Reclaiming My Health. . .

Good Morning and Happy Monday!!

Sorry it has been awhile since my last posting! We had a wonderful and busy week! It was our first official week with the flip-flopped schedule I talked about in my article for Heart of the Matter. We have switched our day around and so far it is working much better. It still needs some tweaking, but I am breathing again and enjoying the process and my time with the girls much more :-)

I have also started back on my journey to health. You may notice some of my sayings on my blog like "I am a Beautiful and Confident Princess of the King, Crawling into my Heavenly Father's lap and LETTING Him love on me daily." and "My Mission is to encourage Moms to experience JOY in the Ministry of Motherhood!" Last summer, my husband and I started attending a series of weekend seminars called Discovery, which is where I created these visions for myself. During the past ten months we have attended 5 different weekends, most recently this past weekend, and each time we have come back with a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship with each other.

I have always battled with low self worth and have always found my worth in others eyes, in particular with my appearance and weight. When I didn't feel as though I would measure up in these areas, I would always play the Nice Guy and would try to be all things to all people, thinking that if they at least thought I was nice they would like me. I fell into a trap of signing up to do everything that came up, wanting to make new friends, wanting others to think I had it all together, not wanting to miss out on opportunities to cultivate friendships and thinking that if I didn't sign up, that someone would think less of me. That led me to last year, doing two-three bible studies at a time, teaching Sunday School, being a member of a few Christian women groups, on top of trying to lose a ton of weight and be the perfect housewife and homeschooling mother I could be. The result of all this busyness was feelings of guilt, still not feeling as though I was doing enough, feelings of not being enough on my own, and mostly, feelings of pure exhaustion!

My first weekend back in August helped me to start the healing process with my self image, and the following weekend helped me to see the negative underlying causes for doing all of the activities I was involved in. Yes, many of them were good things and had good outcomes - a deeper understanding of my faith and better prayer life, as well as friendships - but many of them were done for the wrong reasons. I decided to step back from everything, and to really evaluate every opportunity that came my way... what was my motivation for wanting to join or do that activity, and would it add value to my family? While all of this has been GREAT and I have gotten my priorities straight again -- FAMILY FIRST -- with that freedom also came the freedom from my fitness regime that I was on. Admittedly, it was an unhealthy regime, consisting of exercising at least an hour and a half and skipping lunch most days. I did lose weight but the second I started eating lunch again and decreased on the exercise, I started to gain it back. Then enter the holidays and the total abandonment of exercise and I have now gained 15 pounds since September!

What the past few months have been about for me is getting my priorities straight, learning new ways of accomplishing some of the things that kept me busy before and creating closer relationships with my family. NOW it is time to focus more on myself again and reclaim my health, but in positive ways, using tools that I have learned through my Discovery weekends. My personality is an All or Nothing approach normally, where I would jump in with exercising like crazy, a strict diet and giving up all treats. What I have learned about myself is that if I do that, I will fail and the failure will cause me to quit. I have to learn new behaviors, behaviors that may result in me losing weight slower than I would like, but behaviors that can last a lifetime! So, what am I going to do???

This week I am starting back on Weight Watchers. I have had success with this program in the past, but have also ended up forever thinking about food and being obsessed with counting. . . that aspect was not healthy for me. My plan is to come up with a series of menus that are WW friendly and planning those in advance, without having to worry about counting so much, with the exception of a few days when we want to go out or want to try a new recipe. For fitness, I am going to try to be more realistic. I used to wake up at 5:00 every morning and walk/run 3 miles, do a Walk away the pounds video a couple hours later, and then another one a few hours after that. What I have decided to do now is wake up at 6:00 am and walk/jog 1 mile every morning. This will also serve as Quiet Time in prayer as I experience God's presence so much in nature and in the early quiet hours. I will then do 1 Walk away the pounds video later in the day WITH the girls, so that I can begin to instill in them the importance and habit of daily exercise. That will be my daily fitness. My husband has also agreed to work with me two nights a week doing the two videos I purchased from Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser. If you haven't heard of these videos and are looking for something to pump up your workout, THIS IS IT! Each video is a little less than 30 minutes but oh my goodness!! You are sweating within the first couple minutes, during the warm up! This will challenge me a bit more, and give some time with my husband, but will be a new step for me as my normal pattern would be to do them daily and then get worn out and quit!

So, why am I telling you all of this? I wanted to publicly declare my committed efforts to my health and to share a bit of my journey with you. I would LOVE it if others choose to join me and we can create an accountability group of sorts, and would love any yummy, healthy recipes you have :-) Most of all, I wanted to encourage anyone else out there who has, like me, taken a step back from taking care of themselves to begin again with me. Let's get healthy for the RIGHT reasons -- for ourselves, to prove that we can, so we can be sexy for summer (ha!), and so we can set good examples for our children!

Will you join me?