I’m not gonna lie, today was tough. Like really tough. The last week honestly has been tough if you want to get down to it. Today though, I cried, a lot. Changing the conversation with myself has not been easy however each time I heard the old conversation, I immediately changed it. That is until today.

I gave myself a fitness goals at the beginning of the year that are small. When I say small I mean tiny. Why did I do this? I knew that if I told myself I would do 5 1/2 push ups, 5 lunges on each side, and a 30 second plank, I knew I could do this. I will begin walking again when it warms up as I’m a wimp when it comes to the cold. These are goals I would have never done in my past. Honestly they don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I should be doing more. The problem is by starting out the gate fast, I often never finished due to the conversation. I would get angry with myself for not reaching whatever big goal I had and self sabotage would show up like a monster at the door. This way I can do these small goals and continue working up. I honestly can not wait to see where I am at the end of the year. Each time the old conversation would come up when doing my little goals, I would simply say, “Good job on meeting your push up, plank, and lunge goal for the day.” That is, until today.

This morning after doing my exercises I hopped on FB for a bit before my acupuncture appointment. This picture showed up in my Memories feed. I absolutely love this picture. As you can see, it was taken when Jenna was just a baby. It is a treasured picture with my Mimi who passed a couple of years ago. What a fabulous picture. I looked at it with fond memories and shared it to my wall. It’s a great picture and it is also a picture where I was a size 8 and I looked good. Now at the time, I was trying to work off the rest of the baby weight from Jenna, which wasn’t a lot but I thought I was really heavy here.  I wasn’t thinking that today, just wow I really liked this picture and hey I looked good at 33. Then I got ready for the day. I put on a tank and maxi skirt because it is cold and I wanted to wear a cable knit duster because it was cold. I have this weird thing about too many layers on my arms so if I’m layering with a duster or jacket, I will wear something sleeveless. I looked in the mirror and like a loud-speaker, I heard the old conversation. “Oh my gosh your arms are disgusting.” “How can you even go out in public looking like that, how awful.”

I stopped and immediately tried to change the conversation to thanking my arms for allowing me to do a 30 second plank and 5 1/2 push ups. It wasn’t working. You see, my arms have never been this big, even when I was pregnant. My arms and legs were the two things I felt like I didn’t have to camouflage, but now. I cried today. I cried a lot today because I didn’t like what I saw staring back at me in the mirror. Those old tapes played over and over in my head. They wouldn’t stop or quiet down. I started going through how I’m not doing enough push ups and how I need to buy weights NOW instead of when I’m ready, etc. It was so hard hearing that super loud voice telling me how disgusting I am and there is no way my husband isn’t embarrassed by me. His work trip is in a month and a few days. I’m telling myself I can’t go because I’m going to embarrass him and I should be embarrassed for wanting to go. I haven’t gone to his work party because I was too embarrassed for people to see how I look now. It was very hard for me to converse with my friends today because of how I was feeling. Maybe if I still looked how I did in the picture, it would have been different? When I get back down to that size, it will be different. The funny thing is when I look at myself in the picture, I realized I was saying the exact same thing. Instead of saying, “Great job for losing a lot of the baby weight and getting back into your size 8 clothes.” or “Congratulations body for bringing this baby girl here through a very tough pregnancy.”; I said, “You are so disgusting and huge, I can’t believe how long it is taking you to lose this baby weight”. You see, I can say if I looked like I did in the picture it will be different and better, but unless I change my dialogue, it will be exactly the same.

The conversation I had with myself  today and in the past, is a conversation I would never remotely consider having with another person. It’s mean, there is no other way around it. Today I was mean to myself. Meaner than I’ve been in a few days but I couldn’t stop it. This is a dialogue that I’ve been having with myself for years now. Oh how I wish that when I decided to change the conversation, this dialogue would have just disappeared. It didn’t, it is still here and something that I will probably be battling until my new dialogue and conversations get loud enough to overtake it. So yes, today pretty much sucked. I’m sure I will have more days that will suck. The good thing is because I’ve decided to change the conversation, I’m changing my dialogue. I thanked my big arms and legs for what they are letting me do now. I thanked myself for allowing me to bring it back to a place of health. I thanked my body for telling me what foods are best for it and what foods I really need to avoid. Those conversations were quite and they were short. They were a whisper back to the loud-speaker dialogue in my conversation today. The important thing is that I did whisper back because I know that each day if I purposely change the conversation, one day it will over take the conversation and I will be in a much better place both physically and mentally.