Knowing.

Since my first year with my healthy life-style change is coming up (in 11 days),  I have been doing so much reflecting.  This has been an crazy year. I have learned more about myself than I think I had in my whole 19 years. Losing weight is so, so much more then just eating right and working out. It forces you to take a hard look at yourself, and reach deep down and figure out WHY you let this get out of hand in the first place. If you figure out why, you can work towards fixing it. For me it was a combo of a couple different things. 1) Emotionally eating and 2) Having a diet heavy in processed foods.

I didn't realize I was an emotional eater until maybe 2 months into this. I started going through a rough time and found myself searching the pantry for no reason. It clicked! I was consuming so many extra calories because of my mood? That ended quickly. It's not worth it. Now, if I am mad or upset, I get some fresh-air or talk to someone. I refuse to eat unhealthy, extra calories to better myself. In the end, it makes you more miserable. If you are battling emotional eating you can start to change this by simply asking yourself when you go to grab food, are you actually hungry? If you aren't you may be emotionally eat, or just bored. Go do something and get your mind off of it. I love this quote and I think it fits perfectly with this topic, "Eat to live, DON'T live to eat." It is so simply put and true. Food is what we need to survive, you want to eat good things.

That being said. A year ago today I was eating so unhealthy. Mostly processed food. By that I mean everything other than, fruits, veggies, meats, grains, nuts so on. If you rely heavily on processed foods and you aren't happy with your weight, switching your diet over to healthy foods from earth will help you loose weight and feel better. There are so many chemicals and sugar in packaged foods. There could be over 100's of ingredients to make a cookie. That's so scarey to me. I'm not saying I cut them out entirly. I still have a cookie once in a while, or chex mix, stuff like that, I just have a lot less of them. Getting back to basics is the easiest way to explain it, try eating the way people did 100 years ago. There were no pop-tarts, or doritos, or frappa-mocha whatevers or t.v dinners. Your body wasn't ment to eat things someone made in a lab somewhere. It's a really important thing to remember!

The moral of the story is, you cannot lose weight until you understand why you are the way you are. You can't fix something if you do not know the cause of it. Really figuring out why I was over-weight was really difficult. I'm happy I did though! It took a lot of time, but it was well worth it in the end.