A new ME!

I am absolutely, positively LOVING this new journey I'm on! This may take a couple of posts to catch up, but believe me, it's pretty awesome. Back in September, my family packed up and moved to "town". We lived way out in the sticks for the past 13 years and, well, it just wasn't fun anymore. My 16 year old daughter hated being so far away from her friends, and nobody wanted to travel so far to our house so we made the big difficult decision to sell the family farm and head to town! It's been pretty great. I'm 5 minutes from work, and we are 15 minutes from my daughter's school. To say it's been life-changing is an understatement.

 After getting settled, I made the most awesome decision to finally get rid of some weight.  A LOT of weight! I set a pretty lofty goal of losing 110 lbs in a year. I started around Halloween after all the candy was gone and I felt like I was ready to make a commitment to myself. That's all it is, really, to commit to do better for yourself. I'm the type of girl that has always felt guilty for doing anything for me. Everything has always been to benefit someone else, the hubby, the kid, a job, whatever. Doesn't matter, it was just time. I started with a plan to go Paleo. It has always worked for the hubby and he really likes it, so that's where we started. It's much easier when it's a change for the family. So with that, I lost about 20 lbs and was feeling pretty good, especially since I was able to lose it in spite of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Around the time I started losing weight, I noticed a new gym in town, not far from the house, and I was intrigued. It's a kickboxing and cross training gym and it just looked FUN. I knew that I needed to drop a few lbs before I even started, because, let's be honest, I couldn't even walk upstairs without being winded. In December, after losing the initial 20 lbs. we went to an intro class and that's all it took, I was hooked! The first "real" class I went to, I was scared to death, it was the day after Christmas, and it was all I could do to walk in the door. But after I got there, I learned some things: 1. I wasn't as weak as I thought, 2. The people there were amazing and as afraid as I was of failing or getting made fun of, I found a community of people who were encouraging and were just trying to get fit themselves. They weren't concerned with the fat girl in the room who couldn't do half of what they could. I even got some encouraging words and it was an amazing feeling! I found somewhere that I belonged and that was life-changing for me. l love my gym and my gym family!

To keep this from getting too long, I'm gonna make this post to be continued…
I'm happy to be back and can't wait to continue the story.