Originally posted here with The Demoiselles

My “Getting Healthy” Info

I’m Kyla Roma- a 24 year old Canadian prairie girl, blogger, life long vegetarian, puppy mama & thrifting addict. I’m new to Getting Healthy, and I’m really excited to kick this off. I’ve got high hopes & there’s a lot at stake for me!

1. As of the beginning of this project, what are your height and weight?

Right now I’m 5’7″ and I weigh 140 lbs. On me, that looks like this…

2. We all know that numbers never give us the big picture. When you think of your body – its size, shape, strength and health – how do you feel?

Generally, I’m very happy with my body but I have been a huge slacker over the past year. When it comes down to it I feel like I have a problem of pain & staying active:

Pain: I’ve had chronic back pain since I was about 18 years old & was rear ended by careless winter drivers one too many times. Dealing with it is really hard a lot of the time and it means that I’m almost never comfortable, a lot of the time I’m physically braced without realizing it, and my back pain escalates. Unless I manage it all the time, it becomes unmanageable… so I start to rely on pain killers & sedatives so I can sleep. At only 24 years old it’s a ridiculous situation.

I go through phases of trying to stay on top of it and getting really frustrated by how hard it is to just feel normal in my body, and giving up. Over the past year I’ve let it get completely out of hand. From my lower back all the way up to my upper back neck, shoulders & arms I ache all the time, and I often have sharp pain when I move. Everything down to breathing deeply hurts, and I find it hard to keep focused on work, school, or even blogging(!) because of my body.

Staying Active: The Canadian Prairie winters are brutal, and as the snow settles down and the wind chill gets serious I gain weight. It’s just the way of the world & since the summer I’m already well on my way to adding 10 – 20 lbs to my body by the spring. The weight I don’t really mind, but the cabin fever? Hold me.

When it’s -30 F the last thing I want to do is go to the gym, but it’s easy to get depressed when you just stop moving around. Add to this being a student again for the first time since my undergrad as well as being a new car owner, and my life style is quickly becoming sedentary. That is so not me. I need to find a way to be active that fits with my life & that will help to energize me so I can manage school, work, hanging out with my friends & my husband because of it, not in spite of it.

3. Based on all of that, what is your biggest goal in the Getting Healthy project? What is one thing you must accomplish during the next two months?

I absolutely, no questions asked, must get my back pain into control. Just seeing that my big complaint above is essentially “it hurts really badly when I breathe” is embarrassing & sad. I need to be comfortable in my body again.

4. Do you have any secondary goals? What are they?

I get bored of health kicks quickly- I commit to too much and don’t stick with it long enough to see results so I need to find a routine that works for me and marry myself to it. I’m going to use this project as a way to test out new tweaks to my routine and see what my life would look like if I stuck with them.

I’ll be keeping the best things and throwing out the rest- and that’ll include everything from how I get together with my friends (carb centric gathering are what I’m all about), becoming a healthy vegetarian instead of a lazy one, and cutting out the Tylenol & Advil that takes the edge off my back pain so I can actually feel what my body is telling me. Even if my body is telling me “Ow.”

5. What’s your day-to-day lifestyle like? What are you into? (We’d just like to get to know you better!)

I’m a comfort seeker. I love finding a routine that works for me so I can use it to blow through the boring stuff in my day- all I want to do is make a cup of tea, get into my craft room and dive into my google reader. I spend a lot of time writing, editing, and community building for my blog on the weekends, and I spend all my time in the evenings with my husband & our puppies or with my friends.

I’m very sarcastic, more than a little nerdy, and try to balance it out with a healthy dose of blog reading, baking, crafting, and white wine.

6. What is one way that our readers can get you motivated, right out of the gate?

Well that I’m blogging this journey is terrifying enough to get me motivated, believe me! But some moral support? Please bring it on!

• Give me your suggestions for something that could help me reduce my back pain.
• Let me know how you’ve made staying active a part of your routine that you look forward to.
• Have a question? Ask it by leaving a comment and I’ll answer any you have in a video blog next week.
• Add me on twitter or check out my blog KylaRoma.com if you’d like to get to know me better!

7. Anything else you’d like to share with us, to help everyone get to know you?

I’m going to be breaking my goals down and updating them every week, along with focusing on a specific issue I tackle that week- from trying something new for my back pain, to pulling things that work for you into my routine. It’ll be really easy to follow my progress, I swear.

I’m excited to connect with you guys, to try your suggestions & to report back how they worked from me with pictures & video blogs. Most of all, I’m excited to be actually doing something & to know I have a plan to tackle all of this. It feels like it might change a lot. That’s what I’m hoping, at least.

Thanks for following along!