As someone with anxiety and an inherent need to not have people mad at me, saying 'no' has always been difficult and over-explaining my actions became as second nature as breathing. If a manager wanted to know if I could take on extra tasks, I would say yes and over-commit even if my bandwidth was actually full. I was afraid to refuse and this often let to me feeling quite burnt out or overworked.

As someone who loves pasta and bagels and is Italian-American and grew up on the Standard American, carb-heavy diet, attempting a low-carb, ketogenic diet seems like quite the hurdle. But I did dabble with really trying to be better at it in 2017, though for various reasons my approach was on again-off again and while I overall lost about 11 pounds, it wasn't where I wanted to be and some of that was on me and not being consistent.

So this year, for 2018, one of my goals was to improve my overall health and that includes my weight and diet and overall general wellness. I've noticed the older I get the more bloated and sluggish I feel after large, carb-heavy meals and since I didn't want to spend every day in digestive discomfort and actually make progress in losing weight, I need to better commit to keeping calm and keto on.

It's probably easy to tell from the lack of consistent updating and such that 2017 was more akin to a raging dumpster fire than a life glo-up for me. So it goes. Not all of it was bad, though...

I've been pretty quiet here, mostly because November ended up being a bit of a thing to get through between work, work, death in the family, and just so many things piling up all at once that before I knew it here we are in Thanksgiving week. Thanks for everyone still reading, and new readers, even though I've been so quiet!

Week 3 was trying to get in some walking at least 4-5 days a week and two Stronglifts sessions. Walking around the park after work is usually somewhere between 40-60 minutes, so I feel like that's fairly good for being basically couch-to-desk three weeks ago. 

Week of this whole Revising Me project is coming to a close and this week was trying to establish patterns, stick to eating goals, and several attempts to not get frustrated.

I tried to be good and have a salad for lunch Mon-Fri, but I got to about Tues before I needed to mix it up. For the most part breakfast was same: a low-carb protein bar that's high fiber from Costco and some hard boiled eggs. Aside from Friday, I mostly made or brought in all my lunches from home, which is actually quite a feat for me when it comes to the work week. 

But, I have quite a few mental hurdles to overcome, it seems.

I haven't talked about it much here but I've decided to be candid: I need a change, specifically my weight. This isn't a new revelation, but early on in our Disney World trip in a group photo it was there staring me in the face. I've gotten big, bigger than I've ever been, and for someone who is only 5'1" it's utterly not ideal.

To be clear- if you're happy with your size, thin, thick or anywhere in between, that's awesome! You are happy with you and that's what matters. In my case, I'm not happy with me in this regard.