Goals then and now

The weekend felt really good for me, after my (ahem!) grueling 20-hour work week last week. still, my first week back to work went pretty smoothly and my body handled it OK. The pain I had from hitting my tendon/incision site with a wrought iron chair leg has passed and my swelling is almost non-existent. Physical therapy is going so well that she keeps making it harder. Today we did a lot of calf raises and lunges and an exercise on the steps to get me more comfortable with pushing off the front of my foot, which I can do but it still hurts. So today I did end up needing to ice after therapy but my walking is getting continually better and I am going to keep up with my exercises so I can continue to progress. My physical therapist thinks I will be able to go down to once a week soon since I'm doing so well. That makes me happy. I know that doing hard stuff now will make a lot of things easier in the long run. That's a message I got earlier today too. I was reading through my blog to find out when I first started mentioning my sun allergy and in the process I read some of the blogs from the early days of my journey when I was making the first real progress I have ever had in this fight. I was pushing myself, sometimes doing 2 workouts a day, eating low carb and focusing on the goal. I was working on stopping the inner negative talk and in one post I complained on how I was plateaued at 154 pounds because I had hoped to be under 150 for my high school reunion. At my heaviest I was 225. When I started this blog I was around 195, so to see me complaining about 154 was crazy. That was my 20 year reunion and I probably hadn't weighed 150 or less since 11 grade. Anyway, what I realized reading the earlier posts is that, it wasn't easy. My kids were young (and had learning/behavioral problems), we were struggling to find stable daycare, I had lost my job, we had only been back in the state for a couple years and my wage was cut almost in half when we moved out of Las Vegas. We had plenty of stress, but I kept focusing on the goal and I pushed because I wanted it so bad, and the fact that there were visible results happened encouraged me to keep working. One huge mistake I made back then (2011'ish) was beating myself up for falling off track, which led to all-or-nothing thinking. Another big mistake I made was that the goal was something that ended. At one point I was in a weight loss competition; when it ended I lost my drive a little. Then I set the goal of being a certain weight for my reunion, and once it was over AND I didn't reach my goal (I was 152 instead of 149) I decided this was too hard and lost my way, gaining and losing the same 25 pounds but never getting back to a good place. Now, I think the lightest I've been in years is 183. I don't live and die by the scale, but the fact that I tend to stick between 185-200 pounds is a sign that I have unhealthy habits that I have been ignoring. Now that I'm older my goals are different, they are the kind that don't have an end-date; they are about quality of life instead of having a cute wardrobe or trying to make people jealous of my success. I think my goals indicate a slightly healthier mental state but I haven't yet committed to making them happen like I did all those years ago. Rereading my blogs this morning reinvigorated me to put more focus on my health goals. I am slowly adding more plants into my menu this week and in time, I will replace some of the dairy with plant-based foods as well. For now I am free-styling with it, trying to limit or scale back processed foods. I do feel like these changes will start healing me from the inside. And that is all part of the goal.