I love me because...

I'm part of a group of women all working to lose weight. We've been giving mini-challenges to each other...one of them really stuck me...

Tell yourself you love you.

Hmmm...so to the mirror I went.

Me to self, "I love you."

*giggle* Shifty eyes...smile playing at the corner of my mouth. Hard to look at me when I said that. So again...this time more assertively...

"I LOVE YOU."

It felt good.

So I took it to the next step...

Self to me, "Why do you love me?"

And boy if that didn't stump me for a minute...I started out tentatively..., "Because I'm a good person?"

Why?

Because I am generous with myself, my time, my money, my stuff....and because I like to help other people.

But what about YOU...what do you love about you?

I like my sense of humor and I like my laugh. Actually, I like laughing in general - it makes me happy.

And on it went...this little conversation with myself until I had a chance to really tell myself today the reasons why I like...scratch that...LOVE me.

If you think this is easy...I challenge you to try it. :)

The full 30 minutes...

I've been working on getting my mile run time down, but this week I was thinking about my goals and I realized that I need to really work on endurance more than speed.

For me, its more important that I can run as long as I need to instead of being a sprinter and going in short fast bursts. Not that I'm anywhere close to being a sprinter, but I was thinking futuristically and decided that I wanted to be an endurance runner and not a sprinter.

So, I changed my routine and today I ran a full 30 minutes WITHOUT stopping. This is huge.

At 5 minutes I checked my watch...gaaah...25 to go!

At 10 minutes I peaked over the tough part...mostly because I had the perfect song to run to...

At 15 minutes I thought...this is what I would normally stop at...maybe I'll just go another 2 minutes and then I'll have "improved."

At 17 minutes I thought, "I can make it to 20 minutes..only 3 more to go."

At 20 minutes I stopped watching the time and turned the treadmill to distance to see how far I could go and told myself that I would run until it read 1.5 miles then I could stop.

At 25 minutes I reached 1.5 miles and thought to myself...I've got to go the last 5 minutes.

At 28 minutes I knew I wouldn't stop until the calories lost read 300 no matter what the time read and wouldn't you know it...at 30 minutes it all came together.

Three months ago I could have NEVER done that. I would have flopped on the floor after 5 minutes and been depressed at how out of shape I was.

I'm proud of myself today. I'm proud of how far I've come and today I can actually see the finish line and it doesn't look too far away or too hard to get there.

Today I ran the full 30 minutes.