Yesterday I told you I’d done something drastic to motivate myself into losing weight and living the active lifestyle I want to have. Motivating yourself through little prizes is classic advice—lose 10 lbs, you tell yourself, and you get to splurge on that cute pair of shoes your frugal side says is too expensive. It might work for some, but I just end up failing, feeling bad about myself, then buying the shoes anyway to make myself feel better. Then I’m still fat, in more credit card debt, and stuck with a pair of shoes that didn’t come in wide sizes, making my chubby feet feel like they’ve been locked in an iron maiden after 10 minutes of wearing them.

That sucks.
This time, though, I think I’ve found something that might work for me.
One of my twins went to Costa Rica with a school group last summer and loved it. He told me, that as a nature-lover, I HAD to go. His favorite part was seeing real sloths hanging in branches over his head. He didn’t touch them, though, saying they had lice, and they bite and scratch. 
Good call.  
He was also a fan of the monkeys that would break into your hotel room if you didn’t lock the doors. He would wake up in the morning to the sight of a gaggle of shady monkeys peering at him from a tree right outside his window, just waiting for him to mess up and forget to flip the lock so they could grab his iPhone and Pop Tarts. The worst part, he says, were the “weird loud birds” that would wake him up in the morning and taunt him as he hiked through the rainforest.

I don’t know what those birds were. Maybe they were some weird species of South American  buzzards that pluck out your eyeballs and eat them for breakfast while you’re distracted by the sloths…thus allowing the monkeys to pick-pocket your corpse for Tic-Tacs and spare change.

Circle of life, yo.  
So in August, my other son came home from school saying there was another group going in 2020 for an “active” version of the trip. He wanted to go and said he wouldn’t mind if I tagged along, too. There will be hiking, zip-lining, white-water rafting, snorkeling, swimming and general walking around looking at stuff. I want to do ALL of that. I want to hear the weird noisy birds and see the lice-ridden sloths and tangle with the felonious monkeys. ALL of it.
I decided, though, that if I was going to go, I didn’t want to be somebody’s chubby, out of shape mom waiting at the bottom of the mountain, holding everybody’s phone while they zip through the forest treetop suspended by a piece of dental floss. No, I want to be the one vomiting my way through the canopy. I don’t want to sit on the beach in a big hat and tent-sized cover-up doling out sunscreen and posting proof-of-life photos to Facebook for the parents who are at home chilling in the AC. I want to feel comfortable, even in the presence of a bunch of firm, fit, stretch-mark free 16-19 year old bodies, while wearing a swimsuit and wading into the ocean to confront another fear  of mine—sea life. 
I know that’s weird. Spiders, bats, bugs, snakes…no problem. But a fish? OMG. They freak me out. FREAK. ME. OUT. The thought of purposely going into the water, where these demons live, on purpose, makes my blood pressure spike. Just the picture on this post makes me shudder. (The name of this phobia is ichthyophobia, if you were wondering.)


But I'm not going to worry about that now. I'll worry about that as I'm putting on my flippers and mask in about 18 months, trying not to hyper-ventilate and making myself confront my fear 1) because I hate being afraid of things and 2) I don't want to look like a wimp in front of my son.

Anecdotally, the last time I did something to avoid looking like a wimp in front of one of my kids, I plunged down one of those stupid tall high-speed water slides...I'm not certain even now, years later, that I've extracted all the bits of swimwear from my crevices. Let's hope that doesn't happen while snorkeling.  So, I’m going to Costa Rica. I'm doing all the stuff on the trip itinerary, even the stuff that scares me. And that requires me to quit screwing around and get serious about getting fit. I have 18 months to lose 100 lbs or so, get fit enough to hike up a mountain in crazy humidity without dying, gain enough confidence to wear a swimsuit, in front of a bunch of strangers IN PUBLIC and overcome a life-long phobia of fish.

Yeah, I can do that.