Here's to the Beginning

Hello to anyone who might have stumbled upon this.

My name is Bethany and I have a problem.

I am overweight and have been for a large majority of my life. Like so many others, I am finding myself at a decision point: Lose the weight and reclaim pieces of myself back or give up and submit myself to a lifetime of discontentment and the ever-burning question “what if?”. I choose the former because I am exhausted with the latter. I currently am in a size 14/16 pant. If I continue gaining weight I will isolate myself to shopping in specialty stores for “plus-size” women. That is an option. But here is the deal, my body is tired from years of lugging around excess baggage. My mind is tired from constantly thinking about my weight, worrying about how I look in clothing, and feeling hopeless and desperate.

August 2015 my life changed forever. I gave birth to two beautiful twin boys. Over a year later, my boys are becoming more and more active every day, and I fear that soon I will not be able to keep up with them. When the boys were about 5 months, I began to buckle down and try to lose the weight I gained during pregnancy. Eight months later, I had managed to lose 20 pounds. While I am glad that I lost the weight, I hit a wall. After several months of not losing one single pound counting calories and managing what I was eating, a common wave of defeat fell over me. Broken, I reached out to a close friend who told me of a friend of hers who had lost a significant amount of weight in a program called Take Shape For Life. I got in contact with her friend, and two weeks ago I began my journey towards weight loss. My goal seems daunting to me, but sometimes scary goals are important to make.

Here is my goal: I want to lose 50 pounds.

There is no timeline because I tend to self-sabotage when I pressure myself. That number is the goal, but I hope to gain much more than I lose. I want to gain a sense of self-compassion, respect for my body, a new-found confidence in who I am that is not connected to what I weigh. I want to be able to put on an outfit without feeling the need to layer to cover bulges of discomfort. I want to gain an understanding of who I am, what got me to this place, and how I can equip myself so that I never return. I want to gain freedom from endless self-talk that belittles and degrades myself because of a mirror reflection.

I know that a mental shift is as important to my journey as a shift in the scale. It is with that in mind that I am writing this blog. Many weight-loss programs have a physical weigh-in at the end of every week. Consider this my Metal Weigh-in. Some post might be scattered ramblings. Others might hold great breakthroughs. I don’t know. I haven’t lived them yet.

Every story is beautiful. This is mine.