Cut the Crap!

You know what really pisses me off? The hold that junk food has over me. I thought I had a handle on it and then boom I eat a slice of pizza and its like I just injected a needle full of serotonin into my arm. I end up in a three-day binge session that had so much sugar, salt and crappy food that it probably should have killed me!! So why is it so hard to kick this habit, when I know with everything that is inside me that it is the only thing that stands between me and the life I want.

If you don’t get it right… Keep trying!

The hardest part of my journey that I started a year ago was finding something that not only worked for me but to find something that I could keep doing for the rest of my life. The graphic above this blog is a screen shot from my fitness pal app that I have been using to track my progress. As you can see I have gained and lost the same weight several times this last year. There are several reasons that this happened but I can kind of boil it all down to two things. First, I would get discouraged and I would just give up. Second, I could not maintain the restrictions that I placed on myself because they were unrealistic.

When I started my journey I tried to make a lot of changes very quickly and I was somewhat successful. I quit drinking soda, I stopped eating fast food and I started exercising. All of that sounds simple enough but when you add-on that I also was trying to not eat any processed foods, I was trying to drink smoothies with mostly vegetables and I was also cutting carbs you can see how all of it can stack up quickly. I tried to go from zero to a thousand real quick. Of course, it worked, it shocked my body and I began to lose weight very quickly. But as you can see it was short-lived, I couldn’t keep up with it all, my weight loss slowed and I eventually gave up.

2 STEPPING STONES down 33.65 more to go…

Well, I reached my first goal!!! I lost 34 pounds

That was a piece of cake. I shouldn’t have typed that because now I really want some cake… It wasn’t a pice of cake but it was the easiest it has ever been.

When you have 557 pounds to lose, the task can seem to be a daunting one. The hardest part of my weight loss journey also happens to be one of the most important, in my opinion. Set realistic goals and do not focus on the big picture. I know, that is almost as weird to read as it is for me to write-but its the truth. People normally tell you to look at the “big picture” and don’t stress the little things. Well, the opposite is true with weight loss, if you have laser focus on the small goals you won’t get overwhelmed by the enormity of your situation.

Every other time that I have tried to lose weight, I made the mistake of setting goals for myself that required me to do more than I was capable of and to lose huge chucks of weight to reach my goals. You have to know your limits, not an excuse you make because it is hard, but the actual point that you can’t go any further. This time around I did things a little bit differently, I came up with a system of figuring out a realistic set of goals. I like to call them STEPPING STONE goals. These are smaller goals that will lead me down a path to my Redefined Reflection. I like to call this the Ivy Reflection Method. 

You want to learn about the system I came up with? Well, if you don’t then stop reading here, but you will miss some good stuff. 

Playing YoYo on the scale..

What are you supposed to do when your scale won’t even weigh you anymore?

I stepped on the scale and all it said was error!! Even the scale couldn’t process how big I am. Can I blame it really? If I can’t fathom it how can I expect a machine to be able to grasp it.

So what did I do? Well, I had to know what I weighed so I went to a Hospital walked up to their loading dock and stepped on a scale that was made for huge shipments of hospital supplies. There was the number my little scale refused to reveal to me, my weight, 680 pounds!! I think it was a couple of pounds lighter when I left, after throwing up and shedding a few gallons of tears.

I have been playing YoYo on the scale ever since that day. I worked out and starved my self (or what felt like starving to me) and lost about 78 pounds. I couldn’t sustain the diet that I was on, so I fell “off the wagon” and gained all the weight back in  about 3 weeks. It took me upwards of 3 months to lose it. Since that first weigh in, I have repeated that cycle what seems like a dozen times, except at the end of every cycle the numbers were higher on the scale. My weight finally tipped the scale, reaching its highest number at 807 pounds about one year ago.

So what is my problem??

A lot more about me…(It’s a LONG one)

I told you a fraction of my story on my about me page, but if I really want to be transparent and show my truest self it is important to talk about all of the things that have gotten me to this point in my life.

Might as well start from the very beginning… For the first six weeks of my life I was literally starving to death. Not because my mom didn’t feed me or anything, it was due to a blockage in my stomach that wouldn’t let food go through my body so everything that I ate was later vomited out. After many trips to the hospital, several formula changes and a lot of my mom yelling at doctors they finally found the problem and I had a life saving surgery. The doctors told my mom, had they not found it I would have died.