Hope for a new direction while realistic about goals

When I got on the scale this morning, I weighed 190 pounds. If I was in England, that would be 13.6 stone. 

Either way, I'm 25 pounds overweight, and it shows. I have less confidence. I'm sluggish. I'm most often depressed. I have become very good at making excuses for not exercising. 

This wasn't supposed to happen. I wasn't supposed to let myself go like this. I wasn't supposed to ever let myself give up my best anti-depressant. 

But, I did.

And now I have to reach within to try to stop making excuses. And I have to improve. Or, it's only going to get worse. 

Let's go back for a moment to the last time I was 190, putting aside for a moment that I've been at this heavier amount for at least six months now. Maybe longer. I don't know. I sort of stopped caring about my health and fitness last fall, and that's now carried over to my mind, which has dealt with this years losses by simply retreating. I've created this prison for myself where I just accept that it's never going to get any better.

But that's bullshit. 

I had been about 200 pounds at the end of my second marriage. I was fat. I was a sloth. I was out of shape. And when I realized my marriage had been crumbling for years, and was never even much of a marriage, I dedicated myself to getting better. I was so angry, so confused, so scared, that I embraced exercise as a way to get through it all.

After two months of going to the gym five times a week, I was down to 170 pounds, and I began to feel shards of confidence growing in the caverns of self-doubt where my consciousness dwells. I changed. I became the best version of myself that I'd ever been. I had a lot less fear. 

And now, so many of those fears have returned. They've smashed those shards into atoms. I've retreated within myself to an extent that is unhealthy. 

So I have a choice. I can either continue to spiral back towards a person I did not like being, or I can begin a journey back towards being the best version of myself I can possibly be. 

I know which I want, right now, as I type this. I am hopeful at this moment, but there are other times in the future in which I will give in to the self-loathing, give in to that part of me that wants to hold back self-improvement. 

Not everything is perfect in my life, and there are many challenges coming in times ahead. And I may choose to write about them here, in this little space that is public but not public. I have so many things I want to say, so many observations I want to capture, so many hopes I wish to grow into.... 

What comes when hopes are realized?

It's been a long time since that's happened to me. But, I have hope anyway!