Adina’s Cute & Perky Blog!

“Lord, if you can’t make me skinny, please make all my friends fat.”

That was at the bottom of an E-mail someone sent me yesterday.  Kind of funny, but kind of true of me in my former life.

I used to scan every room I was in looking for someone bigger than myself.  Sometimes I found one, and sometimes I didn’t.  I tended to surround myself with people who made me feel OK about being larger. 

Large and in charge. 

Only, I was in charge of nothing.

And I always thought that one day we would all work together toward a common goal.  I knew we all needed to lose weight.  I figured we all knew this.  How could we not know?

I mean, I was 256 pounds.  How many times did I see a 75 year old woman with this girth?  So, something evidently happens in there.  You either get healthy, or you die.  Hmmm….which will I choose?

So…I became the weird one of our group. 

I was the one who showed up with a cooler.  I was the one who was late to dinner, because I had to go to the gym.  And when I got to dinner, my food was different from the others.  And I didn’t order dessert anymore.

And when I got stuck or struggled, they encouraged me to eat.  Drink.  Be merry. 

Only, I wasn’t merry.  Especially not when I was off plan.

And as painful as it seems, in your journey to health and fitness, you lose friends.  But you gain them too.

I was telling someone at work the other day that he needed to surround himself with friends who wanted him to succeed.  Not friends who wanted him to stay as he was.

And it’s hard advice to hear.  But if you think about it, it would be like a recovering alcoholic spending time with someone with a drinking problem.  You would never encourage an alcoholic to stay with someone who was going to offer him alcohol on a regular basis.  Yes, from time to time he will be around alcohol.  But there is that time where he is too weak to knowingly put himself where it is served.  Not if he truly wants to recover.

While you are battling your way into health and fitness, there will be times you have to stay away from the people who would drag you down.  Even if they don’t know they are doing this to you.

But thank goodness the sacrifices come with reward.

At the end of my struggles was a life worth living.  And joy I didn’t know I had.  Ten years ago, I didn’t know I would go to my 20 year reunion and be unrecognizable.  I didn’t know I would laugh so long and so hard it would feel like I had just done an hour of cardio!

And somewhere along the line, for me, the prayer changed to, “Lord, since you DID make me thin, help me bring my friends along for this wonderful ride.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.