So the Journey Begins.....

My friend recently started a blog called A Thousand Miles. Her goal was to walk a thousand miles in the next year and in the process inspire others to lead a healthier life by sharing her experiences. It must be working because she has inspired me to start my journey to getting healthy and write my own blog. The big difference, however, is while my friend's blog aims to inspire other's, my blog is intended to inspire me.

It's not that I am a selfish person, uninterested in other people's welfare, it is that I am a pragmatic person. If I am to inspire anyone, I have to first fix myself, but I've begun this journey multiple times before only to get sidetracked by life. So this time I'm raising the stakes. I'm putting myself out there in a public fashion in an effort to motivate myself into action. It's a heck of a lot easier to fail in a private ambition, so I am creating a very public forum to gain a very wide support group all designed to keep me on track to getting healthy in 2011.

So here is my background, I am a skinny girl. I've pretty much always been a skinny girl. That's not to say I've never had weight challenges...post pregnancy weight (baby two) took six months to take off versus two with my first daughter, sometime after I turned 40, I gained an extra ten pounds which apparently put me into the healthy range for weight on the physician's chart, but was a little foreign to my comfort zone. I was certainly curvier, but I don't think anyone outside of the fashion industry would have called me heavy. In the last year I had surgery to fix a valve between my esophagus and my stomach which created some complications which make it more difficult for me to digest food properly. The long and short of it, is I've lost the weight I gained after 40 again and a little more.

So I'm back to the skinny girl again, so what's the problem. I'm sure there are several folks who are thinking "GAG" right about now, but the problem is I'm the skinny girl, but not the healthy girl. The reality is I have a resting heart rate in the 90s, kidney disease, high cholesterol and border line blood pressure problems. I get winded when I dance for too long, I have a compromised immune system, so I catch every cold and it turns into bronchitis, and I have all the other aches and pains we get with aging. I want to begin the journey to control the things I can control with my health. Eating foods that power and boost my immune system, exercising my heart and my brain, and finding a lifestyle that helps embrace menopause not fights it, but I need a village to help keep me on track. So this is my first step to growing my village.

Day one, started back to the gym, built blog, ate yogurt and granola for breakfast instead of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. It's baby steps, but it is a beginning. Tomorrow, I'll set my goals.