Today is day SIX of the Oxygen Fitness Challenge

So I am cleaning, getting ready for my first client to arrive, when I come across a lone chicken nugget that had been left from the day before…..I gobbled that sucker up so fast it was almost fresh again! What did you expect….It’s CHICKEN!!  You already know that I LOVE ME SOME CHICKEN. I especially love chicken that has been squeezed from a tube, shaped into a round little ball, dipped in flour, and then fried. YUM! Cheers to good health 😉

(I wrote the exert above on July 11, 2011. I was 190 pounds)

I started my fitness journey just over three years ago and it began at what I felt like was the worst time in my life. After seventeen years together my husband told me that he wanted to move on with his life and he intended it to be without me.

I can still recall nearly every detail of that fatal day and the drive we took to have our conversation. “I’m not in love with you anymore Amber. I will help you find your way as you start over, but I want a divorce.” We were heading to a dance team birthday party our daughter had been invited to at The Great Wolf Lodge. She’s nine and I was thirty-four years old. I had no idea back then, but his choice would be the end of us all. It was also the beginning of us as new people.

Today I am once again at a new beginning and that beginning is equipped with the understanding that life is not a series of stops and starts, nor will there ever be a reset button. I will be stuck with every choice that I make for the rest of my life. “Choose wisely…” #nopressure

THE LIFE YOU LIVE IS A CHOICE

It’s easy to stay frozen in fear when the answers to life are not obvious. There are times I want to curl into a tiny little ball to hide from pain, doubt, and loathing. There are times I can not stomach the person that I am. The person that needs to fight, that needs to struggle, that needs to be strong on her own. The person who needs to love herself first. Why do people assume that I don’t?

I would argue that it is the world who lacks in love and I insist that it be acknowledged that I am not, nor will I ever, reject my soul as deserving. Of course I love myself. You should love me too and if you don’t love me then there is obviously something wrong with you? Or is it me? Now you know my confusion. Who should love who first and what if we don’t? There are people I do not like and people who do not like me. What then of love? Where does that fit in?

I live my life questioning, but I leave the answers open to perspective. We are not meant to know one certainty, or any absolute. If we were humanity would not always be reaching for more, and more, and more progress. I smirk because nature is showing us  through science what is happening to the world via our growth and expansion. We may very well find ourselves ending by our own hands. We need to slow down, to love life with less, and yet we all are searching for something, “There has to be more to life.”

That’s exactly what I was thinking about my first time at the gym. I was crying. I was fat. I was not sure of my purpose. I did not know where to start. I did not know how to make things better. I did not think I could continue. I was not sure I even wanted to try. I just knew what I could not continue as things were and that each new day was my chance to try.