Changing My Goal

Two years ago I decided to take part in a Healthy Lifestyle program offered through my work. It was in joining this program and setting a goal that I came to know a woman named Whitney as a friend and not just a community outreach nurse from work.

The program is designed to help encourage healthy living through goal setting. Being significantly overweight it seemed weight loss should be my obvious choice in setting a goal. I was very optimistic the first year. My goal was to lose fifty pounds in a year. It seemed reasonably achievable.

I changed my diet. I tried to do extra exercise. I managed about 20 pounds.

Last year I decided to set a goal to lose twenty more pounds. It shouldn’t be too difficult should it? Apparently it was. Instead of losing weight, I gained weight back.

Last year was very stressful for me. Nothing seems to put weight on an empath faster than stress. I had about five months of intense personal heartbreak. I had more than a few stressful nights at my job. I began losing sleep and eating my stress away.

At the beginning of this year, 2017, I felt change in the air. I decided it would be my year of metamorphosis.

With the onset of my now more positive attitude things began to look up. Some of the things that had stressed me out cleared up.

I wasn’t fully healed back to normal though. Different stressors had entered my life. Included in this list was the desire to lose weight. I had begun feeling stress from my inability to lose the weight.

This year in my consultation with Whitney we talked about my goals for this year. I told her that weight loss was becoming too stressful and I had pretty much just given up.

Knowing everything I had been through over the last couple years, and knowing I have been working hard on emotional healing as well, Whitney asked if maybe I should try a goal other than weight loss. She thought maybe I could find something to work on my mental and emotional health instead of my physical health. It made a lot of sense.

Writing is my outlet. This blog needs articles. So, I set a goal of writing two blog posts a month dealing with my journey to emotional healing and mental health.

I think this is a goal I can meet. I feel optimistic. Not feeling pressured to lose weight made me even feel lighter.  I have begun to want to change my diet.  I am paying more attention to the little things that put weight on.  With the pressure off, I might lose the weight anyway.

I think this was a good decision.