Welcome!

Hi everyone! Some of you are friends of mine from years and years before, some of you are new, and maybe some of you have come across my blog randomly. Either way, welcome!

I want to post a little about myself and how I got started on this journey. This is a journey thats about 4 years in the making for me. I've been overweight my entire life, but it was just recently that I "got it" and figured out how to lose weight and keep it off. Some would say that I'm obsessed with weight loss and working out, and yes, they are right! But if you want to become healthy and fit, I think it's something that has to happen. I was a chubby kid all through school, but I was never "obese" until I had my first child in 2007. At that point, I was 210 pounds.

Yes, that was me. This is what you call the "wake-up call". I hated how I looked, how I felt, and everything else about myself. I dropped the weight though, and got down to my pre-pregnancy weight. In 2009 I suffered a miscarriage though, and my weight went right back up to 150. I was a mess emotionally, and then I found out that I was pregnant 3 weeks later with our second child. After I had Jacob, I was back up to 175 again. I felt like I was right back where I started. I wasn't confident, I had no drive, and I was always just so tired. Most of all though, I was just tired of myself. I had never been lower than a size 10 in my teenage years, and all through my adult life. At that point, I was a size 18. Was I ever going to get to a size where I was happy?

One day I decided that I was going to get back on that wagon, no matter what it took. I decided that I had enough of myself. My marriage wasn't what I wanted it to me, and that was because I had no life in me anymore. I was going to fix myself somehow. I started working out to the Bootcamp DVD from Bob Harper's collection. Doing the maximum results program got me going, and I really started losing weight right away. I changed my eating habits drastically, and I stuck with it as much as I could. I started seeing an improvement in everything from my streghth to my endurance. By week 12, around Thankgiving, I was back around a size 10 again. I didn't want to stop there though, and decided it was time to really step it up. I picked up Bob Harpers Inside Out DVD's and since then I've dropped another 20+ pounds and now I'm down to a size 6. I submitted my story to Bob Harper, and he published it and posted my pictures. That was one of the best days of my life!

This is me now! 123lbs and hoping to make it to 115.

The key here though is INSIDE OUT. You have to change internal thinking to get to where you want to go. It's not about how hard you work out, it's about your relationships with food and yourself. This is what I'll be talking about a lot through this blog, because that was really the turning point for me and something I think that people really struggle with.

Until next time!