Parenting

Mom's Selfie-A-Day Body Transformation Is Truly Amazing

by Maria Guido

After her husband committed suicide, she needed to change her perspective and life

When her husband committed suicide at just 31 years old, Justine McCabe turned to binge eating as a coping mechanism. Her realization that she needed to make a change for her own mental health brought her to a place of strength — and she single-handedly totally changed her life.

She decided to focus on making herself feel better and decided to look to endorphins from exercise to help with that. “I wanted to find out if natural feel good endorphins really could help get me through my worst grieving days. I was desperate to do anything to help fill the gaping hole in my heart,” McCabe writes on her blog. “I started it slowly, but that was quick to change when I realized I wasn’t just taking my body to the gym. I was taking my mind out for exercise.” She admits to feeling apprehensive about that first visit to the gym: “I don’t even know how my 300lb frame stayed on that cardio machine for 60 minutes. But what I can tell you is the small glimmer of excitement I felt as I begrudgingly took a picture and sent it to my best friend.”

That picture turned into another. And another. And another… and this time lapse video was born. It’s a shot from every day of her first year going to the gym.

“There was never any of the answers I was looking for in the emotional binge eating. The only thing I would be left with was an over extended sick to my stomach feeling, regret that it was not worth it and I would have to be held accountable for what I did,” McCabe writes on her blog. “It was a cycle I began to repeat endlessly, almost expecting a different result each time. Torturing my body with breakfast foods was never going to solve any problems or make unidentified emotions disappear.”

“I have learned quite a powerful message in these twelve months. As human beings, we are limitless. Everything we think we can or cannot do starts within the boundaries we set for ourselves,” she writes on her blog. “I did not want to be who I was becoming. I truly wanted to change my life. I revoked my excuses, realizing that the future pages to my story were blank. I am the author of this book.”

Just a year later, she’s lost 124 pounds. But this isn’t just a weight loss story. It’s a story of someone reclaiming their life, and their right to feel good again. She went through hell and developed a plan of action to change something about her life — something for the better. That is truly inspiring.

Nothing is impossible.