Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life

I wrote 50,000 words of the first draft of a novel in 30 days.  I can do anything.  Okay, maybe not anything, but fifty thousand words in thirty days is a pretty darn good start.  At the beginning of November I set out to reach a goal, and by the end of November I reached that goal.  I kind of amazed myself.

I started off slow, which meant in the middle of the month there were some incredibly insane days/nights (they all just sort of melted together there for a while) as I tried to catch up.  For a good portion of the month I was living off of caffeine and fast food.

I’d like to be able to say that that’s the sole reason for the need for my next goal.  But it’s not.  Oh no, it was a slow, lengthy progression, this one.  Do you know when you’re watching a movie, and the bad guy is after the good (but just really stupid) person?  And the bad guy is really far away, and the good person has so much time to either get away or really wind up and give the bad guy a good beating?  But he or she just stands there and stares at the bad guy and lets them catch up, all the while you’re screaming at the TV screen, “Don’t just stand there!!”  Yeah.  That was me with my weight gain.  I really could have kicked it’s butt at any time in the past five years.  But I didn’t.

In 2004 I was at a happy weight.  By 2005 my favourite pants were getting kind of tight.  By 2006 my favourite pair of pants looked real nice hanging in the closet.  Still do.  I have talked a lot in the past five years about losing the weight.  I have even attempted it a few times.  I did pretty well for a little while, but then I lost momentum.  I did not plateau, though.  Nope.  I am a lovely little (or not-so-little) yo-yo.  I am currently at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been in my life, including just over eleven years ago when I was nine months pregnant with my daughter.

Other than not looking so great, it doesn’t feel so great, either.  I can feel where my body is supposed to end.  It feels like I am continually floating in a great big bowl of Jell-o.  And it’s not even green Jell-o.  It’s ucky skin-coloured Jell-o.  Who wants to float around in that?  Sometimes my butt or my belly will bump into a counter or a door frame, and I’ll just cringe knowing that my butt or belly shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

So I’m starting this blog.  Really, it’s about reaching goals in general.  Another one of my current goals is to complete the previously mentioned novel, edit it and send it off to publishers.  But that’s not what this blog entry is about.  This blog entry is about getting myself out of the great big bowl of Jell-o.

I figure that maybe if I do something really scary by telling the world that I’m fat, maybe it’ll give me the ambition to really change that fact.  I had thought about starting a blog before, but there was always something stopping me.  I didn’t have a good title.  I didn’t have a good template.  The colours were all wrong.  Gosh.  How can I start a blog if it doesn’t look just right?  And how can I start a weight loss regime (or work toward other goals) without a blog?  Heh.

I’m going to try to be realistic with the weight loss goal.  As much as I want to lose loads of weight in ten seconds flat, heh, I’m going for five pounds per month.  That would bring me down 60 pounds in one year.  Tomorrow I’ll weigh and measure myself and determine exactly how much I need to lose to get back to my happy weight, and how long it will take at five pounds per month.

I’m going to be just as realistic with myself on this blog venture.  I’m not going to promise to write every day.  That would just be setting myself up for failure.  Once a week, that I can promise.  I’ll likely pop in a little more often than that, though.

Until next time … (I haven’t come up with any clever sign-off line yet, but I’m not going to let that stop me).