During my entire life, I have always had crazy and detailed dreams... often times my imagination will fuel my creativity at work or in writing... which is great most of the time... but this morning I woke up with the nightmares of all nightmares. I was watching myself in the dream... like Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Future in some bad episode of "A Christmas Carol". In the nightmare, I was at a family event (that’s not the scary part) and someone asked me to sit next to my Dad on a couch so they could take a photo of us together. I had a sad face and unhappy feeling about getting my photo taken... and then I realized... I was HUGE in my dream. I had gained all my weight back and probably more! I actually thought to myself in my nightmare... what happened? How could I have let myself get big after all that hard work? I was very upset watching myself waddle across the room and plunk on the couch to get a photo taken.

I immediately woke myself up out the dream... laid in bed for a couple minutes and was in complete disgust at how overweight I was in my dream... decided I better get up and start the day to shake those negative thoughts out of my head. I walked into my bathroom... looked out the window at the gorgeous sunrise coming up over the water... and the first thought that entered my head was... "WOW today is going to be a great day to go for a jog on the boardwalk". After I had that thought... I knew... the nightmare was only my subconscious warning me of what I never want to be again... fat! I took comfort in realizing and acknowledging that the reason why I will NOT be overweight again is because I’ve changed the way that I think and live my life.

I now consider exercise a treat in my day and eating healthy is what fuels my body to do the activity that I enjoy most... jogging. My brain really has changed the way that I think about things... and there is no turning back.