This is me!

1. Tuesday Transformation November 14,2017.

• This is me. My name is Caroline. I am on a weight loss journey. I took this photo September 22, 2017. I weighed 229.2 pounds. I have a story to tell, I have a life. I live here in the Michiana area which is between South Bend Indiana and Niles Michigan. This is my journey back into healing.I am 53. I am happily married for almost 5 years and we don't have children. It is my first marriage and although I had some strange long term relationships I finally found the love of my life and like I said we will have five years of marriage on May 25th 2018. We do have 4 cats. My father passed away several years ago. My mother passed away last November which was in 2016 the Monday before Thanksgiving. She was in Ithaca New York. I got to say goodbye to her before she passed and her side of the family and my husband and I planned a memorial on Labor Day of this year 2017. I had to plan the memorial because my two older siblings could not do it. It's a long complicated story and my brother did show up but my sister did not. I don't want to go into the details but it left me depressed, confused and angry. We have so much healing  we need to do from a very abusive childhood that should of been addressed years ago but it was not and that is how it is today. I can't out my siblings because this is my story . I talk to my brother periodically on the phone but have no contact with my sister at this time. She has never even met my husband because she is in her own twisted marriage and although I have a place in my heart for her she is a toxic person to be around.  She lives three hours away near Detroit. She and her husband have never expressed an interest in meeting my wonderful husband. She is in her own emotional food hole and I can't crawl back down there with her and she needs to get her own healing.  That is all I can say about her because I don't want to out her or my brother. How did I get to this weight when the year before I was losing weight and gained it back. I let myself go. I focused on anger, resentment, and self destructed with my weight. I focused the last year of planning a memorial, anger that I did not get help from siblings and just a lot of repressed memories of how we grew up. This is my story of coming back and come follow the chapters of how I progress. I am not a rich person, my husband is a music teacher and plays in symphonies and I am employed to help him part time and I do ebay. After I did the memorial in September I came back exhausted and wiped out. I know the weight had something to do with it. I have all the weight loss tools to finally bury the anger, frustration and get back to a healthy weight and maybe someday have a relationship with my sister but this is how I am doing a weight loss blog on a budget. You will see a lot of things from Walmart, Aldi's and Meijer grocery stores because let's keep it real that is where I shop. I also shop a lot at Goodwill and a lot of the things I use to cook with, things I wear and buy are from there because I am frugal and perhaps it can inspire a reader to say "never thought to do that". Are all the foods healthy no but they are realistic. And so the journey begins.

What can I say I like hats and most of my pictures are of  me with hats. This was taken a week ago. I am now at 217.00 as of today November 14, 2017. I have lost 12 pounds since September 22, 2017. I use Lose It App to help me. Tomorrow I will tell you more about the app. I like to wear a lot of black clothing lol but not always. I am aiming for a pound a week and sometimes I hit that goal with the whole pound and sometimes a little more. Every Tuesday I will show you my progress on Transformation Tuesday. I can also show you the lose it app to prove how I am doing. I have a lose it scale I got from eBay a few years ago and and my goal is 175 by June 1st. Starting on January 1st 2018 I will up my goal of 1.5 pounds a week but at this time with the winter approaching and not a lot of sun and other factors I would just prefer to do a pound a week so I can see some progress. This is not a race but a journey. It will be sad, funny, life hacks that work for me and just a no-nonsense way of losing weight and keeping it off. I promise to blog at least 3 times a week and if I don't blog I will put a positive quote up. Thanks Pintrist for that. But every Tuesday I will show a photo of my journey and the lose it app to show where I am at. May you be blessed today. This is a journey and I have an exercise machine calling my name in the other room.