Friend or Foe?

About a year and a half ago, I came to terms with an increasing problem. Quite literally.

You see many moons ago I was the athletic type, competition cheerleader, lifeguard, workout fiend. I finished college, married and divorced within a year, remarried and gave birth to my daughter the next. The following year I gave birth to my second daughter and we moved to Texas. I had given up my career to stay home with the babies, I had also given up so much of what was me, I was also 1200 miles from any family or friends. I didn't have time to take care of myself or my emotions and didn't have a support system close enough to help me out. Needless to say it was a part of my life that was filled with mixed feelings of turmoil, resentment, and happiness.

Mr. Wonderful and I have struggled to keep our family and relationship intact, there have been times of success and times of great failure, but the one constant for me throughout it all was finding comfort in food. It was a quick cure for the stress and depression, but had a long lasting effect on my overall self-image and the increasing number on the scale. At the worst, I was pushing 180, I felt like crap, and I didn't have the internal drive to do anything about it.

I finally joined LA Weightloss. The $$ I had to fork out for the program was my motivation to stay focused. After the initial couple of weeks of learning the program and weighing foods, the task became easier and eventually a habit. The end result, 26lb weight loss and back into single digit clothing sizes. The energy increase was phenomenal too. It's amazing what eating a healthy, balanced diet will do for you.

I maintained the weight loss pretty well. That is until work started getting stressful last year and I got lazy, stopped preparing lunches in advance, and started frequenting fast food joints. It became a couple pounds on the scale isn't too bad, I'll just watch what I eat which really never happened to gaining back half of what I lost. My clothes are starting to get tight again and I'm getting that I'll start on Monday attitude. The worst part, I know I can do it...I'm just not.

It's a vicious thing, food. Source of life on one hand, personal hell on the other. I need to stop internalizing the things that lead to turning to food for comfort, dust off my will power, and deal with life. The one thing I have control of is myself. I'm the only one who can put the right foods into my system and get the results I desire!