The Road to Awesome is Paved With Success AND Failure

Well, here is a just a bit of transparency for your Wednesday.  


Being a fifty-two year old mom of toddlers has been a wake up call for me in a lot of ways, but especially in the area of my health.

I mean, I've always planned to live a good long time, but I don't think I ever felt the PRESSURE to live to a ripe old age.  But I have young children now.  They need me to be around, you know?

So in December of 2012, I started a journey to good health.  I changed a lot of my bad eating habits. (Not all of them, clearly judging from this, and this, and this.)  But as a general rule, 

• I eat much cleaner, healthier foods  
• I get more exercise, typically working out 4-6 times a week
• I take a Sabbath
• I stress less about the small stuff

I'm still not as good as I should be about resting, relaxing, or de-stressing, but I'm working on it. :)

Anyway, as part of my journey to good health, I had to take a look at myself in the mirror and realize I had a lot of weight to lose.  The avatars you see at the top are my starting weight (on the left), and my goal weight (on the right).  Keep in mind, these avatars are like a 25 year old version of me. (Meaning, I'm not nearly this smooth skinned or firm . . . like I said, a bit of transparency here today).

To be a healthy weight for my age and height I was shocked to learn I needed to lose 51 pounds! So I set myself a goal to lose the weight in one year (an average of 1 pound a week). I didn't gain all that weight overnight, and I wasn't going to lose it overnight.

                  As of TODAY, I have lost 26 pounds.  

              Halfway to my goal!

At my heaviest (I still look okay,
but looks can be deceiving, as I
was 51 pounds overweight here!) 

And today, 2 sizes smaller and 26 pounds lighter!

I feel successful, even though I have definitely had some rough weeks in there (I gained 4 pounds one week from ONE MEAL!  And at a pound a week, that took a month to get rid of! Then I plateaued for 6 weeks, desperately wanting to give up . . . but I didn't)

But I also feel successful because I'm not stressed out about the ups and downs I experience on the scale.  My goal is in the distance, and the successes and failures along the way are just part of the process.  

I think that's true of everything in life.

The journey of our lives include successes and failures. They are just part of the process.  

All that to say, I'm on the path that leads to awesome (notice I didn't say skinny! . . . but if skinny is involved, I guess I'm okay with that too!)

Finding the Margins

When I was in college, I had this one professor who always allowed us to use a cheat sheet on test days. That policy, in and of itself, was not that unusual, as many professors had similar policies.  But where this professor differed was that he had no rules about our cheat sheet other than it all had to fit on the front side of one sheet of paper.

No rules about font size.

No rules about margins.

Simply, "However many words you can get on the front side of one piece of paper."

Like everyone else, I tried to type my entire study sheet on that piece of paper.  Every. Single. Word. I used size 6 font and set the margins as wide as I could.  And in whatever white space was left by my printer's inability to print that wide, I wrote by hand.  There was not one square inch of white space.  No discernible margin.

I noticed, though, that this didn't actually help me on test days.  There was too much on the page to be useful at all.  I couldn't find any of the information I needed because the words were all just crammed together on the page.

So I changed my strategy and actually studied for the test.  Then I put information on the sheet that I thought I might need during the test.  Around each piece of this information was space.  Lots and lots of space.  And because I had created margins around my information, it was easy to find what I was looking for.

I was thinking about this yesterday because I listened to a sermon from Andy Stanley called Breathing Room,  and it made me realize that sometimes too much is just too much.  Cramming everything into life that you think you need doesn't make your life better, it makes it busy.  And it makes it infinitely harder to find the things in your life that are actually beneficial.

All that to say, I'm going to begin today to find the margins of my life, create some white space, and enjoy the breathing room.