3 Months

A lot can change in three months.

One thing that has always bothered me about myself is my commitment level. I usually set goals and when the going gets tough, I quit. I haven't gotten around to writing the next great American novel. I'm too intimidated by editors to query for magazine articles. I started an Etsy shop and then quit after my first sale. I've quit South Beach, Clean Eating, vegetarianism, and lots of other diets. There's a long list of things I have quit.

But for the first time ever, I have set a goal and stuck with it until I accomplished it. Several goals in fact. I lost five pounds. Then I lost ten. Now I've lost fifteen. I ran a 5k and actually ran the whole time. I started lifting weights and stuck to at least two hours of lifting every week. I've recorded most of the food that's gone into my body. I've stopped drinking (for the most part!). I've learned how to eat healthy without feeling deprived. I've done all of this in three months.

It feels great to be skinnier. It feels great to be doing harder lifting exercises than most of the guys at the gym :) . But more than that, it feels great to have set a really hard goal and achieve it. It makes me feel like maybe there are more things that I can do, things that I've told myself I can't do. Like write that novel. Or at least write a magazine article.

Three months feels like a long time when you're doing hard work, but in terms of my life, it's a very short amount of time. And that is what scares me. I'm so afraid of falling off the wagon and going back to the way I was before. I'm afraid of this being "the time I lost 15 pounds and then gained it all back". But another part of me knows that there is no going back. I know things about how to change my health and my body that I didn't know before. I know what works for me. I also know what doesn't work. So I don't think I'll be able to go back to those old habits, because I'll know what I'm doing to myself.

I'll be the first to admit that telling yourself "no" to something really sucks most of the time. When you're a kid, you can't wait until you're grown up and can do whatever you want. College and the years following it were that time for me, when I could go out at 10 pm on a work night and have a beer and pizza with friends. Just because. But it is nice, as an adult, to be able to set some rules in your life for yourself. It gives you a feeling of self control.

So that's that. More fun posts and photos to come, I promise.