One Year

I just wanna send a big "Thank You" to everyone for your kind words and support! I never intend for these posts to be boastful, but helpful and encouraging, so it's great to see so many of you taking the inspiration from it. I know when I first started here I used to look at posts like these and say, "Yea, right. Like that could ever be me." But the more you see it happening, and you see it happening to ppl whose lives and situations can be comparable to your own, the more you really start to see that you have the power to make this happen, too. So I do hope you all see that- whether you have twenty or two hundred pounds to lose, there's no reason why you can't do it, too!

First I want to say this: YOU look AMAZING!

Second can I ask you this: what would you say was the thing that helped you the most?
What was the hardest thing?
What was the easiest?

Thank you so much for being such an inspiration.
I am so stuck at my present weight. It took me about 2 months to lose 25 lbs.
I have been stuck for over 2 months though: haven't lost any or gained any. I will not give up though!

Again: you look amazing girl!

These are really good questions, though they're difficult for me to answer. Pretty much the only questions I ever get asked are "How are you doing it?" and "What's your secret?" And to those I simply answer, I'm doing it the only way there is to do it, and there is absolutely no secret. I promise. I'm not just keeping it to myself! Believe me, if there were one, I'd be sharing that "secret" for a very high dollar amount. lol

The absolute hardest thing for me- and it's something I still struggle with- has been changing my relationship with food. I never realized until I began fighting against it that food was actually IN CONTROL of me, and not the other way around. That's a very hard concept to grasp, and once I did it was very hard to learn to change those behaviors.

The easiest thing? Now that's hard one. I can't say there's been anything outright easy about any of this, although I will say that once I learned to tell myself "no," and I got into the habit of saying "no" every single day, it did become much easier to resist the temptations.

As far as what has helped me the most, there have been so many inspirations and helpful habits along the way. Keeping short term goals in sight, staying on a schedule, varying both diet and exercise to keep it interesting, and having a supportive family around me have all been things to keep me going, for sure. I have an amazing husband who has been so ecouraging throughout this whole thing, as well as his family who is always thinking about my "needs" when I go to dinners and such. I even have one or two really great friends who have helped me, but that being said, none of that support means anything if you can't support yourself. I think in the end the only thing that can truly help you is believing in yourself. Had I never found a way to pull myself out of the self-hating mode I had long ago fallen into; had I not been able to fight through the self-disgust and the utter lack of confidence; had I not found a way to really forgive myself and learn to at least accept myself and then eventually come to almost like myself, I would not be here now. In the end, no one else can do this for you, and there is no miracle tool or magic drug. YOU have to do this for yourself, and in order to do that, you have to believe that YOU can.

So I don't know how helpful any of that is for those of you reading. But it's what I've learned in the last year. I put these success posts up, and I love this website, because it allows you see others just like yourself fighting the battle of their lives, and winning. And it's the most overused, cliched phrase ever, but I honestly am one of those "If I can do it, you can too" stories. I just hope a few ppl reading this get enough out of it to realize that they really can do it too, and then post their own success stories to keep feeding the inspiration.