The Similarities of Dating & Weightloss

I don't know about you, but I'm now a great believer in acceptance being the key to progress.

Over the years my experiences have taught me that my resistance is what actually has taken me further away from my goals and dreams. At times it ate away at me, my self-worth, my confidence, and has even been the major cause of depressive episodes I have gone through in my life. But what I came to learn was that if I could accept exactly where I was at, I could move forward. This is the irony of acceptance.

Let me give you an example from my dating days before I met my husband Craig. 

The year before I met Craig I'd been on two dating websites. I'd met some lovely men and had been out for dinner, coffee, some nice walks and generally, it had been okay. 

When I looked back (hindsight is a wonderful thing), I realised that until I met Craig, I was still very stuck in a negative thought process. Here's what I was thinking... I'm never going to meet anyone, there's no-one for me, I'll be single forever... those kinds of thoughts. What happened next stunned and shocked me, and has pretty much been one of my biggest lessons in life. I realised that in order to end the emotional pain I was feeling around being single and lonely, and to get on with my life, was to do exactly that. Get on with my life. 

Over a matter of a few weeks I processed this option of just getting on my with my life. With making the choice to accept exactly where I was at, and that one possibility was that I could be single forever, my world changed. The thought of the latter did terrify me, because even though I had gotten used to being single, and I enjoyed my own company, I was more of a people person and preferred being with others. And, I wanted to share my life with someone special. 

Deciding to be brave and face one of my greatest fears in life (of being single forever) was the best thing I did. Within hours of making that decision, I went online and took my profile off one of the dating websites. The next morning I went onto the other site, and there was a message from Craig. And as they say, the rest is history. 

This entire process of accepting what I didn't want to accept or thought I couldn't accept worked for starting my weightloss journey too. Almost the minute I accepted that I could be overweight forever, and that indeed I could be that fat old lady, something shifted within me. From that point on, in July 2018, I started making small changes that led me losing my weight and keeping it off, for the first time ever!