This Broken Mess of a Life

I'm a bit of a Pinterest addict and I regularly use it for inspiration for my weekly meal planning. Yesterday, I realized I had some chicken thighs in the fridge that needed to be cooked and I had no time to cook them and no idea HOW to cook them. So I went to Pinterest and typed "slow cooker chicken thighs". One of the first recipes that came up was this Lemon Pepper Chicken Thigh recipe. So I went with it. This was possibly my biggest Pinterest success so far.

Spinal Fusion Surgery – L5S1 Fusion Surgery Day I’ve never really written in much detail about my surgery day and all the specifics about being in the hospital so I thought I’d spell all that out for anyone curious or wondering what it’s like.

Five years ago, I was really unhealthy and overweight. I know I weighed somewhere over 204 (I’m 5’6”), but when I crossed that 200lb threshold, I stopped getting on the scale.  Like lots of moms, I tentatively looked into things to try to lose weight. I tried Couch to 5k once and stuck to that for about a week. I’d go shopping and try to buy what I assumed was “diet food”. But I was super uncommitted and uneducated, so it was a recipe for failure. I was also going through a lot of turmoil in my life at that time. I was a newly divorced single mom and running my own business and really struggling. And one day a light went off in my head….. I deserved to be treated better than I was treating myself. Around that time, about four years ago, one of my oldest friends , who just so happens to run her own gym , told me about a program they were going to run at the gym. A 21 day weight loss challenge, guided by her and her nutritionist husband. At that point I had cut out beer ...