Being nice to that girl

I've been looking at photographs of myself over the past 10 years in an attempt to understand what triggered my weight gain.  Its a myriad of things really....being perhaps awfully young to be married and out on our own, struggling financially to sustain mortgages and car payments, dealing with scary health issues of close loved ones, overall insecurity about who I was and what I wanted...

When I see the pounds gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) pile on in the pictures, it feels like looking at someone else.  A girl with self-esteem issues who buried her frustrations and sorrows in Skittles and General Tso's Chicken.  I used to use words like "cow" and "fatty" and "whale" to describe myself, but now I see the damage that self-loathing can do.  Hating myself only made my problems seem more intense and before I knew it, I was in a full emotional landslide into whatever sugary confection was readily available.

These days, I try to be more gentle with that girl.  She dealt with some hard things and in the end, she brought me here.  She's not any of those ugly words.  She's a girl who didn't know what to do about her own health issues, but she tried to keep everything else from falling apart.

I know full well that I still don't have everything figured out.  I will likely always mentally seek a sugary confection when I get sucker-punched by a bad day, but it doesn't mean that my actions have to follow their old patterns.  I'll do my best to make better choices because I'm not just doing this for now.  I'm doing this to ensure the remaining years of my life are as good as they can possibly be.  Its not easy, but I was never promised that it was going to be.