For the past 14 years, I have been in an ever-constant battle with my weight.  I blame a lot of it on stress and anxiety.  Those 14 years were full of home renovation, a high-pressure job, a husband who works solely on commission in the bursted bubble of a housing market and two premature babies...one of whom threw in congenital heart disease just for good measure.

So, yes, I've been stressed.   But, I won't deny that a good portion of my jiggling thighs is because I love chocolate.  And beer.  The three of them together equals the perfect storm of cellulite.

The thing I have come to realize, as my 40th birthday nears, is that burdens don't go away; they just change.  Life is never going to be easy.  It's time to acknowledge that and work with it, instead of against it.  I don't want to fight myself anymore.  I want to fight the fat.

Tonight, I completed my first of 36 boot camp sessions.  I was excited, but to tell the truth, I was scared of not being able to walk afterward. 

My friend Melisa is a group fitness instructor and I talked to her just before I went to class.  She told me that because I'm social that I would love the atmosphere, that I would have fun and that I should "embrace the pain".

What she failed to tell me, is that I should also embrace the vomit.

Apparently, the instructor saw it coming when my beet-red face turned crisp-cotton-white, which is probably when I felt the room spinning.  She stopped the class.  FOR ME.  Which is really not embarrassing at all.  You know, if you're made of stone.

After she got me a Gatorade, things improved.  Not a lot, but enough for the walls to stand still.  I fought through.  I did not quit.

Then I came home and started typing and searched the internet for a photo of the boot camp to insert in this post.  I typed the name of the workout facility into Google, hit images, and saw this picture...


Thank goodness for that Gatorade.