I am not a numbers person. I have been doing a lot of soul searching lately and realizing that my obsession with numbers was sending me into a deep depression – numbers like my weight, the numbers on my clothing labels, the numbers of calories in every single morsel of food that passed my lips, the number of calories burned during the number of days I went to the gym. Being obsessed with these numbers helped to change my life at one point but, brought me back from the brink of potential chronic illness or death. Now; however, that same obsession is robbing me of happiness. So screw the numbers, it’s time to try something new. While I have regained a little of the weight I’d lost, I can not let that determine my happiness or self-worth and I can no longer see that as a failure.

It’s time to focus on my well-being. It’s time to eat healthfully because it’s good for me; not because it’s going to change a number somewhere. Screw the calorie counting, I already KNOW how to meet my body’s nutritional needs – after all these years, I can plan a 1300-calorie day without reading a single nutritional label. It’s time to exercise because it makes me feel good and enables me to participate in the activities I love; not because it’s going to change a number somewhere. Rather than “killing myself” in the gym, I should come alive there. It’s time to accept the body I have and celebrate it for what it is, not for what I wish it could be when staring at pictures of fitness models. It is time to treat myself well because this is the only self I am ever going to have, not because I think it isn’t good enough and needs to be something else. I have never (well, rarely) tried to change who I am in my heart to meet someone else’s expectations; why would I try to change my body for that reason?

This is where I am now in my journey… a place of acceptance, of celebration, of joy.