I am here to touch on something that is so dear to me.  That is fitness. See I was always the fat friend.  Just don’t ask my friends from high school. They all magically forgot how they pointed out how I was taller than almost everyone. I was also bigger than them.  I only had one friend who I could share clothes. What really blows my adult mind is that during my younger years I played some sport year around. I had to be fit right? The requirement to be “popular” in a small town is you play sports. My love was for basketball. At one point in time during the 10 years I played I was on 3 different teams. I was doing some type of activity up to 7 days a week. I just had to show up. There would be an adult that would tell us exactly what to do for 2 hours and I got home.  Once I graduated high school it all came to a complete stop. I no longer had someone else telling me what I should do to exercise. I also was never taught the whole picture of fitness. It isn’t just the workout. It also is the food you eat. The amount of sleep you get each night.  It is a whole cycle of things that effect your fitness. It took me years to understand. For health and fitness to be such a huge category in America there really isn’t a starting point. Also, why I think most people fail to figure it out. **DISCLAIMER** I am not a doctor or a licensed fitness guru.  I am just someone who has slowly figured things out and want to share my story.  Hopefully my story will inspire someone else to join the fitness journey. At the end of the day that is what fitness truly is: a journey.

Fitness according to dictionary.com.

Fitness[ fit-nis ] noun: 

1. health. 
2. capability of the body of distributing inhaled oxygen to muscle tissue during increased physical effort.
3. Also called Dar·win·i·an fit·ness   [dahr-win-ee-uhn]. Biology. 
   1. the genetic contribution of an individual to the next generation’s gene pool relative to the average for the population, usually measured by the number of offspring or close kin that survive to reproductive age.
   1. the ability of a population to maintain or increase its numbers in succeeding generations.

Even the definition has multiple factors and not just exercise. I am going to share my journey to where I am at now.  I am not fitness guru. I do not have abs. I won’t ride a bike. I will try anything once. I use to think running was the only thing that could help me lose weight (Spoiler alert!) it wasn’t. Shoot in high school I couldn’t run a mile straight. As a 35 year old women – I realized no one actually taught me how to run. You’re probably thinking it’s simple: lace some shoes and run. Running is mostly mental not physical. Fitness is mostly mental. Then the physical follows suits. It took me forever to realize that little detail. Another thing I learned as I got older, any amount of stress would cause my body to spiral. I wasn’t gaining weight solely because I was overeating. I was stressed out. My body couldn’t regulate because of the level of stress. I am going to break down into posts the resources I have acquired to help me get to where I am today. It was trial and error. I did it using free (for the most part) resources.  My hope is to encourage one individual to take small steps into their process of having a healthier and happy life.