Unapologetically Em, & Fabulous!

I published my first blog ever on January 1, 2022. It was titled, “I love you fat” and it was the start to my new health and wellness journey that I’ve been on ever since. When I wrote that blog, I weighed over 300 pounds.

Now, as we’re heading into the end of 2023, I have lost over 100 pounds and I have never been healthier!

That seems almost unreal to type that, honestly. I never in a million years thought that I was ever going to figure out my weight issues, let alone learn to be healthy. I never really valued any of that until I was forced to.

With my struggles with lupus and a B12 deficiency, that opened my eyes to how poorly I’d been treating my body and it led me down an entirely new path; one where I am happy and healthy, and where I finally understand the reasons “why” behind it all now.

You see, when you are overweight your whole life, you are almost always familiar with yo-yo diets and all the new latests trends in the weight loss world. I’ve tried them all.

It wasn’t until I started looking at the reasons WHY behind everything that I got to the root of the problem and was able to start making changes. I had to learn that I had a lot of unhealed trauma that was causing me to binge-eat so I didn’t have to feel any of that. On top of that, my mental health was suffering as well because of how crappy I felt all the time.

I started to get to the point of just accepting that this was my life and this was the way God made me and I just needed to get used to it.

THANK GOD that statement was not true!!

I wasn’t “stuck” being overweight; I just had a lot of work to do to figure out what was really going on. And once I began doing that work, I started healing, and loving myself, and realizing that I deserved more. That trickled down into feelings of self-respect and no longer being okay with just “accepting life” as it was.

Nope! Now that I had all these new feelings of self love and worthiness, I decided that I wanted to start showing my body the kind of respect that it deserved, and boy has that paid off more than anything ever has in my life.

Of course there are the obvious benefits of losing weight: wearing smaller clothes, seeing a smaller number on the scale, and no longer feeling like the “fat friend”. But, the biggest, and most important (to me) lessons that have come from my 100-pound weight loss journey completely caught me off guard. I never realized before how unhealthy I actually was and how limited I was with my body’s abilities. I couldn’t go up a flight of stairs without being winded. I couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes without stabbing pains going into my tummy. I had major gut issues so much that I just became totally used to them. So many things were affecting my life that I didn’t even realize could be changed.

Once I started focusing on my over health (i.e. feeding my body nutrition, focusing on what it needs), and not just on “losing weight”, is when I started noticing real changes, and even more results than ever before.

Because I realized something; being healthy is a lifelong commitment, not just a 30 day fad diet. You truly have to make a mindset change and that’s what I did. And I’m so grateful for that now because I see it all so differently. For example, when I do my weigh-ins (usually on Monday), I don’t go binge a whole bunch of food right after because my weigh-in was over. (Yes, this is now I used to think.) Or I don’t focus on trying to starve myself before weigh-ins. That was all very unhealthy thinking, yet that mentality is very common throughout diet culture.

Now I view it as everything that I’m eating or doing should be benefiting me (and my body) in some way, shape, or form. If it’s not providing any benefit to me, I view that as me disrespecting myself, and since I’ve just done so much work to be able to stop doing that to myself, I’m not about to backslide into that way of thinking again.

It truly has just been a tremendous shift in my thinking and that has allowed me to appreciate my healthy journey so much more than I ever have before. I enjoy seeing my body progress in my workouts. I love feeling strong for the first time in my life. I appreciate my relationship with myself now more than I ever have in my life. I could go on and on about the benefits, but I think you get my point.

This change in thinking also got me thinking about how many other people are out there struggling with these same things as me. People who have tried every diet out there and have just given up, but still don’t feel great about themselves deep down inside. People, just like me, who are needing a little extra help. And I’m a firm believer in if you can’t find any helpers, than you need to be one.

So, I created Unapologetically Em, or UE. UE is going to be a one-stop-shop for mental health matters. I was put on this earth to advocate for mental health awareness and what better way to do that than with an online community for Queens of all walks of life to come together and be free to live unapologetically; I have books that I written about my own personal struggles with mental health, I have apparel available to help remind you all of the Goddesses that you are, and I will be adding courses to UE University that provides a ton of information that I have learned over the years in therapy.

UE University is one of my favorite things. It’s going to be a place (once it’s finished) where people can go to get little tidbits of information that may help them through certain situations in life. Why I created it though, is not everyone can afford to go to therapy, so I wanted to take some of the things that I’ve learned and make them available to those people. While I am not a therapist, I do believe in “once you know better, do better” and what I’ve learned in my healing process has helped me tremendously, so I figured maybe it could help someone else.

Along with mental health matters, I also offer 1:1 coaching for people looking to begin their own personal health journey. I put everything together than I’ve learned along the way into one program and now I’m sharing that with other people as well so they, too, can start to feel so much better about themselves.

While this journey started out with just wanting to lose weight, it has now blossomed into my greatest testament of self-love. So, when I say that I want you to feel better about yourselves, I truly mean it. The discipline that it took me to lose 100 pounds turned into self-respect, and then into pride, and then, finally, into total, and complete self-love. I am in love with myself and I want to encourage everyone to start feeling that way.

We have been conditioned into hating ourselves, especially women, because unhappy people make great consumers. I’ll say that again; Unhappy people make great consumers. When people have a void in themselves they usually need to fill it with something; money, things, drugs, alcohol, etc. That void needs to be filled and we’ve been taught to go looking elsewhere to be able to fill it. And that is just not true. While it took me 36 years to understand that, I’m still sharing it in case there’s someone else out there, who may be a late bloomer like me, who needs to hear it.

I don’t believe that void can be filled truly from outside sources. That has to come from within. And yes, it’s hard to do. It really is. The amount of time you have to spend facing your demons, admitting you were wrong, unlearning so many unhealthy behaviors you were taught…it’s a lot. BUT….it is so. So. SOOOOOOOOOOO worth it!!!

Making this promise to myself, to get healthy, was the best thing I could’ve ever done for myself and I desperately want every other woman out there to feel so in love with herself, too. Because we all deserve it. We deserve to be loved and told that we are beautiful and all those things. But, we need to stop waiting for someone else to say that to us. We need to find that within and start showing up accordingly; just unapologetic and FABULOUS!!!!!

The way I see it, why not? Why not just start loving the shit out of yourself? Why not start going for it? Why not start telling yourself how beautiful you are everyday instead of looking at yourself with disgust in the mirror? Who says that we can’t start doing that?!?!?!?!

NO ONE!!!!!!!!!!!! No one is telling us to do that!!! And isn’t that fantastic?! That also means that no one is going to tell you stop loving yourself either!!!!!! No one, but you.

So, let’s start doing that. Let’s start complimenting the shit out of ourselves, not just each other. Let’s stop making ourselves small so that other people feel comfortable. Life is just too short for that.

Granted, I have not always been this way. It took me losing my mother to cancer for me to wake up on life: to its meaning and my place in it. And that’s also what made me realize that I was living a lot of my life for other people. I was a chronic people pleaser in some aspects. And I was not happy.

Then, that fateful day came and went, and a new Em was born, in a sense. Seeing my mom like that will forever be burned into my mind. She was surrounded by so many people who truly loved her and cared about being there for her last moments here on earth. She was surrounded by love before God took her home. But that’s what hit me the most; while she was so loved, and surrounded, it was still her leaving, all by herself. It was still her that probably had a million things going through her mind that we’ll never know. She went to be with Him, all by herself. And that’s what changed me.

I realized after my mom died that at the end of all of our journeys are just going to be between us and God. That’s it. To me, it’s not going to matter if I’m surrounded by a lot of people here on earth. What’s going to matter is when I have to face Him and He asks me, “Why didn’t you use the gifts I gave you? Why did you play so small? That’s not what I created you for.” I’m not referencing the Bible here, I’m just imagining that little happy moment in my mind. And when I think about that, and how before my mom passed, I wouldn’t be able to answer Him. If I’m being honest, before my mom passed, I’m not totally convinced I was even on a path that was going to get me into Heaven.

But then that happened. And I watched my mom die. Right in front of me. Her hands could no longer ever hold mine again. I’ll never feel the warm embrace of her world famous hugs. I’ll never get another phone call from her, ever. again. That pain was all consuming, and then I realized that I had to make a decision….

I was either going to get busy dying, or get busy living.

And my God have I been LIVING NOW!! I just threw all of my fears and doubts and useless thoughts out the window and decided to start showing up exactly as I am, FIERCELY, and unapologetic about it all. And it has been the greatest blessing I never ever dreamed was even possible.

Thus, UNAPOLOGETICALLY EM was born; My online palace for all the Queens out there who may be struggling to find their worth, or they have already found it and are just looking for a community of like-minded souls. This is it!! Whether you’re looking for an accountability buddy for your weight-loss journey, just needing a good book to read, or want to rock a hoodie that supports a great cause, I’ve got you covered.

Unapologetically Em will house all of the things that I’m passionate about, like mental health matters, and will also be the host site for this new blog, Unapologetically Fabulous!

Come along with me as I learn to live out loud, fiercely and authentically, with all my flaws, so I can get the most out this life that God has given me. So that way, when it’s my turn to face Him, I can tell him proudly that I shared my gifts, I tried and I failed, more than once, but I never gave up and never stayed silent to appease other people. I lived the life that was meant for me. And I hope that Unapologetically Em (UE) encourages all of you to do the exact same thing!!!

If you’re anything like me, you wasted too many years worrying about other people’s opinions. Let me tell you, once you let that stuff go, the rest of your life begins. And what a treat it is to do what makes YOU happy every day, not everyone else.

It’s time, my dear Queens. It’s time for you to shine, and be unapologetically fabulous!!!

Em