Stylish Blogger Award!

What an awesome day!  Alexia over at Dimple Snatcher gave me the Stylish Blogger award.  Go check out her blog, she's wonderful.

According to the rules, I have to share seven things about me.

• I love trying new kinds of food.  Actually, as I write this, I'm waiting on a text to hear back from a friend about going to an Indian restaurant later this week.  
• Up until this past year or so, I never liked fish, onions, or tomatoes.  My cooking has gotten much better since I started appreciating these ingredients!
• One of my favorite things to do is go grocery shopping.  In the past, I used to love seeing what new food products were out, what tasty things I could find.  Now, I love grocery shopping because I buy a lot of healthy food and I like seeing my fridge full of healthy things.  
• My favorite form of exercise is dancing.  I've been taking bellydance classes for over a year now, and I love it.  It can really get my heart rate up and I've met the most lovely people by going to classes and workshops. 
• Alternatively, my favorite thing to do in the gym is do jogging intervals around the track, but I don't do it often because being overweight has really impacted my knees.  I'm hoping to do a whole post on interval training soon!
• I love to travel!  I've been to Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, the UK (England, Scotland, Wales), and Amsterdam.  My ideal job would be to just travel the world, take pictures, eat great food, and meet awesome people and somehow get paid for it.  
• My favorite food is cheese.  I love to eat cheese just straight, and I'll spend a lot of money to buy good cheeses.  I can definitely just sit down and plow through a block of cheese.  

And now I get to pass it along to five other blogs:

http://my30by30plan.blogspot.com/
http://wearelosingitblog.blogspot.com/
http://tjstestkitchen.blogspot.com/
http://project365th.blogspot.com/
http://www.slimmingdownforthegown.com/

These ladies' blogs are all awesome - go check them out!

First Observations

This is the first post in my new blog!  I'm pretty excited about this, guys.  I have high hopes for this blog, and high hopes for a healthy future.  I really want my life to be full of adventure.  I love to explore new places, meet new people, and search out wonderful things in the world to see.  My weight has held me back from that for a long time, and it's time for that to stop.

For example, I really do love to be outside.  I spent my whole childhood outside, and if I could I would spend every weekend hiking in the nearby state park or taking trips to beautiful natural places, but I don't because I'm not fit enough.  I'm in no shape to do hiking of any kind, and I don't like beaches because I'm so uncomfortable in swimsuits.  I've suffered from being overweight, but there's no reason it needs to continue.  I can observe my bad habits, and then understand how to change them.

I have rarely spent time being mindful of my food-related behaviors in the past, but recently I've really been observing how I act around food.  These are some of the things I've realized just over the past few days:

• When I crave something unhealthy to eat, it's all I want.  But often, if I have to go out of the house to get it, I will try as hard as I can to get someone to go with me, as if eating out with someone else legitimizes overeating and makes it okay.  
• I'm thrilled whenever I get time to myself because I can eat whatever I want without anybody seeing me do it.  I often seek out food when I feel like I'm less than someone else (example: in my photography class this week, I saw another girl's pictures and thought they were better than mine.  I was disappointed in myself because I would like to be a good photographer. For lunch after class I stopped by my old workplace and ate two of their leftover donuts).  And when I eat food alone, I tend to be pretty focused on eating it, rarely getting distracted by the tv or the internet.

Yesterday and today I've eaten a lot of cheap, fried drive-through food and right now I feel like crap.  I really feel drained and kind of apathetic.  If I didn't have plans tonight to go out with friends, I know that later I would probably start to feel lonely and then depressed and as if I'm always going to overeat.

I know that overeating makes me feel awful, and that eating whole, healthy foods makes me feel great.  I learned that last year.  I just need to make healthy eating a habit, and spend time reminding myself that I deserve to feel happier.  I'm going to pay attention to my behavior this week, and whenever I feel myself gravitating toward food out of emotion, to remind myself that overeating is only going to make me feel worse.  Relating to my example above, I really like the pictures I've taken so far in my photography class.  In fact, the background image on this blog is one I took in my university's greenhouse.  As long as I'm happy with my work and myself, that's all that matters.