Familiarity makes us comfortable.  Many find strength in it.  It is like a warm blanket, soft couch, comfort food, and a good movie.  It’s a loving spouse you feel perfectly at ease with.  Fitness Ridge is like that for me.  It’s like coming home at Christmas after being away at college all semester and finding the house decorated and family there to meet you.  I have cried there, vomited there, felt overwhelming joy there, rejoiced with others there, and laughed there, a lot! Next week, I will be heading back to Biggest Loser’s Fitness Ridge to spend a week in Ivins, UT.

 In May 2011, I got on a plane bound for Vegas with a suitcase full of clothes ready to spend a whole month. I was scared to death.   I had lost 25 lbs before my trip, dropped three clothes sizes, and was ready for anything they could throw at me.  I dropped 15 more lbs in that month, and an additional 10 when I got home.  Nothing could have been harder and easier at the same time.  Harder, because I was reining in the only thing that was out of control in my life at that time, my weight.  Easier, because I did it with some of the most amazing, encouraging people I have ever met who were all doing the same thing I was.  We sweated, laughed, talked, and overcame together.  When I got home is when it became hard.  Of course I knew it would, but I wasn’t ready for what happened.  I didn’t have a problem with eating right.  When I woke up each morning I would immediately panic, thinking I had gained all the weight back.  I would jump out of bed and run upstairs weighing myself.  Still the same, but there must be some mistake!  I would try on several outfits.  They still fit, but it couldn’t be true.  Surely while I was sleeping all the weight must have slipped back on.  Finally I confessed to my husband what was going on and he told me to call Jen our Fitness Ridge shrinkJ  She assured me that it was perfectly normal to feel this way as it would take my brain longer to catch up with my body.  I think this might have something to do with why people who lose so much weight immediately put it back on.  Their mind tells them they have gained it back, so they just give in to it.  I refused to give in.

In April 2012, I went back.  I had become that forty something mom that ran 5ks and mud runs.  I had trouble with my left hip, but wanted to see if I could push myself like the year before.  I could and I did.  I had kept most of the weight off, so the six lbs I lost while there that week, put me back in the black.

Now it’s October 2013.  A whole seventeen months later.  When I started this blog in 2011, I would have never imagined I would have so many followers.  I have had around 11,000 hits on here.  I’m glad so many people are interested in what I’ve been up to, but for me, this blog is so much more than showing people my journey.  It has become my memory.  There are so many things you forget if you don’t write it all down.  Good things, funny things, and most importantly how I felt.  The emotional part of this roller coaster is key to finding yourself.  With that being said, I think I can truly say I have found myself again.  I had lost myself through pregnancies, childbirth, and uncertainty.  Here, I have found myself and although the person I found is quite different than the one I lost, I love her.  I imagine we all find ourselves wishing we could be or do something else in life, but right now, in this time of my life I am perfectly happy.  I traded a high stress job for being a goat farmer, owning my own business, and continuing to home school my two kids.  My husband works from home.  That’s the bomb.  He doesn’t always like his job, but he always gets to spend time with us.  He too gave up a high stress job.  Since the last time I was at Fitness Ridge, I have hosted 50 interns on my little micro farm.  That has been amazing.  We have had some beautiful people come through and help us with our continuing project.  How has my weight been?  Well, I have actually been able to keep most of the 55 lbs off.  It makes me sad to look at my less toned body in the mirror, but I realize I have at least not stopped trying.  My husband pointed this out when we were in Wal Mart a couple weeks ago.  So many people shopping there just looked like they had completely given up.  Convenience food filled buggies, dead look in their eyes, and so heavy all they could wear was a stretched out t shirt and jogging pants.   I have not been able to work out with my hip problems, but I have really watched that I maintain.  Yesterday, I got up and started packing for my third trip out here.  I tried on the t shirt I wore home from Fitness Ridge on June 19^th, 2011, my 43^rd birthday.  I expected that it would be too tight in the arms and waist, but guess what???  It fit.  And so did the pants I wore to hike in.  Now that I have spent the last two years maintaining, I am ready to take off the last pounds.  Join my adventures this week as I and my partner in crime and roomie, Phyllis take on Fitness Ridge.