All good things must come to an end...

...or every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end...

Forgive the cliches, but here I am. Spark Motivator, huge success story, lost 50 pounds and maintained it for NINE years. Almost a decade. Maintained it through job changes, life changes, a big move. Look at me! Maybe my clothes didn't fit *quite* as well, maybe I didn't make the *best* choices, but heck, I was still pretty slim.

Enter November 2018. On November 28, 2018 my father fell and broke his leg badly. To make a long story short, lots of bad things ensued...surgeries, kidney failure, sepsis, dialysis, a stroke and...ultimately...he passed away on July 22, 2019.

I ate my feelings. I.ATE.MY.FEELINGS. It started slowly...the holidays after watching him almost die in the hospital on Christmas Eve. Then it was the traveling back and forth from my house to their place every weekend and visiting my dad in hospitals...rehabs...rinse, repeat. I would grab convenience food on the go, my mom would host me for sleepovers and cook me decadent meals where i would eat mine, half of hers and anything leftover. Then he died and I thought "I deserve this" while eating a bag of chips or grabbing that medium shake that previously would have been a small.

My cat died a month and a half later and she was like another daughter to me so I continued to eat my feelings. And then time to go back to work and CRAP my clothes do not fit...this is bad.

No big deal, I've got this! Been there, done that. I curbed the eating a decent amount and stepped up the activity but the scale is frozen and my shrink sends me for bloodwork to rule out a medical reason for the weight gain and there is none BUT now I have put myself in a position where my cholesterol is 251 and although I may have only gained 30ish pounds back my health is actually WORSE than it was 50 pounds higher. And I'm scared.

So back to Sparkpeople, with my head hung in shame, trying to do better so I don't die young. So my kids don't have to do this whole bereavement thing while they're still kids.

So I am no longer your motivator...it is time for you to be mine.