My Roadmap to Change, Stop 1

Since I have referenced a couple of times that I am now actively working on retraining my brain to bypass its long-held negative beliefs, I thought I'd take some time to document how I got on this journey to begin with. I will say, I have generally always had an interest in psychology and self-help techniques, but I rarely took any real action (or enough real actions) to change myself. Things came to a head for me a few years back when I realized I was the most stressed out, overworked and overweight I had ever been. I had a short fuse with everybody.  Most things other people did seemed completely illogical, baffling and just plain wrong and I let those things get to me over and over. I knew things needed to change but I kept telling myself that I didn't even know where to start.

In the late summer of 2017, just after my birthday (and incidentally, a month or so before my 20th high school reunion), a friend shared a Rachel Hollis video on her Facebook page. It was called something like, "Why you can't lose weight." I had never heard of Rachel Hollis - I had no clue who she was or whether she had any business talking about weight loss. I clicked on the video because I was frustrated with my inability to lose the weight that I had been trying to lose since my kids were born (which, at that point, had happened over 10 years prior).

I expected to either hear something like, "you just have to burn more calories than you take in," or, maybe, "you need to hire a personal trainer and a dietician who can help you calculate your macros," blah blah blah.  And maybe her video did have suggestions like those, but the thing that really stood out to me - as if this video had been sent to me specifically - was the message that (to paraphrase) you need to drop your bullshit and get real about all the changes you're NOT making when you say you want to lose weight. As a person who used to work out at the Y and then be so hungry when I was done that I'd regularly stop at the only fast food restaurant (Taco Bell) between the gym and my house, that message, and her delivery of it (like, "friend, you are too smart to be acting this dumb!") really hit home for me. I went on to drop 10 pounds before my reunion a few weeks later. That message was a catalyst for all the changes that would come next.