Three Year Anniversary

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my commitment to my health. While I would love to share that I reached my goal in the first year and have been maintaining ever since, the truth is actually much more satisfying. Maybe it's something to do with the journey and not the destination adage, but the goals that I've picked up in these three years are so much more meaningful than the goal I started out with, which is still just over half way to fulfilled.

I set out three years ago to lose X number of pounds so that I could be smaller, more attractive, and some nebulous understanding of healthier, with the number on the scale as my only metric go measure by. My ultimate goal was to get to a healthy BMI that I could foreseeably maintain; after getting a Fitbit, I added a healthy and maintainable body weight percentage to that, too.

I may have only achieved half of the original goal so far, but I am actually 2% away from my body fat goal (I've gone down 7% in body fat from when I started measuring, not the very beginning). What I take from that is, while my weight loss has been slow and anything but steady, my body has already transformed.

Healthy no longer is an external image in my head; it's been incorporated into my whole lifestyle. I never set out to balance my hormones, but I did. I never set out to fix my sleep schedule, but I did. I never set out to curb my anxiety, but I did. I never set out to heal my self image, but I am. This isn't something that happened idly during these three years; it started because of the weight loss. The amazing thing is, while my scale number has shrunk, I have completely grown.

One thing I did set out to do, even before I started managing my diet and weight, was start running. When I started, 30 second intervals were a feat; yesterday morning, I ran three miles before a 12 hour work day with a co-worker who's become a dear friend. I could never have seen that coming years ago, but the number of milestones that hits is almost uncountable. Here I am, training for a race, managing a full work load, maintaining a 1000 calorie daily deficit and waking up happy in the morning.

I do want to lose the rest of the weight, and I do want to lose it this year. I want to get the loss phase taken care of, so I can devote this near miraculously cultivated energy to new goals. I want to not have to maintain any deficit while I'm training for a marathon. I want to train for a bleeding marathon.

I want to run it in three years.

So here's to three years past and three years more, to all the weight we've lost and all we've gained along the way.