I would totally be lying if I said I wasn’t over the moon about this. The Korean in me wants to say how excited I am really fast and then never mention it again because that would be almost as distasteful as actually mentioning that something awesome happened in the first place. Now that I think about it, the Korean in me says I shouldn’t even be blogging at all … I am a bad Korean.

The only thing that is equal to the excitement that I am feeling right now is the fact that I am completely terrified. I think that I have taken more photos of myself this past week than in the past 7 years in my Shrinking Giyen project. Now I am going to start videotaping myself. Seriously, this is crazy. I am so uncomfortable looking at myself that I actually had to switch the sidebar widget to my main Flickr feed because I don’t really like looking at myself and things seem all the better when my self-portraits are mixed in with other photos (as to somehow disguise the fact that I am taking pictures of myself). It’s neurotic, I know. You can still keep tabs on my daily self-portraits here.

Okay, I am gonna breathe a bit and let myself lean into the fact that I am happy for the first time in a long time. QB made some crack about me “not going Hollywood on him” then advised me to go read Margaret Cho’s “I’m The One That I Want” – which I actually finished over the weekend. I really didn’t know much about Margaret Cho until I read the book. But after reading it I can definitely say that much of it is familiar to me and my life. There are a lot of commonalities about self-esteem issues and personal hardships in there. At the very end, Cho sums up how I am feeling about life right now:

“I believe that when you take those first steps in loving yourself, the universe conspires with your soul to keep that love affair going.”

A few years ago I the cynic in me might have thought that this was metaphysical crap. Now, I’m drinking the koolaid.

PS. Thanks Mir & Aimee for such great advice!

Several years back I went to a Chinese acupuncturist in the University District who was a 6th Generation Doctor of Oriental Medicine from Beijing. When he was a child his parents sent him to a Buddhist monastery where he studied medicine just like his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father and so on and so forth etc. etc. etc. This man had the smoothest skin you could ever imagine beholding. In fact you could almost get hypnotized staring at his poreless porcelain visage. That is, if were not for the fact that it takes your full concentration to decipher what he was trying to say. And I am a seasoned when it comes to understanding what Asian people are trying to say in English – I could hardly understand him.

When I first went to go see him he looked at my tongue, checked my pulse and read my palm. He then looked at me and said, “You have lots of emotional stress.” No shit, I didn’t need to pay anyone $110 to tell me that. Then he said, “Too much belly fat. Lose weight. ” Again, did I pay for this? Thinking back, that juncture I wanted out of my relationship so badly that I just ate and ate and ate my way through the stress. I didn’t need acupuncture, I need a new life. I started out at 148 lbs back in 2001 and after the implosion of my relationship, a job implosion, depression and a mid-thirties crisis, I’ve gained 40 whopping pounds. You do the math.

Suffice to say, I have reached the limits of ‘emotional stress’ and ‘belly fat’ and am now working achieving a better life balance. I am on the path to being the happiest that I have ever been, yet I am the unhealthiest that I have ever been. If you were wondering how this feels – it totally sucks ass. It’s like being in an ill-fitting outfit. Like all of the time.

So I am, as with many aspects of my life, making decisions and taking massive action.  Getting in shape is just another one of those things that is so important for me to accomplish once and for all. As much as I like to think that my weight issues don’t bother me, it totally does. I am sooooo over it.

In honor of my commitment (and to get over my fear of the camera) I am going to take daily self-portraits so I can document the changes in my face leading up to the Jingle Bell 5k. I got the idea from this blog that I am addicted to. Sharyn is doing a series of self-portraits called 365 days + 1.

Her photos are much more clever and creative than mine will be.