“Every new day is another chance to change your life.” ~ Unknown

Like everyone, my journey began in childhood, but not in a good way. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those sob stories about how horrible my childhood was and how it is to blame for everything in my life. I don’t believe in that. I believe in taking personal responsibility for where you are today, in this very moment, regardless of anything that has happened previously.

My childhood was actually pretty idyllic. Our family was pretty normal. I had good friends my entire life. My parents weren’t too tough or too soft. We spent our summers at the beach. I didn’t struggle in school, and I was in the top of my class. It sounds like a dream childhood. There was just one fly in the ointment of that perfection…. I was overweight.

I had started kindergarten at a normal weight. I was taller than everyone else in my class, even the boys, but I was not overweight. The same for the 1st grade. The summer between 1st and 2nd everything changed though. That summer I gained 30 pounds. Thirty pounds on a six year old body is a lot of weight. I went back to school the next year, and I was the fat kid. I don’t remember a lot of bullying because of it. There were a couple of incidents, but nothing that was horribly traumatic. I had something to hide behind. I was super smart and pretty much excelled at anything academically. I didn’t let my weight hold me back physically either. I played basketball, soccer, and softball. I was a good kid, and I could mostly forget that I was overweight.

The sixth grade was the year that my weight started really bothering me. I was twelve, and that was the year I hit 200 pounds. We used to get weighed in school twice a year in front of our whole class in gym. Most of the girls in my class were barely breaking 100 pounds, and I weighed in over 200. I was so embarrassed and I wanted to be like the other girls and wear cute clothes like they did, but I couldn’t. My life was filled with friends and fun though, so it wasn’t something on which I obsessed.

I was self confident because I was so good at so many things. I don’t think anyone realized that I was even bothered by my weight. I didn’t spend much time thinking about what others thought of me or my weight. I was very lucky that I have always had the type of personality that didn’t care about other’s opinions. I didn’t spend much time thinking about my weight at all actually. I pushed it into the “I’m not going to worry about that” category. So I went through school and then college getting heavier and heavier. As an adult, my weight stabilized around 250 pounds. I stayed at that weight for almost 20 years. Then I had a total hysterectomy in my late 30’s. I added another 15-20 pounds after my medically induced menopause. And THEN I quit smoke in my mid 40’s. I added another 15-20 pounds again.

So there I was at my highest weight ever, and now it is really affecting my life. I was exhausted all the time. I wasn’t very physically active anymore because I was just so tired ALL THE TIME. And to add insult to injury, I got so large that I was having personal hygiene issues. That was really the straw that broke the camel’s back with me. I had to lose some weight because I was miserable.

May 2018 at my highest weight of 283 pounds.

That may sound like a typical declaration from someone who is over weight. Probably the type of declaration that they have hastily made 100 times, and then quit on just as quickly. But that wasn’t the type of person I was. I hadn’t ever really dieted before. I was serious when I said that my weight wasn’t something that I thought much about. One time, during my senior year in high school, I decided that I wanted to lose weight and be thin before college. This was back in 1991, and there wasn’t Google or Pinterest to find diet ideas. I found a meal plan in a magazine and decided to try it. The problem was that I didn’t like any of the foods on that plan, and I was hungry all the time. I was miserable trying to eat like that, so naturally it failed… after only a month. That one diet shaped by adult thought process about all diets.

Diets were something that made you miserable and you would have to suffer through if you wanted to lose weight. Because my weight wasn’t holding me back in my life, I never wanted to lose weight enough that I was willing to be miserable to do it. I am pretty self-centered that way. I like to be happy. Gaining weight and reaching 283 pounds, changed that mindset though. Finally I was at a point in my life where I was already miserable, and I needed to do something to change that. I was determined to lose weight.

At 45 years old, and with the internet to back me up, I was much better prepared to start my second diet. The first decision that I made was a simple one, but one that I have come to believe is the reason I have successfully lost weight. I decided that I wasn’t going to do ANYTHING that made me miserable. That meant I wasn’t going to eat foods I didn’t like. I wasn’t going to go around being hungry all the time, and I wasn’t going to exercise in a way that I hated. So with these resolutions, I set out to find a way to lose weight that allowed all that.

What I settled on was counting calories. I didn’t do weight watchers or Keto or any of diet plan. I just researched what was the ideal calorie range for my current size to be able to lose weight, and then doggedly started learning the calorie counts on everything I ate. I found the lowest calorie foods out there that I already liked and ate them like a champ. Imagine a full dinner plate piled high with cabbage or broccoli and a piece of baked chicken on the side. It might not sound appealing, but I loved chicken and was pretty fond on most vegetables. I ate more salads. I replaced my gallons of ranch with fat free Italian. They weren’t as good as before, but I didn’t dislike them. That was pretty much my mantra. This food may not be as good as before, but I still enjoy it, and knew I could eat it everyday.

My goal was to lose the 15-20 pounds that I put on when I quit smoking. That’s all. I wasn’t planning to lose anything more. I just wanted to get back to the weight I had been previously. I had a stray thought that maybe I should shoot for 30-35 pounds and get back to where I was before my hysterectomy, but I didn’t really want to put that much effort into it. My brain actual thought, “Well, I will do this for a couple of months and then I can go back to how I was before.”

Then an absolutely amazing thing happened. I was eating all these natural, unprocessed foods. I had cut out most refined sugars. I was eating a lot less breads and pastas. And I started to feel better. Don’t get me wrong, the first couple of weeks were not pleasant because I was craving things all the time. My mind thought about food ALL the time. I wasn’t hungry though, because I was stuffing myself full of nutritious, low calorie foods at every meal. And as my body started getting used to me giving it healthier food, it started to feel better. I was less tired and achy.

I decided that maybe I could add a walk into my routine a couple times a week, now that I was feeling better. So I started walking during my lunch break. When I started, I couldn’t even make it a quarter of a mile without severe pain in my back and having to stop and rest. But I kept it up and slowly was able to go further and further.

It was about this time, a couple months into my “diet” that I reached my previous weight before I quit smoking. This was my goal and I had reached it. But I loved the way I felt now, and didn’t want to stop feeling like that. So I decided that I would keep going. I decided that I wasn’t on a diet any longer. I decided that this was my life. This is how I wanted to eat for the rest of my life, because why would I ever want to go back to feeling as crappy as those processed foods made me feel. I decided to see how much more weight that I would lose if I kept going. In the back of my brain I wondered if I would be able to lose 40 more pounds and get down to 220. Wouldn’t that be amazing. I couldn’t even imagine. The thought of getting below 200 or even more outrageous, getting down to a healthy BMI of 150, was so impossible in my mind, that I didn’t even dream about it.

I had discovered podcasts earlier that year, and at this point I decided to search for a podcast about losing weight that I could listen to on my commute to work. I imagined someone who would help keep me motivated and give me recipe tips. What I found was so much more. I found a podcast called “Losing 100 Pounds with Phit-n-Phat” and its’ creator Corinne Crabtree. It was like divine providence. Here was a woman talking about losing weight in a way that resonated with me.

I have always believed that your life is what you make it. That is just part of my personality. It isn’t something I learned, it is just how I have always thought. If I didn’t like something, I could change it, and if I didn’t change it, I had no one to blame but myself. Combine that philosophy with some time spent with Al- Anon because of my adult alcoholic son, and it was a perfect storm of believing in taking personal responsibility for everything in your life. And into that walked Corinne Crabtree, a no-bullshit, southern, tell it like it is woman who had lost 100 pounds and now taught other women how to do it. I was all in from the first podcast. What she taught was taking responsibility for what you are doing, for your mistakes, and then just keeping on going no matter what. She taught that regardless of what you do to lose the weight, if you don’t deal with your mental crap about why you are over eating, then you will never keep the weight off permanently. She taught that you needed to love everything you are doing, if you want it to be be your life and not just a temporary diet that will fail.

I learned that I was still overeating, even though I was eating within the calorie range that would ensure I lost weight. I was still stuffing myself full at every meal even though it was now with healthy foods and I wasn’t figuring out why I felt the need to keep eating until I felt slightly nauseous. I learned that eating things at night or late afternoon, when I wasn’t hungry, but just because I had extra calories left for the day was still overeating. Eating anytime that I wasn’t physically hungry, regardless of the situation, was because emotional reasons. I had never thought of myself as an emotional eater before. I came to figure out though, that I used food as a way to relax and de-stress. You see, eating releases dopamine in our brain, and that gives our body pleasure, which makes us feel better or relaxed. And that was what I had been using food for my entire life. I learned I could trust myself to stop counting calories and listen to what my body was telling me. Her free podcasts helped me learn all of these things.

My journey was no longer just about seeing how much weight I would lose. I knew now that I would reach 150 pounds one day in the foreseeable future. Now my journey was about becoming the person I should have always been. A better version of me, where I anything I dream, I can accomplish. I knew I wasn’t perfect and I would make mistakes along the way, but that I got to choose every single day, and every single minute what I wanted with my life and if I was willing to do the work to get it.

I started working on everything in my life. I wanted to be more present in my marriage and with my kids. I wanted to be more physically active, so I started walking 5k races every month. I started yoga, and meditating. I dream of being strong enough to climb a mountain. And I know that one day I will accomplish that. The weight kept coming off, but that was secondary to this amazing life I was rebuilding for myself.

And then came the day that I never even considered possible, the day that I stepped on the scale and a two was no longer the first number I saw. The day my Life in Onederland started.