Sorry to hear about Reva's tummy - my own black labrador retriever, "Gus" sends along hugs to Reva, and says he hopes she's all better soon.
Meanwhile - I am very happy that you've started on the weight loss project. Like I mentioned before, it's easy for me to just sort of 'coast along' and not finish the job off, so it's incredibly helpful for me to have others around who are going through the same sorts of things.
Also, wanted to mention something - usually, when we decide to take action it's because we're unhappy or dissatisfied with 'what is', and this can be useful, to a point. Thing is though - in order to keep one's motivation up, and the momentum going, it's extremely helpful to shift one's focus towards how great it's going to feel to achieve little milestones along the way, and to eventually get to goal. I can't quite explain it, but I find that if I am taking action because of unhappiness, sometimes the results are slow to arrive. Things take longer and I lose my momentum. If I focus in on how much I am going to enjoy the new situation, any action I take to 'get there' feels fun, exciting and almost easy.
I'll give you an example of this. I live in a huge house, and it has needed extensive renovations. My husband and I really do not like living here, and want to move. We've worked really hard to renovate the entire house. We still have a lot of work to do. When we spend time thinking about how much we dislike the house, the area, and how awful it is that we're stuck here - it's much harder to get some work done on it. In fact, weird things have happened. Came home from Home Depot with a new counter top for the kitchen, but it was too short. Bought the wrong sized door for the back entrance. Things take ten times longer than they should. We hired the wrong guy to put new flooring and vanity into the upstairs bath, and it was a disaster. We had to re-do the whole thing ourselves.
Meanwhile, when I manage shift my thoughts into imagining our next house, where I'd like to be, what features it has, the kind of neighbourhood we'll live in, how cozy it'll be - for some reason, when we take action on THIS house - we're able to just fly through it and get amazing amounts of work done, and it all goes beautifully. The one weekend I sat down and wrote out a description of the house I'd like to be in - just brainstorming really, we ended up replacing the front porch railing, the back porch railiing, installing a new front door and a new back door, and painting our bedroom. Just the two of us, in one weekend. I had no qualms about using the fancy table saw and making my own new front porch railing. Believe me, this was not something I'd ever done before.
This is called 'inspired action'. It's not a chore or some sort of drudgery. It's not some draconian task - it's becomes excitement and happiness because you're thinking about where you're going, and how wonderful it's going to be when you get there.
Somewhere in my weight loss journey, I remember looking up the definition of the word 'inspire' - and one of the definitions listed was 'to breathe life into' and I really liked that. What you're doing Michelle, is breathing life into a dream. Up until now, this idea of losing weight may have just seemed like an impossible dream - but not anymore! The steps you are taking right now are turning that dream into a reality.
It is not a question of whether you can or can't do this - you *are*. And guess what else I just thought of? The opposite of 'personal worst' is personal best. Pretty exciting, don't you think?
Ok - enough of my silly pep talk. I think I needed to hear it too.
