Monday, 12 January 2015

I Will Love Myself

A while back I embarked upon a quest.  A weight-loss quest.  Diets have been my constant companion for so many years, I find it hard not to embark upon one.  But this time, I told myself, this time it will be successful.  This time I'm doing it for my husband.  I love him like crazy and against everything I know about diets and healthy living, I was going to this for him.  He didn't ask me to, I took it upon myself.

Odd how I can still be so clueless.  It is not because I do not know that weight loss is all about balance.  It's about lifestyle change.  It's about eating to live, not living to eat.  I know all that.  Years of teaching Health and Career Education and Physical Education, I was the one preaching to girls why they should stay very, very far away from fad diets and steel themselves against the popular images of what we are expected to look like to be considered worthy.  I spent hours encouraging kids to not fall in these traps.  I guided them in their paths to a place where they stood a chance of choosing who they want to be, inside and out.  Not strive to be who public opinion wants them to be.

And here I was... Thinking those rules don't apply to me.  Maybe I just forgot.  Maybe I'm just so addicted to dieting that it became impossible for me to see what it was doing to me.

2015 has arrived and I am still overweight.  And you know what?  I made a resolution this year.  A resolution first and foremost to find happiness.  Which leads me straight to part two of my resolution: my new years resolution is to NOT diet this year.  This year will be the year I will learn to love my body.  I will learn to accept who I am and love it.  I will buy clothing that fits me now and not hold on to clothing I want to wear but I need to loose just a few pounds to fit into it.  I will buy pretty bras and get manicures and pedicures and maybe even have my hair died at a salon for a change (maybe...), but I will not diet.  I will not let my weight consume my thoughts and my opinions about myself.  I will start running again and maybe even take up yoga.  But I will not count calories.  I will not say no to the tasty french fries on my plate for lunch right now, just because I'm fat.  Nope, I will eat as many as I want.

I will enjoy my life.  I will enjoy my cooking and baking.  I will experiment in the kitchen and learn how to make new pastries (thanks to an awesome Christmas gift) while perfecting my macaroons.  There will be homemade pie, bread and pizza.  And love, lots of love.  Love I will pour into every cookie I bake and chicken pot pie devoured at my table.

There will be love, and I will love myself.  All of myself.

About Me

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I’m new to this. This idea of putting my thoughts online for the world to see. Facebook is different. With Facebook I get to control who sees what. But here, here I have to make sure that everything I put online is worthy. Not just worthy as a representation of me but also worth enough that other people might want to waste their time reading whatever I spew forth. So, I guess if I am to do this for real, I will have to write a little something about me. The problem is just... how much do you share online? How public do you make your life for the sake of publishing something meaningful? I don’t know these answers yet and as soon as I do, I’ll do what needs to be done. Promise.