Hunger pains.

I have been eating less quantity of food over the past week as I try to eat down the food I will have to throw away. I am eating less often because there are less snacks in the house I want to eat. So because of that, today I woke up, as usual feeling like crap, but within an hour of getting up I got hungry. Like hungry. Stomach growling feeling like I was going to pass out starving. I haven't felt like this in a long time, but I don't know if I like it. My stomach, while growling, still feels sour beneath the hunger pains. It's like a double edged sword. So I am sipping on some freshly filtered water while my Schwan's apple cinnamon muffins bake (the last 9 of them from the freezer.)

But when I woke up today what I really had on my mind was body image. You can see some really great photos about bodies at different heights, weights and muscle mass here. Make sure to click on the pictures to read the descriptions below each person. These are really amazing photos and really open your eyes to what Olympic athletes look like. I love that Rulon, from the biggest loser, is in one of the photos from back in his Olympic Wrestling days. But anyway, I woke up thinking back over my life and how I have never loved my body. I have never been thin enough, fit enough, hard enough, etc. My thinnest weight since I stopped growing was probably 130, which at the time was I think a size 6 or 8. While I was strong, I also had a lot of fat on my body. Ok, not a LOT, but enough that I had no muscle definition and I was 'soft'. I would do tons of sit-ups and crunched, wanting a 6-pack or at least some visible sign of abs that never came. But I was in high school and I ate a lot of unhealthy food. If I had a healthier diet, I bet I would have seen those muscles. I stayed that weight until I got pregnant with my first son 11 years ago. During the first half of the pregnancy I barely gained any weight at all, maybe like 5 pounds. Then one month I gained 20 pounds, the next month I gained another 20 pounds and the month after I think I gained 10. One morning I woke up and I has this saggy flap of skin hanging off the bottom of my baby belly. it was like some foreign object to me, what WAS this flab? Well obviously my body's visual result to my eating. I have never gotten rid of that bit of flab. Even after having my first son and I lost about 40 pounds of the 60 I gained, I was still bigger than I had been. I was able to get down within 10 pounds of my pre-baby weight when I got pregnant with my second son and gained another 60 pounds. This time was harder. I had less muscle, so when I got back down to near my pre-baby weight this time, my clothes fit different and I was a bigger size. I was alright with it, I looked ok enough. Not rock-bodied, but not bad either. I am not sure exactly what happened, but over the course of a couple years I gained about 30 pounds. I think it may have just been the stress of trying to make it day-to-day working without enough to pay bills and then moving and still not being able to pay bills. I started turning to food because my life was a bit out of control. It started a bad habit, a really bad one. Emotional eating. I now weigh about 60 pounds more than I did before I had kids, but I am twice the size. I have so little of my high school muscle left. Now when I see myself I long for the days back when I was 18 and thought I was fat. I was crazy to think that! It is going to take a lot of physical and mental work to get comfortable with my body again, but I really hope that I can get healthy enough (in every way) to be comfortable wearing shorts and a tank top, or a bathing suit. I currently don't even own shorts, and I have tank tops but never wear them because of my skin and I also don't own a bathing suit. Why? Well, why buy something I will never wear?

That got me to thinking, what are my goals in this? Well, I already said I am not doing this for 30 days, my Whole30 will end up being more like Whole45 or something like that. But honestly I will probably continue with it even after so I don't fall back into bad eating. I am kind of an all or nothing kind of person, right now anyway. And if I let myself have something once, I will keep making excuses to have it. But in all, I want to have regular blood pressure, I want to get down to a single digit size in jeans, I want my skin to clear up, I want to feel comfortable enough to buy and wear a pair of shorts and a tank top, I want to feel good enough about myself that I stop wearing baggy t-shirts and jeans every day and start dressing cute, just because, and I want to be happy.

That last one is a weird one eh? Honestly I have been so down for so long I forgot what feeling happy is like. On the rare occasions when I did feel happy, I felt like something was wrong with me. Not only that but the people a round me got used to the way I am so when I was happy, they wondered what was wrong, so I stopped acting happy when I was happy. Screw that. I am feeling better than I have in a long time. I haven't even started yet and it's making me happier than I have been in years. Now I don't want people (my husband) thinking I have been miserable or anything. It's not anything like that. I have just always been a glass-half-empty kind of person and have suffered from depression on and off for years. THAT is what I am talking about. For the first time without medication I feel good about something and not only can I not wait to get started (IN 2 DAYS!!!) but it's going to be interesting ACTING happy too and not hiding it behind some sarcastic mask or outright lie and pretend I am mildly unhappy for fear of being happy. Yes, I said that, fear of being happy. Maybe it's the crap in the food, maybe I am coming out of the processed fog, I don't know, but whatever it is, I hope it only gets better.

Tomorrow I am heading to the store to stock up on food for Whole30! (I am really excited about this.) Today I am going to clean all the fast food bags and soda cans out of my van (LOL) and take my measurements plus see how fast I can run a mile (Walk a mile?) on the treadmill. Tuesday morning I will weigh myself and then I am not stepping on the scale again until the end. I have not decided yet if I am going to weigh myself after 30 days or wait until the end of April to do it. Probably 30 days so people wanting to do the Whole30 have an accurate assessment of my 30 day results.

This week has gone by slow and fast all at the same time, so now I have to finish preparing for this journey because I begin in two days!