See? I told y'all I was a bad blogger...
I don't really have much news on my weight loss front. I started a second job as a server at Olive Garden and it's been all I can do to keep my hair washed, much less exercise or really actively diet. With that being said things are finally settling down in regards to my schedule and so I have purchased Beachbody's "Brazil Butt Lift" exercise DVD'S since I should actually have some time now to use them and I am SO EXCITED!!!
For me, exercise is about finding something that works and that I can stick with. Last year I had a lot of success with losing weight while I was swimming at the YMCA - I lost about 30 pounds pretty rapidly and swam nearly every day. It was awesome, especially since I have problems with my joints and high-impact exercises can exacerbate these problems. When summer rolled around and the pool was invaded by 17,000 summer campers I hopped out of the pool and onto the elliptical machine, again because it was easier on my joints, and my weight loss continued.
Then, in September, I changed jobs and my exercise routine pretty much disappeared. I was working ridiculous hours and had absolutely no energy left to even think about going to the gym, so I dropped my YMCA membership. Driving almost half an hour, working out for an hour, then driving back was just not going to work for me. I mean seriously, I could be sleeping in those two hours!
Now it's time for me to get serious again, which is why I bought the Beachbody DVD's. I already own a Bellydance workout DVD and love it, but I've also gotten kind of bored with it and it's not very challenging for me anymore. I can practically do the routine in my sleep so it's time to move on to something else. I did a lot of research before deciding on the Brazil Butt Lift series (and yes, it does tone more than just your behind!) and I'm really excited that I won't have to leave my apartment to get my workout!
I've also decided to cut back on carbs (gasp!). I'm talking about the super-processed starchy carbs that come in bread, pasta, cereal, etc., not the good carbs in fruits and veggies. Anyone that knows me knows that I am a carb-aholic; I rate my favorite restaurants based on the bread that comes with the meal. We've all heard about how bad gluten is for you though, and so in an effort to be healthier I'm going to cut back and limit my daily intake. I'll be honest and admit that I will still be eating bread and pasta and such but I'm going to be sure to avoid it whenever possible.
And I'll stop sneaking breadsticks at work. Mostly.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Schwoo...
Sorry guys, I'm really trying to be a good blogger, I just have a hard time making myself post on a semi-consistent posting. Y'all need to start poking me or something, seriously.
Anyway, the past week has been pretty good for me as far as my diet goes. I've avoided temptation and stuck to my guns, even when I baked green chocolate chip cookies for St. Patrick's day last weekend and only had two.
On a funny note, when I first tried to type "good" in that previous sentence I accidentally typed "food" instead and made myself LOL.
For the past few months I haven't concentrated so much on losing weight as I have maintaining it, especially over the holidays. I wanted to see what would happen if I relaxed my vigilance just ever-so-slightly. Would I blow up like a puffer fish? Thankfully the answer is no, even with all the delightful treats to be had over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now it's time for me to jump back on the bandwagon. I've set a goal to lose 40 pounds by the time summer rolls around, and I hope you'll join me (if you feel led to do so) in setting your own goal, no matter how big or small. =)
When I'm trying to lose weight, I focus my attention heavily on my eating habits. For a while I used a FANTASTIC app on my phone called MyFitnessPal that allowed me to track calories in vs. calories out. The app has a huge database of foods, even from restaurants, and I found this enormously helpful when planning my meals because apparently I really had no idea the kind of stuff I was putting in my mouth. I quickly learned to look up what I wanted to order before I ordered because there were times that the calorie count in what I had just purchased was so outrageous that I couldn't stand to eat it. I would log absolutely everything I ate and it really helped me develop a good sense of how many calories are in most of the foods I eat. Nowadays I don't use it as religiously as I did before, but I do refer to it occasionally to look up something new and I highly recommend it to anyone that is just starting out, but take heed!: you will be amazed, shocked, and probably a little repulsed by some of your favorite foods.
I always try to make my calories count. What that means is, if I'm willing to eat something that is horribly fattening and totally off my diet, you can be damn sure that it's going to be something effing delicious and not some crappy piece of whatever. Hostess cupcakes might be good, but a cupcake from Sprinkles is so much better, and if I'm going to eat one I'm going to eat the best one I can get. It's like spending your money: if you had $500 and wanted to buy a new purse you wouldn't spend it on one from Wal-mart, now would you? Heck no, you'd be headed to Coach.
Planning ahead is also something I try to do, whenever possible. If my girlfriends call me up and want to go out to eat one night I'm not going to deprive myself by not going with them, but I am going to be sure that I behave myself as much as possible in the days leading up to our night out and in the days after. Personally, this way of thinking enables me to go out and enjoy myself without feeling guilty. I will still try to make better food choices while I'm out, perhaps swapping a starchy, fatty side for some steamed vegetables, but I won't completely limit myself either. If I want two breadsticks at Olive Garden with my soup instead of one then damnit, I'm going to have two!
It becomes more difficult to plan ahead on the days I work because the hotel I'm employed at feeds us lunch or dinner, depending on our shift, and I never have any warning about what they're going to be serving. Somedays it's actually quite healthy, like grilled fish with veggies and salad, and on some days it's not so healthy, like nacho night (which is quite popular, go figure), so I have to really watch my food choices carefully in case it's something that I would consider to be off-diet. For example, before work today I had Subway for lunch instead of Chic-fil-a, because there's a good chance that what we have for dinner tonight at work would put me over my calorie limit if I had eaten chicken nuggets, and no one wants that.
And at the end of the day, to reward myself for good choices made and temptation avoided, there's a tiny Weight Watchers Ice Cream Sandwich waiting for me in my freezer at home, my treat to myself before bed time.
Anyway, the past week has been pretty good for me as far as my diet goes. I've avoided temptation and stuck to my guns, even when I baked green chocolate chip cookies for St. Patrick's day last weekend and only had two.
On a funny note, when I first tried to type "good" in that previous sentence I accidentally typed "food" instead and made myself LOL.
For the past few months I haven't concentrated so much on losing weight as I have maintaining it, especially over the holidays. I wanted to see what would happen if I relaxed my vigilance just ever-so-slightly. Would I blow up like a puffer fish? Thankfully the answer is no, even with all the delightful treats to be had over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now it's time for me to jump back on the bandwagon. I've set a goal to lose 40 pounds by the time summer rolls around, and I hope you'll join me (if you feel led to do so) in setting your own goal, no matter how big or small. =)
When I'm trying to lose weight, I focus my attention heavily on my eating habits. For a while I used a FANTASTIC app on my phone called MyFitnessPal that allowed me to track calories in vs. calories out. The app has a huge database of foods, even from restaurants, and I found this enormously helpful when planning my meals because apparently I really had no idea the kind of stuff I was putting in my mouth. I quickly learned to look up what I wanted to order before I ordered because there were times that the calorie count in what I had just purchased was so outrageous that I couldn't stand to eat it. I would log absolutely everything I ate and it really helped me develop a good sense of how many calories are in most of the foods I eat. Nowadays I don't use it as religiously as I did before, but I do refer to it occasionally to look up something new and I highly recommend it to anyone that is just starting out, but take heed!: you will be amazed, shocked, and probably a little repulsed by some of your favorite foods.
I always try to make my calories count. What that means is, if I'm willing to eat something that is horribly fattening and totally off my diet, you can be damn sure that it's going to be something effing delicious and not some crappy piece of whatever. Hostess cupcakes might be good, but a cupcake from Sprinkles is so much better, and if I'm going to eat one I'm going to eat the best one I can get. It's like spending your money: if you had $500 and wanted to buy a new purse you wouldn't spend it on one from Wal-mart, now would you? Heck no, you'd be headed to Coach.
Planning ahead is also something I try to do, whenever possible. If my girlfriends call me up and want to go out to eat one night I'm not going to deprive myself by not going with them, but I am going to be sure that I behave myself as much as possible in the days leading up to our night out and in the days after. Personally, this way of thinking enables me to go out and enjoy myself without feeling guilty. I will still try to make better food choices while I'm out, perhaps swapping a starchy, fatty side for some steamed vegetables, but I won't completely limit myself either. If I want two breadsticks at Olive Garden with my soup instead of one then damnit, I'm going to have two!
It becomes more difficult to plan ahead on the days I work because the hotel I'm employed at feeds us lunch or dinner, depending on our shift, and I never have any warning about what they're going to be serving. Somedays it's actually quite healthy, like grilled fish with veggies and salad, and on some days it's not so healthy, like nacho night (which is quite popular, go figure), so I have to really watch my food choices carefully in case it's something that I would consider to be off-diet. For example, before work today I had Subway for lunch instead of Chic-fil-a, because there's a good chance that what we have for dinner tonight at work would put me over my calorie limit if I had eaten chicken nuggets, and no one wants that.
And at the end of the day, to reward myself for good choices made and temptation avoided, there's a tiny Weight Watchers Ice Cream Sandwich waiting for me in my freezer at home, my treat to myself before bed time.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Pick A Place To Start
My number one tip to anyone that cares to listen is don't try to change your entire diet at once.
Our eating habits are not something that we develop overnight. For many of us our unhealthy tendencies started in childhood, while others didn't start gaining weight until they put on the dreaded "freshman fifteen" in college. Maybe for you things started going downhill when you got that desk job with doughnuts every morning in the conference room and the Starbucks down the block. Maybe you had a couple kids and found it was easier to snarf a Big Mac on your way to the carpool lane than to carve out time for a healthy meal between oboe lessons and soccer lessons. However it happened, it is not going to "un-happen" in a day, or even a week, and it's probably going to take quite a long time to correct these behaviors.
So let's say there are several aspects of your diet that you want to change: you want to cut back on your sugar and salt, cut out the trans fats, eat only good carbs, no fried foods, cut back on your portion sizes, and oh hell, let's say you want to eliminate processed flour too.
To this I pose a simple query: are you high?
It is simply too hard to change everything at once. You are absolutely setting yourself up for failure by trying to do that and losing weight is hard enough as it is. Your best bet is to pick one aspect at a time and focus just on that. After all, it takes one completing an action 21 times for that action to become a habit. So, 21 x 3 meals a day x 4 different kinds of muffins at Starbucks x 39 ways to get your hamburger x oh yeah, is this whole grain? = you lost me on the snack cake aisle. Or something like that... I never was very good at math, but you get my point.
When I decided I needed to make a change, I started small and switched to Diet soda instead of regular. At first it was nasty as hell, but within a week I didn't mind the taste at all, and after a few months I had already lost about 30 pounds. That one success, however small it may have been, gave me a huge confidence boost and made my goal seem that much more attainable. I have no doubt that had I traded Diet for regular while also cutting out fried foods I would have caved and been in the Whataburger drive thru line faster than you can say, "Would you like fries with that?"
Start small. Baby steps. You'll get there.
-Sarah
Our eating habits are not something that we develop overnight. For many of us our unhealthy tendencies started in childhood, while others didn't start gaining weight until they put on the dreaded "freshman fifteen" in college. Maybe for you things started going downhill when you got that desk job with doughnuts every morning in the conference room and the Starbucks down the block. Maybe you had a couple kids and found it was easier to snarf a Big Mac on your way to the carpool lane than to carve out time for a healthy meal between oboe lessons and soccer lessons. However it happened, it is not going to "un-happen" in a day, or even a week, and it's probably going to take quite a long time to correct these behaviors.
So let's say there are several aspects of your diet that you want to change: you want to cut back on your sugar and salt, cut out the trans fats, eat only good carbs, no fried foods, cut back on your portion sizes, and oh hell, let's say you want to eliminate processed flour too.
To this I pose a simple query: are you high?
It is simply too hard to change everything at once. You are absolutely setting yourself up for failure by trying to do that and losing weight is hard enough as it is. Your best bet is to pick one aspect at a time and focus just on that. After all, it takes one completing an action 21 times for that action to become a habit. So, 21 x 3 meals a day x 4 different kinds of muffins at Starbucks x 39 ways to get your hamburger x oh yeah, is this whole grain? = you lost me on the snack cake aisle. Or something like that... I never was very good at math, but you get my point.
When I decided I needed to make a change, I started small and switched to Diet soda instead of regular. At first it was nasty as hell, but within a week I didn't mind the taste at all, and after a few months I had already lost about 30 pounds. That one success, however small it may have been, gave me a huge confidence boost and made my goal seem that much more attainable. I have no doubt that had I traded Diet for regular while also cutting out fried foods I would have caved and been in the Whataburger drive thru line faster than you can say, "Would you like fries with that?"
Start small. Baby steps. You'll get there.
-Sarah
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Adios, Chubby Lady!
Well, where to begin.
If you're here at this point, my first post, it probably means that you know me. If you don't, I'd like to introduce myself, then and now.
This was me at Halloween 2007. I'm not sure of the exact number, but I weighed somewhere close to 320 pounds. I may have been smiling but believe me, I was miserable.
And this is me as of Valentine's Day 2012; I am currently down to a weight of 185 pounds, bringing my total weight loss to 135 pounds at this point.
When I first started my weight loss journey I kept it to myself, mostly because I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to that point, the point where I barely fit in movie theater seats, nevermind the seats at the football stadium. Reliant Park apparently missed the "Everything's Bigger in Texas" memo.
Now I tell anyone who will listen about how far I've come, and if they care to hear it, how I got there because if I can do it then ANYONE can do it.
Let me say that again: ANYONE CAN DO IT.
That's why I have started this blog. I want to share my journey and help someone on theirs, if I can. I won't sit here and tell you it's easy, because it's not. Definitely not. Hell, I want a cupcake right now just thinking about it.
I will tell you that it's worth it. Every little step you take towards your goal is worth it, even if it seems like you're not even moving, even when you have set backs and bad days and a second helping of your co-worker's birthday cake, just hang in there because you WILL get to where you want to be.
Just remember what Margaret Thatcher said: "You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it."
-Sarah
If you're here at this point, my first post, it probably means that you know me. If you don't, I'd like to introduce myself, then and now.
This was me at Halloween 2007. I'm not sure of the exact number, but I weighed somewhere close to 320 pounds. I may have been smiling but believe me, I was miserable.
And this is me as of Valentine's Day 2012; I am currently down to a weight of 185 pounds, bringing my total weight loss to 135 pounds at this point.
When I first started my weight loss journey I kept it to myself, mostly because I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to that point, the point where I barely fit in movie theater seats, nevermind the seats at the football stadium. Reliant Park apparently missed the "Everything's Bigger in Texas" memo.
Now I tell anyone who will listen about how far I've come, and if they care to hear it, how I got there because if I can do it then ANYONE can do it.
Let me say that again: ANYONE CAN DO IT.
That's why I have started this blog. I want to share my journey and help someone on theirs, if I can. I won't sit here and tell you it's easy, because it's not. Definitely not. Hell, I want a cupcake right now just thinking about it.
I will tell you that it's worth it. Every little step you take towards your goal is worth it, even if it seems like you're not even moving, even when you have set backs and bad days and a second helping of your co-worker's birthday cake, just hang in there because you WILL get to where you want to be.
Just remember what Margaret Thatcher said: "You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it."
-Sarah
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