The 3 month challenge

Tomorrow a friend and I start a 3 month challenge against each other. If I win I get 2 round-trip tickets on Alaska Airlines. Which, being the only airline the flys in and out of this place is a pretty big deal. The ticket has stipulations like we have to fly standby but still this is a pretty sweet incentive to me!

My friend is a guy. I understand that guys can loose weight quicker and easier then woman. I still intend to win! We are having weekly check-ins/meetings/weigh-ins and monthly winners who get dinner or a movie bought by the looser. I'm pretty excited. We want to do another one starting in March depending on how successful this one is.

My friend is helping me set realistic goals. This is a problem I have. I like to set goals that are astronomical and completely unrealistic and then I don't understand why I don't meet and surpass them. Yes I understand that sounds crazy. On a logical level I can see that the goals are unrealistic but I really feel like if I work hard enough I should be able to meet them. We have set a goal together to loose a total of 30 pounds each during this 3 months. That's just 10 pounds a month, 2.5 pounds a week. Totally do-able right? I feel like the number is way way waaay to low.

Tomorrow we do our initial weigh in. We'll also make a list of why we want to lose weight, what we hope to accomplish out of this and stuff like that. That way we can look at the list daily and hopefully it'll help motivate us to make the right choices. Also having a buddy to do this with and meet with helps to keep each other accountable.

I'm really nervous about telling people how much I currently weigh. I haven't even told my husband how much I weigh. Although if he looks on the calendar by the bathroom and can figure out what all my little daily numbers mean, then he could easily figure it out. But I don't think my weight matters to him.

Part of the reason why I'm doing this:
I went in to get steroid injections into my hips today. They hurt like hell, the injections and my hips. Well hours after sleeping off the "traumatic event" I feel much better. My back is still really painful but I can walk and the pain going down my legs and the numbness in my toes is gone!  Hurraaay! However there is still the back thing, the reason why I've now missed almost 3 weeks of work.

My back specialist pointed something out to me today. All my health issues have been going on for a little over a year. Literally 1 year and a month. That's when I hit this high weight. The highest I've been in my life. I gained 87 pounds in a year and a few months. Stress and a lot of crap happened in my life and so I stopped working out, stopped seeing friends, stopped doing pretty much anything fun that I enjoyed, lost all confidence in myself and emotionally ate myself sick on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis. He doesn't know all of that, just the weight gain part. He said that if I lost even just 20-30 pounds a lot of the problems I've been experiencing this last year would go away. 6 months ago, a different doctor who was seeing me about the stomach ulcers and hiatal hernias and all the other crap pretty much said the same thing.

Maybe they're right? I sure never had this much problems before in my life. Ever. My tolerance to physical pain used to be a lot higher too. So I need to do this. I think having a buddy to be weekly accountable to or being able to talk to about it daily, will really help me get started. Plus I have sparkpeople.com to really help with support and to find an amazing amount of good stuff to help me along the way. I'm hoping to get my friend on SparkPeople too.

I've tried challenges before, hoping they'll help me get out of my rut and get going but with the online challenges its hard for me when I can't see or talk to the other people like on the phone and stuff. I don't have the option to pick up the phone when I'm struggling and talk to someone. I also don't get the chance to meet up and have a work out buddy or weekly meetings and stuff so I'm really excited about that.

Overall I'm just really excited about this whole thing. I've wanted to do something like this but just never really gotten around to it. The idea of sharing weight stuff with people I see every day, that takes some trust and that's an area I've really been struggling with over the last couple years. But my friend was like "I have an idea" and I'm like "oh hell yeah let's do it" hopefully everything works out really well and next time we'll have more people doing it.

I know more than the Doctors

I just spent some time uploading photos of me to my facebook and I was struck with a thought. Wow. Some of these photos from high school and middle school (ones I didn't post on facebook) I look so angry or just plain unhappy. I know I had depression stuff back then, I mean what girl going through puberty didn't. But I also know that some of those photos were taken when I was feeling pretty darn good about myself. Do you know what that means? I thought I looked pretty cool. I thought I looked cool! OMG I thought I looked cool with that lame attempt at a smoldering look on my face. Or that one when I think I'm attempting to look aloof and thoughtful. This is sad. 

What's really got me sad right now is my state of health. I'm having back pain, woopty doo dah. The ER put me on steroids, 2 different kinds of pain killers and a muscle relaxer and told me to see a back specialist to get MRI's and see if I have a slipped disc or some such silliness. I'm all for taking a break and relaxing for a few days, even though the drugs are giving me the weirdest dreams EVER. But missing so much work and all this talk about long term care and possible surgery? As far as I'm concerned lets just deal with the facts. I'm fat. Yep I said it. I'm fat. Seriously, I am twice the weight I should be! I'm physically the weight of like 2 people! That's whats wrong with my back. I don't need an MRI or surgery or anything special. Give me a couple days rest and then damn it all let me starve myself and workout until I loose the weight and watch the back pain disappear. That's my thought anyways. No one seems to agree with me.

I'm 28 years old. I'm starting to feel old but I'm not old and I'm so not ready to even accept that I'm an adult yet. I feel like life has only begun and yet death is just around that corner. That is so not acceptable. Yes I have this overwhelming fear of getting older. Some huge part of me believes that 30 is over the hill. Yes I do remember having that feeling when 25 was looming up on me, but this is worse. I'm getting older and yet I'm still overweight, I don't have a college degree, I haven't accomplished anything that I wanted to. Seriously, I found a list of things/goals I wanted to accomplish by 25. I haven't done any of them!