Tuesday, January 10, 2012

My Journey to fitness and health...

I have been pretty focused on fitness and health recently.  I do have some other life things that I want to work on - procrastination, being more organized, displaying more patience - but as we know trying to do too much at once is a recipe for failure (for me at least).  So I will continue to focus on fitness for a while until it feels like I've got it under control.

Sooooo I have made attempts to lose weight before and one time - before that last kid - I was successful.  I lost 20 lbs using Weight Watchers and kept about 15 of it off for over a year.  It took me 8 months to lose that 20 lbs, mostly because I have always been very honest with myself about what kind of "diet" I will (or won't) do.  I am not one of those "I've tried ever diet under the sun and nothing works" kind of girls.  I know me well enough to know that low-carb, low-fat, super restrictive, eat these 3-4 foods together, or any other craziness will last about 3 days at my house.  I lost weight on Weight Watchers because I could eat what I wanted when I wanted.  It took 8 months because I was not going to do something just to lose weight and not be able to do it for the rest of my life.  That is the recipe for gaining the weight back. (Which I did - when I got pregnant)

So my new journey to fitness and health started in January of 2011.  After an interstate move I found that the weight I had been maintaining for a couple of years had increased by 10 lbs.  So I decided to go back to the thing that worked in the past - Weight Watchers- and I was incredibly excited about the new Points Plus program.  I did WW for a few months and lost about 8 lbs and then I lost my mojo and even an upcoming trip to Aruba couldn't get me back on track. I started to track WW points along with calories and realized that I was only eating 1200 calories a day.  I don't want to ONLY eat 1200 calories a day for the rest of my life.  Do you know how fast 1200 calories goes??
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During this time I started to get more interested in the health aspects of food.  I watched Food, Inc, Food Matters and any other food related documentary I could get my hands (remote) on.  I found that while the things that I saw disturbed me and changed the way that I thought about my local grocery store, the cost prohibitive nature of natural and organic products was difficult to overcome.  I am also a bit of a skeptic when it comes to product claims.  I worked in a deptartement where it was my job to design product testing and I know first hand that it is possible to design the test to get the claim you want. I also know that a lot of things that aren't good for you can be consider "all natural" and I just wasn't ready to pay a premium price for something that may or may not have been a premium product.

So I did a little more research and found that the food at the mecca of the natural, organic grocers -Whole Foods - was really just a step up from my regular grocery store and did not justify the exorbitant prices they were charging (go ask someone at Whole Foods where the pasture raised chicken is *hint there is none*).  You have to carefully read the labels there because they do have conventionally grown foods there - at a significant mark up.

So instead I have been doing a slow conversion.  The first substitute was whole wheat bread - I try to buy the brands that don't contain high fructose corn syrup.  Then I swapped out the white flour pasta for whole wheat pasta - If you cook it a little longer, the texture difference is negligable.  Then I moved on to brown rice - I have found that the Brown Jasmine Rice from Trader Joe's has a pleasant texture.  (I mention texture because that is always the biggest complaint when switching from refined white products)  I have started to experiment with grassfed beef and pasture raised chicken.  I wish there was somewhere local that was reasonably priced but I will likely reorder from Baucoms Best again.  I am also experimenting with fruit and veggie smoothies.

I had a fitness revolution as well... I HATE CARDIO.  I detest sitting on a bike, walking on a treadmill, step aerobics and most other cardio type activities.  The only exception is dancing.  Give me a Wii dance game and I will work it.  I LOVE weight lifting.  When I was going to the gym, I would regularly choose Body Pump or classes the used body weight strengthening techniques.  So imagine my joy at finding Bodybuilding.com and seeing these women with AWESOME bodies suggest that it was possible to have the body I want with just managing my macronutrients and lifting heavy weight.

So these are the things I am focusing on Lift Heavy, Watch Macros.  I am positive this the right path for me.  It is so in sync with what I like and what I know I am willing to do :-)

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