"WOW! Mommy! You have a REALLY fat butt!"

This was my four year old daughter's comment to me last week when she came into my bathroom just as I was getting into the shower! Oh, from the mouth of babes! And sadly enough, this was not the first time I have heard this same thing. But I will get into that later. I can't say that her comment is the main reason for my motivation to finally do something real about my weight, but it certainly adds to my motivation.

I am a business owner, and one of the many things I have learned from my experience of being my own boss is that accountability is essential in reaching goals. Since I am my own boss, decide my own activities and decide my own hours it is easy to get off course if I am not accountable to someone. That is one of the main reasons I decided to create this blog. I need a way to be accountable in regard to my weight loss. I am taking a very bold step outside of my comfort zone to make my struggle with my weight and efforts to lose weight public information. I mean, honestly ... everyone who knows me, knows I am fat. It is not like I am really hiding it from anyone, but still, it is quite scary for me to just put it all out there.

The second reason for this blog is for me to "journal my journey". My battle with weight is not only physical, but also very emotional. I know I need to start being very honest about my emotions and why I "eat my emotions".

A lot of the information on here may be boring to the reader and might seem quite self indulgent and may not be witty or exciting, so for that I apologize in advance. However, I think this will be an essential tool in my weight loss efforts. Unfortunately, I do care what other people think. Since this is not exactly a quality about myself that I like, but have not been successful in overcoming it, I figure I will use it to my advantage. If I know people, whether I know them or not, are at least randomly checking my blog, it will motivate me to stick to my goals.

Having all that said, here goes my story of how I got to the place that I am now and how I plan to change it and get to my goal weight and fitness goals.

I have not struggled with my weight my whole life. I grew up quite active, participating in many sport and activities. I was blessed with more than abundant height. I am 6'1'' tall. Along with my height, came the expectation of me to play sports. I played basketball and volleyball in high school. Wasn't too crazy about basketball, but loved and, still to this day, love volleyball. My family and I skied during the winter. I loved to backpack and hike. In college I started running and enjoyed that also. So, overall I grew up having a pretty active lifestyle.

I grew up in a home where we LOVED good food and LOVED to eat lots of it. My mom was blessed with a very active metabolism, so she could eat anything she wanted and not gain a pound (oh how unfair that I did not receive that gene!) and I think I just grew up assuming that everyone could do the same. We had ice cream for dessert pretty much every single night. It was either ice cream or popcorn. My mom is also an incredible cook, so once again we all love food. Luckily enough, growing up I could eat all that wonderful food and great desserts and really not have it affect my weight. I can't say that I was always stick thin, but I never really worried about my weight. I don't even remember stepping onto a scale until I was about 21 years old!

My struggle with weight began at about 23. I had just gotten home from spending 18 months in South Africa as a missionary. I was eating a lot more fried food and fast food. It finally started catching up with me. I was not what I would consider fat, but I had put on probably about 25 lbs. and it was somewhat noticeable (Luckily, being 6'1'' 25 lbs is not as apparent as on an average sized woman). The month that I turned 24, I got married. This is when I first heard the words "your butt is really fat". My now ex-husband, decided to be so romantic and the first time he saw me without clothes on, (on our honeymoon) decided to tell me that he thought I had a fat butt and that was one of the first things he noticed about me when we first met. He was kind enough to inform me though, that he decided to look past it because he thought I was pretty and figured "we" could get rid of my fat butt by making sure I went to the gym a lot. Wasn't he such a gem!?!?! Needless to say, I started having a complex about my weight and especially about my butt.

Without going into a ton of detail, I will just say that over the next 5 years I lived in a very abusive relationship and I also gave birth to three children. I gained huge amounts of weight with each pregnancy and in between, because once again, I tend to "eat my emotions" and in an abusive marriage, there were plenty of emotions to eat. After giving birth to my third child I weighed 280 lbs. When she was only 2 months old, I divorced my husband. Over the following 2 years I managed to lose 100 lbs. Also, during those two years I got remarried (to a wonderful man that would never tell me that my butt is fat .. even though it is very, very fat at the moment!) And then we decided to have children together. I gave birth to two more children and managed to gain back the majority of the weight I had lost.

I have always considered my weight problems to be temporary. I am done having children. I assumed that as soon as I was done with having babies I would just simply lose the weight and that would be that. Well, my baby is now two years old, and in-spite of many different attempts as losing weight, I am currently weigh only a few lbs. less than I did when my last daughter was born.

It is time for me to get serious about losing this weight. I need to get to a healthy weight not only for my self esteem but also for my overall health. I feel a lot of guilt that I am setting such a horrible example for my children, especially my three daughters. I don't want them to grow up thinking that it is okay to live the way that I am living.

I also realize that it is ridiculous that I have the best weight loss and nutritional products in the world at my disposal (through my business) and I am not only not using them, but I am being somewhat of a hypocrite by telling people how fabulous they are and that they should use them,when I myself am not doing the same.

So, I am ready to start on this journey. I will weigh myself once a week, on Sundays. I will then post my weight on here each week. I will keep track of what I eat each day and also post that on here. I will be getting up at 5am each morning and spending 2 hours exercising. I will walk/run on my treadmill as well as do resistance training.

I have two main goals that I plan to achieve within the next year.

1) reach my goal weight of 160 lbs. (or so, I say or so because I have never been to 160 in my adult life, so I am not sure how it will look on me).

2)I want to run a marathon. Not sure why I have this in my head. I have never run further than 4 miles, but still, this has been on my "bucket list" and I figure this is the ideal time to do it!

I am sure I will add other goals to this list as time goes on.

If you are reading this, thank you for stopping by and checking out my blog and thank you for your support!