Home Stretch

I know it's ridiculously premature for me to call this section of my journey the home stretch, but I can't help it - that's how I feel today. I know this feeling will be followed by months of challenges, highs and lows, plateaus, frustrations, celebrations, etc, but I'm living in the moment right now, and in this moment, I feel like I'm in the home stretch. I suppose I should leave the power of that phrase to refer to my last 10 or 15 lbs, but I've lost 118 lbs, and I'm well over half way to my goal.

Hence, the feeling of home strech-edness. :) I feel like the hardest part is done - I've changed my habits completely, quit the caffeine, found a way to hardwire exercise into my routine, changed my routine completely to incorporate healthy living, lost the majority of the weight I had to lose, and now I can just cruise along and get to the finish line.

I'm making it sound ridiculously easy, and I still have a good amount of weight to lose, clearly. I'm sure there will be days in the future when I think I'm crazy for writing this post, but hey, it's just how I feel today. Optimistic.

I'm not delusional. I plan to be at my goal weight (still not sure exactly what that is - we'll see) in February of 2009. I've been working on my weight loss since September, so I'm eight months into it, and I plan that it will be another 10 months until I'm done with the losing portion of this journey. So while I'm more than half way there weight wise, I'm not even half way there with the time I'm planning it to take me, but that is okay.

The more I lose, the better I feel and the more fun I have with this journey. I feel more energized all the time, and I find new things I can do. Those are only going to increase as I lose, so in September, when I'm hopefully down another 30 - 35 lbs, I'll still have a ways to go, but imagine how much better I'll feel with an additional 30-35 lbs gone for good!

At that point, I'll weigh less than I've weighed in a decade. That will be pretty cool.