In the Raw

This blog started as a chronicle of my journey to lose weight by eating right and exercising. It was an honest account of the challenges I faced along my chosen path -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- to keep me accountable, document my progress, and inspire others to do the same. It eventually morphed into a lifestyle change blog (including fitness, green living, healthy cooking), but it tends to deteriorate from time to time (more often than not lately) into a running blog that mostly contains race reports and the occasional recipe post.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped posting the bad and the ugly, only celebrating my successes and ignoring my failures -- or at least downplaying them.  Part of me attributes this to my increase use of Dailymile, Facebook (and sometimes livejournal) where I post about the day to day struggles,  which seem too trivial for a whole blog post, so by the time I go write a blog post it's old news (to me) and I feel like I've already written it. The same happens when I started daily journaling about weight loss elsewhere; I got burnt out of blogging and thus had no mental energy to write anything here.

But another part of me feels like posting about it here is just whining and no one wants to read an entire post of that =P But you know what, this is my blog and I am still my primary audience; how can I learn from my mistakes if I don't write about them and reflect on them? Posting a one sentence status on Facebook or a line within a dailymile workout description gets buried quickly never to be found again. But here, I can search for it, relive it, reflect on it, and learn from it. How can I help inspire others with my journey when they don't get the whole picture? Reading about my successes may inspire others to strive for the same, but it doesn't help them relate when they struggle to get there and can't understand why it's so hard when I make it look so easy.

Well guess what: it's hard for me too! Real hard! Having a healthy lifestyle is a constant battle with myself and I have many meltdowns over it -- just ask Jason! Sometimes I get overwhelmed with making all the right food choices, or finding a new recipe to cook, or dealing with a running injury, or just plain being sick like normal people =P  People who follow me on Facebook joke that I am super woman because I'm always posting about running or biking or cooking something healthy ... but I'm not. I am a mere mortal just like you just trying to make sense of this crazy world and my place in it. Sometimes I joke that things were so much easier before I lost all the weight and became a runner/cyclist/fitness enthusiast -- before I knew better -- because, you know,  ignorance is bliss. When you know better and you make a bad choice it comes with a side of guilt. But is it worth it? Hell yes! I would not give up this lifestyle and go back to my old self ever!

I love the athlete I have become;
I love cooking my own meals from scratch;
I love knowing where my food comes from;
I love trying new things;
I love the simpler lifestyle I have adopted.

So there you have it. Kitzzy in the raw. Maybe this random stream of consciousness will help someone else cut themselves a little slack, or maybe no one will read it. But it sure feels good to put it out there.

PS - Wow, if you read all that, kudos to you! I guess this is why I take on this exercise of daily blogging from time to time, because it forces me to take a hard look at myself and reflect. This was supposed to be an entirely different post, but I like what came out when I started writing instead. I guess I'll write the other tomorrow.