Moving is frying my brain.

   Well it's been quite some time since the last blog post because honestly I've been so stressed. We move in two weeks so you can imagine where my mind is right now. I know I've gained weight but I've packed the scale away and I have no idea what I weigh right now and honestly I don't want to know. I feel the stress of keeping up with my weight will just make things worse at the moment. My main concern is packing and getting everything ready, seeing family, seeing friends, and just trying to stay afloat. Regularly I feel like my brain is fried. I'm definitely depressed and stressed out because this is a huge move for us and scary. But aside from this things are going wellish, I mean it's a move all kinds of stuff goes wrong but we're just trucking along with everything. Currently, I am in a hazy state of just-let-me-look-at-this-wall-for-a-few-hours it's hard to concentrate on anything.

   We did have our going away party last Saturday and it was a blast. We went to The Varsity and spent time with friends and family. No tears lots of laughs, just how I like it. Tomorrow I'm sure there will be lots of tears because its a party with just my immediate family. Tonight, we go see a movie and dinner with some very good friends and my brain is just not ready for all the sadness to hit. I mean yesterday I watched a TV show and someone died in it and I lost it. I cried so hard as if I were losing a family member again. I think it just set off the tears that have been brimming at the top for awhile. I always feel like I'm about to burst lately and I know it's because of, stress. I feel like that's a cop out but things are very stressful with a move and when it's cross country that adds on to it.

   I thought about addressing the things in the Huffington Post article that has been circulating titled: “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong” written by Michael Hobbes. (I will link it down below) But I don't think it's necessary; I think it's a great article that goes into depth about how being fat doesn't mean you're unhealthy and that the medical field is very behind on that notion. The article goes into how judgmental we are to someone who's overweight and the fact that overweight people are just as judgmental to each other. In fact it's a well written article with a lot of great resources and I highly recommend you checking it out but the most important thing that I think people are not seeing is, we have to be happy with ourselves. I like how the article addresses the medical myths and things that we need to change with how we look at overweight people but I don't like that I see folks using it as a justification for themselves. What I mean by this is if you already love yourself at whatever weight you are then you shouldn't need articles like this to make you feel better.

   I want to take this time to remind people that no matter what weight you are, if you do not love yourself you will not be happy no matter what. I don't mean loving yourself because you're healthy or blah blah. I mean truly loving yourself, appreciate yourself for who you are big or small, short or tall, “ugly or pretty”; I put ugly and pretty in quotes because we're all beautiful but its how you feel about yourself that matters. But Ashley, it's easier said than done; yes I'm aware of this. I'm also aware of the fact that anything to do with mental health especially the image of yourself takes time to work on. I never said it was easy but what you need to know is that if you're 300 lbs now and you hate yourself you will still hate yourself at 200 or 150. There are so many studies about how people lose weight but still think they're fat and that's because they never truly learned to love themselves. You can have an eating disorder at 500 lbs just as easily as you can at 100 lbs and the image you have of yourself is the root cause of that. The article actually goes into some of the mental issues that society's notions of beauty put on us if we're overweight (or underweight) and I agree with what the author says about this subject but I just wanted to add my opinion to the matter. Please focus on loving yourself first. Make sure that when you make decisions about your personal habits they're because you want to not because people are pressuring you whether intentionally or unintentionally.

   Let me know what you think about this subject. I find this a very good article and its nice to see more coming out about health and weight and the fact some health issues are not always because you're fat.

Article: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/