I am a broken down chick today.

The workout that made my head spin.

I had a really, really brutally difficult workout at CrossFit today (more on that later, CF is the only reason I’m writing this and not a blog called Melissa’s Worldwide Adventures in Pizza Eating)–and I was contemplating my existence while trying to get the room to stop spinning this morning (it took until 2:45 this afternoon, seriously, before I felt human again.) Today I kept trying to answer the question HOW DID I GET HERE? How did I become the person who was lying on the floor of the gym trying to catch her breath for LIKE 30 MINUTES STRAIGHT?

I would like to blame several things. 1) the Chinese restaurant near where Tim and I lived right after our wedding, which I believe was the gateway to us giving up immediately (I mean one day) post-wedding and just eating ourselves silly 2) a misplaced sense of food as a reward coupled with a love of emotional eating–so no matter what kind of day you had, good or bad, hey–SPECIAL food is required (something tragically caloric, natch) 3) an intense dislike for cooking at home and an equally intense adoration of eating out  4) the people who invented pizza–this is mostly their fault. PIZZA IS DELICIOUS, YO. 5) Two pregnancies. There are two sweet, sweet ladies who hang out at our house that are so perfect I try to overlook the bizarre things that still exist on my body years later thanks to 18 months of housing another human in my belly.

I could come up with 1000 other reasons that I’ve ended up here, but the truth is–I MADE BAD CHOICES. None of the things above were forced on me. I made choices, really bad ones, stacked on top of one another. And now, I have to spend a lot of time making up for those choices.

And that, simply, is how I found myself lying on a floor making a sweat angel at 11 a.m., asking my trainer whether the gym was supposed to be moving (he claims it was standing still but I don’t believe him.) And how I decided to start this written record of my journey from a suburban working mom with many too many extra lbs. and an inability to run a mile without stopping–to something much better than that.

This is definitely going to leave a mark. And I’m kind of excited about it.