Singing for a smaller me

Getting rid of this weight, for me, boils down to this one statement: I am a responsible adult and my food choices must reflect that.

There are so many things we do as grown-ups that no one really *wants* to do. For instance: Who wants to work forty hours a week? Pay bills? Go to bed at 10 p.m. for that forty hour a week job? No one.

I think the poor eating and exercise habits I enjoy today, in large part, result from the gaining of my independence from parental control and becoming an adult. Think about it: as children our parents make the majority of decisions regarding what we eat and what we do. Pizza and ice cream and cookies are treats, not daily occurrences. And my mom shoved me out the door every day to go run off all that excess childhood energy. As a teenager, I had to walk everywhere because mom had no intention of giving me a ride. There was no choice in the matter and, as such, I stayed at a fairly normal weight.

Imagine what happened when I moved out of my parents house to my apartment in college? My inner child, who regularly threw tantrums over not getting her way, got everything she wanted. All those forbidden foods (fried whatevers, pizza, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, and more) became the staple of my existence. When I went to the grocery store, I didn't want to buy broccoli. Nor did I want to waste my precious time going to the gym, even if it was a five minute walk.

Those pounds really snuck up on me. Yeah, sure, whatever.

Those "Freshman 15" are supposed to be a warning sign that you need to wake the h*ll up, get back to the gym, and pay attention to what food goes in your refrigerator. Guess who didn't heed that warning? Yep. That would be me. Heck, I don't think I stepped on scale more than three or four times college freshman and sophomore years. And, in my case, it was more likely the Freshman 25 or 30.

So many years of my life were spent giving in to that inner child and feeding the insatiable beast within. I readily accepted so many of the trappings of adulthood, but my weight and bad habits haunted me for well over a decade. It had to stop somewhere.

You never know how grateful I am that whatever it was clicked in my head last year. Realizing that food choices were part of being an adult freed me to accept that I can lose weight, make it stick, and that it's not some ridiculous thing only *I* have to do for the rest of my life - most people watch what they eat, they're just a lot better at it than me.

What does this mean for me? I've done a lot of thinking about this and part of me says this shouldn't be an epiphany, but the fact remains that this was a revelation. Making good food choices equates with maturity? Say it ain't so! I think it bodes well for the future, but we'll have to see cause I don't like counting my chickens before they're hatched.

And, for your viewing pleasure, another picture of me: