I grew up in a little town called Ivalee, Alabama. Living the country life suited me just fine, but when my parents divorced, my mother, sister and I moved to the big city. I am just kidding it wasn’t a big city but it was bigger than Ivalee. I grew up, finished high school and enrolled in Cosmetology “aka” Beauty School. It was there that I met the love of my life “Jojo”. We had a whirlwind romance and married after only knowing each other for a couple of months. We left small town Gadsden and moved to Atlanta, GA (which I also loved). My wild and crazy husband decided he wanted to go to Aviation college so we packed up all our belongings in a little white Toyota station wagon and the smallest, cheapest pull behind U-haul you can rent and moved to Ozark, Alabama. We both finished college and we lived in Ozark until an opportunity for Jojo to become a pilot with a private airline in Turkey became available. I also started working at the company. I was the secretary to the General Manager Sevinc Pinar Pasha, then I worked a while in accounting and finally worked in the aircraft maintenance department until my beautiful baby girl was born in January 1993. We moved back to the states in 1995 while my husband took a job in Taipei, Taiwan. He commuted back and forth but we decided to move back to Turkey in 1997. Unfortunately, we separated in the summer of 1998 and divorced in 1999. I have been single since. I spent all this time concentrating on trying to raise my daughter the best I could. I am very proud of her. She is an excellent artist and she recently graduated from UAB with a Bachelors of Arts Degree.
I wanted to start this blog to tell about my journey of finding and loving myself for a change. In June, I had to go to the dentist because I had broken a tooth and needed to have it pulled. I get very nervous at the dentist because I hate the sensation of the numbing solution they swab on the spot where they are giving you a shot. They took my blood pressure and it was 210/130. They refused to see me until I got my blood pressure under control. I am a person who hates going to the doctor. I had not been to a doctor in probably 15 years. Luckily, my sister was with me and she convinced me to go. I went to the doctor and he put me on blood pressure medication. He was a life saver. He didn’t scold me for being overweight. As a matter of fact, when I told him that I knew I needed to lose 130 pounds, he said: “Let’s concentrate on getting your blood pressure down.” He was shocked and very proud of me when I had lost 15 pounds in two weeks. I have my blood pressure under control and I hope when I get to my goal weight that I will no longer need the medication. That is my goal. I have lost 38 pounds since June 13, 2017. Today is September 11, 2017, and I am going to be under 200 pounds by New Years.
I finally decided that it is time to concentrate on me for a change. I have a tendency to want to help others and neglect myself. But this is the year of April. I will be 50 years old in April 2018 and I am determined to be at my goal weight by then. I forgot to mention that I already have a food blog: http://inthekitchenwithapril.com. I have neglected it because I have been focusing on my health. Check it out. There are some good recipes there. Just remember to use portion control. One thing I want to say is I am still eating ANY Food I want. I use an excellent app called MapMyFitness and I log everything I eat. It also syncs with my Fitbit to record my steps.
Join me on my journey and we can encourage and uplift each other.
With all my love,
April
