A Brand New Me
By Cindy Walker

Well, slowly but surely the weight is coming off. I have gone from 194.6 pounds to...are you ready for this...182.6 pounds! I hope to be below 180 before the Romantic Times convention starts, which is in about nine days. Wish me luck on that one.

I have to admit though, that for the last three weeks I've fallen down on my exercising. There have been mornings when I simply didn't hear the alarm and got up way too late to exercise. Then there were other mornings when I woke up, but I just couldn't seem to drag myself out of bed. In as little as three weeks, I am noticing a lot of things – like I yawn all day long, I don't have energy, and my thighs are starting to bulge again. Drat! My plan was to begin walking at the beginning of April, but that hasn't happened. I'm hoping that once the convention is out of the way and I'm not killing myself coordinating a show and writing the script, I can set aside time each day to walk. Now that spring is finally here (knock on wood), I just need to kick myself in the butt and do it.

On the eating side of things, I'm going to confess I've been bad there too. Things have been so hectic, I have not had time to go to the grocery store, much less take a day out to cook. I try to eat sensibly, but that doesn't always happen. Of course, I've been reverting back to that old way of thinking -- that if I don't eat or eat very little, I'll lose weight. I'm really fighting that right now. Eating sensibly is what helps you lose weight. I know that. But what do you do when absolutely nothing sounds good? I have food in my cabinets, but I find myself going from cabinet to cabinet to refrigerator and back to the cabinets, yet I can't find anything that sounds good, looks good, or tastes good. But I really resist the temptation to just grab a bag of chips or some type of snacky food and pass that off as my meal. It's very tempting and hard to resist, but more often than not, I do resist. That little voice in the back of my brain nudges me into doing the right thing. For the most part anyway. It wasn't nudging too hard when I got that vanilla malt though...

Now, is this weight loss changing my attitude about me? Not really. I do try very, very hard to watch what I say because I'm the type that tears myself down all the time. In my warped way of thinking, I always assume people are thinking the worst about me, so I just go ahead and give it a voice before anyone else has a chance. The way I see it, they're thinking it, so I might as well just say it out loud. So I say what I believe people are thinking about me. Aside from the bad food habits I'm trying to break (yes, I'm still fighting those cravings for Krispy Kremes), this is probably the hardest habit I have to break. I guess it's like a safety net – knock myself down, degrade myself, and generally tear myself apart so I can beat everyone else to the punch.

So I've consciously been trying to avoid those types of comments. It's hard though – sometimes things are out of my mouth before I realize it. I've been trying to gracefully accept compliments, but again I have to bite my tongue to keep those barbs from flying out. It's really hard just to say thank you. Why? Maybe it's because I don't have confidence in myself; low self-esteem, feeling inadequate, like I never measure up to some warped standards of beauty. I don't know – there's no “Dr.” in front of my name and no “PhD” behind it – but I do know that I have to find a way to conquer this way of thinking in order to progress.

It's still so very hard when you have a negative body image, and you've    more >>