I am the queen of being hard on myself. If you don’t believe me, ask any one of my best friends. I will take the weight of the world onto my shoulders if I think it will help a bad situation turn good. (By the way, that doesn’t help. Sometimes it just creates more problems.) So, before I continue with this friendly reminder, let me first say that I completely understand where all of you are coming from. That said, I have something to say.
I love this Sisterhood. I love that we interact every day. I love that we look to each other for encouragement. I love that we are friends. Not just online friends but real friends. I know that I can count on any one of you should I need something. And I love that. It makes me happy. But one thing that does not make me happy is seeing people being hard on themselves for having a bad week or a few bad weeks. It hurts my incredibly sensitive heart.
Look, folks. Weigh loss is only a PART of our journey here. Sure, the weight loss part of your journey is the biggest reason WHY you’re here at the Sisterhood, but we all have to keep in mind that weight loss isn’t our life. It’s part of our life. Weight loss is a incredibly tricky thing. I like to look at it like it’s a puzzle. You find all of your pieces, figure out where they fit and connect to one another, and then you have the last piece into place and your puzzle is together! You’ve figured it out! And the weight melts right off.
Now, we all know what happens when we try to move a finished puzzle, right? Odds are, unless you’ve mastered the art of moving a finished puzzle (If you have, I hate you. Okay, not really.), that at least part of the puzzle is going to come apart. And what do you do? You just put them back together again. Right?
This happens in life, too. When things become out of routine, your puzzle pieces come apart. So what if they come apart? It happens. Conditions have changed, and it would be impossible for the pieces to not come apart. You can’t always control life changes that create unbalance in your life. You can’t always control that one day you’ve had such a crap day that you want ice cream, and by God, you’re going to have ice cream.
So what if you have ice cream that one day?
OK, OK. I know what you’re thinking. But I don’t want to let my team down! I get that. I do. But we didn’t put you into teams so that you would be afraid of letting each other down. We put you into teams so that you could pick each other up and cheer each other on. We put you into teams because for some people, being a part of a team helps them focus better. And it lets you get to know each other a little better.
I get that you are a bunch of competitive people. I am competitive too. Winning is fun, but it isn’t what’s important. Our journeys are what’s important. Reaching our goals and creating new life habits that are going to make us happier people is what’s important.
Think about how far you’ve come. Not in terms of numbers, but in terms of life. Even if you’ve only been with us for a short while, I’m certain that you’ve created at least one change that is going to help you in your journey. One change leads to another and a bunch of changes lead to happiness. I’m not telling you to not be competitive. I’m not telling you to just throw every thing out of the window. I’m telling you to just keep at it. BE PROUD OF YOURSELVES. If you hit a snag, don’t be so hard on yourselves! Pick yourselves up (or ask one of us to do it) and start again. A bad week isn’t the end of the world. A bad week is fuel for the fire to have a good week next week.
So, now I’m challenging each and every one of you to think about this week in a new way. If the scales are bad this week (and I know they won’t be), then write me a post focusing on the good things instead of the bad. Then use those good things to turn around the bad things. I KNOW you can do it.
And never forget, I’m proud of every single one of you every single day.
