Here it is...

The scary truth.

298 freakin' pounds.

and so it begins today. This is the highest I have ever been minus being preggers where I tipped the scales at 313 pounds and thought that when I gave birth I would lose 80 pounds. Well....that didn't happen. 26 pounds left that day and that was five and half years ago.

So I am making this declaration to myself. I am going to make changes. I am going to do what I know how to do....and that is make the right decisions for myself and for my family. I hate what I have done to myself...however I don't know what thin feels like. I know that I have always considered myself fat, heavy, thick, chunky...whatever I decided to call it to make myself feel better in the moment. Well now it is time to call a spade a spade and admit to myself in my little corner of the internet....that I am an excuse maker. I am everything to everybody...but nothing to myself. I am a special education teacher, a mother, a photographer, a crafter, a volunteer, a jane of all trades and I work my ass off. But for everyone else.

I watch Biggest Loser every season...but I don't ever get off the couch and do anything about it. I have had a gym membership since 2007 and I never go. I am always too tired or I have made a committment to someone else which once again puts me on the back burner. I am a willing participant to take the back seat to others. But something has changed in the way I think lately and it is my daughter. She is almost 6 and has my body. She is a big girl...and I don't mean fat....I mean tall. She is big for her age. I have 5th grade students in my class who are the same height as her. We have a wonderful pediatrician who is realistic about her...doesn't just look at her weight and say....she is obese. He has always maintained that if her percentages in height and weight are equal...that she is just a big girl. She has always been over 98th percentile in her height and weight since she was born. But now I am seeing her watch me and copy the things I do. She is not as active as I would like her to be. She eats fast food like me as we are always racing from one place to the next. She would rather sit and watch tv or craft with me. She doesn't know how to be active...because she has me as a mother.

So it has to change. If not for me....then for her. I am doing this for myself...but in the moments of thinking I am over it....I am going to look to my little girl who is sweet, kind, gentle, caring, creative, funny, dramatic...knowing that she got those traits from me and I am going to add to the list....daring, adventurous, active, athletic, energetic, and able. Able to look at anything and run not walk towards it and realize that I am also doing this for her. So I can be a Mommy that she wants to look up to and not one that she is ashamed of. I have realized that I was just like her once..."big" for my age. But everyone told me I was fat. Everyone told me that I "had such a pretty face" and that I could model if I just lost the weight. But noone told me how and instead I grew up in a house where with every celebration...came food, with every disappointment...came food, with every stress...came food. I do the same thing with my family. But it is changing now. I don't want my kids to know the name of every restaurant in a 10 mile radius, but not know the taste of their own mother's cooking in the comfort of their own home. I don't want my kids to continue to ask for chicken nuggets every time we pass a fast food place. It is over today.

So my excuses have kept me down. Life happened, school started, my husband went on the road, money issues talked me into saying I couldn't afford to eat healthy....but yet I could afford to eat fast food everyday. I will say this...I know that it is going to be a challenge to me. I am going to have to plan ahead for myself and not just for everyone else. I am going to schedule in time for myself. I am going to have to stop playing games on facebook, pinning on pinterest, checking emails, texting, watching biggest loser on tv. I am going to have to stop making excuses and look at myself long and hard in the mirror every day and know that I made this committment and it is time.

Time to be the woman I know I can be. Fully and completely. Not just the amazing teacher or mom or friend to everyone else. The amazing Jenna Marie that has been hiding in a fat suit for the better part of my entire life.

Remember that I am not normally like this....but these are the thoughts that have been racing through my head every night as I lay down to go to sleep, keeping me awake at night and scaring the bejesus out of me. But today I woke up with the resolve. I woke up with the I have had enough feeling that I have been waiting for.  I have to be brutally honest with myself and instead of writing it in my normal journal I am putting it here.

This has to change. Here it goes.

<3, J