After a quick donut stop, I was about to get on the freeway when I realized that the station was doing a pledge drive. Since I was trying to pay attention to the crazy people who apparently took the word "merge" literally, I wasn't immediately able to devote any time to rolling my eyes and changing the station.
I am not quite sure what made me stick with the station. I have a back-up station just in case something awful, like a lightning strike or pledge drive, happened with my preferred station, but I never switched to it.
The pledge drive was all about starving children overseas, especially in countries like Cambodia. The thing was, they weren't emphasizing the guilt trip like I was expecting them to do. They put their needs and their purpose out there without being overly dramatic.
Of course, I still felt guilty.
And incredibly fat.
These kids were starving, to death, while I'm cramming a donut I didn't need into my mouth because I was too lazy to grab any one of dozens of healthy breakfast choices out of the giant room of safe, fresh food we keep right in the house.
It didn't seem right. I'm not a big person naturally. When I did gain weight in my early teens, I lost it easily in my late teens. Even after my second child was born I was well within the range of a normal weight. The last ten years has been a pretty steady 8-10 extra pounds per year.
Yeah, that puts me at about 80-100 pounds overweight and, after thinking about starving children, I could feel every flabby ounce of it. While I recognized I had become "big" over the last decade, I never felt truly ashamed of it until that moment.
Having already relinquished my donut money, I didn't have much I could give these people, no matter how good the work they were doing was.
I don't have a lot of money, but I do have fat.
It was then I wondered what would happen if I tried to get people to sponsor me to lose that weight. There are lots of fundraising gimmicks out there, why not make this one weight loss? I don't have any medical conditions making me this size. I could certainly use a normal energy level and, being bipolar, it could help improve my mood and reduce my dependence on medication.
I dismissed it as ridiculous and self-serving. I laughed about it with a co-worker at lunch, but I didn't get the response I was expecting.
I would sponsor you to lose weight,
especially if it were going to help feed kids locally.
It was then I realized I didn't have any choice. It was time to put together a plan.
