Archives for January 2018

My family went on a trip to Southern California last month to watch my oldest son Ethan in a lacrosse tournament. (He and his Utah Hoppers teammates kicked butt!) This was a pivotal time for me. Over the previous three and a half months, I was struggling with a variety of challenges and reverted back into some bad habits. I stopped focusing on health and tried to numb my frazzled feelings with food. I have a history of that not working out so well.

I stepped on the scale in the middle of the night after a 12-hour drive — having pigged out most of the vacation and quite a few times the previous months — and the scale displayed a disappointing number: 250.4. On Aug. 18, I weighed 197.2 pounds. I’d put back 53 of the 176 pounds I’d dropped over the previous year and a half. Yet again, I was proving that my body has an amazing lost-and-found system for blubber. [Read more…]

Two years ago, I stood in a changing room — JcPenney’s because they carry husky sizes — looking at myself in the full-length mirror. I was disgusted. I was angry. I was dejected. How in the heck did the cleaning crew miss that smudge on the mirror!? Joking aside, it was disheartening to look at myself, to see how I’d allowed myself to gain so much weight and lose so much hope. I was looking in a mirror. Misery was staring back at me. [Read more…]