As of late, a lot of people in my life have been asking me, "how did you do it?", and I'm hoping that writing this in exhausting detail will answer those questions. Also, I like to write, and I hope that if people are actually reading this, from time to time they will be able to put up with random streams of consciousness about nothing in particular that I need to put in writing. My Facebook friends know what I'm talking about.

To start at the beginning, for the vast majority of my life, I was really really fat, and one fateful day 18 months ago, I realized that I needed to do something about it or suffer the consequences. What would those be, you ask? The most well publicized of course, are high risk for heart disease and diabetes and other really bad health things that make you dead before you want to be. But personally, it was the "little things", like knowing that every time I went to a restaurant I was going to have to ask for a table with chairs because I couldn't squeeze my giant ass into a booth, or hoping when I went to the movies that it wouldn't be the old fashioned bucket seats because I would again have issues squeezing in the aforementioned giant ass. It was not being able to go on roller coasters because the bar wouldn't go down over my gut. It was asking for a "seat belt extender" on airplanes. It was getting winded going up a flight of stairs. It was going to the "plus size" store and grabbing stuff off the rack, never trying anything on because it was just going to look like a Hefty bag anyway. I could go on and on, but I'm starting to get depressed.

Many of us go through life wishing we could be better than we are. I always wanted to be fit. Not thin. Not skinny. Just "normal". You see, from the age of 12 I was heavy. First pudgy, then chubby, then just plain fat. But, knowing it would take a lot of work and discipline to become my ideal, I told myself for many years that it was impossible, that I had too much going against me, that I was destined to always be fat. I deluded myself by deciding I was doing all right the way I was and didn't need to lose weight. Even as I got bigger and bigger, I found ways to look in the mirror and be satisfied that I "wasn't really that bad". I was able to mask a large host of flaws until one fateful encounter with a full length hotel bathroom mirror and really bright florescent lights. It was one of those experiences where there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no hiding from the truth. I was nasty to look at as well as feeling nasty because of my physical limitations.

From that moment on, for the first time in my life, I didn't run and hide from the truth. I faced it head on. I took the bull by the horns and attacked it. And at first it fought back with all its strength. But so did I. And the harder I fought, the easier it got to beat it. I won't go into detail in this first post, because I will do that over the course of many posts. Also because I'm really tired, irritated and my kid is hungry. Long story short, over the past 18 months I've lost 100 lbs, started an excellent fitness routine and completely revised my relationship with food. Please read the posts to come in the next few days/weeks/whenever I get a chance, I will go into more detail and hopefully be able to help people who are just like me, who know they can be better and just need a kick start and a little encouragement to get on their way.