Posted by Trish Milburn Jun 21 2011, 12:01 am in eating healthy, goals, guest blogger, weight loss
By Ashley March
Almost two weeks ago I posted an announcement on my Twitter and Facebook accounts about the possibility of a Biggest Loser-like weight loss competition for romance readers and authors. The response I received was very enthusiastic, and I’m thrilled to say that the Romance Biggest Winner competition will begin on July 5, 2011 and run through January 5, 2012. For more details, see this post at the blog for updates.
Today, however, Trish has been gracious enough to ask me to blog at Healthy Writer about my own personal motivation for wanting to coordinate Romance Biggest Winner. (Thanks, Trish!)
To be honest, I’m very vulnerable when it comes to my appearance and how people perceive me. This is one reason why I try to always be the person taking pictures instead of the one in front of the camera. However, after years of attempting to lose weight and keep it off unsuccessfully, I’ve become just desperate enough to reach out to others for accountability.
I’m one of those people who use food for comfort. It makes me happy—even if temporarily—and helps me de-stress. That’s part of my problem. As a writer with a full-time day job and another part-time job, with two little ones who regularly wake up during the night, and writing hours that occur after the sun goes down, I also use food to help me stay awake. I don’t drink coffee or tea because I can’t stand the taste, and I gave up soda nearly three years ago when I discovered I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. Food gives me the rush I need to stay up late until everything I need to do is accomplished.
However, as I look at myself objectively, I can see that these temporary fixes are destroying my health and if I don’t get my act together now, the consequences of my poor health habits will soon overwhelm me. I’m 27 years old and need to lose at least 100 pounds to be at a healthy weight. I’ve been trying to be “the skinny girl” since I was in elementary school and became aware of the fact that I looked different than everyone else. I know how to count calories, can tell you the healthiest “power” foods, know all the terminology used by the experts, and understand that nothing but eating healthfully and exercising regularly will help me to lose weight and keep it off. And yet, up to this point it has been a barrier I haven’t been able to cross. Instead I’ve tried to lose weight quickly because I felt like I would only be able to succeed once I was skinny. So I’ve fasted and binged repeatedly, from the time I was a teenager to just a few weeks ago. It was at the point of failure for my latest fast that I decided to start the Romance Biggest Winner. I can’t stand doing this to myself anymore.
My husband has been overweight most of his life as well, and we have a running joke that we’ll always start “tomorrow”. In the past few years, the joke has lost its humor. Instead of being accountable to one another, we’ve become each others’ enablers. It’s my hope that by having him see me get healthy, he’ll be motivated to try once again and that we’ll both, this time, be successful. Although my goal for the Romance Biggest Winner competition is to lose weight, it’s not my primary focus. I want to lose weight because I want to be healthy. There was once a time in my life when I envied all the skinny girl clothes—the jeans, the bikinis, the lingerie. I’ve had two children since then and realize I’ll probably never wear a bikini. But now, although I still want to be able to wear cute clothes, my greater desire is to be healthy. I don’t want to experience gall bladder attacks every few months. I want to be healthy so that I can enjoy hiking and biking and all the other fun activities I see people doing with their families. I want to grow old and be able to see my grandchildren grow up, not die prematurely because I allowed myself to contribute to the slow destruction of my body.
I also want to be an example for my daughters. Growing up, I had one side of the family who was very overweight—some morbidly obese, even—and although I understood that none of them were comfortable with their weight, there was so much love and happiness when they were together, and food always took a central role at their gatherings. On the other side of my family, everyone was “skinny” in my eyes—although a lot of them were smokers—but they didn’t seem nearly as happy. My mother had been overweight as a girl and in order to lose weight when she was a teenager, she drank nothing but tea and ate nothing but soup to get down to her goal weight. She’d been obsessive about her weight since then, and that obsession transferred to me. I have clear memories of her sitting on the kitchen stool in shorts, pinching the flesh on the inside of her thigh and telling me how disgusting it was. (My thighs were twice the size of hers.) Throughout her life, I never knew her to be happy with how she looked, even though she was one of the slimmest people I knew.
I’m not going to blame either side of my family for my personal choices—I AM responsible for my lifestyle and the decisions I’ve made. But I can’t help but think that if I had been given better examples, it would have been easier for me to be confident and choose a healthier path. This is what I hope to model for my daughters, not to be obsessive about their body image, but to choose a healthy way of life because that’s simply what’s best.
I know that speaking about our weights and confessing that we need help is a very difficult thing to do, and this is why I’ve been so encouraged already by the many romance readers and authors who have stepped up to the Romance Biggest Winner challenge. I admire each and every one of them for taking advantage of this opportunity and putting themselves in the public spotlight. And it is my great hope that when January 5, 2012 comes around, we will all have journeyed down a path toward better health and blocked out the road behind us: always going forward, never returning to the sedentary, unhealthy women we once were.
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To learn more about Ashley and her books, visit her website.
Posted by Trish Milburn Jun 15 2011, 12:01 am in eating healthy, exercise, fitness, goals, guest blogger, process, weight loss
By Heather Snow Hello! My name is Heather Snow and I am a very Un-healthy Writer. Well, that’s not true. Regardless of—luckily—blessedly, despite my habits I still enjoy overall good health. But I know that won’t last if I don’t change my ways. So let’s start again. Hello! My name is Heather Snow, and I [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn Jun 1 2011, 12:01 am in exercise, goals, Trish Milburn, weight loss, Writing
While New Year’s Day is the most popular time for setting goals, to me there are other natural times to reassess and set new goals — times like the changing of months or seasons. While the official beginning of summer is a few weeks away, in reality it’s already arrived. The heat is here to [...]
Posted by Michelle Butler May 30 2011, 1:43 am in eating healthy, exercise, goals, Holidays, inspiration, Michelle Butler, Michelle Mondays, Writing
Today is the unofficial start of summer. It’s a great time to renew or kick-off some healthy writer goals! This season is just made-to-order for healthy living. The weather makes you want to enjoy the great outdoors as it opens up so many more opportunities to get up and move. Any trip to the grocery [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn May 24 2011, 12:01 am in fitness, goals, Trish Milburn, weight loss
One of the recent e-mails I received from The Biggest Loser Club covered how motivation to lose weight is more effective the more specific we are in our reasons why we want to lose that weight. So I got to thinking about the beginning of my weight loss journey two years ago and realized that [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn May 10 2011, 12:01 am in bad habits, calories, exercise, food, food diary, goals, Trish Milburn, weight loss
We’re five months into this year, so now is a good time to assess how we’re doing in our Healthy Writer journeys. Here are five questions to ponder. I look forward to seeing your answers. 1. What resolution/goal have you kept up without fail this year? I gave up Coca-Cola at the end of last [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn Mar 1 2011, 12:01 am in calories, exercise, food diary, goals, inspiration, motivation, Trish Milburn, weight loss
There is little more exciting than seeing visible progress being made toward goals. For 17 days out of the 28 in February, I stepped onto the scale and saw a weight loss from the day before. Yes, that means there were 11 days where the number went up, but I tried not to let that [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn Feb 15 2011, 12:01 am in calories, exercise, food diary, goals, progress, Trish Milburn, weight loss
Recently, Tawny blogged here about the FitBit. I’d been eyeballing one of these handy little gadgets for about a year and recently bought one. I had to wait a few days after receiving it to set it up because my husband was installing a new hard drive on my computer. But last Monday, I set [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn Feb 8 2011, 12:37 am in calories, exercise, fitness, food diary, goals, portion control, Trish Milburn, weight loss
It’s February, Punxatawny Phil didn’t see his shadow, I have a new FitBit, and I rededicated my efforts to tracking my calories and getting a certain amount of exercise each day, no excuses. I’m determined to have a fabulous February. As the final hours of January faded away, I could literally feel my mood lift. [...]
Posted by Trish Milburn Jan 18 2011, 12:01 am in calories, exercise, fitness, goals, Trish Milburn, weight loss
When I first started this blog a couple of years ago, it was mainly a reporting mechanism for me to share my calorie intake and my exercise amounts and how they affected my weight. The blog has changed a good bit since then into a much more interesting and robust vehicle for conveying good health [...]
