25: The Year of Changing Habits
Last week, I turned twenty-five. While this didn’t come as a shock to me, the state of my life did. Now, I’m not saying that my life is terrible, I’m just saying that’s it’s not what I thought my life would be, at twenty-five. As a little girl, I would lie awake at night feverishly calculating every minute of my adult life. By the age of ten, I thought I had a perfect plan. I would graduate high school by age eighteen, have my bachelor’s degree by twenty-two, be married by twenty-three and have kids by twenty-five. Looking at the downward slope to twenty-six, I have only achieved one of those goals. I did graduate high school at eighteen. I am twenty-five and still working on my bachelor’s degree, I’m not in a relationship, and I don’t have kids. Though, I have the body of a woman that has popped out three kids. That’s right. I am five-foot eleven and I weigh 264 pounds, when I stand on the scale naked, after I first wake up and have taken my morning poo. Yeah. I said poo. Shut up. So, all I have to show for my childhood life management is a fat ass and a high school diploma. Okay, I have an associate’s degree, too. My point is that I’m not living the life I’d imagined. Even though I’m not living my dream life, I’m still living well. But I can’t continue living my life with this weight. Starting today, starting right now, I am changing. I’m on a mission to get my life back on track. I have a new outlook on love, life and my weight. What? Do you think I’m going to stop here? No! I’m going to continue to embarrass myself and explain each one of them.
Gandhi once said, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.” That is my new outlook on love. I am exhausted by the ritual of dating and every emotion that goes along with it. I’m tired of meeting a new guy and getting my hopes up, thinking that maybe he’ll think I’m worth loving. Guys don’t understand the wreckage that they cause when they sleep with a girl and never call her again. Guys don’t understand how awful it feels to be seen as a means to an end. They romance you, and make you feel so good, like you are the only girl in the world that could possibly make their hearts beat faster, then you have sex with them and they no longer see you again, and if you do hang out again, they no longer look you in the eyes. If they do understand, they just don’t care. From now on, no man can hurt me, and no man can use me, because they don’t have my fucking permission. When I meet a guy, I will no longer get my hopes hope, or have any expectations. That’s right, I am jaded and cynical about love and I’m okay with that.
Leading up to my twenty-fifth birthday, I made a decision. It came on by accident, really. My friends and I decided to make crazy flavored cupcakes. I’m talking about, Bacon cupcakes, salsa cupcakes, Irish car bomb cupcakes. That experience made me realize that I needed to try new things. My new mission in life is to try something new every day. I doesn’t have to be food related. It can be something as small as taking a new route to work or wearing a piece of clothing that you normally wouldn’t wear. Not only does this small thing relieve the monotony is your daily life; it also expands your horizons. It makes your world feel a little bit bigger and a little less mundane. Today I went outside of my comfort zone and joined Weight Watchers. Today is only day one, but I feel like it’s the start of something good.
Today, I weighed in at a whopping 264 pounds. It’s the heaviest I have ever been. For the longest time, I saw the scale as this great white shark and the numbers were the teeth that would certainly tear my confidence to pieces. I took a deep breath, faced my fears and stepped on the scale. Three hyphens blinked across the screen until my truth slapped me in the face. 264 pounds. 264 pounds of fast food, poor lifestyle choices and over-indulgences, gave me 104 reasons to change my diet and my laziness. I took a proactive step in changing my life; I joined the new Weight Watchers. This isn’t an advertisement for some diet plan. I’m real. I will not weigh 264 lbs. when I turn 26, one year from now. For so long, I felt like my weight was a way of rebelling against the media. It was my unique way of telling them, big can be beautiful. However, there are more important things than “sticking it to the man”, my health is more important. I want to make the ten year old version of me, proud.
I’m not trying to get married, have kids, have a bachelor’s degree and lose 104 lbs. by the time I turn twenty-six. I just want to be on a firm path to some of those things. I want to be that driven girl, my ten year old self knew existed within me. So, I’m inviting you all (my one follow so far) to follow me in my journey to making my twenty-fifth year a productive one. I want you all to join me in celebrating my successes and hold me accountable to my failures. My next post will have my before pictures. As I make my weight loss milestones, I will post more pictures. I am on a mission to make myself the best me possible.
