Motivated Monday: For those of us who struggle.

I’m here.

I’m bringing the honesty forward. Paleta in hand, forty pounds gained back and all.

Food isn’t the enemy. Food is just food. Ice cream isn’t evil and kale isn’t angelic. You aren’t a bad person if you eat too many French fries and you aren’t a martyr if you eat nothing but unseasoned chicken breast. We all have setbacks. Sometimes we gain four pounds and sometimes we gain forty.

That doesn’t mean we are failures. We only fail the moment we decide to give up.

I have been working for the last year to believe in myself again. To find my spark to lose weight. To rediscover my love of eating right. But mostly I’ve been looking for the ability to forgive myself for gaining weight back and to stop being so hard on myself.

It has taken time and a lot of self care but I have finally made peace with what the scale is telling me and have decided that I am worthy of putting in the work to get to where I wanna be, though it will be hard. I don’t share for pats on the back or applause, I share because there’s lots of celebration of success but little talk of struggle and perceived failure on social media.

I’m here to remind you you CAN do it. If you KEEP TRYING you WILL GET THERE. It is only when we give up on ourselves that we have failed. I am not giving up. I’m going all in. You can too. Now that I’ve found forgiveness in myself to be better and do better, my happiness around my food is back to being positive and balanced.

Let’s do this together.

Cheers to never giving up!

Vanessa