Day 84 - HOPE!

It’s Friday!  Today was a great exercise day – a four mile walking video and my favorite yoga class of the week.  But, more importantly, I can’t believe that tomorrow I’ll be posting my twelve week results!!!  I am so excited.  I don’t think I can even come close to last week’s results, but I am hopeful that tomorrow’s picture will really show the progress I’ve made.

Tonight I found myself thinking about hope.  I was referring someone to the nutritionist we take my son to, and I caught myself explaining that she was the first person to offer us hope after my son’s autism diagnosis.  Before we met Kelly, everyone who met my son was full of dire predictions – he would never talk, we’d have to consider an institution, his life (and ours) was going to be really, really hard.  Kelly was the first one to tell us that there were physical symptoms we could treat, tests we could do, and that he could heal.  She never promised us a full recovery, but she did offer us hope.  At that point in my life, hope was better than all the money in the world.  It still is.

So, what does all this have to do with losing weight?  I realized tonight that for a long time, I had totally given up hope for my own health.  I’d been researching everything possible to get my son healthy, and had sacrificed hope for my own health in the process.  Making the decision to start this journey was a public statement of hope for myself.  I just didn’t realize it at the time.

So, what does that mean?  It means that I finally realize that the reason I’ve started and stopped so many diet and exercise programs is that I have always had hope.  I’ve never truly given up on getting fit, strong, and healthy.  It’s just been buried pretty deep, and I’ve gotten sidetracked really easily.  But now, I am really committed to this program, but also I am full of hope.  I just know deep inside that this time is different.  I have the tools, the support, and the ability to do this.  But most important, I have hope.