I am making another attempt at losing weight right now. Husband and I have started going to the gym and I start sessions with a personal trainer on Monday – which I am both looking forward to and dreading, because I am out of shape and I’m worried that I won’t be able to handle what he throws at me.

Thinking optimistically, this should make me fell all the better when I finish and am in much better shape and can handle the next step up. For instance, I love doing the treadmill and playing my music loud and just pounding out my frustration and working through the ‘I can’t’ part of myself, and on Thursday after work I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill for the first time in my life – usually I just power walk.

All this being said, I am going to the gym partly for my health, of course, because I don’t want to get cancer and I want to have babies – two goals currently under threat by my weight – but there is something else spurring me on: I want to have style.

I love clothes. I get this trait from my maternal grandmother who used to love to shop, for herself and for us. My love of clothes means that I buy a lot of clothes, I have a lot of days when I get frustrated because nothing looks good on me, and I always feel as though I don’t look quite as good as the people around me. One of the most frustrating things is having my weight fluctuate so I never look the same way in the same outfit twice. It always seem as though my pants are either too tight or falling down, never in between. I look at clothes in stores and fall in love with them, only to find that I’m bigger than the store’s biggest size – or in the case of plus-size stores, smaller than their smallest size.

I want to be one of those women that looks put together and professional, I want to be able to shop at any store and find beautiful things to wear that fit me and I want to be able to go into my closet and find beautiful outfits that fit and go together.

I am not a person that’s comfortable buying thin clothes and fat clothes, but I do have a skirt in my closet right now that I bought when it just almost fit, and I’m hoping that by the spring it will fit perfectly – I look forward to wearing it with a bright white blouse and some snazzy shoes. That picture will help me push through. That picture and the big blue eyes my baby will look at me with.