3 Fat Chicks on a Diet Weight Loss Community - I never know what to put here :)

Hi, my name is Tiff and I'm up in snowy Manitoba, Canada. I'll be 23 at the end of April, and currently I'm 167ish pounds, 5'5" with about 30lbs to get down to my ideal weight. I think this is going to be a lengthy introduction with a lot of rambling. It almost seems like more of an autobiography than an introduction but I need to vent somewhere... (I do this a lot, it seems.)

For a long time, I've been feeling like I've lost control of my life. It's kind of hard for me to write about; I'm an anti-social person at the best of times and have never been able to express myself very well. I have to DO something though, because I've been doing nothing for SO long and where has it gotten me? nowhere, and fast.

I've always thought I was fat, for as long as I can remember. It never really mattered what the scale said, I always thought it was too heavy and that I was fat and ugly and flawed. When I hit puberty in high school (around 15ish I think) my weight went up to 130 (due to my new figure) and my self-esteem plummeted, and it's been a reciprocal relationship ever since.
I've never really been an active person; I have asthma which flares up with exercise and cold temperatures (which there is a LOT of where I live, I feel like I"m trapped inside in the winter) and shied away from sports while I was in school and whatnot. I've tried halfheartedly in the past, but nothing really stuck and I got back into my sedentary rut. Also, now that I've been pretty much inactive for couple of years I'm starting to get a lot of pain in my back, hips, joints etc. which I think is mostly from the fact that I sit on my behind all day making jewelry and tinkering with my website. (and also my awful, awful mattress :()

In the past few years, I've had what could be considered a DIABOLICAL amount of drama, which has led to a lot of stress and depression and weight fluctuation. I got married way too young {150lbs} (six months out of high school to a man who didn't know what it meant to respect a woman, of course I didn't know that at the time), got pregnant {185 at heaviest}, had my daughter {155 within a week after birth, ridiculous, I know} and then slowly gained most of it back over the next 9 months or so. Over the next year I started realizing that there were some serious issues with my marriage. I moved in with a friend, (my daughter stayed with him, I continue to judge myself harshly for this decision even though I know it was the right one) and for few months I told myself that I was going to go back to him, but after some time away I realized how much happier I was being away and that the 'me' I knew was being crushed when I was around him. I made the move permanent. By the time I told him I wanted a divorce I'd lost around 20lbs from the stress {155}. That was mid 2007. I'm sure any of you who have gone through similar can imagine the next few months/years etc. I didn't end up with primary care of my daughter, but I can say that she is happy and healthy and she stays with me most weekends, and although it hurts when she's not here, I still believe it was the right decision. (I just feel like everyone and their dog judges me for it. I also have some issues with feeling like everyone judges me for everything.)

Well, it's been a year and a half (ish) and I'm back up to {167}. I've had a couple of jobs, one I liked and one I didn't. Currently I have my own business designing jewelry (although not as successful as I'd like, but i'm a perfectionist and I"m still relatively new), although I have to go out and find a part time job to help pay the bills. Part of me feels like a failure because of this but I know that's horseradish and that I shouldn't beat myself up because of it! I am trying to re-train my thinking and nip the self-destructive thoughts (and I have a lot of them, a LOT) in the bud. I battle with a lot of thoughts of being inadequate and like nothing I do is good enough. (some of this comes from my childhood, some of it scars from the failed marriage.) I used to bottle up all of my feelings, but I'm slowly learning how to deal, although I do have my setbacks.

I've found a man who treats me the way I should be. (there's a lot of drama related to him too but I think I'll leave that out here, I've babbled a lot already.) I am slowly figuring out who I am (or who I am not, mostly) and am making gradual progress towards being a happy, healthy existence but there's a lot of hurdles to get over. I have a beautiful three and a half year old who is SO smart, and I have a lot in my life to be thankful for.

I still spend a lot of my time right now in varying states of anger, frustration and blubbering (i.e. crying, lol) but right now it's not a bad thing, I'm just expressing instead of internalizing. There are a lot of things that I haven't dealt with, I just never knew how.

tl;dr :D

So, to anyone who managed to slog through that sea of self-analyzing, I applaud you, and thank you for caring enough to read it all. I feel better after getting some of that down, and I think that maybe I'm finally ready to pull myself up out of this hole that I've been digging for so long. (now if only I had the upper body strength :D)

Tiff a.k.a. The Frozen Rose