Come on in, 2019. Welcome. Here, let me get your jacket. Can I get you something to drink?

I am majorly welcoming 2019 into my life. Not only because its the year that I get to marry my favorite person in this entire universe, but I am also welcoming this year because I feel really good about it and myself in general. I took some time the last couple of weeks of 2018 to really look into both the past and my potential future. I wanted to better understand where I had been in order for me to move forward. I am very proud of myself for finally taking the first step in making myself healthy and talking to a doctor about my fight with weight loss. As we all know, the first step in making a change is admitting you have a problem. I also feel my timing was perfect, to take the last half of 2018 to better understand my fight so that I could jump into 2019 kicking and screaming.

Right before the holiday I had another appointment with my doctor. It was a catch up to see how things were going before we got into the thick of holiday nonsense. I went in there with a major bad attitude because I hadn’t seen any progress in terms of weight loss. When I mentioned this to my doctor, she quickly replayed that she didn’t expect that to happen because that would be putting the “cart before the horse” (so to speak). I guess what I didn’t realize was that the first step was a hormone cleanse, and once we are able to see a shift in my test results, then we could work on the weight loss portion of our program.

I took this as a sign. It was a sign to take a step back, stop putting so much pressure on myself and let the process work. This was a big reason for my “break” over the holidays, which also came at a good time since I woke up the day after Christmas with the stomach flu. I guess we are all just one stomach flu away from our ideal weight, right? I did weight myself the day after I started to feel better, for no reason at all, but I didn’t gain any weight over the holiday (wahoo!), but then we went away to Canada and I came down with “all this food is delicious-itis” and I am pretty sure that weight loss went right out the window. I am only human.

After my meeting with my doctor and my time off I came up with one big resolution. In 2019 I am going to take the pressure off of myself. I have the fundamentals to win this fight, but first I need to be able to get my inners to match my goals.

Over the last 2years I have been stressed out in a huge way. My job became a lot more stressful with many of our projects shifted and began to not go the way we had expected them too and in the timeframe set out. With most jobs, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but I work with my family and there is a lot of added pressure there. Just as a spoiled child does, I didn’t handle things not going my way very well, and it stressed me the f-out. That was the beginning of the end. I started to take things professionally very personally. I internalized a lot of my stress not wanting to bring my stresses home with me because I didn’t want to add more stress to Kevin’s professional stress.

I was also stressed about my personal relationship. I am someone that needs forward momentum to know that they are doing a great job. There was no forward momentum in both my professional and personal life, and I felt stuck. So the stress built up, not knowing which way I needed to go to make myself feel better. This all resulted in me feeling pretty crappy about myself. Talk about a self-esteem bomb.

Then September 27th, 2018 I got the relationship promotion that I always wanted with Kevin. He proposed, and something about our relationship changed. He had been putting on this role to throw me off the engagement scent which made me think that getting married wasn’t on his radar. Think Chandler and Monica from Friends. Every time I brought up getting married he’d make a face or make a grunt noise that was not very becoming of him or our relationship. Man, did it chap my hide. Then after we got engaged I got to see what was really going on behind that scenes. That he had made a resolution last year that he would propose. Now, I see how truly in love and excited he is about our future. This lifted a huge weight of sadness and anxiety about our relationship off of my shoulders. It also made me fall more in love with Kevin knowing how excited he was/is about this next step for us. I didn’t think this was possible. Now the stress of my personal relationship has been replaced with the stress of planning a circus of a wedding, and I can’t wait to celebrate.

Knowing that I won’t be able to rid myself of all these moving pieces, I need to figure out how to handle my day-to-day stresses better. So this is where taking the pressure off of myself is going to take a front seat in this bus called 2019. I am going to have fun with the process of planning a wedding. I am going to try and not sweat the small stuff. I am going to learn better ways to handle the stresses of my professional life. I am going to take things one step at a time. I am going to not take things so personally that don’t need to be. I am going to speak up when I don’t believe in an action, instead of holding it inside. I am going to take a leading role in my professional life and not let others walk all over me because I am a female in a male driven world. I am going to believe in myself and remember my motto- A smart person surrounds herself with even smarter people. I know what my abilities are and I know my limitations. Knowing that, I will ask for help.

MIA BELLA LOTTA’S CALL FOR ACTION: I think its only appropriate to plead to my reader’s that they also ask for help and recognize their own limitations. Especially if you are a woman. 2018 was a big year for us bad ass females in taking a leadership role and grabbing the world by its metaphorical balls and saying “no more!”, but that can lead many of us to take on too much and get in over our heads because we don’t want to be looked down upon for not having the abilities. That only makes this fight worse. Being able to recognize our limitations means we are smart enough to ask for help and strong enough to admit our limitations. So here it is, what are your limitations and how do you overcome them?

SONG OF THE WEEK: “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten

I might only have one match
But I can make an explosionAnd all those things I didn’t say
Wrecking balls inside my brain
I will scream them loud tonight
Can you hear my voice this time?This is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my fight song
And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me