Last Chance

New year, new me.  Even though the New Year’s resolution to lose weight is trite, when inspiration hits I need to take advantage of it.  So here I sit still at the foot of this enormous mountain.  2009 was a rough year filled with unwanted changes and struggles to find my footing and the result on the scale is evident.  I gained 20 lbs in the last fourteen months or so.  It amazes me to think that in 2008 I was seeing a nutritionist and a personal trainer and I started this blog only to sit here typing a scant year later heavier than I have ever been.  I had all the tools in my hands for success and it just didn’t work out.  And I know why.  Although I had all the means to lose weight, I wasn’t ready.  My head was so stuck on the struggle of it all that I never did enough doing.  No nutritionist, no trainer can provide me the actual tools needed to get my big butt up this mountain, only I can do that.

Six months or so ago I started thinking about what, at the time, I felt was my catastrophic failure.  I beat myself up.  I could not fathom how I did not find success when I had every possible thing working in my favor.  Then I realized that even though things were on my side to make my success possible I was still sabotaging it.   Why?  Well, I thought long and hard on that question.  The conclusion I came to startled me.  I wanted to fail because I did not feel like I deserved to succeed.  I was given a second chance at life when I beat the cancer and what did I do with that chance?  I rolled it in bacon and threw it in the deep-fryer.  I have packed on 55 lbs since the cancer.  Granted I wasn’t at a healthy weight leading up to the cancer but one would think that being faced with my own mortality would have led me down a path of better health.  Next year I will celebrate 10 years cancer free and I will officially be “out of the woods” as my endocrinologist tells me.  But instead of celebrating my life free of health concerns I allowed myself to fall victim to all the life-threatening diseases that go hand in hand with obesity.  And I am finding it difficult to forgive myself for that.

I am angry.  But I think that’s what I needed to really make me want to change.  I’ve been pitying myself for a very long time.  And that pity has led to me to morbid obesity.  The one thing I fear more than anything is dying. I was forced to come face to face with that fear when I was only 21 and I am not kidding when I tell you that that thought is always in the back of my mind.  The thought of leaving Ramses alone kills me but the path I am on is  leading straight towards that fate.

So, this is me, once again craning my neck looking for that peak.  This is my last chance and failure is no longer an option for me.