Giving Back

Disclaimer: this is NOT an anti-gain train blog.  Although, this might be something you want to think about doing.

This morning I was packing and whatnot (yes, at the last minute), cleaning my place up (it's mostly clean... there's walking room...), and thinking about my health/weight loss this year.  We're coming up on the end of 2011 and I've made some healthy changes, yes, but overall, I'm still just not hitting the mark.  There have been some massive changes this year.  I'm finally done with school, I've been in and out of work, I broke up with a man I had thought I might marry, I took a few blows to the ego and self-confidence somewhere in there, and I made new friends and created stronger friendships with the ones I have.

One thing I haven't done this year is volunteer.  I have spent the bulk of my life volunteering for a multitude of reasons.  I let the fact that I had essentially two full time jobs stop me from giving back.  I'm doing my best to realize I'm human and can't do it all, so therefore not to be disappointed in myself.  It's only semi working :P.

This being said, while thinking about all of this, I was cleaning up my kitchen and putting away cans of soup (P.s. I seriously need to clean out the cupboards).  And then I had this really cool idea - well I think it's cool anyways.  It's based on the idea of giving back and I'm jumping off of a WeightWatchers program (for a period of a week or two every year, they have a drive where members are encouraged to donate the amount of food per pound loss - or just donate period!).

I'm going to weigh myself on January 1, 2012.  I'm going to weigh myself again on December 20, 2012.  Clearly, there will be weighing in between those two dates, but for the purposes of this idea - these are the two dates that matter.  For every pound lost, whether it's five or 50, I am going to donate that amount of food to a homeless shelter in the area.  This is, of course, assuming I, myself, am not homeless at that point in time.  This is not a point in saying I have a goal of how much weight I have to lose, because that's not what matters here.  The two numbers.  Right there in black and white.

This is not to say I can't do other forms of volunteering throughout the year or donations of some sort.  This is simply to say that we often forget where we "start" and connecting giving back and losing could be a fun way to mark that journey.  We all know it's hard to lose pounds - we wouldn't be here if it wasn't.  But for as hard as it is for us, there are a lot of people who have it harder or worse of than we do (and this is coming from the girl who sometimes doesn't know where the money to buy food is going to come from).

So, feel free to join me.  You can either do it yourself, or email me (mytrainermorgan@gmail.com) and I'll keep your weight in my special file and check in on you on December 20th of next year, reminding you where you "started", as in started the year.  Maybe you don't have a lot of weight to lose or you're in maintenance.  If you still want to join in, email me your literal starting weight and your "ending" weight.  Whatever amount of weight loss you maintain, donate that! 

Feel free to jump on in this with me.  I've already set a calendar date for December 20, 2012 to weigh in and calculate :).