Wahoo!

I’m still floating from my weigh-in last night: I've lost 75 pounds!! (11 of which I have lost in the last three weeks working through this twenty eight day challenge.) I have been working towards that number for so long – stuck it out through a 9 month plateau where I couldn’t lose an ounce – and there it is. 75 humongous pounds. That’s the weight of an entire human being: 1 ½ of my daughter. That’s 15 bags of sugar. That’s 9 gallons of water. It’s a 75 pound bag of personal demons, sadness, disappointment, and self-hatred. Gone. I won’t carry that anymore. Any of it.

I left my private with boot camp session with Ellen yesterday completely spent – totally exhausted. But not broken, not even close. I can’t really even describe the joy that accompanies this particular exhaustion. As tired as I am I still feel like I can take on the world. What is there that I can’t do? All those platitudes that people throw around that I tend to dismiss because I hear them so often suddenly have very deep meaning to me: “What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” “Believe in yourself without compromise”. “Your only limits are self-imposed”. It’s true. All of it.

And what’s failure anyway? Even if I hadn’t lost a pound in the last three weeks with Ellen, it wouldn’t have been failure. I have pushed my body, my heart, my spirit right to the edge – some days we even went right over that edge – and I didn’t give up. It didn’t even occur to me. When I was sad, I sat with it. I didn’t eat to make it better. When I was tired, I pushed through it. I didn’t sit back and wait to feel inspired – I went to the studio and inspired myself, letting my beloved teachers help spark the blaze. I surrounded myself with people who believe in me without comprise so that when I started to waiver, their support helped set me back on track.

So, I’m starting my last 7 days of my 28 day challenge. I can’t believe that I’m almost at the end of something that won’t really ever end.