Dawn’s Weight Loss Journey

It is rainy and dreary here this morning! WOW… Sure wish I was home in my beloved P.J.’s!!! 

Well, it’s been a strange week, filled with some highs and some lows! Let’s get the lows out of the way… 

My uncle passed away last night…And this makes me sad…He has been in the hospital for a month, and was terminal, so it was expected, I suppose…Still tough none the less… When growing up, he was my favorite uncle, but in later years, he became an alcoholic and withdrew from the family…So, you know…Very mixed emotions about it all… 

Mostly, I am worried about my mother, for it was her brother… Now, my mother is mentally unstable at best, on good days…When things like this happen, I get extremely worried about her…She just seems so fragile some times… 

I saw my mother this week, rather unexpectedly…(She lives 45 minutes away!) I was coming out of my doctors and she was heading in. (Yes, we see the same doc!)  Now. I had not seen her in over a month…I know. I know. Bad daughter I have been, but frankly, I was kind of caught up in my own marriage/housing drama… 

Anyway… If I had to guess, I would say my mom has gained 20-25 pounds in just the last 6 months!!! Honest!! She is heavier then she has ever been…She looks awful…She does not look like my beautiful mother…And I was soooo shocked I didn’t really even know what to say… 

She is a diabetic, she does not work, and there is no excuse what so ever for her to look like that… I am soooo worried about her that I have been unable to sleep the last few nights…Add in to that the stress of her brother dying, and man…I just don’t know if she is gonna make it…Honest… 

My sister has talked with her. My step dad has talked with her. I have talked with her…To no avail…We were all hoping that seeing her brother in the hospital and so sick would help change her (He was a diabetic too…) but so far, it has not… Its very hard and stressful to see a loved one letting themselves go, knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it…Kind of like watching a train wreck about to occur, and knowing you are powerless to stop it… 

How do we all know this?? Because we have all been there. Right??? I didn’t lose weight because of anything anybody said. It was a personal decision that I had to make, when my time was ready… 

And I was not ready many many times…And nothing any one said to me made any difference, really… You can never force anyone…Just like smoking…A smoker has to be ready to quit…An overweight person has to be ready to change… 

So I know, no matter how much I talk, it goes in one ear and out the other with her. She is not ready… The good news is (YES, my blog is not ALL doom and gloom) that seeing her this week…Seeing my uncle pass away at the age of 64, has again, reconfirmed TWO things… 

Number one: I WILL fight this battle of the bulge my whole life, and I will eventually defeat it. I will never ever give up. I do not want to be my mother. My father. My uncle. I don’t want to be that… Number two: Once again, if you don’t know this by now…Life is way too short to not be living the life YOU want to live…Whether it’s as a fat person or a thin person…A happy person or a sad person…A healthy person or a not so healthy person… 

YOU can control that…And why would you not??? Because I will tell you. There is a lot of stuff in this life we CAN’T control…Things happen without our knowledge or our permission…That’s called life…So why then, would we let the few things we CAN control, control us??? Not me… 

Not anymore… I am trying. Desperately. To live the life I was meant to live. It’s not easy…Hard decisions had to be made. People I loved had to be let go…Never ever easy… 

So I will end with this little ditty that my friend said…Last week, after a pretty serious heart to heart, I said “I know. I know. I am not EVERYONE’s cup of tea!”  And she replied: “Dawn, you may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but you are definitely someone’s cappuccino!” I LOOOOVED it… Why settle for tea, when you can have cappuccino??