This is me.

Hello!

My name is Lizzie.  

 

This is what I look like (as of September of last year, anyway)...

And in case you're wondering who that sexy man is next to me, it's my husband, Josh. Here's another picture of him. Ain't he cute??

This next picture is also of me. You can scroll down ahead of this text now... You see that smile I'm plastering on my face? Yeah, it's pretty fake. I was pretty good at that. You can call it the "girl at the party, talking to a plastic fern in the corner of the room, pretending to have a good time" syndrome. I didn't want to be noticed. I was a peacekeeper, wanted to make sure everyone was having a good time, so of course that meant that if I had any problems going on (with my weight, my marriage, my self-loathing), I kept them to myself. Instead I'd grab 3 tacos and hoped it would keep me quiet. So I gained 90 pounds. I had lost my self-worth, my marriage was not an open one at the time, I felt very insecure around people, even my best friends, and in general (no matter how much I tried to keep people happy), I was not always a pleasant person to be around.   

  Yeah, I was a mess.
 
 Well, then something happened back in 2011 that I'll probably never forget. Even now the occasional butterfly appears in my stomach when I think about it. My very best "friend" walked away from our friendship over something that hurt a lot of people (including me), my marriage was struggling, and I went a couple of months picking at little clues of what was really going on, because no one wanted to tell me, afraid of how hurt I would be. My life, so I thought, was taking a turn for the worse. I thought my marriage was going to come to a horrible end, I was devastated and hurt over my best friend, and I felt like I was in a hole full of unknown, and no one was willing to lift me out. That, of course, was not how they viewed it (as they shouldn't), but nonetheless, that was how I felt.
   Finally, after picking my husbands brain for the up-tenth time, we signed up for some counseling.
We went, thinking we were just gonna go and talk about our feelings, and our needs and issues with the marriage and so forth. Well... I don't think we even talked about those things at all in those sessions.
   The counselors' goal for our sessions was to "reintroduce ourselves to each other, and to ourselves". I thought to myself "yeah, ok. Whatever. This is gonna be a waste of time."
   Long story short, it wasn't.
   The benefits of re-approaching oneself, especially with someone looking from the outside in, is that you see things you overlooked before, because at the time you were too busy looking at something/someone else. The counselor could tell me how I viewed myself on a deeper level just from my mannerisms. The way I nervously laughed when I'd say something serious about my life. The way I crossed my arms. The way I sat on the edge of the couch farthest away from him. All signs (obvious to him, but not to me at that time) that I didn't value myself at all. Not even a little. To me, my opinion didn't matter. My feelings didn't matter. If someone else had a opinion about something, then they must be right. All things that I had no clue whatsoever about. Feelings that I had no idea I had. They had to be spelled out to me. And all it took for this guy to see them was one hour-long discussion.
 So when someone points those things out to you, it makes you think of when you started to develop those nervous habits, why you started, and how it's effecting you and others today.
   Those sessions allowed me to make a clear decision about myself, whole picture in front of me. I was able to really think about my life, from that day forward. He gave me tools on how to approach myself, on how to approach my husband (and vice versa, of course), and take hold of my life for the first time!

 This blog is about my life journey. Weight loss, acceptance, self-respect, finding myself, etc. This last couple of years have been the most eye-opening years of finding myself. I have lost 50 pounds so far, and I even took up running (which, as an asthmatic, I thought was laughable a few years back), and it has helped me find my "inner-tiger".

  I realize now that if I want to go for something, I can. Nothing can hold me back. My journey continues, and I hope to continue writing about it here as I walk this path. It's an exciting time of embracing the future, whatever it may hold.

  Cheers.