80 ounces of water later...

This year I made a lot of goals. Personally and professionally. One of my personal goals was to lose weight... lots of it. So in January I started a 5 month unsuccessful journey in the direction of weight loss.

I started by counting calories using My Fitness Pal and going to the gym 5x a week. I fell into a more love than hate relationship with a 5am alarm and took on the challenge of searching pinterest for healthy recipes to make at home. Being self employed and working from home made it fairly easy to cook every night or at the very least throw something into the crockpot.

Unfortunately with those changes... nothing in my body changed.

So I spent 5 months trying to change everything I was eating to find *something* that would work. Lower calories, higher calories, various attempts to force myself to love fruits and vegetables that I've always hated, dabbling with low carbs after a doctor said I might have PCOS. Everything would give me a momentary exciting budge on the scale and then absolutely nothing. Resulting in less than 5lbs of weight loss after 5 months of hard, frustrating work.

This past Tuesday I went to my first meeting at the doctors office to start the HMR Diet. Basically it is a VLCD [Very Low Calorie Diet] where I drink 5 protein shakes a day and am limited to 500 calories a day-- found in those protein shakes. No food. Just shakes.

When I first went to the information meeting I cried on the way home. And for several days after. I've been overweight my entire life and I feel like I'm out of options and if this doesn't work there's just no hope. Period.

A few weeks ago I had a photoshoot in Cambria and because no one was able to ride along with me I had 8 hours in the car by myself to think. The pressure of feeling like this was my only option was heavy on my mind as was the fear of making this commitment and drastic life change only to gain all of the weight back [and more!] as soon as I stopped drinking the shakes.

Day 3 on this diet and it's been harder than I ever imagined. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Hard.

The funny part is 3 days of 500 calories a day and I'm not hungry.

Physically by the end of day 2 and 3 my head has been throbbing. Last night I was photographing 2 back to back graduations and after 5 hours of carrying the 70-200 paired with my throbbing head I thought I was going to pass out or vomit or both. It was awful and lots of tear inducing.

Mentally after all of these years having a terrible relationship with food I don't think I ever realized how much food revolves around being social. Even if I never ate in social situations it wasn't like I *couldn't* eat. Now, I can't sit at the dinner table, or go to the grocery store, or accept a DumDum that Jack offers me.

Emotionally tonight I'm a mess. I haven't gone to the gym in 2 days because I'm afraid if I wake up too early I won't be able to make it through the day without being paralyzed with headache pain and it seems like the only solution to making it through the next 12+ weeks is to sleep them away. I know I made this decision but it's depressing. Depressing because I feel like I needed to make it and because I don't know if I'm going to make it through and because aside from food I already feel like my life has been drastically limited. And what if I go through all of this and it still fails? What if I don't lose any weight? What if I can't keep going and my last hope slips from my reach?

What if it's too hard for me to get through a 10 hour wedding day?

I just needed somewhere to spill all of this. So it wasn't floating around in my mind anymore.