Today we have a sweet-ass guest post from my girl, Charlie! She blogs at Operation Shrink Charlie’s Big Butt and is super sweet, hilarious, and all around awesome!
I should probably also throw in understanding…because she sent me this guest post (after I asked her to do one for me!) a while ago and she hasn’t given me crap about not posting it. 
Xoxoxo 
So without further ado…
So I agreed to do a guest post for you.
And then, POOF. I vanished for a bit. (and then POOF! I vanished for a bit after that! -Steve)
But I was busy, honest. Life seems to get in the way of lots of my plans and adventures.
But there’s one thing life hasn’t deterred me from.
LOSING WEIGHT.
Because as of this morning, I was in the land of the 140s for the first time ever in my adult life. And as many words as there that could be put together in beautiful glowing sentences that would describe how I felt when I saw that 149 pop up for the first time, I can say with total honesty that words were not what happened.
But there were tears.
Tears of joy. Tears of gratefulness. Tears of relief. And just a couple of bitter tears thrown in for good measure.
I’m sure that some people might not understand that, but you, Steve, I know you will.
I say that because after sharing a room with you for 3 days at Fitbloggin (and also with the illustrious and irreplaceable Mrs. Fatass) I know that we share lots of the same thoughts about weight loss.
There is a moment of reckoning. Where we have to admit that we are not where we want to be, and vow to change it.
There are moments of nothing short of valor. When we do some of the most unthinkable things we have ever done in our lives, all in the name of change. Like watching you do Zumba in the FRONT OF THE ROOM, sweating your butt off and having a blast. (Which you get major kudos for because I have YET to attempt Zumba. I’m far too uncoordinated, a fact you are well aware of!)
But mostly, there are the days when life tries to get the best of us.
Some mornings, I feel like I’m playing a losing game of Battleship with life.
You know the game Battleship? Where you have your ships strategically placed on a board where the other person can’t see it, and they call out numbers trying to sink your ships? Yeah, that game perfectly describes the adventures I have had with dieting.
Some mornings, I’ve already got 3 ships down, and it’s not even 9am. There are days when every single ship of determination I’ve had was sunk shortly after an ill-timed breakfast of bacon and French toast.
Lots of people know how that feels- we start our diets faithfully on Monday mornings, and by Wednesday night, we are crying out “You sunk my battleship!”
Stupid food. Stupid yielding willpower. Stupid cravings that make us cave.
So what are folks like us (who desperately want to lose weight) to do?
I’d like to propose a solution.
We wake up every morning and keep out battleships stationed.
In exactly the same place.
At first, it sounds like something only an idiot would do. Well, this post is being written by an idiot extraordinaire.
Because that’s what I did.
And it works.
Foolish as it may seem, my body needed the structure of never wavering. Even though sometimes I was sunk before noon, it never changed my mind about wanting to lose the weight. Life did it’s best to steer me off course, but there was no changing my resolve. My battleships were stationed to where I knew it would work.
Did I lose weight every week? Nope.
Did I lose weight for good over a long amount of time? It appears to be the case (although I suppose we will just have to wait and see!).
But what I do know is the person I am now is almost 90 pounds smaller than the person I was. And that kind of number is worth sticking to your guns for. Worth holding your ships steady on the course. Worth being sunk once in a while for.
I’ve got 10 pounds and 4 ounces left before I am at my goal of 100 pounds lost. It’s taken me almost 3 years, too many plateaus to count, and a few setbacks. But by holding my ships in the same place, I’ve changed everything.
Remember how I said earlier there were some bitter tears thrown in for good measure?
Those tears are for believing for so long that I couldn’t do it, that I was incapable of losing the weight once and for all. All the time I lost, being someone other than who I am today, feeling hurt and broken, lost and hungry, frustrated and fat.
I cried those bitter tears so I will NEVER forget feeling that way. I don’t ever want to go back, not to that dark place in my life. And I would never have known how dark it really was if the bright lights of success weren’t beckoning me now.
I’m not really good at nautical terms (plus I can’t keep a straight face when someone says “poop deck”) but I know that I want to be something like a lighthouse. Showing people the way to a better place. A brighter place. A place where folks like you and me can shine brighter than we ever have before.
Where together, we can truly run on awesome.
Check out Charlie’s blog here and follow her on Twitter here. You’ll be glad you did!
