Starting in the middle...

If I had any idea that I would be working towards a goal of Figure competing 6 months ago, I would have started my blog then. Its funny how you just fall into something and learn that you actually really enjoy it and it becomes a passion for you.

I'll tell you how this all started. It was July 2009 and I was spending some time with my kids at our beach house. My daughter was playing with my camera and had me pose for a picture. Several days later as I was uploading all the pictures to my computer I came across the picture she had taken of me. I was shocked! Did I really look like that?

I've never been "big". I'm 5'5" and the heaviest I've ever been was 166lbs. (that's what I weighed just days before giving birth to my daughter, Marissa, in 2004.) When I saw myself in that picture taken that July, I just couldn't believe that was really me! I decided to weigh myself. I came in at 160lbs. NOT PREGNANT. In fact, my second child was already 21 months old. I couldn't even blame it on "baby weight"!

So July 6th, 2009, I decided that I was ready to make a change. At first, I just started walking. I would walk for an hour each day. Then a couple weeks later, I got the Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred DVD and I walked and worked out with a girlfriend. We didn't quite make it the 30 days. It was hard to stay motivated and keep our schedules in sync. I was starting to fall back and lose focus.

One morning, late July, one of my preschooler's mothers caught my attention. She walked into the preschool and she just had this "glow". She looked confident and so put together and I realized that it had been a while since I had "seen" her; I mean really looked at her. I was surprised to see how she had transformed over the past months. She had lost weight; she looked fit; she looked AMAZING! Her name is Lisa Jacobs. I remember asking her that morning, "what are you doing?". She explained to me that she had been working out for about 6 months and she invited me to join her for a free trial at her gym. I thought about it for a couple days, not really sure if it was something I could stick with and wondered if our personalities would mix well and I just had a lot of reservations going into it. But...she looked GOOD. I was tired of feeling miserable about myself and I decided to meet her at the gym just two weeks later.