The end of summer goal review

Labor Day is over, we are officially into September. I guess it’s official: summer is over.

Before summer started, I had all of these goals. We were going to eat outside more. My garden was going to flourish. I was going to take Fridays off and spend them with my kids doing things like taking trips to the library and finger painting. That’s when you see summer as this awesome time when everything is green and lush and beautiful and certainly not the gray slush we get in winter. So, most of those things didn’t happen. Well, at least not the the way I envisioned them.

After our trip to Florida in March, I had this goal of losing all of my weight before the summer started so I didn’t feel like a ghostly-white whale in my bathing suit. We know I changed medication in March and then again in May. I joined a gym. I tried to work out regularly. I cut my portions and nothing.

Then summer happened.

I gave up on my goal. There was no way I could lose that weight. My body was hanging on to every pound as if protecting it against some type of impending snow storm. One that would isolate me in an igloo for months on end. My body could live on my own flab.

But I wore a bathing suit. I squeezed into my shorts. I did what I had to do not to miss my summer because of my body-image issues.

Then I notice something. My shorts were getting looser. My stomach wasn’t the only thing I saw when I looked down at my feet.

It wasn’t until after I went to Boston in July that I  decided to weigh myself. Down three pounds. A week later down seven. A week later down ten. Sometime later, I’m now at 15 pounds down from the 158 lbs that I creeped up to.

Why my body decided that late July was the best time to start losing weight, I’ll never know, but it started. Maybe the original meds were finally out of my system. Maybe I was more intense at the gym. Maybe I just sweated it out from all the heat this summer. At first I figured it was just a fluke. But I adjusted my diet to eat a bit lighter. I stopped counting calories. I kept going to the gym. The weight kept coming off.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a long way to go to where I want to be, but this is huge progress.

So while I didn’t meet my goal of losing the weight before summer, I am getting down there at the end of the summer. Just in time to start the new season. A fresh outlook, a more healthy body, my wardrobe back. Yeah, this will be a great school year.