The end is nowhere in sight.

So you may be wondering why I felt the need to write a blog yesterday about the fact that I’ll be blogging the bad with the good. Welllll, it might have had a teeny bit to do with the way that I felt all day yesterday. Or everything to do with it.

I GAINED 3 POUNDS IN 48 HOURS. 

If I had binged or over-eaten, I’d probably be dealing better with it. But it happened despite staying within my calorie allotment, and despite working out twice. I gained three freaking pounds!!! Now, I know that this has everything to do with starting to exercise, that it is likely just my muscles holding on to water, and that I’ll probably lose it again soon… but. I’m at the beginning of my long road to fitness, so a sudden gain of all the weight I just spent ten days losing is SUPER discouraging. And in the past, it has taken my body a good two weeks to begin losing weight again after I start exercising. In the words of Sweet Brown: Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!

While I was feeling discouraged, I started watching a show called “Ruby” on Netflix. It’s about a sweet, bubbly woman who weighed 478 lbs (but was 700+ lbs at her highest) and was trying to lose the weight once and for all. I thought it would be motivational, but after a few episodes, I made the mistake of googling her. Apparently, she started cheating on her diet a few seasons in, and they ended up cancelling the show because she was putting on a lot of weight. Presently, I think she is under 400 lbs, but the never-ending struggle is still going.

I’m not sure why the show hit me so hard, but I was emotionally devastated. I just felt so much compassion for Ruby, and wanted so badly for her to succeed. And I felt like if she could do it, I could do it, too. In the end, though, it put a glaring light on the reality that weight loss—especially permanent weight loss—is SO HARD. That’s a tough pill to swallow, knowing that I’m trying to achieve what so few people seem to be able to.

I have given myself several pep talks over the last few days, because the weight gain and reality of how LONG this process is put me in a foul disposition. The good news is that I’m not giving up, and I haven’t purchased any pints of Blue Bell Banana Pudding ice cream to ease my troubled mind. This is the reality, after all. This is the part of weight loss that SUCKS, that doesn’t make the highlight reel on Extreme Weight Loss, and that gets condensed into a one-sentence blurb in People Mag’s “Half Their Size” articles.

When I started college, everyone told me that sophomore year would be the hardest, because the newness and excitement of starting college would have worn off, but I wouldn’t be anywhere near the end. That’s kind of how I’m feeling right about now. I’m in the bloody middle. I’ve already taken that first dramatic step of deciding to lose the weight, but the excitement of that has worn off, I’m still huge, and I’ve hit the daily grind of eating right, exercising, and staying on track so that SOME DAY (in what right now feels like a million years) I’ll be at the end of the weight loss process.

This is the point at which I usually turn to food for comfort and end up piling back on the weight I just lost. I’m not doing that this time, though. Because if I stop now, I’m 100% guaranteed to stay fat. If I keep going, however, and keep at it day after day after day, no matter how I “feel,” the weight WILL come off. 365 days are going to go by this year, regardless of what I do. But if I do what I know is right for my body, at the end of that 365 days there will be significant, amazing transformation. Waiting for that is the hard part, but I know I can do it. I just have to keep going.