There once was a girl named delle..

..who had been overweight for as long as she could remember.

I call myself codelle, I'm currently 28 and live in Ontario. Is that my real name? No, it is not. I keep my identity private, mostly because I am keeping my weightloss journey a secret from my family, and I don't want them to find out about it before I choose to reveal it to them. Not using my real name doesn't mean that anything I say is not the complete and utter truth.

I've started this blog because it is important to me to start tracking my weightloss journey. I've already come so far and I feel that the experiences and thoughts I am having are worth recording, to look back on later. I have a strong interest in being able to look back on where I have come from, and in remembering as much as I can about the experiences I have had. I better understand the person I am now by comparing who I have become to who I was. Sometimes we only recognise change through the process of comparison.

I've not had an easy life, nor a particularly happy one. At the same time, I have much to be thankful for, and many good memories. I've been overweight more or less my whole life, but I have still have friends and people who care about me for who I am. Most of my misery has not come from without, from how people treat me, but from within myself, from my perceptions of myself and the people around me. Just as I have been overweight as long as I can remember, I have also carried within me the longing to change, to look different, to be someone else. For all of my troubled teen years I believed that being thin would result in being happy. As I entered my 20s, however, I came to realise that happiness should not be dependent on the shape of my body, and that even if I were to drop 100 lbs, I would still carry many of the issues that were contributing to my unhappiness and depression. I started to accept that it was my lot to be overweight, and to work on being as happy as I could be in spite of it. It was not an easy or a short process, and it has taken me years to get to a point where I am comfortable with who I am, and to not only tolerate myself, but to actually like me for me. Instead of viewing weightloss as the solution to my problems, I adopted the view that I should solve my problems before I tackle the weightloss. Finally, some 3-odd months ago, I realised the time was right for me to finally start working on the outside of me, after all the years I have spent working on the inside. No, my life isn't perfect, and I still have issues, but I think it is unrealistic to think I will ever get to a point where my life is perfect. It is normal that we have some issues to work on, and things we want to change. As we live, we grow and change and develop. I have come a long way, and now it is time to see how things will change for me as I work on becoming a thinner, healthier me!