It Begins ... Again

Here it is almost one year to the day since I started taking control of my health.  I'm sitting here, forty-two years old, mom of four, working full time, trying to make all the ends meet and keep the lights on and I am healthier in this moment than I have ever been in my whole adult life.

1989 - dance class at Galipeau's School of Dance Granby, MA

I was a dancer until I was around 24.  Nearly two decades of leg warmers, ballet lessons, and pointe shoes had me pretty damn strong and flexible.  But I wasn't healthy inside.  I had a warped sense of what my body looked like and what I wanted it to be.  I wanted to be bony and skinny and delicate.  I never was after I hit sixteen.

I was crazy fit at the age of sixteen, but I didn't know that then.  My legs were strong, my core was strong and I was very flexible. I had a lot of muscle, so when I was seventeen and stepped on the scale and saw that I weighed a solid thirty pounds than what I considered healthy, I began doing things that were terrible.

My issues with my body began in 1987.  Constantly finding faults where there were none, critiquing and criticizing and judging how I looked and what the scale said and how little I could eat in a day.  I remember being twenty years old in 1992 and not buying a dress because my hip bones were sticking out and I thought it made me look fat.  I thought my bones jutting out made me look fat.  If that's not fucked up, I don't know what is.

Jump forward twenty years and I was on the other side of this.  I was heavy.  Moreover, I was very, very unhealthy. I was in pain all the time, I was depressed, I was filled with anxiety and I had had enough.  You can read up on this on the Fibromyalgia page.

I need you to know right now that I have not ever been obese.  I have no idea what that is like.  I don't know what its like to be judged, gawked at or made fun of for being fat.  My journey isn't about losing a hundred pounds.  I was always on this side of the "socially acceptable" size.  I can't even imagine what that is like or how difficult that journey would be.  My story is more about dealing with pain and body dismorphia and disordered eating.

This page isn't about getting skinny.  

One year ago I decided to bring that shit into the present tense.  I was done. I had had enough of not being able to hike, of feeling like I was one broken hip away from a lifetime of misery.  I was convinced I would die of a heart attack.  I got scared.  

I don't like being scared.  

So, I changed.  It was hard.  It was worth it.

This blog is dedicated to living a healthy life.  Inside to outside.  There is no size I want to be.  There is no number waiting for me on the scale.  There are numberless ways my life has improved because of the changes I made over the last year and I'd really like to share this journey with you.  

I don't think change is hard.  I think starting was hard, but change has always been my friend.  Starting? That was scary.  I hope this little spot helps someone make that start.  

I'm not a nutritionist.  I'm not a fitness expert.  I'm not a doctor.  I'm just an asshole who decided she was done with the constant pain and backaches from living  sedentary life.

In one week I will begin another new journey with an entirely new way of working out and challenging myself.  I decided it would be interesting to blog my way through.  That work out is Tribe Fit and I truly believe that it will lead me to a new level of health and fitness I had never imagined for myself. 

Part of this will mean having to post some photos I'll one day surely regret.  Its okay.  I think its important to track this, to see the results so I can believe them.  I think anyone who has made a healthier change in their lives can understand that.  I still see the old me in the mirror.  I still expect to take up more space than I do.  I still can't just grab my real size off a rack and believe its going to fit.  The inside hasn't caught up with the outside.  I think this might help.  I think this year the inside is going to have to get to it because I can't keep seeing the faults only. 

So, here goes.  I'm a little scared...  But that's never stopped me before.