So today I’m on day 2 of cutting out sodas from my diet, and I’ve already noticed an improvement on my water intake a day. Counting coffee, I’ve already consumed 5 cups of water! (Two 12 and a half oz. Cups of coffee). I’ve found my biggest cravings ironically come on while I’m not eating versus when I am, and last night was a huge challenge because I visited my brother who had a 12 pack ready at his feet. When he asked if I’d like one I calmly declined “no thank you” and he said “well if your thirsty there here”. I probably should have said ok and left it at that but said “I’m actually watching my caffiene and calorie intake now and trying to cut sodas from my diet”. Which was a horrible way of wording it to my brother because he hates calorie counters,and I should have instead said I’m trying to cut back on sugars first because I want to start improving my health, because when I reached for a cup of coffee instead, he gave me that eyebrow raised um that’s the same thing look. Lol Then we got in a discussion on it and how to lose weight and he’s 6″2 and 200 IBS. So he looks great but I’m thinking “easy for your high metabolism, soda drinking butt to say”. But he is a lot more active then me so he wasn’t wrong on his advice. He told me about higher carb intake which is correct FOR HIM because ATM he is more active but luckily I brought that up and my decision for a healthier lifestyle which he respected and it didn’t end I. Him taunting me like a proper brother generally does lol. I’m feeling great today and thinking of going on the vegan or vegetarian train. Although with some of my loves like cheese, furs and bratwursts I don’t know how I’ll do, but if anything I may make that my February challenge. This months get healthy challenge was taking out sodas but I kinda flopped early when my spouse brought home a 12 pack of dr. Peppers just for me rofl, so I accepted the kind gesture and told him my goal yesterday to avoid any further purchases. So Day two and ice water and coffee has helped me cut back, coffee with out sugar too! Which I deserve a gold Star for lol. Although the awesome store bought Starbucks coffee has helped.
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Ok so I had another baby and sky rocketed back up to 200 ibs. but Im officially done with having babies and dedicated once again to working out and getting healthy again, but how am I going about it this time????
Well this time I have logged onto and added the app on Myfitnesspal.com on this site I keep track of my daily calorie intake as well as try to workout three times a week, this is because I plan to try and lose 1 pound a week. This week Ive been following my bad eating habits so that Monday I can start on a clean foods slate and begin to dive hard into my fitness plan.
So what do I eat? or do I eat?!
The answer is of course yes, I do eat and despite my weight issues underweight is not a goal of mine. I will be trying to eat whole foods primarily if not completely, this means anything that has ingredients is a no no. Of course some things are unavoidable for me like cheese, god I love cheese, and bread. But I opt for the more healthy versions of each. like bread with no fructose corn syrup and cheese……..ok well just less cheese. By doing this I get the best bang for my calorie buck I prepare fresh vegetables and meats daily in my pan, pot or baked in my oven. To get a good idea of what I will/do eat regularly this is what I opt for.
Breakfast
- 1 boiled egg, on 100% whole wheat bread toasted, with spinach leaves, mozzarella and tomatoes
- 2 scrambled eggs in a whole wheat wrap, with greek yogurt (tastes like sour cream!) and salsa
- Oatmeal with fresh fruit
- during the hotter months I switch Oatmeal for Cereal
- 2 boiled eggs for a quick fix, maybe 1pc. of toast
- and every now and then I will eat fried eggs (from butter) with bacon and toast but maybe once a month bc I Adore breakfast foods.
Lunch
- Roast Beef, or Turkey (made from actual turkey not deli or lunch meat) wrap with lettuce, tomato, colby, & swiss. I may add a dash of ranch or honey mustard IF I have the available calories.
- 1/2 a sandwich and soup
- flame broiled Boca burgers (soy burgers that actually taste good to me!)
- Chinese Food (watching my calorie intake) its my treat when Im good
- A Cobb, watercress, or tuna Salad
And Dinner
I dont plan this out as vigorously but basically
- Baked or sauteed (dont know the right term for Meats. but never fried in oil or butter)
- I still eat Chicken, Ham, Turkey, Steak, Pork, and Seafood. but I opt for Lean meats and boneless less fatty whiteness on my meats like pork & steak.
- Boiled, baked, or steamed Vegetables, and while I do eat Potatoes and corn I opt for doing so once a week as opposed to with every meal bc those two especially do not contain the amazing nutrients that your greens like asparagus and brussel sprouts do. I ALSO EXPERIMENT! I have tried almost every vegetable in the produce section and opt to try something new ; if its available, that I havent each month with 1 meal. I check out youtube and google on HOW to make them and then see if I can find ways to eat them if they are healthy lol and sometimes Im suprised at how much I do love them! like baked eggplant with olive oil and with cous cous and chicken!
- I replace white rice with Quinoa, and cous cous but recomend cous cous because its easier to season. both found in the same isle as rice but in boxes
Drinks
- I still drink my Dr. Peppers, but Im drinking 1 per main meal and yesterday I only had 1 at lunch time. and I also occasionally drink coffee
- LOTS OF WATER! I try to drink A whole bottle of water after each meal or during. and with snacks.
- Chocolate milk, but less often bc Im trying to watch my intake of sugars now and my dr. peppers dont leave a lot of room for other sweets.
So what am I doing for exercise?
I can actually show you and you can follow along with me or do your own thing entirely.
- Daily: Each morning and evening I will be doing morning and bedtime yoga, my favorite bedtime routine is Tara Stiles Bedtime yoga bc omg its done IN BED! yes love it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lNiQIEfOAU . I add a couple hip opening stretches like what I consider the dead frog pose lmfao AND taking one leg, placing it on my thigh, then taking my hands behind the thigh and pulling it towards me. I WILL learn the names of these moves but doing this routine with incense is A-mazing and if you dont have incense candles work wonders.
- for mornings Im doing the Tara stiles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRsC1YdXqOc but its not my favorite because Im not quite as flexible yet, but perhaps with practice.
- Once a week: (May do more in future) I love the Cassey Ho pilates videos on youtube bc omfg do I feel them and they work! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r_z7DUpjH8 And I do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-4A_Ki7us8 …. An old friend of mine got me started on the amazing benefits of pilates so thanks to Tiffany (her) I will continue to do these. I also utilize my treadmill by walking or jogging once a week.
Ill be doing each of those once a week, or 1 pilates, 1 treadmill, and 1 yoga workout. Likely Monday: Treadmill Wednesday: will become Rump Day lol, and Friday will be my fun fitness day so either a dance game or other. after a couple of weeks getting used to this I may opt to do pilates once a day too.
So after feeling really proud of myself yesterday for doing yoga, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner healthy I decided I could munch on a couple cookies for dessert, heck what are cookies 70 calories? I have 400 left so it shouldn’t be TO bad to have 3 small ones. WRONG! I put those same three cookies into my daily calorie counter and whoah my god I wish I had logged them first! those three cookies made me blow my daily allowance by 1,000+!!!! Now im not being to hard on myself this go around but I definitely realized, I need to be more conscious about what I eat even snacking and treating myself, as well as learn to reward myself properly. for instance if I would have opted for just the chocolate chips plan uncooked, it was only 70 calories for I believe 6, that would have satisfied my sweet tooth and not blown my diet. but I need to find healthy rewards like myfitnesspal.com shows me. for instance that 10 minutes of yoga earned me 37 calories to eat what I wanted. Even though I wouldnt suggest eating COOKIES again lmfao I felt proud. I recently saw a girl who made a chart for everything she would earn if she worked out each day for 1 week, 1 month, 1 year ect.. Holding yourself accountable and being your own “parent” about it is the only way.
So lesson learned, on to fight another morrow.
Its very important when trying to lose weight or get more healthy in general, to never ever give up on yourself, I know what you have been through in the past because just like you I have doubted myself, have dreamed about results and been let down, and most importantly have given up over and over again.
My goals in the last year have changed very much, I went from this crazed must see results person, stressing about if I would or even could ever lose weight, trying hard to prove to my gym, my family and my friends I wasn’t a quitter and all the while only proving them all right by quitting and giving up on myself.
(even when some of them believed in me, I didn’t believe in myself)
This month Im going to take you down a road of my weight loss journey and explain why this month even at my heaviest, I am more confident, more determined, and more relaxed about how and why im losing the weight.
So lets begin at the somewhat beginning,
This was me at 17, moved out, full of hope inspiration and only 135 Ibs. I’m about 5″7 – 5″9 so that was actually a little under my recommended weight, but like most teens I was insecure about it after a teacher told me I was actually considered obese for my size.
Moving on
Now this was me after 3 months after my son,
Believe it or not I was about 195 here, and went up to 200 in the months following, where I dodge camera’s like a criminal, I was besides having two wonderful children a son and daughter at home, completely depressed, all my dreams had ended I was only a month from turning 21 and already I had two children and was going nowhere with my life, staying in a relationship we both were not happy in, I had giving up on myself and it showed in my relationship, my eating habits and sadly my outward image as well. So after trying to make it last for as long as I could, I left my fiance, he moved on and found a wonderful woman who I actually like talking to and is an amazing step mom to my kids, and I moved on started focusing on myself and my dreams and lost almost all the weight and became this.
I moved to Florida, Started working out daily, ate right, took morning runs on the beach during my days off from work, and became the happiest I had been in years, I had two beautiful children, a happy lifestyle and I returned home re-met an amazing man one of my best friends, we became engaged and whala! baby #3 was on her way a year later.
Now I could say that I got to the weight im at now, during my pregnancy, but I’d be lying, I still worked out, still worked and up until 6 months stayed home, and sadly thats not even when I regained the weight.
this was me only 3 months after she was born.
My point in these photo’s wasnt to show you how I lost the weight, but to show you how I too went through, gaining 50 points due to pregnancy, and then these last three pictures are to show you how I gained weight with no excuses to fall back on but my own.
This is me in January the following year, weighing 180, trying to smile but reaching my wits end at my weight gain.
And this was me just a time after starting this blog, during my 3 day a week workouts, eating healthy and feeling like I had no results, Yes I was stupid to not see them!
And finally this is me right now,
The difference is I found new confidence, a new workout plan that has been working for me, and I found that although in this newest picture I weigh 185 pounds, I know more than ever Im going to see results come New Years and this next Summer.
This is the reason, In the past I was to goal oriented, I wanted results by 3 months, by this summer, by this Christmas I wanted to see the results, I wanted everyone to see my progress. Because of this I gained more weight than ever, I could have done all those things but instead I psyched myself out, stopped believing I could and quit. The thing that helped me lose then, me at my thinnest after kids, and me now is the fact that I didnt care about when, I only cared about right now. Do I want to lose weight? absolutely, do I want to slim down by this summer? Of course.
But is that my goal? Not this time.
My New Years resolution was to be healthier by 2013, and by god I got downright worse! but it isnt New Years yet and I did get healthier, yes I gained weight, but now my confidence is back, my mind is healthier, and that’s because for the first time my goal isn’t weight loss, my goal is simply to exercise 3 times a week, Thats it! sure I’m still trying to eat right, but my goal has changed from by New Years, to for life, I plan to workout 3 times a week now for life, If I see results or don’t see results it doesn’t matter to me anymore, I tried a ton of methods and this works for me. I cant say by New years I will look any better, but I can say I’ll be posting monthly again and feeling good about myself.
If I do manage to lose the pounds I will share how, if I dont I will have enough endurance to jog for more than 1 minute.
This month it has taken me along time to figure out how im going to approach this in a writing aspect. I feel at the moment like murphy’s law has hit me full force and im catching my breathe at every turn.
Not only did I break one of my rules out of curiousness,confidence, and excitement it began the downfall to the rest of the year, It started out with me coming to the realization that being afraid of an object with numbers on it was insane, I was going to write a blog about going against what I said because its impossible to see your progress and feel good about your workouts if you dont know what your progress even is.
And so I did it, I eagerly approached the dreaded scale to see how much weight I had lost in three months time, anxiety wasnt a huge factor as the tick tick ticking up numbers wasnt ringing out while I waited, nope simply the hard knox truth of one simple step.
I had managed to gain five pounds. Now most of you are probably thinking five pounds isnt a major issue, but when your trying your butt off switching up diets and exercising thrice a week, to go from couch potato to five extra pounds is humiliating, but still I was determined to make myself feel better and so I said “well maybe I lost inches” so I grabbed my tape measure, pulled out my old notes of my measurements and began to feel better, that is until I noticed they to had grown.
I was completely devastated, all this work and not any substantial results.
Being a mom of three its sometimes hard to balance finding time for yourself and finding out how to treat yourself with said time, for me I picked the gym over cola’s, movie tickets, restraunts, new book releases, pedicures, manicures, facials, and anything related. So five pounds was more than just a smack in the face it was an emotional ordeal for me, making me feel guilty for spending money on something.
For me breaking out of the 180’s will feel like I have accomplished the impossible.
even though these exercises are easy its difficult for me to feel motivated after gaining to even do them, but im going to try doing them daily and see if I get any results.
Its normal after a month or even two weeks of working out to feel slightly if not completely discouraged by absolutely no results.
but two things to keep in mind before eating up an entire chocolate cake out of self loathing.
The first being, most the time no results are linked to a plateau effect, where your body either A, goes into a survival mode and stops you from loosing weight (uping your calorie intake alittle will help this, or working out less believe it or not) or B, the workouts your doing have reached their maximum level of achievement and your muscles are now used to it, so you need to change up your routine.
But dispite all these technical reasons, and there are many one very important reason that most people, especially those dedicated to loosing pounds is this.
Often times when your the subject of “improvement” the “mirror effect” as I call it can occur, what this means is, just like your reflection you become used to what you look like,you hop on a scale so often that your not going to notice minute results, so when your shedding pounds unless its some drastic change, your not going to notice the small inches or even milimeter reductions, thats why so many people take before and after pictures, its not just a way to show off what you’ve lost, but a way that in one to two months you can look back and see how far you have come.
But sometimes the problems we face arent just knowing the problems, sometimes the problem is loosing faith in ourselves, If your like me you have tried things over and over only for them to fail, leaving you feeling like you cant achieve your weightloss goal.
The problem is when you think this way your making that happen even more, we all slip up and eat what were not supposed to, we all enjoy lounging around sometimes when we said we were going to workout. The important thing is not to beat yourself up over it all.
Getting healthy is a long process, and just like any process it takes time, by slipping up you can learn what led to your feelings and what made you crave those bad for you foods or rest.
were you feeling insecure? did you suffer a loss making you feel sad? these things that trigger your endulging/stopping workouts are what you need to target, and after figuring out why you did it, try to think of ways you can change the outcome next time.
For instance, if I know when I feel sad im going to grab chocolate and over indulge, I need to have a better prevention plan so when I do get sad I wont go to an extreme.
One thing that I do is ask myself, Will this help me loose weight? or ask myself how many calories is in this?! sometimes even if your not counting calories just reading the ingredients can help take your mind off of the situation at hand. but its also a good idea not to stock your fridge and cabinets with foods you know your going to over indulge in.
With that said, sometimes its not food consumption that makes us feel insecure.
sometimes its watching others around you, doing the same routines, loosing more weight and quicker then you.
Like I mentioned earlier with the process, the same thing can apply here.
With weightloss not everyone’s “diet” will work for them, you have to experiment with what works for you, maybe that all protein diet didnt work for you because your a vegetarian at heart? maybe your trying so hard to make what worked for a million of the same type of people to work for you, instead of paying attention to your own body and what makes YOU feel better and what makes YOU healthier.
In life I believe their are 3 types of people, just like any personal trainer will tell you there are three types people are catogorized into when working out.
The simplest way I can explain them is by the dinosaurs, bare with me here lol.
you have your prodominate meat eaters that I call your carnivores
your completely balanced eaters which I call your omnivores
and your strictly vegetarian people I call your herbavores.
now this is not to say some people should eat only leaves or feed off the life forms of others, after all were humans not dinosaurs or the wraith, but what im saying is everyones metabolism is different and while working out and eating healthy will make it change, the way your body handles the foods you eat wont.
SO dont beat yourself up, ever notice how some of your friends can consume dairy of any kind while others will be benched over somewhere displeasant for hours? the same principals apply for weightloss, somethings will work wonders for you, while others will leave you feeling horrible. The sutre is finding what works for you and believing you can do it.
And I stress believing you can, because just like anyone out there your going to be your worst critic in the end, and weightloss is a mental game as well as a physical, if you set yourself up to loose you will.
Another thing I want to point out before people think well I have tried it all! remember?!
everything takes TIME! think of weightloss like a colony. your body is the habitat, at first your body just like the new arrivers it has to assess the area or in our case damage already done, then it has to start clearing out the bad things in the area/system, then it starts to plant the seeds that will help, and then the work starts, and after awhile before you know it there is a colony blossoming. Remember always that your body isnt a light switch or a glass you can fill up instantly with nutrition and energy, it takes work and above all time, even if you arent working out, the best start is getting healthy to begin with, before you jump to judging anything you should first give it at least a month or two to work, thats at least four to five weeks, dont workout two weeks and decide you cant, dont eat healthy for three weeks then indulge the fourth, allow yourself to indulge in what you love, but be in control of it, dont let it control you, indulge but dont engourge.
I recently fell off the bandwagon for a week because after working out for literally three weeks and eating healthy for two, my best friend went down a pant size and I actually managed to gain a pant size, things like this can leave you feeling very discouraged, but instead of giving up and feeling like all your efforts were for nothing think about whats going on, did I gain more muscle mass? have I been eating right for me? or for what Ive heard works? for me it was simply finding out alot of the foods I ate were making me retain fat more! even though they claimed to be healthy, and were for others. I found I am a Balanced Oxidizer but was straining myself to diets focussed only on Slow oxidizers (herbavores) and my boyfriend was trying to be balanced but was a “carnivore”. Knowing your body is the only way your ever going to succeed in weightloss, so dont beat yourself up if you make mistakes, its a learning process, and like they always say, if at first you dont succeed, pick yourself up and try again.
This month I did alot a new things while working on what to write for May’s blog, so much so that I missed the deadline to this April’s blog, but fear not within a couple hours a new post will be up and my result photo’s as well.
This is not the April addition post for feeling demotivated but this month while searching the web, because this nutrition thing has been weighing heavy on my mind, especially sense I am working out regularly but often I still feel over tired all the time and starving lmfao. But I found another diet that focuses on Blood type, this interests me alot because alot of men I know are huge on protein lots of it and in all forms and I myself have always found horrible results involving meat in general, Im also more inclined to eating large amounts of vegetables and fruit over meat.
Well according to this study blood types determine the best diets for your body and proper nutrition, this was clever because I know so many diet plans that have worked for others and failed entirely for others.
I happen to be an A- person, and I found through study that im supposed to eat more vegetables which was ironic bc thats what my initial feeling for weight loss was centered, less meats, more fruits, and vegetables, it states that so many different things benefit my blood type that are bad for others, and my friends I found were mosty O people who are considered “Meat eaters” and need more protein then others to loose weight.
Anyways I found it very very interesting and thought I would share it with my readers.
here’s a quick link to one site containing information
timeiswastedwaiting 