A little preface to this blog entry.......I have to post something I wrote back in January. To understand where I'm going, you have to understand where I've been. I have been labeled, by my friends and family, as the "Perfect specimen of everything". They all joke about how I can do everything really well. I'm a Chemical injection pump applications engineer, graduated from Texas A &M with a degree in Industrial Distribution Engineering, play piano, sing, cook, super mechanically minded, volunteer with 4 year olds, lead a young single ladies small group, am starting school to get my estiticans license to become a makeup artist....I can do it all and I have an AWESOME support system in my friends and family. Weight...it's the one thing that I haven't been able to do...ever!

Jan 2 2011

Pay no attention to the fact that it is January 2 of yet another year that I am going to try to get healthy. I started writing this in a journal that I had started back in Feb 2006. Let’s keep this imperfection between us…I wouldn’t want my friends and family to really know how imperfect I am, but I am letting you pull back the proverbial “curtain” and see me for who I really am. I weigh 327.4 lbs and am 5’4” tall. Yeah, let’s not even bring up my BMI. I’ll give you a hint, MORBIDLY OBESE……MORBID….that means death. This weight may kill me. That, in itself, should be enough to make me change my eating habits, but this is a struggle I can’t overcome…….at least, not alone.

Today, in church, the preacher (a guest preacher, so I don’t know his name) spoke about faith. He told the story about the paralytic man brought to Jesus by his friends. They had faith….the friends and the paralyzed man, had faith that Jesus could heal this man. The preacher talked about the woman plagued by bleeding for 12 years and how her faith brought her to touch the cloak of Jesus. This healed her, not because of Jesus’ magical cloak, but because they had faith that GOD could heal her when numerous others had tried and failed.

I’m not saying that I don’t believe that God can heal me of my eating problems, I’m saying that maybe that is somewhere that I haven’t been placing my faith. I have had faith to pray for my doctors. I have prayed that God would give them the wisdom to figure out the problem with my Pituitary tumor, my borderline low growth hormone levels, and my other PCOS related issues. I have been praying that I could find a disease or a problem to blame my weight and health problems on, instead of praying and having the faith it takes to ask GOD to take the problems away, altogether. GOD is the ultimate healer!

I have always struggled with my weight and eating. I was 180 lbs in the 6^th grade. Weight has fluctuated throughout life, but I was around 200 lbs near the end of college. Do the math and you’ll find that I have gained 127 lbs in the past 8.5 years. THAT’S INSANE. It has to stop. It stops now. I’m not looking at a number, I’m looking at a lifestyle and a quality of life that I want back.

GOAL #1: Multipart goal – get under 300 lbs by controlling portions. Get my weight down so that the back pain goes away.