It may not look like it when I’m eating, but I am trying to lose weight. I had three pregnancies in four years, the last one ending in miscarriage. My body has been on a hormonal rollercoaster ride for years, and don’t even get me started talking about emotions.

I was in the middle of trying to get in shape last year when I got pregnant, and after a summer/fall of miscarrying, I decided to pour myself into exercise. I have been doing a combination of cardio tennis, the pushup, situp, squat challenge, pilates, swimming, and, now that it’s warm again, bike riding. I get discouraged working so hard and seeing no difference on the scale, yet I remain so unmotivated to change my eating habits.

I got this Jillian Michaels book, Winning by Losing, because it promised to analyze my body and tell me how I should eat. Then I put it down when it started pushing me a little. I had other books to read, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it must have done something before I put it down, because I have been dealing with my tendency to hold back. I am forcing myself to pour myself out, and I am surprised at how hard that is. It is not just a matter of not holding back anymore.

It is as if I had planted an onion field and decided I wanted apples instead. So I have a thriving onion field to plow up and eradicate before I can put in an orchard. And I know that the orchard has to grow for 7 years before it will yield any fruit. And that’s after I actually get everything uprooted from the old garden, and get the new trees planted. Yeah. So, it could take a while, I’m sayin’.

So today in my journey, I ran into a painful truth about myself. I was doing a cardio tennis drill. There were two lines. The teacher throws a ball up, you run to hit it within one bounce, run through a rope ladder, and run to the other line, where you repeat the drill. I do this ok for a few hits, but then I get so tired from the effort to reach the ball and run through the ladder that I want to catch my breath before I start over. That works fine when there’s a line. Not so much when you are first in line, which is where I found myself quite often. And I started asking the person behind me to go in front of me. . . after the teacher had already thrown the ball.

That really messed that person up and created a jack knife in the line. I felt terrible for doing this, even though the person behind me was the guy who’d mistaken me for the girl who fell.

It made me think about other areas in my life where I wasn’t prepared, and just put on the brakes and just became immovable. It made me wince. Maybe that’s what I’m doing about diet here? Like maybe I should just read the book already, huh?

Have you ever run into a part of yourself that made you wince? What did you do about it?