Burgers and a Ghost Town

I just got back from a mini road trip to Saint George, Utah. My friend and I were bored and decided that we should head down south to where it's warm and there are palm trees and lots of weird roadside attractions. We visited a ghost town where Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid was filmed. It was pretty awesome. It also provided a pretty good full body shot of me so we can all see what I'm working with.

No bueno.

All in all it was a good trip. Sadly I went a bit off my diet and had some In-n-Out burger. Really though, that's the whole reason my friend wanted to go down south. We don't have the infamous burger chain in northern Utah, though we learned that they are building one near us. I just know that the place will be INSANE when it opens, so we decided to try the place out before everyone else to see what all the hype is about. The burgers are okay I suppose.

Me, enjoying a burger. I wish I didn't.

I also had quite a struggle with our hotel room. One whole wall of the room was nothing but MIRRORS. I couldn't stop staring at myself in it and it was horrible. I don't have a full length mirror in my house so I haven't really seen my whole self in quite a while. I didn't realize how gross I looked when I'm sitting down. Ew.

But I've lost a pound since my last blog, so I suppose that's good, especially since I haven't been eating GREAT lately. Tomorrow is another day though. I'm also getting ready to start walking/running again at the track down the street. Now that the weather is getting a little warmer working out will be much easier. I like lifting weights and whatnot in my house, and I LOVE walking outside on the track. I'm not a fan of gyms, so cold weather tends to dampen my workout mojo.

I hope you all are doing great, and thanks so much for being such a source of inspiration!!!

The Wingman/Girl

So it's been a little over a week since my last post.

I dyed my hair dark with some blonde highlights left in. I'm not completely ready to get rid of the blonde, but I'm getting there. I think I look better with dark hair, but after being a blonde my whole life it's a little weird looking in the mirror.

I've lost 2 pounds, which is a good thing. The bad thing......I'm still drinking that dang Mountain Dew. I went about 2 days without it, and the headaches were horrible. I started on my weekend, but when Sunday (which is my Monday) came, I caved and had one. And I've had one every morning since then. I have to be to work at 4:45 in the morning, which is a terrible time for anyone to be awake and I feel like I NEED the caffeine. I know I don't. So here we go again, I'm getting rid of this obsession, I swear.

My problem is I just don't like water all that much. I'll learn to love it though, I promise. Maybe if I didn't drink so much soda I would be thirsty, and nothing tastes better then water when you're thirsty.

So this past weekend I reaffirmed my need to lose this weight. Like I really needed another reason besides my overall well being, but you know vanity is also a pretty good reason I think. I went out with my good friend Becki to celebrate Mardi Gras. I use to go out a lot, always with a big group of my friends. I was a tad smaller then, but not small by any means, but I felt okay and I always had fun. Lately I haven't gone out because I'm not feeling great about myself. I'm the heaviest I've ever been and really none of my clothes fit me anymore. I decided to suck it up though and go out because I'm only 24 years old. That's what I should be doing.

Everyone more or less bailed and I ended up just going with Becki. Tiny and cute little Becki. Everywhere we go she gets hit on, more or less by every single guy within ten miles of her. I don't mind it so much when we're in a group because while Becki is getting a million numbers, I have a plethora of other people to talk to. This weekend though, it was just us.

So I had to stand by while guy after guy hit on her. I had to watch while guys eyeballed her everywhere we went. I had to force a smile when guy after guy would shake my hand and politely ask me my name before turning their full attention to my friend. We started out at the club we use to go to all the time. I've always hated that place......the crowd there consists of frat boys mostly. I don't get along well with frat boys. Becki does though.

Then we decided to head to the gay bar that was having a huge Mardi Gras party complete with drag show and whatnot. I was excited. I get along very well with gay guys and I knew I would feel more comfortable there knowing that Becki wouldn't be getting hit on every 2 seconds.

Leave it to Becki though to find the 10 straight guys in the club. Or really, for them to find her and then subsequently buy her drinks while I sit by and fiddle with my phone.

I love her to death. She is very thoughtful and she's also the one that gets the rest of us out of the house most of the time. She is also not very bright (she once asked me how to spell cloud and book), and really kind of lacks overall in the personality department. But she's hot, so I get why everyone I know, including the one guy I love (story for another time), falls head over heels for her as soon as they meet her.

I felt horrible the entire time we were out. I hate being the token fat friend. I hate feeling like everyone is looking at me like I have no right to be out at the club. I hate feeling too uncomfortable with myself to dance and have fun.

I realize I'll never be Becki's size. I'll never be able to wear the clothes that she wears, and that kind of hurts. But I want to be a good size for me. A healthy, normal looking size. I want to be cute and be able to wear cute clothes and I want to get hit on ONCE by someone who isn't a 40 year old guy with a beer belly.

Being fat is, coining my favorite phrase, THE SUCK.

And so it begins.....

"Sorry, you're much too big. Simply impassible."

"You mean impossible?"

"No, impassible. Nothing's impossible."

~Alice and the Doorknob, Alice in Wonderland

So here I am. Again. Wishing and hoping and crying and praying that I will one day wake up as the girl I so desperately want to be. I want all of this to happen magically, of course. At least that is the attitude I had yesterday before I came to my senses. It's taken me 24 years to realize that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and losing this weight is no different. So I'm doing things a little differently this time and I'm hoping that my failures of the past happened because I was going about everything the wrong way completely.

I'm going to do this for me. Not for my parents or my family or all those boys who stuck me in the friend zone over and over again. I'm doing it for me and my health and my self esteem. As this is my first post, it's probably going to be long. I have a lot to say. Bear with me.

I haven't always been fat. When I was just a wee one, I was indeed a WEE ONE. My grandma always tells me how much smaller I was then all my cousins......that I was just like a little bird. Around the age of 9 I went through a crazy growth spurt and grew about a foot taller then everyone my age. I stood head and shoulders above my classmates, with thin little legs and arms. It was a good thing according to all my dance teachers because I looked just like a dancer should.

I've danced since the age of three. It was something that I was actually really good at, and I loved it. It was something that definitely defined me as a child.

Around the age of 12, when I was just starting 7th grade, I stopped growing up and started growing out. Rapidly. In less then a year, I went from a size 4 to a size 12. That's a hard thing to deal with when your in the horrible world that is junior high school. Blech, what an awful place that is.

By the time I was in 9th grade, I was 15 years old and a size 17. I didn't understand what was going on. I wasn't eating more then the dance girls around me, and yet I was 3 times bigger then most of them. There was one girl named Jennica who has danced with me since I started at our studio. We took all the same classes our entire lives. She could eat an entire pizza in one sitting, and she always had candy in class, yet she didn't gain an ounce. It just wasn't fair.

I still didn't let the weight hold me back. I tried out for one of the 6 coveted cheerleading roles in 9th grade. Out of the 30 some odd girls that tried out, I was picked. It was hard I suppose to wear the little skirt around school on game days, but I didn't care. I was a dancer, and I didn't think anything about it because I had been dancing in front of people my entire life. Some people made rude comments to me, or about me to others, but I tried not to listen to it.

In high school I gained a little more weight, but not much. I spent most of those years wearing a size 16 at 160 pounds. I maintained my weight by dancing, dancing, dancing. Every other day for drill team we ran 2 miles. I was dancing almost 4 hours everyday, and I was fit as a fiddle. Again some people made remarks, but I tried hard not to listen.

That's me on the far right with all the little drill team girls.

Then one day my sophomore year, a girl in one of the dance classes I was a teacher's assistant in told me I was so brave for being on the drill team and dancing in front of the whole school with all the size 0 girls on the team. I'm not sure why that, more so then all of the harsh comments I had received my whole life, opened up the self esteem floodgates. After that, it was like everything that had ever been said to me came rushing out and I began to hate myself.

I'd never thought of myself as brave, I was just doing what I loved to do. I was good at it, and I had worked hard to become the dancer that I was. I never really thought that my weight should have kept me from performing.

After that everything changed. I heard the rude comments, and they hurt. This time, when my dance teachers told me I needed to lose x amount of weight, I listened. Before that I knew I was healthy, though I did weigh more then I should, but I was keeping everything in check with working out and eating right. I just couldn't lose the weight no matter what I did, so before the brave comment I brushed off what my teachers said because I felt I couldn't do more then what I was already doing.

Around Christmas time my sophomore year I started throwing up everything I ate.

It was the only thing I hadn't tried yet, and I figured it would be the only thing that would work. I lost some weight, but I lost myself completely in the process. I didn't really care about dance or my grades or anything anymore. I stopped dancing at my studio, though I kept up with drill team. I became angry and depressed and I more or less hated my life. It continued this way until I became a senior and I couldn't take it anymore. I quit drill team and just did dance company, which was wonderful. I still binged and purged once in a while, but nothing like I had been doing the 2 years prior. I put some of the weight back on, but I was happy anyway.

Dance company my senior year. I'm on the left.

My senior year was great. The years after high school were also great, except I stopped dancing. I got too busy with work and college and eating. I don't know what happened, but after I stopped dancing I stopped being healthy altogether. I moved out of my parents when I was 18, and I've been on my own since then. I've lived on fast food, soda, soda, and more soda. Not to mention the fact that for a while I went out with friends every weekend to the bar to get our drink on.

Right before graduating high school. Me on the left with my super thin friend on the right. In the middle is our bus driver who safely took us to San Francisco.

In the almost 6(!) years since high school I have gained over 100 pounds.
Me six months ago on the left.

I weighed myself today for the first time in a really long time.

275

No, no, no. That just will not do.

So here I am about to start the weight loss journey the healthy way. I haven't purged in 6 months, which is great. I have stopped drinking alcohol almost altogether......though every once in a while I may drink on a special occasion. There hasn't been one of those in about a year, so that's not a big deal I think. Now I just need to learn how to eat better, and cut out Mountain Dew.


Mountain Dew is my lifeline. I love it, I really do. But I know that I can't love it anymore, and thus Mountain Dew and I will be breaking up. Today. Let the caffeine headaches commence.

I need help though. Any tips, tricks, words of wisdom you can share with me would be great. I'm researching all I can, but any words or encouragement would be very much appreciated.

Wish me luck.