Today I am feeling really passionate. Yes, some days my passion wavers, as everyone’s does, but today I am just bursting with excitement and desire and happiness. Those days where it’s almost like staring directly at the sun you are so damned motivated. Yup, that is me today. For no good reason I suppose other than I am just feeling so blessed and on track and I just love the life I am living so much. That sounds so ridiculous but I can’t help it. I am just genuinely to my core happy. And so excited and passionate about where I am headed.
I had an awesome workout last night despite having to leave the gym earlier than I normally do for therapy, I was at first weary of only getting in an hour workout, 2 classes. But they were amazing and kicked my ass and made me feel powerful and strong and amazing. The normal teacher was out sick and my favorite girl subbed and kicked ass. She is so ridiculously tough but that is obviously what I need. But while I was dying, dripping sweat and feeling my muscles being pushed to the point of fatigue, clearly something else amazing was happening. I was getting incredibly happy. That is probably the passionate, committed feeling that I have today. Direct result of a killer kick ass workout. I know there is a definite correlation between the two.
After my hour workout and after an hour of therapy, when I finally made it home last night I looked at myself in the mirror and just smiled because honest to God, I felt strong and proud of my muscles. And then I almost wanted to cry because I know that there has never been a time in my life where I looked like this. This is the image that I could only dream about but thought was never going to be me because I’ve lost weight so many times before and never looked like this. I honestly didn’t think I COULD look like this. And there she was, my mental image of a healthy strong Emily, starring back at me. Yes, I have more to go. I can always do more, but I am so proud of myself and what I’ve accomplished that it just gives me the fire to keep going stronger, harder.
I have this passion inside of me that has finally been fully released and it’s so damned cool to believe in yourself enough to try for the things you have always wanted. I don’t expect instant results but slowly every single day I continue to change and grow and it’s so rewarding. Today I just feel like I want to burst out and honestly push myself to the limits physically just to see what I can really do. Of course, I feel that way right now but I am sure by the time 5 or 5:30 hits and I actually get to the gym I will be tired and won’t feel like it.
I feel like there are certain roads that we travel down in life that suddenly without realizing it become deal breakers. Like once you go down this particular rabbit hole, there is just no going back. I’ve walked down a weight loss path many times in my life but always felt like the final step was missing, that when I got to the part where I had to take it to the next irreversible level, I turned around and went backwards. I stopped short of the deal breaker in the road. I honestly can equate it to your eyes suddenly being opened for the first time on a topic. How can you ever go backwards once you fully realize some fundamental truth? I never was able to fully realize it before but suddenly my entire world has been changed and there is just no way to ever turn back. It IS the deal breaker for me. I cannot unlearn all the things I have experienced the past 4 months and I wouldn’t want to.
I have learned how to live my life, on my terms and be the woman I’ve always wanted. I am at the point where I don’t stress about food. What??? You read that right, I pretty much eat healthy and don’t worry too much about it. I even, gasp, have a mixed drink or eat French fries on a weekend and it’s just not a big deal to me. I go out to dinner, I eat wheat thins with cream cheese when the mood strikes me and I move on. And you know what, my weight doesn’t really change, the image I see in the mirror doesn’t instantly show those less than stellar nutritional choices. And my brain mostly doesn’t punish myself. I get up and go to the gym and move on. I am thoroughly convinced this is how life is supposed to be lived.
Sure, we all have different goals and desires. For the body fitness models at my gym, they are ridiculously strict about everything but they have different goals. I just want to live my life, enjoy the foods that I love on occasion and be healthy and fit. I don’t need 8% body fat. It’s just not a driving motivator in my life. But healthy and strong is.
I learned a long time ago that I was never going to be that perfectly skinny girl. My body was never built that way. I have those child bearing hips, I have a larger frame in general, I am short. Plus the years of yo-yo dieting and abuse have left its toll in the form of loose skin, stretch marks, cellulite, all the little imperfections. It would be unrealistic to think I was ever going to be able to get my body perfectly thin. Losing weight thru running for the past 10 years left me with a less than ideal body. More loose skin than was necessary and pretty hollow at times. You know when a person losing too much weight but doesn’t really strength train, (I realize now that was the problem), they start to look gaunt and ghostly. I was not really happy with my image because sometimes I looked sick and of course it was way too hard to maintain. I cannot be perfect but I have discovered that I can be better than that. I can be healthy and strong.
I look at strong women and I get it now. I see what that is so much sexier than thin. Muscles are amazing gorgeous physical representations of courage and bravery and hard work. I can’t be “thin” but I can build amazing muscle and be strong and what do you know, that is so much better. I don’t know what exactly it is about strength training that makes me feel so confident. Running is my therapy, my head clearer, my joy. But strength training and tearing apart my muscles to rebuild them is rewarding in a way that I just can’t describe.
I promise you this, in another 8 months, when I have completed 1 whole year of personal training sessions and a year of strength training at the gym I am going to get some professional photos taken so I can always remember what I was able to accomplish on my own. I think maybe that is what it’s really all about, the ability to really do something that you thought was impossible. I guess I always believed that as a fat girl there was just no way I could be toned and build muscle, that I was always destined to be flabby and soft. It’s just not true. You just have to work for it. :)
I guess I am just feeling incredibly motivated to see where I can go with all of this. To see how far or how much I get my body to actually change. It’s a challenge and for some reason I rarely back down from challenges I present to myself. It’s like once you actually start to see changes you just don’t want to stop. I have really been feeling muscles want to come out that have never been there before. I am actually feeling some leg muscles in my quads for the first time ever, and of course those troublesome abs. I can feel “hard” in there. It just makes me want to work that much harder, but I know it’s a day in day out kind of thing. Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort. I actually have a wooden box sign of that saying sitting on my living room shelf. You have to put the work in to get the results.
Someday I am going to look in the mirror and not recognize the girl I have become and I can’t wait until that day!
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