Moving Forward - Part 1

The good old Monday tradition is back.    ;)
Okay, so now that I got that extremely negative post regarding my explanation out of the way - it's time to move forward, and look to the future.  Obviously there are issues, and it's time to face them.   After I wrote that post on Friday, I spent my weekend going through each and every post on this blog, beginning with day 1.  And boy am I glad I have this blog to look back on events of my life, and my weight loss journey.  It helps me see things with 20/20 vision, so to speak, and I was able to clearly see what my issues were/are.  I have quite a few issues to work through if I want to lose weight.  

The first being stress.  Not only have my posts made me believe that stress is a factor, but I did a resting metabolic test at the gym, and the trainer told me I am very stressed, according to the test.  I would say this is due to work (this job has me working a lot of overtime, because there is just so much to do), and also my "romantic" relationship.  I put romantic in quotations, because it's anything but romantic.  It has been nothing but toxic since day 1, yet I continue to torture myself.

The second issue was, whenever I accomplished a goal, the change or start of a new one led me off-track - or maybe it was my self-esteem that made me stop short.  For example, one of my new years resolutions for 2013 was to complete an entire rotation of Xtrain, a new Cathe Friedrich workout program.  I did that, and when it ended, I struggled for a bit.  It wasn't long, though, because I made my 5K goal official on Facebook shortly after, and I continued to workout consistently.  I joined a new gym, where I got through the entire Cough to 5K program, and also found some classes I really, really enjoyed for my cross-training days.  Once I ran the 5K, I didn't really have a plan.  I took a week off, because I felt I "deserved" it, and that week led to months, and then to more than a year.  Clearly not having a plan didn't help.  But I also think that it was my self-esteem that led me to stop.  It wasn't enough to run a 5K or finish one program - I kept telling myself in my mind that there would be no way I could keep this up.  I never did, so why would that change?  I have a lot to work on to keep the consistency, and to increase the self-esteem.

Another issue is food.  Well, I already knew this.  But towards the beginning of 2013, I was working out quite a bit, and a lot more consistently than I had ever been.  But my food choices were not that great.  Sure, I did good during the week, but there's only so much bad food and alcohol your body can take when you're trying to lose weight.  At that time in my life, I had been going out quite a bit, and drinking was the norm on the weekends, followed by greasy foods to cure the hangovers.  No bueno.

That leads to my next issue: the scale.  I had been doing so good with exercising, but that didn't matter when I saw the number on the scale going UP, instead of down.  It was really really discouraging, and it was what ultimately led me to stop working out altogether.  Sure, I was seeing results when it came to tracking my measurements, but that darn number just has a hold over me.  Anyone would want to stop working out if they didn't see a change in that number.    But the number on the scale wasn't just because of my eating habits.  It was a combination of the above issues that has led me to stop every single diet/exercise program I've been on.  
So now that I've identified my issues, down to the core, what am I going to do to change things going forward?  That's coming up in my next post....