Last week was kind of nuts. We had made plans to prepare our food at the beginning of the week, but it just didn’t happen. Which resulted in eating out every night and making just bad decisions.

Then, we went to Disney World this weekend. While you walk a ton at Disney, you can also EAT a ton at Disney. I made an pseudo effort to make healthy choices, but sometimes something would pop up. For example, I posted on the FFK FB page about my healthy breakfast one morning: a massive bowl of fruit inside of a hollowed-out half of a pineapple and a bowl of oatmeal at Kona Cafe inside the Polynesian (we didn’t stay there, but we dreamed that we did by going there everyday because it’s our favorite. By the way, I’m a massive Disneyphile. Have I mentioned that before?) Anyway, so we were finishing up our delicious breakfast, and then they brought us out two of the most sinfully delicious chocolate cupcakes we have ever eaten. Yes…they brought them out…for breakfast. They were bringing them out since it was our sixth anniversary of us being together. The old-point-counting-sticking-to-his-healthy-guns Nathan wouldn’t have eaten it. Well, I did. Along with a lot of fantastic food that weekend because Disney is delicious. (I mean, I don’t really know if Cinderella’s Castle would taste good if you bit in to it, but I’m pretty certain it would be.) I know that some people think that vacation is a time to splurge and I can understand that. But for me, vacations have been my downfall for a long time. I’ll come back from a trip and have gained/retained like  crazy. I am working on being better about that. I think it goes back to not surrounding what I do around when or what I eat, which is really easy to do on vacation. Time to work on that.

So during this what felt like a gorgefest of a weekend, I felt down on myself. I left for Orlando on Friday morning weighing almost 240, a number I haven’t seen in a long time. It started to scare me. I felt like I was losing my grip on my weight loss. I was worried that this was the point where things were going to start to unravel for me. That this whole weight loss thing was just a phase in my life. It scared me. It really scared me.

How did I handle it? Not really that well. I still ate pretty bad on the trip. The worst part was that at each meal, I felt a little guilty about what I was eating because I knew that I was making a wrong choice at every turn. This all lead up to Sunday when we were getting ready to leave the parks.

This is my Florida driver’s license photo. It was issued to me in August 2010.

Like I was saying, on Sunday I was still feeling pretty crummy about my weight. My jeans were a little tight, my shirt was pulling in certain ideas, I just felt fat. When I left the World of Disney store in Downtown Disney, that all changed. I was in line to pay for a pin lanyard (oh yeah, I collect Disney pins. Don’t hate.) but the line was painfully long, so I went to another register. I paid for the lanyard, and the lady asked to see my ID. She looked at the photo, looked at me, looked at the photo, and looked at me again. “You need a new photo!” she said. “You’ve lost some weight!” I thanked her and began to tell her my story. She told me that she always makes an effort to say something to people that look like they have lost weight from their photos. From them on, my view completely changed. Yeah, I’ve been far from perfect with my weight loss, but no one is expecting me to be. I shouldn’t get down on myself each time I make a bad decision. I need to move on and learn from it. I’ve come a long way from that photo, both physically and mentally. I know that I can keep on keepin’ on to reach my weight loss goal. It’s going to happen, it just might take some time. And you know what? It truly is the journey and not just the destination. See ya tomorrow.