This post is really hard for me….I’ve actually been planning on writing this for over a month but kept putting it off.

I’ve struggled with my weight for most of my life. While I was pretty skinny as a kid, by the time I was in high school that had started to change. By the time I was 16 I was starting to really put on weight, enough so that it was asked more than once if I was pregnant.

However, it was really when I went to college that not only gained most of my weight, but kept it on for years. At my heaviest, I was around 250 lbs. I’m actually unsure if that is my heaviest, since I avoided scales as much as possible.

I tried multiple different diets, calorie counting, a few fitness memberships, etc and nothing ever stuck. The one that got the best results while I was doing it was calorie-counting. It also made me pretty miserable and stressed. Every time I stopped one of these attempts or “failed,” I would binge, get depressed and frustrated, and then tell myself that I was okay where I was at and it didn’t matter anyways….though I never really believed myself.

This cycle went on for years. I remember one last incident, after a wonderful and amazing field study trip to Peru. I can back after 5 weeks, excited from the trip and all of it’s experiences, but also excited because I was pretty sure I had lost weight while I was there. We were so active the entire trip and I was sure that my clothing were fitting more loosely. This was especially exciting to me because I had struggled a lot with insecurities while I was down there, both about my weight/appearance and academically.

I remember stepping on the scale when I got home. It read 253 lbs. It was like a punch in the gut. I knew I was heavy. But I had avoided scales enough that I really didn’t register just how much I weighed. I still have no idea if I actually did lose weight while in Peru or not, but that was the heaviest I had seen the scale ever read.

It would be nice to say that this realization got me motivated and I miraculously started losing weight….but that’s not how the story goes. I stayed at that weight for another 2 years, still yo-yo dieting and cycling through attempts and the following depression.

Then my life went through some MAJOR changes, right around the time I graduated college. I will admit, the first 15-20 lbs I lost were not lost in a healthy way. In dealing with the fallout of all of these changes, I lost most of my appetite and didn’t eat nearly as much or as often as I should have. But once I had started to deal with things, my focus shifted to taking care of myself, both physically and emotionally. When combined with my new physically demanding job, I started to lose weight, a bit at a time.

It’s only within the past year or so that I have started semi-regularly working out and learning yoga, mostly at home. I also started focusing on eating healthy foods and meal prep.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to help with my motivation and accountability, both in fitness and other areas of my life. As you may have seen in my July Goals post, one of my goals is to work out at least 4 times a week. One small reason for that goal is my plan to start including more of my fitness journey on the blog.

One way of doing this will be a monthly fitness update. Though future ones will not be nearly as in depth as this one! These will include things that went well and not-so-well over the past month and progress pics like these ones:

So, that’s it! My fitness journey up to this point. Kinda messy at points, but definitely making progress! Thanks for reading!