It has been a few years since my last post. I am back and have re-designed my blog to align with my life today. I am still a type 1 diabetic (unfortunately the cure hasn’t quite been perfected yet. But it’s coming!) In the past few years I have continued to grow and evolve and I am ready to get back here and start sharing my journey again!
My life has had many ups and downs and for a long time it was mainly just a lot of downs. Growing up I struggled with my body image and confidence. I was always the heavier girl in my group of friends and felt pretty insecure most of the time.
I also felt so different most of my life because of the fact that I am a type 1 diabetic and was told from a young age that I couldn’t do the things that other kids did. Like eat candy on Halloween or have chocolate bunnies at Easter, and couldn’t eat cake at birthday parties! Not to mention I had to poke myself with needles all the time! Ugh! And my family lived in a constant state of fear that something bad might be happen to me at any time. Thank god research and technology has changed the way type 1 is treated these days so that I and all those kids who have this dumb disease can eat carbs and in moderation just like everyone else (as long as I count those carbs correctly and give the right amount of insulin to break the sugar down, yes we should have math and science degrees!)
I shied always from exercise the older I got because I would experience low blood sugars that weren’t fun. This was a pretty big obstacle for me to overcome and it’s always a work in progress, because until there is a cure, I will always have to balance and live with the ups and downs of Type 1 diabetes.
Being different…
being told I couldn’t do things, feeling insecure about my body, lead to me becoming pretty rebellious in high school until my mid 20’s. I used to drink a lot to numb my feelings and fit in. I masked who I was because I didn’t feel good enough just being me. And the worse I treated myself, the worse it became. The guilt was so heavy and the shame I carried all the time was just crazy!
It has been a long journey getting where I am today. 12 years ago I reached bottom in my life and knew that I didn’t want to live that way anymore. I wasn’t sure what I wanted exactly but I knew it wasn’t that life anymore! The real me was not going to let that darkness have control over my future so I stopped drinking and everything else and started a journey to be the best version of me I could be. Over those years I’ve learned to dream again, set goals achieve them and take risks! The journey is evolving all the time and I still have ups and downs but those downs are few and far between!
But I have a confession to make! It’s something that was really irritating me for a while!
I DON’T LOSE WEIGHT EASILY!!! Seriously!
Honestly I used to get so mad when I stepped on the scale because it wouldn’t budge! I would be so upset, even in tears with feelings of defeat and failure. But if I am being honest with myself, had I ever really been consistent with anything? Probably not, but it’s still frustrating because I know other people who can lose weight and not be 100% committed and consistent.
It doesn’t matter to me any more though! Sometime after I found Anna Renderer’s Popsugar workouts a light bulb went off for me. I was like wait, I feel great after I work out!! And why would I let the scale change that? I made the decision then that I wasn’t going to work out to lose weight. I was going to work out to disconnect after work and to be healthier! And I honestly feel that is the number one reason why I’ve finally found something that I could stick with! Because I’m doing it for the right reasons now and my body is like, geez thanks lady, it took you long enough to love me for who we are and get ok with it and lose all that drama that you were attaching to it!
Maybe it has to do with just doing something good for someone and not expecting anything in return (and that someone is YOU!!).
Once I had that mental shift – the doors started opening up. It really is true what they say, “The teacher will appear when the student is ready!”
So here I am. Loving myself enough to invest in the nutrients my body needs to get those regular workouts in. I’m not only joining accountability groups and actually participating in them, I am also running them so that I can share this simple method with people I care about!
When I kicked drinking and got out of the depression I was in I learned that I would get out of this new way of living what I put into it. Over the last year I’ve finally started to see results in this area of my life as well.
I’m sharing this story today because I know we all struggle and we are all on our own path. Do I wish I had the ‘I don’t care about the scale” epiphany a long time ago? Yes I do but I can’t change the past. Do I still step on the scale once a week to see if I lost weight? NOPE! My scale broke sometime over the holidays and I haven’t replaced it yet! It was hard, very much like an addiction. I wanted to know! But now to measure my success I look in the mirror and focus on how strong I’m becoming. Instead of judging my worth by what I see on the scale now I feel my arms and can feel baby triceps starting to form. I squeeze my butt and feel it getting harder! I take sweaty selfies. I focus on what I am starting to love about myself. Recently I took a sweaty selfie and I was like OMG Jason what are those??? And he told me they were my abs?!?! What??? Maybe they are just baby abs for now, but I’m so friggin’ motivated by that! I will get those abs!!
More importantly, how much will I grow on the way to that goal? What will I learn about myself? What fears will I uncover and squash? I know I can do this!! And my friends who have supported me along the journey are a big reason I am here today! So thank you ladies!! But it really is an inside job… so tell me what motivates you?? Why are investing in yourself? Why are you worth it?!
I have a 21 Day Wellness Group starting April 10th, called
Confidence is Beauty, the “Spring Awakening”
and am looking for ladies who are ready to take some small steps to wellness and have FUN on the way!
This is my all time favourite comment from a challenger
Well + Worthy 
You look amazing. Keep it up
Thank you!!! And thanks for reading my post.
No problem.