Tag: scales

Fat Fridays: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Well, here we are, the last day of the year. The typical time that we reflect on the past and get excited about the future. 

Looking back I feel like I had a lot of good accomplishments. I started off the year a size 22 and now I am a size 16. I started off the year getting out of breath walking up stairs and I ended the year running a 5k. I started off the year with no exercise habits and ended the year with a desire to get myself moving every day. It is now a rare week that I don’t get in six workouts. I have plans to go running tomorrow and that is something I am looking forward to. 

This past year I changed my diet significantly and managed to move my A1C down out of the range where I needed to be on medicine and was able to quit taking metformin. I am not as happy with my diet though. I did not find a diet that was easy to share with my family and that was satisfying enough that I wanted to stick to it. I kind of abandoned my diet over the holidays and now I am needing to start all over again in this area. 

In all, a lot of good things happened this year. 

I am looking forward to next year. I’ve set some new goals. 

For exercise I’ve told my trainer that I want to focus on running and weight training. I plan to sign up for a 5k every two or three months so I have something that I’m working towards. I would like to get a lot faster. My end of the year goal is to run a 5k in 30 minutes. This December I ran one in 37 minutes. I don’t know if I’ll make my goal or not, but we’ll see how close I get. 

For weight loss I am hoping to get down to a size 14 by the beginning of summer and a size 12 by next Thanksgiving. In high school, at my skinniest and fittest I was a size 10. I don’t anticipate ever getting my high school body back. I’ve given birth 10 times and nursed 10 babies. Some things will never be the same and that’s ok. So, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve decided to not attach my goals to a number on the scale. I don’t really care what number it says as long as I’m fitting into smaller clothing. I’ll probably end up weighing myself just out of curiosity, but I don’t want to be focused on reaching a certain number. 

As far as diet is concerned I’m feeling a lot more motivated to drag my family along on my health journey. Poor family. 🙂  I want to focus on whole grains, lots of fruits and veggies, lean meats, and as little processed food as possible. I think it will be easier for me if we are all eating the same things. We’ll see how that goes. 

I am hopeful about this coming year. Not really hopeful that it’s going to be a peaceful, easy year. But, hopeful that I will be able to cling to a healthy diet and exercise as a much-needed tool in my survival skills toolbelt so I can handle whatever the next year throws at me. 

Happy New Year Everyone!

Fat Fridays: Which Direction are You Looking?

Losing weight is kind of a funny thing. You drop some pounds and you look at yourself and you’re so excited. I look great! I look so much better! Isn’t this wonderful! But then, after a while you start looking at yourself and thinking, man, I need to lose so much more weight. Look at all this fat. This is so depressing. 

It really has to do with your perspective. Which direction are you looking? If you’re looking backwards then losing weight feels great. I used to be THIS much and now I’m a lot less!! Yay me!! But when you’re looking forwards, it can get depressing. I want to weigh THIS much and I still have so far to go. Uggh. 

This week I found myself kind of in the UGGH category. I’ve lost a lot of weight (44 pounds as of this morning!), but in order to hit my goal weight, I still have 62 pounds to go. Argh. I’ve been having to encourage myself. I’ve been keeping a log of my weight loss and I went back and looked at the numbers. Ok, a month ago you weighed this much, you’ve made a lot of progress! 

It also makes me think about the WHY of weight loss. Why am I doing this? I know when I was in my teens and twenties, weight loss was about achieving a certain look. I want to wear THIS size clothing. I want my measurements to be THIS much. If I can look like that model in the magazine, then I will be happy. And I think I thought I would be happy because then I would be attractive enough. Which is what our culture teaches us. You have to look a certain way or you are not really worthy of being loved. 

Well, I have been happily married for almost twenty-two years now and my husband has proved to me that he is capable of loving me through thick or thin. And while I would love to look my best for him, I don’t feel like I have to look a certain way to be lovable. (I say that breezily, but it was a long, hard-fought journey to get to this place.) 

I now find myself being motivated a lot more by health concerns. I am prediabetic. I know that my weight is a major contributing factor. I have spent long periods of my life completely inactive and I feel like I’m missing out on things I want to do because my body simply isnt’ strong enough to do it. I want to climb mountains, go on long bike rides, go running. I want to have energy to do active things with my kids instead of just watching from a chair. 

These past six months as I have been exercising daily, losing weight, getting stronger, I have started to appreciate and love my body more. Look at you! Look at what you just did! I am excited to think of all the things I will be able to do as I shed more and more weight. 

But, all of this brings me to the final point I want to make. This week I was at the park taking a long walk, almost four miles. It was so nice to be outside in nature. The sunlight was at that perfect evening slant, the trees were shimmering in the breeze, the grass was extra green. It was just a perfect time. And I was thinking about my goals, ONE DAY, I’ll be at the weight I want. ONE DAY I’ll have arrived. And I was thinking about my WHY for weight loss. And it occurred to me that I was already doing my WHY. I was taking time for myself to get out in nature and walk. I was being active and doing something I liked. I don’t have to wait for some nebulous time in the future when my scale finally says the magic number. I’m already living the life that I want. Right here, in the present. And instead of swiveling my head back and forth: future, past; focusing on the here and now seems better. 

Fat Fridays: Working on Not Being Discouraged

Good Friday morning everyone. It’s early. I just dropped my kids off at school, and frankly, I would rather go back to bed than continue with this day. I’ve been in a funk all week. We had spring break last week and it was so nice to sleep in, take the kids to do fun things, and just relax. This Monday morning was especially painful as the alarm went off at 6:15 am and I had to drag all my grumpy kids out of bed again. 

This school year has five of my kids doing school in-person, one doing virtual at home, and two doing homeschooling at home. I think most of my homeschooling friends would agree that by the time spring shows up, we are about done (as in over-it) with homeschooling. So, this week has basically been me prodding, cajoling, threatening, trying to encourage my six year old to get his stuff done every day. Not fun. Not exciting. Not inspiring. 

My weightloss journey has kind of felt the same this week. Not fun. Not exciting. Not inspiring. My weight has decided to do a shuffle in a three pound range and the fluctuation is discouraging. I know, I should just not weigh myself. But, I waited the whole week I was making myself wait, and the scale still didn’t show any movement. I think my body is comfortable at this weight. I am actually at a weight that I have hung out at for quite a while in the past before the pounds started creeping on even more. 

If I step back and think with perspective, I can see that this is all part of the journey. Some days you lose, some days you maintain, some days you fluctuate. If I stick to the plan it will stay on a downward trend. I know these things. But when you’re already feeling blah, it’s hard to remember that. 

I was texting with my trainer the other day and she asked me what things I was worried about that would keep me from sticking to my weightloss journey. She suggested that I make a list, and then start working on solutions for each of those things. I still haven’t done it. But I’ve thought about it some. And I need to be careful, because I know that one of those things that derails me is discouragement from very slow weight loss. You know, when you are really careful with what you eat and you are exercising diligently…and then nothing happens. After a while you start wondering, Why am I even doing this? 

So, this is how I am combatting this dangerous mindset. First, I am trying to remind myself why I am on this journey in the first place. Yes, I am trying to lose weight, but I am also trying to battle pre-diabetes. This past week I had a fasting blood sugar of 93, which is just amazing as I had been averaging in the 130s before I started my program. I am also trying to get in shape so I can do things with my family. This past Saturday our family went on a four mile hike up, down, and around a mountain. I was able to keep up with everyone and didn’t feel dead or exhausted the whole time. I am also just trying to stop my food addictions that had me using food to self-medicate all my moods. That is no longer a driving force in what and when I am eating. I am counting calories, keeping track of carbs and protein and managing to feel full on significantly less than I used to eat. These are all good things that I am succeeding in. 

I needed to remind myself of all that. I also think I need to work on that list of potential obstacles and start brainstorming more solutions so I don’t derail myself without even realizing it. 

Fat Fridays: Week 26 You are Beautiful

Hey Everyone. Hope you all are well. I am doing fairly well. I have not stuck to much of a diet, but I have made some good choices. Stop eating when you’re not hungry. Choose the healthier option. Don’t have junk lying around your house to tempt you.

What has been on my mind this week is body image.

When I first started this diet I had this secret desire. I wished that I could just like myself and the way I looked no matter what weight I was. I wished that liking my appearance didn’t have to be dependent on how much weight I had lost.

There is a pervading attitude in our culture that you must weigh a certain amount before you can even be considered to be attractive. Or at least, that’s the idea the magazines sell. But, actually, if I’m honest, my issues with body image started way before I started putting on weight. I remember as an eleven year old pinching the extra skin on my stomach and thinking to myself, I’m so fat. I remember as a skinny little teen thinking I was so much bigger than all the other girls. I remember before my wedding, silently lamenting that my stomach wasn’t as flat as it should be.

Now, of course, I look back at photos of myself and gasp at how tiny and skinny I was. How cute I was. What a perfectly normal, nice-looking person I was. And of course I then latch on to that past young me as the unattainable thing I wish I could have. If only I could have my twenty year old body back. There is a meme that sums it up perfectly:

fatmeme

Yep.

But, realizing that I wasn’t fat as a teen still doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Not liking the way I look.

So, I actually went through some pretty devastating soul searching in the past couple years as I dealt with some of my issues, and the way that I see myself. I had a lot of long talks with God. A lot of journaling. A lot of talks with my husband. I talked it all out, until I finally got some clarity. Understood why I thought the way I did. And slowly, some of those raw areas started healing.  But, I still had a habit of just not liking the way I looked. And I kind of latched onto the idea that when I lost all my extra weight, then I would be happy with my looks. But secretly, I wished that I could like myself no matter what the scale said.

Well, I have been noticing this week that a shift seems to have taken place, probably over a long period of time, and I’m just now noticing it. I look in the mirror and I smile at myself. I turn this way and that, pat my hair and think, you look nice. I realized that I’ve been taking little selfies of myself occasionally and sending them to my husband, just because I feel happy with my looks and I know it will make him smile to get my picture in his messages. I put on a dress and think, wow, that looks really nice.

Today, I was standing in front of a mirror, pleased with what I saw, and it struck me how momentous this was. I like Esther. I think Esther looks pretty. Miracle of miracles. Even now, I get a bit teary-eyed thinking about how far I have come in this area. I feel like this deserves some kind of public proclamation. So here it is.

For all of you reading these blogs because you also are on a weight loss journey, I pray that you too can learn how to look in a mirror and like what you see. You are beautiful, just the way you are.

 

 

Fat Fridays: Week 24 Half a Diet

Hey Everyone, How’s your week gone? Mine has been better. Life has settled a little bit more into a pattern, it doesn’t feel as chaotic, peace seems to be settling again after a crazy month.  Last week I shared that my diet had gone on hold. Well, here’s some good news. I’ve been diligently weighing myself, just waiting for those numbers to start creeping back up. And they haven’t. I’ve lost 25 pounds and I’m holding steady at my current weight. This is actually a pretty big deal to me. In the past, I have done different diet plans, but as soon as I fell off the wagon my weight would immediately start to climb upwards again. I don’t want to push my luck. I’m trying to figure out how to jump back into the pool. Get back into the game.

It’s summer. The season of cookouts and popsicles and ice cream and barbecues. I have decided that I’m going to try out a more simple version of my diet for a couple weeks and see how it goes. See if I can start losing weight again. I know that right now I do not have what it takes to go completely vegan and grain free. So, I’m going to try half the diet, and just go grain-free for a while. I’m not even going to try and limit sugar. (Because actually, my go-to is sugar plus grain. Sugar on it’s own is not nearly as appealing to me.)

You might wonder why I’ve picked grain. So, I’ve gone off my diet and I’ve been paying attention to my body as I have eaten the “forbidden” foods. Meat really doesn’t seem to do much to me. Dairy, well, I don’t think my body likes dairy a whole lot, but I am not in the habit of eating dairy. I don’t buy blocks of cheese. I might put some shredded cheese on a Mexican dinner occasionally, but I don’t pour it on. I don’t like Milk so I stay away from that. I’ve lost my taste for yogurt, don’t really like it anymore. So, I probably should completely abstain from dairy, but I figure the occasional sprinkle of cheese and an occasional ice cream treat are doable. Grain is what really does a number one me. It spikes my blood sugar, it makes my stomach feel yucky. I generally have a feeling of ick after I eat a bunch of refined grain. Especially wheat. So, I’m going to keep it simple for now as my life is still a bit nuts and I’m finding summer eating to be difficult, and I’m just going to cut out the grain. See what happens. Though I don’t like watching a scale closely, I think I’m going to watch it for awhile just to see if any visible results happen. I’ll keep you posted.

I guess my philosophy right now is, do what you can. Even a forward movement of inches is better than a complete stand still. Ideally I’d love to be taking leaps and bounds forward in my weight loss journey, but if a slow crawl is all I can handle, at least it’s something.

Goals: cut out grain. Continue to try and make my mental health a priority. Have fun with my kids.

Have a good week, see you all next time!

 

Fat Fridays: Week 14 Shakes, Headaches, and Scales

Here we are, three weeks completed on the vegan, grain-free diet. Happy reports: I have been feeling pretty good this week. I’ve had more energy, and I don’t feel like I’m in a fog. In fact, I feel a lot like I’m waking up from a semi-comatose state. I’m getting used to eating differently too. This week my go-to easy meal has been to grab a can of bean or lentil soup,dump it in a pot, throw in a package of frozen veggies and heat it up. Fast, fairly inexpensive, easy, filling. I’ve also resorted back to the food of my youth, growing up in Haiti, and I’m eating plantain again, almost every day. It’s a filling starch and healthier than white potatoes. And they’re yummy. My other diet addition has been to start drinking a vegan shake for breakfast every day. It’s 24 grams of protein and has lots of other nutritious stuff in it. It’s become a good way to start the day.

Not so happy reports: I’m still dealing with a lot of headaches which I think are part of the detoxing process. Also I am prediabetic and this week I’ve been waking up around 5 am with really low blood sugar. It wakes me up and I either stay awake till my normal waking time of 6:45am or I have to get up and eat a small piece of fruit. Last night I ate a big snack right before bedtime and that seemed to help, but it’s hard because I haven’t really been hungry at bedtime. It feels counter-productive to eat when you’re not hungry.

One other happy report is that my clothes are definitely getting loose on me. I’m in that awkward place where my current clothes are getting too big and I have to wear a belt now, but I’m not quite ready for the next size down. You’ll notice that I haven’t posted about numbers of pounds lost. I’m trying to stay away from numbers. I have found that my relationship with scales is not good and the obsessive habit of constantly weighing myself when I’m on a diet is not a habit I want to pick up again. I’m trying really hard to not weigh myself often and try to keep track of my progress by the size clothing I’m wearing. We’ll see. Unfortunately I own a scale. (I haven’t for years, but one of my kids needed one.) When you feel like you’re losing weight, it’s really hard to not get on the scale. Seeing those numbers go down is a real rush. But then, if the numbers go up or stay the same, it causes a lot of discouragement and sometimes you even just feel like giving up. So, I remind myself that this diet is not just about weight loss. It’s about achieving good mental health. Losing the brain fog. Having energy. Perhaps lessening the episodes of depression significantly. And losing weight would be great too. 🙂

Plans for this week: Continue the diet. I’m also looking at a supplement that helps your body with the detox process. Maybe it will help with the headaches? I haven’t exercised this week as my back has been giving me a lot of problems, but the last two days have been better so hopefully I can start exercising again! (Yeah, I said that last week too, but this week will be different!) (Promise!) I’m also just trying to be proactive about getting in the sunshine and soaking in the vitamin D and feel-goodness of the sun. I tell my four year old it’s “Sun Medicine”.

So, go enjoy some sun medicine if you can, and have a good week everyone!

Sunrises, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and My New Piano

Sunrises. I love sunrises. For many years I have been too tired to get up and enjoy them. Nowadays, though,  I am driving my kids to school early every morning and during the winter I have been enjoying a lot of sunrises. My kids’ school is only about two miles away. It takes us maybe five minutes to get there. Part of the drive to the school involves going up a big hill and then we crest at the top and suddenly we have a big view of mountains and mist and red orange light peeking through the clouds. It’s amazing. Every morning I can’t stop myself from exclaiming to the kids, “Everybody look at the sunrise! It’s amazing!” And the kids have learned to oooh and aaahh right along with me. Thanking God for the sunrise is part of our morning prayers. I have always imagined God standing at an easel, throwing paint on left and right, painting the sunrise every day. God the Creator. The Creative One.

The other day as I was driving along, enjoying the beautiful colors, I thought about how we are created in the image of God. I’ve always wondered about that, what it means exactly. I thought about God painting the sky every morning, making art and it occurred to me that when we create things, make our own art, we are, in a small sense, being like God. We were made to create because we were made in the Creator’s image.

I thought about music. I love music, but I have struggled with music over the years. As a teenager I used music as an emotional outlet. A way to vent, a way to express emotions, a safe place to feel emotions. As life got more and more complicated, harder, I found myself shying away from music. As I look back, I can see where I struggled to keep depression away, and one of my solutions to not dealing with depression or anger or a bunch of other unresolved feelings, was to shy away from feeling any emotion. Just stay neutral. Calm.

The only problem with this approach is that when you don’t allow yourself to feel bad emotions, the really good emotions go away as well. I don’t think you can fully live in joy if you don’t also allow yourself to mourn. You can’t have peace if you don’t go through the conflict first. You can’t have happiness if you don’t deal with the anger. I think that as I shut myself down emotionally, I also shut down music. I just couldn’t do it. Music was too closely tied to emotions. I could sometimes sit down and play through some Bach or Mozart in an attempt to make my brain feel orderly, but I wasn’t feeling it. And so I mostly avoided it.

Lately, I have been looking at getting back into music. My husband, excited that I was showing an interest again, went out and got me an old 1935 Wurlitzer Baby Grand, for a really good price off Craig’s List. I went with him and helped him move it. It’s a perfect fit for our house.  It’s got some history, apparently it’s original owner was a violinist with the Knoxville Symphony and she died after a long happy life at the age of 103. It’s also a bit dinged up and scratched here and there which means we won’t have to freak out if our kids add another scratch or ding. I rearranged our entire living room so that I now have a Music Room at one end. I have started practicing a bit every day. Scales, warmups, old songs I played in high school. Just easing myself back into it. I have really been enjoying myself, but I’ve wondered about the emotional side of it. Can I relax enough to let myself play with feeling? Can I let myself feel the sadness in the song? Can I let myself feel again? I’ve been a bit worried that maybe I can’t any more. Maybe that part of me is gone. 

Today I was working on getting my piano music moved to a different bookcase and I found a piece of music that I didn’t even know I owned, “Pie Jesu” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s REQUIEM. My copy was a vocal duet with piano accompaniment. It’s a beautiful, simple song written in latin. The English translation that is written on the music gives the words as this:

Merciful Jesus, who takest away the sins of the world, grant them rest.

Oh Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world, grant them eternal rest.

I sat down and started to sing it and play along. Alas. I am not a talented soprano and there was no way I could sing that high. My voice couldn’t bring justice to the beauty of the song. I stopped playing for a minute. And then I remembered my piano teacher, Ms. Wong, telling me to make the notes sing, make the melody sing. And I realized, I can’t sing the song, but I can make the piano sing it. And I did. And my fingers made the melody sing and it was beautiful. When I finally finished I sat there, feeling fidgety, like I needed to get up and do something. I stood up and went over the other side of my living room where I was still rearranging other books onto a shelf. (Moving my living room around created a couple projects I hadn’t been anticipating.) I was putting books back onto an empty shelf and I picked up my old Bible from years ago. I flipped it open and found myself in the book of Job, and I suddenly just wanted to read this chapter. Job 9. In this chapter Job talks about how powerful God is and how unworthy he, Job, is. In verse 33-35 he says,

“If only there were someone to arbitrate between us, to lay his hand upon us both, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak up without fear of him, but as it now stands with me, I cannot.”

I stopped reading and thought about how horrible that would be to have the full burden of your sins on your shoulders and no way to approach God because He is too Holy. And I suddenly realized that the song I had just played was an answer to Job’s predicament. Jesus takes away the sin of the world, and grants us rest. He removed God’s rod of punishment from us.

I went back to the piano, stared at the music again, and with fresh wonder, played the song again. And while I played, some tears fell, and I felt just a bit like my ice wall around my emotions started to crack a bit more. And I felt hopeful. Excited. I have missed music and I hadn’t even realized how much I missed it.

Here is a link to a recording of “Pie Jesu” if you’d like to hear it.

“Pie Jesu”

Fat Fridays: Week 2 The Number of Shame

How much do you weigh? The answer of course is, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! As I thought about writing this weightloss blog, I wondered whether I should disclose where I am starting from. How much do I weigh. After much mental agony I decided that the answer is NO. That is just way too vulnerable, way too out there, way too painful. And here’s the question of the day. Why? Why is it so painful to share our weight? What is it about that horrible number that stirs up so many emotions?

Think about it. We have this system of weights that we invented to give a numerical value to how heavy an object is. It’s scientific. It’s helpful. It helps keeps things fair and equal and even. When we buy food we do it by weight. That way, I know that every time I give you a certain amount of money, you will give me the exact same amount of food every time. 1 gallon of milk. 2 pounds of flour. 4 pounds of apples.

I’m not sure why we started weighing people. Haven’t looked up the history of it. I’m going to presume it has to do with medical science attaching value to certain weights, coming up with a system that says if you are this tall and weigh this much then you are healthy. But, if you are this tall and weigh this much then you are not healthy. Those lovely BMI charts. I am not saying that medical science is incorrect. I’ve read all the articles. I fully understand that the more extra weight I carry around, the more likely I am to develop a whole host of unwanted diseases and syndromes. But why does that number, my weight, evoke so much shame?

When I think about the giant array of heights and body types for women, the idea that there is a certain number that we all want to be is ridiculous. It’s a person-by-person situation. My ideal weight will look nothing like your ideal weight. So, why do we hold that number so close to our chest. No one needs to know how much I weigh!

I think for me that number has come to represent just how far away from perfect I am. Ok, forget perfect. Let’s just say normal. If I was a normal, self-disciplined, healthy individual, I would weigh this much. And I don’t. And what does that say about me? It says I’m a slob. I’m a glutton. I’m without discipline. I’m gross. I’m unworthy. I’m unlovable. And I have a numerical value that tells me exactly how far off the mark I am. And so it becomes a number of shame. And there’s no way I’m going to share my shame with you and so…It’s NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS how much I weigh.

Here’s the problem with shame. It’s not a very good motivator. I have tried to use shame as a self-motivator to lose weight. “Look at you! You’re disgusting! You don’t deserve to eat anything but vegetables and water for the next year. You look horrible. You have do something to fix this mess you’ve made.” And so I go on a diet. And I’m angry. Angry at myself for getting  into this horrible state. Angry that I now have to deny myself all the foods that I like. Angry that other people seem to be able to eat whatever they want and don’t have to deal with weight problems. Angry that I am such a failure at life. Eventually a temptation arises that is too big to overcome, I cave, the diet crashes, and I slowly go back to my relaxed way of eating which is to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, without giving it much thought. So yes, shame is a horrible motivator.

I have heard people say that you need to love yourself. That is the way to overcome weight issues. If you love yourself then you will want to take care of yourself, take care of your health. You will care about the fact that being overweight is actually causing you to be more sick, less energetic, less confident. You will care so much about yourself that you will willingly take on the lifestyle changes and make the sacrifices necessary to lose weight. That sounds good. I like it. It fits with the theme I have been coming back to over and over again. Love God, Love your neighbor as yourself. It seems that in order to love our neighbor as ourselves, we would need to love ourselves, right? So, here’s my question. How do you get to that place where you love yourself?

This number, how much I weigh, I’ve been carrying that around for my entire adult life. I left high school trim and fit, went to college and immediately gained 15 pounds. That crept up to 20 pounds before I got married. This number has been staring at me from the scale for 20 plus years now, speaking it’s message of shame. The higher it goes the lower my head hangs. It’s really hard to love myself when this number is loudly proclaiming how unworthy I am.

When I sat down to write this I had no idea where I was going to go with this. Apparently God has some ideas. I guess it’s going to have to come back to my identity in Christ. The world with all it’s systems of measuring, tells me very clearly that I don’t measure up. Not skinny enough, not rich enough, not smart enough, not connected enough. The world’s message is I AM NOT ENOUGH. Right now I am feeling that so strongly. I’m not a good enough wife. I’m not a good enough mother. I’m not a good enough friend. I’m not a good enough anything. I don’t measure up. How can I, miserable failure that I am, ever hope to change my ways and lose weight? I have tried so many times and I have always failed. I’m just don’t have what it takes. So, what does God say about me?

Here’s a list I found:

whoiaminchrist_single_printedsheet_halfsheet_v1_00-600p

I can add a couple more. I am loved by my husband. I am loved by my children. I am loved by my family. Maybe this person, the one that God says I am, can love herself enough to willingly take on the lifestyle changes, willingly make the sacrifices necessary to be healthy again. We’ll see.