A Healthy Middle

I want to let you readers in on a little secret, for a majority of my life I've struggled with my weight. Now this may not shock anyone, because a lot of Americans this day in age do struggle at some point with their weight, but my struggle has been one on the lower spectrum. You see I have struggled a majority of my life with being underweight. I have never had an eating disorder or anything of the sort, I have just been under the ideal weight that my physicians felt was healthy for me pretty much my entire life. Most people I encounter have a sort of flippant response along the lines of, "Wow, I wish I had the problem." It's a little hurtful and a little ignorant, but it still happens. I get it, people don't really understand, they think that it was lucky that I couldn't gain weight. It seems like a dream to some people and I understand their view point, but I'm here to tell you that it's not a dream at all. Being twenty to thirty pounds underweight is no healthier than being twenty to thirty pounds overweight, both are a serious health concern. It was irritating and disconcerting that I couldn't gain weight no matter what I tried. To gain healthy weight one needs to eat a great deal of protein and gain muscle mass. It's a lot of work and most of the time I couldn't gain a pound no matter how hard I tried, so around the age of 21 I just stopped trying.

Then I met Mr. Tal and things changed. Dinners out, bar nights, parties, road trips, plus my metabolism slowing down made it easy to gain all the weight I ever needed and then some. I don't blame our relationship at all, I became comfortable with him which made it easy to let my eating habits fall in the crapper but that's my doing. It became apparent with the wedding approaching that I needed to shape up. If you recall I wrote a blog in June about that need to shape up. I currently am on the higher end of the weight spectrum for my height and I'm not happy with it at all. I was doing well working out and eating healthy until medical issues put me on bed rest for two weeks. My depressed mood combined with my doctor ordered down time had me falling behind in the working out and eating healthy department. I let it go on for about a month and a half, drowning my sorrows in ice cream and pizza. However, I need to get back to that goal I set for myself a few months ago. I'm starting up my routine again and feeling really good about trying to be healthy. However, I feel an inner struggle, one that I felt when I originally began my journey to a healthier me. For so long I struggled to gain weight, it seems odd that I'm trying to loose some now. That's not exactly the truth of it though, what I'm really trying to do is be as healthy as I possibly can. I'm trying to eat right and exercise and that is a wonderful thing. Getting to look beautiful and radiant on my wedding day is a fringe benefit of all that.

So now to share my plan of action to getting to a healthier me. Exercise using my EA Active for the Wii, 30 Day Shred, walking and running. Exercise will be two days on one day off in order to achieve a gain in muscle mass. Eating healthier, which means no fast food, or very little, no junk food in the house at all, well rounded meals, with necessary amount of protein. I'm hoping for now that this will be enough. I hope to see results in a few weeks and that my inner struggle will subside when I hit that middle ground I'm aiming for.

So readers, do you have any plans to get healthier? What do they include?

Tune in next time for more tales of a DIY bride.