Super Honest Hour

This is probably my most difficult blog post so far because it’s very personal and very honest, and truthfully, slightly embarrassing for me to share. The only people who know these things about me are my husband and my counselor. Honestly, as I am thinking about what to say, I’m having a hard time organizing my thoughts. I’ll try to back up and at least explain how I got to where I’m at now.

Since a very young age, I’ve struggled with my weight (which was actually fine at the time) and my relationship with food. Fast forward about 20 years from when I can remember this starting, and the issues are still there. This is extremely difficult to share, and definitely embarrassing, but I promised I would be very honest, and I’m hoping this may even help someone.

It hasn’t been terrible the whole time. I’ve had some ups and downs, and I’ve had long stretches of time when I thought I was done with this forever. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and I’m currently not in a great place. I can say that I know what caused it. Last year was a very rough year for our family. Within the span of a two months, my husband and I lost our baby boy at 19 weeks gestation, and we each had a parent in the hospital with serious health conditions. It was during all of this that a lot of bad habits started to reappear.

Our lives were so out of whack after everything, and healthy choices were not a priority. For a while, it was just about survival. We started seeing a counselor after all of this happened, and it helped tremendously, but for me, the unhealthy habits have not been as easy to let go of.

This leads me to where I’m at now. I’m not where I want to be physically, not even remotely close, and if this were the only issue, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s what this has led to. Let me start by saying that I am a perfectionist, and I have extremely high expectations, especially of myself. Also, when I do something, I go ALL THE WAY. Keep these two things in mind.

After realizing that I need to get it together, I tried different diets. Because of the way I am, I would do ALL the research and dive right in. It would work for a little while, but then it would go terribly wrong. We travel an insane amount, and when we aren’t traveling, there seems to always be some sort of event or party. Me being me, I would obsess about what I was supposed to or not supposed to eat, and if I deviated from that even the slightest, I would absolutely freak. This obsession and unrealistic expectations led to lots of anxiety and late night binges. I shared this with my counselor, and she told me that I needed to let go a little bit because I was just making it worse by doing so much research and being too unrealistic. Well, I am also very stubborn.

This leads me to the more serious issues. Because I have such high expectations of myself, I am very hard on myself. What’s more concerning than my current weight is the way that I have been treating and speaking to myself for a very long time. I’m just going to be EXTREMELY honest with you about some things. I’ve been weighing myself every day, sometimes more than once, and I will let that number dictate how I feel about myself and how I speak to myself. I will examine myself in a mirror and pick apart everything that I dislike about my appearance, and I will definitely compare the way I look to others. You can imagine what all of this will do to a person’s mind and how much insecurity it will create.

I know this post is kind of a downer, but I felt like it needed to be shared because it’s so huge in my life right now, and because I know I’m not the only one. I know that this is something a lot of people, men and women struggle with, and I want them to know that they are not alone. I also want people to know that there is hope, and it CAN get better. A friend of mine posted about a blog called “It’s Not About the Food”, and it has helped tremendously. Although I do still struggle with the things I mentioned above, they are definitely getting better. In my next post, I will share some of the things I am learning and what I have been doing to improve.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, and I can’t wait to share more of this journey with you.