I've Come a Long Way in Four years

Today I had a meeting with a personal trainer.  She went through the standard questions with me and when she got to "what are your goals"... I was kind of stuck.  I hadn't really though about it specifically.  Sure I want to be able to eat more food and burn more of it just sitting on my butt folding laundry.  Which is called Base Metabolic Rate.  And I've always said that I want Jillian Micheal's arms and back.  But all I could really say was that I wanted to lose 10 lbs.  I know that's not really important, but the fact of the matter is I don't know how to stop trying to lose weight.  Even though I've been maintaining my weight for more than 6 months, I've kind of just kept the "lose it" mentality.  It's kind of a safe place to be.  I guess at this point I'm going to try eating the Clean way and see what happens.  I do want to increase my muscle mass so that I can burn more calories - when I'm not at the gym.  So I need to eat more protein and incorporate heavy resistance training in my workouts. 

Throughout this process the trainer was amazed that I had lost that much weight on my own without a personal trainer or nutritionist.  So tonight I decided to take a look at the pictures when I was at my heaviest weight.  I was massively pregnant with Annaliese (who did end up coming out at a whopping 10 lbs 8 oz).  And I actually think that I was close to 260 in this picture.  So here are my before and after pictures.  Four years apart and three babies born. 

I am proud of the work I've done.  I should be happy!  Really happy right?  But I'm still struggling.  Well I am going to say this, I will be eating a piece of Luke's chocolate birthday cake Wednesday so I guess I am liberating myself in a way.  But I think being healthy and losing this much weight is kind of like the battle an alcoholic deals with.  But my drug of choice was food and the temptation will always be there to turn to a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream for comfort or to escape.  Based on the numbers out there the need for support with emotional eating is huge.  I guess I've replaced the endorphins I used to get with food with the ones I now get from working out.  Something I'm learning about myself is that I am a bit of an endorphin junky.  I wonder if it's the type A personally I have, the addictive qualities.  Humm.  Oh well I guess the first part of getting better is to recognize the problem(s).