Jennifer Lynn

Whew, where to start. This journey is the strongest one I have ever taken. What is different you say? Good question. There is both a sense of urgency and a peacefulness about me. I want to attack this situation and get it taken care of. Yet, I have no fear that I won’t accomplish this. I think that maybe, just maybe, I’m changing my life, not just how fat I am. I have great love and great hope! Yippee!

I just finished reading a book by a Republican middle-aged white man about weight loss. Now, normally, I don’t give a royal shit about anything a Republican middle-aged white man has to say about anything-I stand corrected. Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas wrote a book entitled, “Stop Digging Your Grave With a Knife and a Fork.” A lot of patrons were putting it on hold so I thought, what the hell, and did the same. I was surprised that this guy who has a lot of power had the same embarrassing stories to tell about being fat. Then, he went on to talk about 12 different things he calls STOPS that you can do to help get started. They were all very common sensical things like get your butt off the couch. Towards the end he has several different questions to ask yourself and I am going to spend some time with those questions here to help better understand the me that is me and how I became me. Confused yet? Me too, let’s just see where this takes us eh?

~Jen

Last weekend was a super fantabulous 3-day weekend in which we did little to nothing and had a blast doing it. We did spend one day “in town” and purchased a new scale. I am so excited about this scale. Our old scale is/was deranged-if you weighed 4 times in a row you would get 4 different weights. It also didn’t go very high in fatland terms so for the last three weeks that I’ve been sweating all I get is an error message. I cannot tell you how tough an error message is to your ego and your ability to keep sweating it out. It’s like having a loser sign taped to your back. Blah.

So, this new scale is nifty! It keeps track of the weights of 4 individuals and it does a decent job of guessing your BMI. So, we came home and pulled it out. Looked all over it and read the instructions. Ris says, “are you going to weigh or wait until Friday?” I panic and say I’m going to wait until Friday. Then, the moment she leaves the house I weighed. Oh my good great golly Buddha. I knew I had gained a lot but was feeling that I had gotten back down to my normal range. Not so, said the honest new scale. I weighed 347. While this threw me into a funk, I didn’t let it get to me too bad. I vowed that I would see a big difference come Friday.

The Jentastic news is that yesterday, January 20, 2006 I weight 338.6. Woo hoo! I’m very, very happy and so glad to have the motivation. Motivation follows behavior modification-I forgot that a while back.

“You goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.” ~Ralph Marston

I’ve been reflecting and sweating my ass off for the last three weeks. Reflecting because I started this blog over a year ago and for all extents and purposes I failed in my goals in 2005. Notice I didn’t say I failed period, I failed last year. This year is a whole other story. It is embarrassing to start writing on this again. Mostly because I made a big deal out of this and I shared the blog with a few close friends to motivate me to keep at it. I can imagine their disappointed faces as they visit every once in a while to see I’m still not posting anything and I get sad. I sit in this chair typing and see my belly protruding past my lovely lady lumps and I get sad. Then I get angry and dish lots of self loathing on top and go eat something. What a terrible way to live! Nothing changes in any way positive.

Larisa and I started putting our best foot forward the beginning of January-I know it’s such a cliche, but you gotta start somewhere. I’m approaching the whole thing differently. For starters, I’m not talking about it. No one besides Ris would have any idea that anything has changed. I’m not even talking to Ris about it. Why? We are the queens of talking and rationalizing to each other and I’m just not going to do it anymore. I’ve been there before and I need to internalize and be me. It seems to be working well for the both of us. We each let the other do what they need to do and when it gets real bad (ask Ris about her donut attack today) then we try to pull each other out of it without any judgments or frustrations. If you fall, you fall. It doesn’t mean your less of a person-it means, again, that you’re human. I need that complete acceptance with no judgment and for the first time, I feel I really have it. I’m so calm about this and that is a first. I’ve set goals for myself each week and I’ve met them for three weeks. I’ve hit a zone when I work out where I find myself pushing further and further because well, I can. I am proud of myself and I realized that I needed to visit this place and make it my own again. I don’t need to start a new blog to hide my past failure because it is all a part of me and it epitomizes what so many people suffer thru when they are fat and unhappy and are expected to take a beating each time they fall.

I’ve got a collection of songs on my ipod that I walk to-a lot of sexy, raw songs and Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life. Who knew that the song that speaks to me the most is a Bon Jovi song? Good grief! I won’t break copyright law because good librarians know all about copyright but go read the lyrics sometime. Every single line-even if they rhyme-speaks of me and how I am approaching this. It’s My Life, it’s now or never. I ain’t gonna live forever. I just want to live while I’m alive.

There, I don’t think I went over 10%.

~Jen