Are you afraid you will never be able to lose the weight you want to lose? Do you think at your age, that's just what happens and that there's nothing you can do about it? I'm here to tell you that you can change your body; you can lose the weight, and you can get in shape.
If I can do it, you can do it.
While I've never been terribly overweight, I've over eaten at times and eaten the wrong things.
Worse than that for me, I've always resisted exercising.
In fact, I have always detested exercising, until I got desperate and had to change my mind about it; that is, change the way I framed exercise in my mind.
I found myself, in the past ten years, dealing with an increasingly painful condition called scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.
I was always very proud of my long straight back, but 10 years ago, all that began to change.
My spine began to twist and curve and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
When I went to an orthopedic doctor, he wanted to cut me open and put a steel rod and pins in my back.
I told him I was not interested in surgery.
The doctor actually had the gall to ask me if I was embarrassed by how my back looked.
I said, "not until now...
thanks for that".
Then he asked me if I had trouble walking, which frankly scared me! I left worse off than when I had come to him seeking help and answers.
For the next 6 years I tried to do as little as possible so as not to hurt myself or to affect my ability to walk.
What I did as a result of that doctor's fear inducing questions was the worst thing I could possibly have done...
nothing.
Finally, in 2009, I had to do something.
The muscle spasms in my lower back were so bad, I lived with chronic pain and really couldn't walk or stand for more than 15 minutes at a time.
I was scared about my future.
I went to a Back Boot Camp, and I learned how to exercise for my back.
The improvement was dramatic.
Then my mother died, and I fell off the exercise wagon.
A year later, I went back, but then I was still struggling with depression from losing my mother.
I couldn't make myself get back to the program that had helped me so much the previous year.
It is now four years later, and 2 months ago, I finally was at the same low point and had to make some decisions.
I went back to the Back Boot Camp program, and this time I really learned that when my back is bad, I need to exercise not baby myself.
What I experienced was a change in mind set and a realization that I don't have to live with chronic muscle spasms.
(If you've never lived with chronic pain, lucky you...
it's very wearing.
) My point with sharing this is to highlight that you can make changes, but you need to change to change.
Does that sound like double-talk? It's not.
It's completely logical.
I think I've learned this from curing my depression by changing my eating habits and realizing if I don't stay with eating that serves me and solves my depression, I will return to living as someone who struggles with depression.
This is not a sentence or a deprivation; it is a wonderfully liberating discovery.
Just as I've applied my journey of eating to my journey of exercising to help my back and body feel better, so can you incorporate clean, healthy eating in your life.
It will be a revelation to you as you change how you eat, change how you feel and change the weight your body carries around.
It's not dieting nor is it deprivation; it's healing your body...
not with drugs, but with whole healthy food.
I don't believe in dieting.
Dieting doesn't work because it is framed in your mind as something you don't want to do.
Eating healthily and feeling great are not punishments.
When you choose to eat right and exercise, the rewards are many; they are behaviors you will choose to continue and make a life style.
One of my favorite sayings relative to all this is, "Don't diet; try it"!