Welcome!

Hi everyone!

Thank you so much for joining me on my 24-day Advocare Challenge! I'm very excited about this new chapter and hope you'll enjoy it with me.

The first thing I have to do is warn you that this blog is truly a selfish endeavor. I need a way to keep myself accountable and track my journey. I've done food journals with Weight Watchers, MyFitnessPal, SparkPeople, and many others, but they all have specific parameters that work for someone else. This blog will be for me. It will be brutally honest. If I offend you at any point, well, stop reading. I've spent a lot of years hiding and not being honest with myself, and the truth isn't always fun. It's time to heal, and I truly believe that I can only do this by being 100% honest.

My hope is that through these 24 days and the lifetime of days that follow, you'll be able to laugh, cry, sweat, heal, and grow with me. Before my first post about the challenge, it's imperative that you know how we arrived here.

It's simple, really. I ate.....and ate and ate and ate. I ate healthy things and unhealthy things. I drank alcohol and didn't drink water. I ate emotionally: happy, sad, excited, hurt, tired, bored, rejected, loved. You name the emotion and I've probably eaten because of it. I ate late. I ate early. And can you guess what I didn't do? Exercise. Bigger than that? I ate away my emotions so now I have a ton of emotional baggage that I'm working to shed along with the pounds. Take that baggage!

(Image borrowed from: http://www.mycollegepal.com/blog/college-student-vs-emotional-baggage)


Right about now you might be thinking, "how depressing!" but I promise it's not. It's inspirational. Learn from me. Grow with me. Never bury your head in the sand because once you're that deep it is HARD to climb out of the sandpit. I know that I have to fight off every grain to free myself and I'm finally ready!

So, what are my goals?

Short term (During the 24-day Challenge):

1. Successfully follow the program every day. Not a single cheat. 
2. Develop health habits. Eat foods that my body needs, not that my emotions want. Work out on a regular basis.
3. Lose 20 lbs. I know that sounds like a lot but I know people who have done the challenge and lost more than that. I'll be happy with whatever the number ends up being.
4. Lose inches. I honestly don't know enough to set a numerical goal, so let's see what happens.
5. Begin the journey of letting go of the past and focusing on the future.
6. Stop saying negative things about myself. Be positive.

Long Term:

1. Routinely make healthy food choices out of habit.
2. Share these habits with everyone. Friends, family, strangers of the Internet. I want to live in a healthy world and everyone deserves that.
3. Exercise 3-5 times a week for life. I used to be a 3-season athlete and I'd love to play on a team of some sort again. Basketball? Softball? Dodgeball? Yes. All of them and more!
4. 125-150 pounds. Yeah, it's a lot. I know. But I managed to gain that much so over time, even if it's a lot of time, I should be able to lose it.
5. This is the most important. I want to feel good. For example, I want tying shoes and walking up stairs not to be a struggle. I want to walk across the campus I teach at without a huge feeling of dread, sweat and loss of breath. 

Tom Landry once said that "Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with the plan." If you follow the Advocare 24-day Challenge link you can find out more about my plan. Only time will tell if I can stay with the plan but I can promise the world and myself that I'm going to try my damnedest. If found my starting line and crossed it this morning! Get ready for greatness!

(Image shared from http://dianhasan.wordpress.com/)

So, in the words of one of my favorite movies, "and away we go!"