TMI

I live in a little podunk town in New England with my boyfriend, my bird and two cats. Between stepping in cat puke and sweeping up seed shells, I work at an ER. I'm basically a secretary so I get to handle panicked patients, get paid some meager scraps and drink all the free coffee. I also lay awake at night wondering how alone and abandoned my college degree must be.

I started trying to lose weight a few years ago. Getting too comfortable in a relationship (especially one where your better half loves to cook) is an easy way for this to happen. I'm not sure what the turning point was, aside from being a young woman in America, but I start I did, and lose I did. I lost almost 10lbs in a month from starving myself - like, 600 calories a day kind of starving. If you know remotely anything about the human metabolism, you will certainly know that I promptly regained this weight in half the time it took to lose it. Is it worth it? I don't think so. Maybe if I was a model and I had a big show coming up this would have been worth the torture, but considering it was cold outside (I live in New Hampshire... It's not warm until June) I was wearing sweaters anyway. Oh well.

Now repeat this cycle for about an entire year. Although on average I was eating between 600 and 1200 calories a day, with generally at least one night a week being an all out go-crazy-eat-a-whole-bag-of-Chex-mix plus vodka kind of evening (what can I say? I was a college student) I was the heaviest I have ever been.

Starve and binge cycles are probably the worst thing you can do for your metabolism. No, it does not even out - not when you're drastic like I was. You train your body to think it needs to hold onto the fat because you're not nourishing it properly, and thus when you have your Saturday night pizza it puts it all into your love handles for safekeeping. Your body wants to survive, and that is its only objective. Your body does not care how you look naked.

Once I punched a hole in a wall (psycho alert!) due to a number of factors that eventually can all be traced back to me being overweight/unhappy/insecure, I finally educated myself about how the human body works, and why what I was doing wasn't working.

This blog is about using that knowledge to better myself. I want to share everything I can, because I could have saved myself so much grief if there had been someone there for me. Unfortunately, some people believe that the only answer is starvation, or a pill, or surgery.... or to just accept yourself for who you are. But I don't ever want to accept myself as someone who is unhappy and insecure. To find that holy grail, that moment of complete self assurance, I must embrace my body and support it to become the best it can be.

Don't get me wrong - it's important to love and respect yourself. But just because you were given a canvas doesn't mean you've painted a masterpiece. Be the best, happiest, most fit person you can be, and you're doing it right. It's not size, it's health and happiness. That's what I'm after.