In the beginning

I should have named this blog the Diet Diva. Or maybe Know All, Do Nothing. Or Fatty For Life. It's tough coming up with name ideas. Almost as tough as naming your baby. Almost . . . but I digress. As you get to know me, you will find that I do that a lot. Digress, go off on tangents, what have you. It's just that I get an idea in my head and it transfers itself right through to my fingers and onto the page you are reading. I write how I speak, fast and furious. Ideas come and I need to get them out before i forget them. I am a busy mom, you know, and things don't often remain in my head long enough to remember to get them out later because something else will have taken over my focus when I need to express a thought or idea. And so, I have learned to just say, or write, what I want as soon as the thoughts come. I try to proof read, to make sure everything makes sense and, surprisingly, it often does. We'll see if it works out for me today.

I suppose I should introduce myself, explain what this blog is all about and maybe, just maybe, give myself, and you, a reason to stick around. You see, I am not very devoted to things like this. I am a busy mom and wife. Something always comes up that needs to be doing and blogs, the gym, healthy eating, etc. miraculously find their way to the back burner, eventually to be shoved completely off the stove until a new bee starts buzzing in my bonnet and I put it on simmer and wait for it to boil. And those ideas do love to boil, often spilling all over the stove and making a huge mess. And then, the clean up committee comes along (meaning the life of a busy mom I was telling you about) and said idea gets shoved back further and further and the cycle just repeats itself over and over again. It's why I have managed to lose and gain so much weight over the years.

I am one of those girls who knows anything and everything about weight loss. I have always been overweight. I think I was on my first diet when I was in first grade. Or maybe second grade. I just know that I was the fattest girl in my class and didn't want to be. I remember my mom telling me what I should and shouldn't eat and making me go outside to play. But, I was the quiet, shy girl. The girl who had a few friends, but not the kind who would grab a bike and tear off into the wild outdoors. No, my friends, more often than not, lived inside the pages of books. So, I did go outside, only to find a quiet place in the shade with a new book I had sneaked out of the house, constantly on guard for my mother's voice calling me home for dinner. I can't tell you how many of those books, as I grew older, were weight loss books. I have read enough that I should, probably, have a degree in weight loss. At the very minimum, I should at least be thin as a rail. And I probably would be, had I followed any of the advice listed in those many, many books.

The bottom line is, I just never actually do anything about it long term. Oh, I get those ideas I spoke of earlier. The great "This Is IT, THE Plan For Weight Loss" that I work on for a day, a week, maybe even a month or two. And I lose a few pounds here and there. Once, I even lost a whole 30 pounds all together in a three month span of time. Of course, it was right after I had my eleven pound baby, but I did actually work on getting that weight off with a good diet and exercise. But then life interferes. In the case of my thirty pounds, winter arrived. At the time, I lived in the mountains, worked full time, and had two small babies. There was no way I could continue to walk the 3 miles I did each night after dinner with my babies in below zero weather and a hundred feet of snow. I know, I know . . . Once, I was doing really well with Weight Watchers and then I got pregnant with my first little one. They kick you out of Weight Watchers when you are pregnant. *sigh* Of course, when I no longer work on my weight loss, I gain weight and I gain quickly. Those thirty pounds I so proudly lost in 3 months, I gained back before Thanksgiving. Over that winter, I gained even more. Five years later, all of my "baby weight" is still there. Plus another 25 pounds.

It is only recently I discovered what I was doing to myself. Making excuses. The kids have a late night baseball game, I am invited to a much needed mom's night out with a few friends, or the hubby declares payday Friday my night off from the kitchen. We go out to eat. I act like I haven't eaten outside of my kitchen in a century (when it had really only been a few days) and make the most horrible meal choices on the menu, promising myself I will do better tomorrow, I will work out at the gym an extra hour or two to burn it off, I will never eat out again in my life. Or, I get a PMS attack and eat the biggest chocolate bar you have ever seen in your life. I make the same promises to myself about the gym and starting over tomorrow and never doing this again. But, guess what? The tomorrow I promise myself never comes because I never actually do change my eating habits and instead make plans for the next restaurant I can convince my husband to try to avoid another night making dinner and then the whole kitchen clean up. I don't actually go to the gym because the overeating has upset my stomach and I feel like crap. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

And here I am, with a 49.7% body fat and needing to lose at least 150 pounds, but really would prefer to lose 165 because I am a woman, and we must always push the envelope when it comes to imagining ourselves and a perfect weight and a smaller dress size. Surprisingly, my goal weight is not that unreasonable. I would like to weigh 175 pounds, but would be satisfied with weighing 190. It's under 200 pounds, a weight I haven't been since I was in high school. Or maybe eighth grade. It's been so long, I really can't remember. I am not sure what dress size that would be for me. I am six feet tall (and when you weigh as much as I do, that means I am a BIG girl right now. I hate that feeling, the Amazon, should we invite her to be a member of next Sumo Wrestler's R Us. Since I can't do anything about my height, I am going to do something about my weight. Maybe the whole odd girl out of every single damn crowd will go away. Maybe not. It's worth a try).

With all of that, I am now going to formally introduce myself. My name is Kama. I am a thirty-four year old mother and wife. I have two amazing, intelligent,funny, and adorable boys. Bugs is my second grader and Bubba is my kindergartner. They are my life and I can't imagine not being their mommy. I also have a hard working husband who is so supportive and loving, he would give me the world if he could and I love him more than anything. In a nutshell, I am devoted to my family. And life has finally progressed to a point that my boys no longer need my every second of attention and devotion. It's gotten to a point now that I no longer have to plan my days around meals and snacks and naps and potty breaks. It no longer takes me an hour to get ready to leave the house for fifteen minutes. I can simply say, go get your shoes on and meet me in the truck and we are off in a few short minutes. My boys are also old enough to notice how different their mommy is from other mommies. They are fond of reminding me how squishy my belly is and how wide the booty of my pants are, lovingly, of course, because they don't realize that their words sting. They also remind me how much bigger I am than other moms. It is a nightmare I never wanted to live, but have blushingly endured since my oldest was in kindergarten. And this is NOT an example I want to set for my kids. I don't want them to think it is okay to be fat. It is time, now, for me to take a part of my days back for myself.

As I alluded to earlier, I love to read. I read anything and everything I can get my hands on. And, in the past five years, I have discovered a love of writing. It's quite cathartic, managing other people's lives, manipulating villains, making people fall in and out of love. Fictionally, of course. And so, I am going to give my passion for writing a chance with my own life. I will manage my own life in these pages, non fictionally. I will manipulate my fat villain and make myself fall in love with healthy eating and exercise. Because, no matter how many books a person reads or writes, the big secret for weight loss is simple. You have to work off more than you take in and what you take in should provide your body with what it needs to function properly and not what makes your brain happy.

My plan for this blog is to relate, every day, my feelings of how my journey is proceeding. How I ate each day, what I ate each day, and how it feels sweating and killing myself in the gym, and, most importantly, how much weight I am losing as I go along. I also hope to find some seriously delicious recipes to share that are healthy. The exercise part is easy enough, I just need to get to the gym and get my body moving. It's the food part that is most difficult for me. Frankly, I am lazy. I hate to stand over a stove and then deal with the mess later. It is SO much easier to run through a drive through or find a delicious new restaurant to try out. But, this is not teaching my kids good habits, and all that eating out is one reason why I gain weight so quickly. So, I will be on the hunt for GOOD recipes that my family will enjoy that are healthy and nutritious. As I go along, I am sure I will have more ideas to add but, in a nutshell, this blog is all about weight loss. And, if I ever get there, what it feels like to reach my goal weight.