Setting New Goals

My weigh in on Sunday affected me more than I thought it did.  I've been totally off for the past three days, consuming mostly that chocolate cake I made Matt for his birthday on Sunday.  But I've been making popcorn and smothering it in butter and just not eating well.  Interesting how easy it is to slip back into bad habits.  I have also been so exhausted the past few days and I am wondering if it is because I have not been eating healthy and I've eaten way too much sugar.

After searching the internet for stories people have written about doing Chalean Extreme, I have decided that I can't get upset over my apparent lack of weight loss.  Most people report that their weight didn't change much but they did lose a lot of inches.  I took a sneak peak at a few of my measurements and it looks like I've lost another half an inch off my waist and a half an inch of my thighs!  So that made me cheer up a little and if i am losing inches I have to contribute my weight to building muscle.  I have been so sore almost every day this whole program so I know I am building muscle!

One of the ways you reach a large goal that you have set, it to break it down into smaller goals and work your way through those to eventually reach your large goal.  I thought I could just focus on my goal weight now that I have come this far, but that doesn't appear to be the case especially with weight lifting.  So I have decided to set a few goals for the next month to focus on during the last month of Chalean Extreme.  First I was reading up about your cheat days sabotaging the rest of your week.  I don't want to consume thousands of extra calories on my cheat day and have that mess up all the hard work I have put in over the week, so I want to get rid of my cheat days.  I need a lifestyle and having a day where I don't adhere to my lifestyle every week just doesn't seem right.

Goal 1: This coming month I want to focus on eating healthy and tracking everything that I eat.  I want to start educating myself again on what is in food and how it effects your body.  I need to know how much of each food you are supposed to be eating in a day.  How many carbohydrates should you be eating, how many grams of fat, how many complex carbs, how much dairy and really get down this healthy eating thing.  This will give me a project to work on and focus on this next month instead of just stressing about how I am not losing weight.

Goal 2: On that note I also have a goal not to weigh myself for the entire phase 3 month.  This is because I know how much my weigh in effects my mood.  If I hadn't weighed in on Sunday, I would not have eaten so horribly the past three days.  Before my weigh in I was feeling good, eating healthy, and had a very positive outlook.  After my weigh in I was eating sugar, processed foods, was tired, and depressed.  Otherwise known as emotional eating.  This is going to be tough for me and I need to make sure I have my food down pat because if I am not weighing myself I can't be positive that I'm staying on track, which is why tracking what I eat will be so important.

For the rest of this week, starting now since I have pretty much sabotaged the whole day already,  until my official end of phase 2 I just want to do my cardio and make sure to get back to eating healthy.  Fortunately the cake is almost gone.

Emily's Wedding

I wanted to post about Emily's wedding the other day but ran out of time Saturday and was too upset yesterday.  Today I have my game face back on and I am ready to kick it to the curb!  This week is a transition week in my weight lifting program and so it is mostly cardio.  I only have one weight training video I am doing this morning and I plan on getting as much cardio in this week as I can.  My mom has the day off of work today so I am planning on going over after lunch and we are going to play Zumba world party on the wii in the afternoon.  And now without further ado: Emily's wedding.

While Emily was busy making wedding plans and organizing the flowers, decorations, and times, I was busy working hard to fit into my dress.  I was super excited because I bought a size 10 dress!  Yea!  My smallest size to date.  In the morning I was really thinking that I was going to skip my morning workout since it is the hardest workout of the week: burn intervals, a combo weight lifting and cardio exercise.  But I powered through the hour and I am glad that I was able to finish.  I totally collapsed during the burpees though!  NOT my favorite exercise.  Here is my victory picture, can you tell I'm exhausted?!  No energy for fun poses ;-)

After exercising it was getting ready to go (the girls were flower girls so I had to get them all fixed up too).  The wedding was at the Temple and was at 1:00.  Not the best time for the kids since it is right through lunch but I just fed them snacks the whole time and they did fine.  It was great going to the Temple and letting the kids run around the fountain and smell the flowers.  Lily loved going to see the Temple and kept saying "Look it's an angel!"  I don't have the professional photos yet you you get the candid shots Matt took.
After the ceremony we took pictures outside and let the kids run around some more.

My dress fit almost perfectly!  (cleaned up pretty nice from the picture above haha).  I love the dresses for the girls.  Emily had everyone pick out their own dresses which was nice but also a little bit stressful trying to find green dresses after Christmas!  I wish I could post some more pictures of the family photos, but I don't have those yet so we will just have to skip on over to the reception.

There is Emily holding Chloe, and of course yours truly.  By the time the reception started at 6:30 the kids were rapidly deteriorating but we were able to keep them occupied for a while with the food and with dancing.  Lily doesn't like loud places and there were tons of people at the reception (as one would expect) and it was a little loud for her but I was proud of her for doing so well for so long.

 Chloe was great too.  She loves to bump heads with her Grandpa.  That is my father in law/ Emily's Dad and Chloe always has a smile for him.  Lily is a bit shy around Grandpa so he loves giving Chloe lots of attention. 

Here is a more formal picture of the three of us.  I think I was messing with my hair right before this was taken that is why my arm is up in a funky position.

All in all it was a great day, although exhausting for everyone.  We left the reception early, around 8:00 because the kids were spent.  Both of them fell asleep in the car within about five minutes!

As a last picture I thought it would be interesting to compare pictures of me at my sister's wedding last July to me at my sister in laws wedding last Saturday!  I wore a size 12 dress to my sister's wedding which was too small for me.  I really needed a size 14 since I didn't lose as much as I thought I could.  Bad Idea to buy a dress two-three sizes too small for me!

My hair is totally messed up from the wind in the picture on the right!  A little too wispy.  anyway, here is a full body shot:

You can read about my sister's wedding last July and see some more pictures HERE

152 and Angry

source

I had a really good week this week.  I exercised every day, played with the kids outside, and ate healthy food. I felt good and thought I was on track this week to hit my goals.  So why then did I weigh in at 152?!?  That is 5 pounds higher than last weeks weigh in.  FIVE POUNDS!  How did I gain five pounds last week?  I thought I was doing good by staying off the scale but apparently it did more damage than good.  The only day where I didn't stick to purely healthy choices was yesterday when my Sister-In-Law got married.  Even then I didn't pig out!  I ate moderately and I had one piece of cake which I shared with Chloe.  Nothing that would make me gain five pounds!

I am so angry and so upset.  I figured that with yesterday not being as good as the rest of the week I would probably see 147 again at the worst because I really thought I was on track to reach 145 this week.  This is the last week of phase 2 for my weight lifting program.  Phase three starts one week from tomorrow and when that is done I can't wait do switch back to cardio being my dominant exercise instead of weight lifting.  This is just killing me.

I am going to start tracking again right away.  I am thinking of just throwing out this weigh in, because there is no way that I really gained five pounds last week.  I should have weighed myself Saturday morning but I wanted to be good and make it the whole week without weighing myself.  Maybe I will weigh myself on Tuesday and take that weigh in as my official weigh in.  I just have to not think about it until then, a virtually impossible task.  Might as well ask me to not breathe for two days.

Yesterday I felt thin, beautiful, happy, energetic, and excited.  Today I feel fat, depressed, and lethargic. I feel like I will never reach my goal and like I have been stuck around 150 for way too long.  Nearly three months after first hitting 150, here I still am.

Confessions of a Weight Loss Fanatic

I could sum up this post in one word: Obsession.  I am making this post in hopes to give you a little bit of insight into what it feels like mentally to go through this process.  And so that I can look back and remember what I went through, and that I never want to have to go through this painstaking process again.  This is the most personal post I have written so please be nice, and unless you have gone through this process yourself (losing close to 100 pounds- Don't get me wrong.  Losing even 5 pounds is a challenge, but it's a whole different ball game when you have close to 100 pounds to lose.) you really can't understand what it is like.  This past year has been very challenging, and my weight loss journey continues to be challenging.  But that doesn't really give you an idea of what it is like day to day, hour by hour to go through this process.  No one who has not gone through this process can fully understand what it is like.  The difficulty of of changing your life, I mean really changing it to the point where you are a completely different person is unsurpassed by any experience I have ever had.  There is a reason why I was 211 pounds (A BMI of 36.2-Obese. That is only three point eight points away from the category of morbid obesity).  I ate too much of the wrong food.  I did not exercise.  Really that is what it boils down to.  Changing those two things.... Who would have thought it would be so hard?

The beginning of my weight loss:  I thought about the next numbers on the scale all the time.  I wondered if what I was doing right now was going to result in a loss or a gain.  My mood was totally and completely dependent on what the scale said that morning.  I tried to only weigh myself once a week, but I was too obsessive about needing to know what my weight was, so I found myself weighing in more and more frequently, even though I only had one official weigh in a week, I weighed in nearly every day.  As time passed and my weight slowly came off, it was never enough.  I was never satisfied with where I currently was.  When I exercised and ate right, if the scale did not reflect a loss (if it just showed that I maintained or even gained) I would be so upset, I would be angry and grumpy until the scale showed a loss.  Fast forward to today: it's still exactly the same.  I still obsess over weighing myself in on the scale and I have to fight every morning not to.  I lose that fight about half the time so I am weighing myself about every other day.  There was a while when I was weighing myself twice a day, fortunately that didn't last longer than a week or two and I no longer feel the need to weigh myself at night.  But the need to know and the mental need to see a loss on the scale can be so overwhelming that I cause myself anxiety, and distress.  I get frustrated when the scale doesn't go down and I think it should, I get depressed when the scale goes up, and I am elated when the scale shows a loss.

Slowly, as my body changed I stopped hating myself so much.  I stopped hating the way that I looked, and every once in a while I caught myself thinking "hey! I look pretty good!"  But it is not enough.  I know where I want to be, and even though I have lost 63 pounds, I am still not happy with my body.  I still think I am fat (and I haven't hit my healthy BMI yet so there is truth in that).  Weight loss has consumed my life for the time being, so much that I can't hardly think of anything else.  I obsess over what I eat every day, some days I go to bed hungry, not because I didn't eat dinner, but because eating 1,200 calories in a day is not very much food and Yes you will be hungry sometimes! Until you shrink your stomach, and mine is still shrinking.  I think about food and exercise and weight loss all the time.  When I take my kids to the park I think "This is going to help me get in some extra exercise and should help me lose weight".  When I play with the kids in the backyard or dance in the living room I think "I wonder if I will weigh less tomorrow because I am getting this extra movement in".  When I take the kids to the zoo I think "This is a great way to get in a ton of exercise, as long as I keep my eating on track today, I bet I will weigh less tomorrow!".  When I eat cookies and desserts that I did not plan on eating I think "Oh crap I blew it today".  In fact the only days that I am not eager to weigh myself in the morning are the days after I mess up on my eating.  Then I don't want to go anywhere near the scale because I don't want to see the damage.  It's like my mental state is fragile and can't handle seeing higher numbers on the scale.

I literally think about weight loss every hour of every day.  It has consumed my whole being so much that I can't work on or think about anything else.  I know other areas of my life are suffering... but they were suffering before because I was so lazy that I wasn't being a good mom to Lily.  I was so unhappy with myself that I was taking it out on those I cared about the most.  All of my energy, all of my focus, is zeroed in on this one thing: reaching my goal weight and no longer being overweight and unhappy with myself.  Reaching my goal weight has seemed unattainable for so long and now it seems real.  I know all of the problems and hardships in my life will not disappear once I reach my goal weight, but it will help a great many things.  First it will free up my soul to start improving myself in other ways besides fitness and nutrition.  It will greatly help with my self image/self esteem.  I will have more energy throughout the day to get things done and keep up with the daily hustle and bustle of life and raising kids.  I have already had an increase in energy, and things are not as hard for me to do (such as going up and down the stairs.  Before, if I were in the basement and I was going up to the bedroom I would have to stop on the main floor to catch my breath before starting to go up to the bedrooms upstairs).  Making healthier food choices is getting easier since I mostly buy healthy food, but I still keep some things around the house for Matt that are very hard to avoid.  Such as chips, and occasionally we keep candy around the house.

Matt loves sweets which makes it hard for me to stay on track, it can seem like a constant battle sometimes of "I want to eat that brownie, no I want to lose weight, no I want to eat that brownie, no I want to lose weight".  Now don't get me wrong.  I am a big advocate of things in moderation and there is a time and place to eat that brownie..... just not every day.  I usually make a large batch of sweets and then they linger around the house for several days.  (I will often splurge on the day I make them and then resist their temptations until Matt eats them all over the next week).  But everything I eat, whether I track it or not, my mind makes comments to myself about how healthy that was and if it will affect my weight loss.

I have noticed I am incredibly numbers driven, that is a big reason why I haven't lifted weights for exercise until I was forced to because I couldn't do cardio after injuring my foot.  Lifting weights builds muscle, muscle weighs more than fat.  That means that the numbers on the scale do not go down!  At least not at first.  Muscle burns fat, so the more muscle you have the more fat you will burn, but the results take some time to develop and my mentally fragile brain almost cannot handle the strain of waiting so long to see a loss on the scale.

This journey has not been fun, it has sucked in many many ways.  Exercises where I thought I was going to die (I cried a few times), times when I felt like I was missing out because I chose not to eat dessert and I really badly wanted to, times when I wanted to splurge on a gigantic bowl of buttery popcorn, or eat a whole batch of cookies, or stuff my face with pasta or skip a workout.  Sometimes I did all of those things, but it is the times when I exercised self control and exerted my will power over food that I grew in character.  It is important to say that not every moment of this past year has been terrible.  There have been many fun events like when I went to the Zumbathons and realized that I could make it through 90 whole minutes of Zumba!  The feeling of accomplishment as I made it to the top of the Incline, the humor of realizing that my pants fall off when they are fully buttoned and zipped, the thrill of buying new clothes in a smaller size.  I am taking my life back and reclaiming it for myself, no longer allowing myself to be tossed about in the sea of food that is available to us.  Who is in charge?  Will you let yourself be conquered by food or will you be the conqueror?  This is my life, and sometimes I mess up.  Sometimes I miss a workout, or I don't eat as healthy as I would like to and yes I obsess over the consequences.  I berate myself sometimes for making a poor choice, but sometimes I say "screw it all, I am eating that!"  You know what?  Just get right back on track.  Am I in control or out of control?  That is what this journey is about.  It is about building character, gaining self esteem, reclaiming my life, changing my life, becoming a better person, learning and growing.  Although the view may be narrow, the effects are far reaching.  This affects every aspect of your life from here on out: personal, work, spiritual, mental, physical.  If I can do this..... I can do anything.

Zumba World Party

Coming up on the last few days of phase one of Chalean Extreme and I am making sure my eating is spot on as well as getting in plenty of exercise throughout the day.  Today was a Cardio day and instead of doing the Burn it off 25 minute program I decided to go over to my parents house and try out the amazing new Zumba World Party game on their wii.  It was so much fun! I loved every song, and my heart rate stayed over 140 the whole time, and was in the 160s-170s for most of it. The load times are faster and there is less wait time between each song as the demo before and after each song is shorter.  I like that because it feels more like a real class and your heart rate doesn't drop too low in-between songs.  I chose a 60 minute class with high intensity.  In one hour I burned 576 calories according to my heart rate monitor and the game told me that I burned 575 calories during the workout, which was spot on!  I have never seen an estimate so close to the actual number of calories I burned, so that was pretty awesome and earns my seal of approval!


 

I love the new settings and the new graphics.  Also, it tracks your "Zumba moves" and once you hit a streak of 6, the game adds more dancers and background light and once you hit 12, the game adds the last set of dancers and lights to the point where it looks super awesome!  You start out with only one dancer at the beginning of the song which is different from the other versions, it makes it feel more like you are working towards something in every song and adds an extra component of "play".  I loved the new feel.  I just tried out the full class mode and I did not play around much in the world party mode (where you can free select songs).  However I did visit this screen and it had more of a DDR feel where some songs are locked until you reach certain levels.  They have also added "flier miles" and passports which I didn't look too close into, but all of the this gives it more of a video game feel instead of just an exercise program.  Translation: Awesome!

Image taken from Amazon

150- 60 pounds down

I finally made it to 150.  Looking back, it really didn't take me too long to lose the last 10 pounds, it just felt like it took forever.  I lost these 10 pounds in a little under 2 months (just one week under) and during the holidays to boot!  It was just incredibly frustrating because my weight yo-yoed up and down and up and down the whole time which made me feel like I wasn't making progress when I really was.  I would be 158 then 160 then 157 then 159 then 156 then 161 (thanksgiving week) then 158 then 155 then 152 then 155 etc.  etc. etc.  All the way until Wednesday when I weighed in at 150.1.  So yes, incredibly frustrating.  I know why: it's the holidays and I would over eat and my weight went up, then the next week it would go down, then the following week I would indulge and it would go up, you see the pattern.  But despite all of that, I fought a good fight and I made it to 150 (even it if was 8 days later than my goal).

As luck would have it, the very day I reach this important milestone, and I am super excited to get into the 140s and finally get into my healthy weight range...... I injure my foot.  Now I can't walk :-(   I am sooooo upset.  I was really psyched up for losing these next 10 pounds because it will put me into my healthy weight range and now I can't exercise.  So I will have to really focus on nutrition and be very careful with what I eat because I know plenty of people who have had foot injuries or surgeries and they are sedentary for a while and they gain tons of weight since they can't exercise and move around.  Now I feel like I am walking on thin ice.  I don't want to lose the muscle in my legs that I have built up either because we are going skiing in a little over a month, and one thing I have been working towards is getting in good enough physical shape so that I can ski the whole day.  I have not been able to ski a whole day in about 6 years, I have been too heavy, my legs too weak, and too out of shape.  I have been working so hard for this ski trip and I am going to be so upset if my foot doesn't heal in time. 

There is an ice pack under that bandage.

So, starting off the next 10 pounds on the wrong foot, but it is just another hurdle I will have to overcome.

New Clothes

This morning the scale hasn't budged.  I find myself wondering what I have been doing wrong, what I need to do better.  I have been thinking about it all morning and I can't find anything that I have been doing wrong.  I have been eating healthy and I have also been exercising regularly.  Unfortunately I do not have a scale that tells me my percentage of body fat so I can't determine if I have been decreasing in body fat.  I feel like I am struggling to get to 150, and maybe it is because I am gaining muscle since I have been doing more strength training exercises.  I won't know until I have my post challenge weigh in that will give me all the stats.  One and a half more weeks to go.  I have decided to go on a scale strike, I have gotten into a bad habit of weighing myself every morning.  So I am only going to weigh myself on Sunday and Wednesday from now on, which are my two weigh in days.  I get too depressed when I see the daily increase on the scale and then I want to go splurge because I think that nothing I am doing is working when in reality it has only been two days and maybe my body needs a few days to reset itself to a lower weight and if I just held out for the next day or so I would have seen a nice drop.  But really I am obsessing over it too much so I thought now would be a good time to reflect over how far I have come since I am so focused on how far I still have to go (about 30 pounds more to lose).  I am now 8 pounds away from my healthy weight range.

I started at 211

 and now I am down to 153.  That is 58 pounds gone!  58 pounds closer to my goal.  The holiday time is much harder to lose weight in because of all the extra goodies that are around.  If I take my weight right before thanksgiving of 156.2 and compare it to today's weigh in of 153.2, that is three pounds lost during the holiday season and in the past three weeks.  If I compare it to the lowest weight I saw on the scale this week of 151.9 that is just over four pounds lost in three weeks and during the holidays to boot!  Here is a picture of my new outfit I bought with the help of my good friend Casey.  I am standing on a step stool in the picture so you can see more of my pants haha.

Success!

This morning I woke up to a friendly sight on the scale: 154.3!  Yahoo!  Now only 4.3 pounds to go to hit my goal of 150 before the New Year!  I figure I dropped about 2 pounds last week since my weight was artificially high from Thanksgiving.  I feel like I have really gotten into the groove of this challenge.  At the beginning I needed to go through post-thanksgiving rehab and I was floundering with drinking just the shakes and not having some more substantial food, but now the shakes actually do a pretty good job of keeping me full and I have a better idea of what to eat and when I need to eat.  I love to put PB2 into my shakes, this afternoon I put PB2 into my cookies and cream shake and it tasted just like a peanut butter cookie!  Yum Yum, I loved it.  I usually only put PB2 in my afternoon shake since the morning shake is made with the protein drink mix and is more flavorful than the afternoon shake, and the morning shake has more calories in it already.

This morning, I ate 1/2 cup old fashioned oats with my morning shake since we had church from 10-12(noon) and I wasn't going to be getting a snack once we left, so I made sure I had more of a filling lunch.  This week was Stake Conference, so church was only 2 hours long instead of the usual three.  I am not sure how I am going to work in my lunch shake next week when we go back to regular hours (11am-2pm) Possibly the worst hours ever to have church, right through all three lunch hours!  Thankfully the year is coming to a close and starting the first week of January, we will have church at 1pm.  Much better, we can go right after lunch (and fall asleep! haha j/k).  But 1pm is still difficult since that is my standard energy slump time.  My favorite time for church is 9am-12noon because I don't usually get tired in the mornings and you can go right after breakfast and eat lunch as soon as you get home.  But! There are just lots of Mormons who live in my area so we have three wards meeting in our one building.

For dinner I didn't have anything planned in particular so I threw together some breakfast burritos. My one fajita sized tortilla was 110 calories, and I ate about one medium sized potato worth of hash browns, two eggs and about 2 oz of steak and 1/2 oz cheddar cheese.  I thought I did pretty good, but I didn't realize how many carbohydrates were in potatoes!  Not to mention the carbs that were in my tortilla..... oops.  Oh well, live and learn I guess, not an unhealthy meal but not one that I am supposed to be having on my challenge since I am supposed to be minimizing my carbohydrate intake at dinner-time.

Tomorrow is grocery day!  That means fresh fruit and new food!  I love grocery day :-)

Getting Started Tips: Food Tracker

In my opinion the single most useful tool for weight loss is a food tracker.  Others may disagree with me if they choose, but I believe that tracking your food allows you to be more aware of what you are eating, and how much you are eating.  There is a lot of focus on the exercise aspect of weight loss and I believe that there is too much emphasis placed on exercising.  Yes it is important, but if you are not eating properly then your exercise is for naught.

Now, if I already knew how to eat, and how much to eat then I wouldn't have been in the predicament I found myself in back in January 2013.  I believe most people share a similar story.  If we knew how to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat we wouldn't have a problem!  I believe that eating right is 75% of the battle and that exercise is 25%.  You need both, but if you are going to pick only one to tackle at a time I recommend that you tackle food first.  Food because you eat every day, food because it is what we always think about.  Food is hard wired into our systems, we need food but in today's society we have too much food and all the wrong kinds of food.

That is where the food tracker comes in.  First you need to know how much food to eat.  There are two great programs that help with this.  The first is the one I currently use because they have accommodations for nursing moms, and that is Weight Watchers.

www.weightwatchers.com

I do their online program which is about $18/month as I think that their meetings are way too expensive ($11/meeting and you are supposed to go every week totaling an average of $44/ month.)  The online program is basically a food tracker where you track how many points plus are in the foods that you eat.  The Points Plus program takes into account fat, protein, carbohydrates, and fiber.  I like how they take into account all the nutrients of food instead of singling out one category.  If you feel like you need support you can participate in their online community.  However this program does not teach you how to eat but it does focus on making healthy choices and the best part is that vegetables and fruits are 0 points!  I love this, but you have to use it carefully because if you eat too many fruits it can stall your weight loss (a problem I have yet to encounter).  You are also given a weekly points allowance of extra points that you can use for anything you want.  (Example: Extra points for dinner, or dessert, or if you want to eat peanut butter and avocados which are high points foods you can and then apply that towards your weekly points allowance.)  You can also trade exercise points for more food if you like.  I do not recommend this as if you use all your exercise points you are essentially eating the same amount as you are burning and I find that it slows down your weight loss.  You can track online or on your iPhone.  They also have tools for creating recipes so if your recipes don't contain nutrition information or you want to make your own recipe you can plug your ingredients into their recipe maker and find out how many points plus are in your recipe.  They also have a bar code scanner which is great if the food is actually in their system, which I have come to find that most foods aren't.

If you need more support from a community and want more interaction with other people in person then you can do the weekly meetings, and that works well for many people.  You are able to buy the monthly pass for about $9.75 a week which makes it cheaper and gives you access to the e-tools from the online version.  Otherwise you get to use paper and pencil to track your points if you are a meeting member.

The second food tracker is My Fit Pal, which is FREE!  I will be switching to my fit pal as soon as I am no longer nursing.

www.myfitnesspal.com

 My fit pal is a calorie counter.  You create a profile and it will tell you how many calories to eat every day in order to lose x pounds a week.  They also have an iphone/ipad app and I believe they also have an android app as well.  There is also a community on my fit pal and you can link it up to your Facebook account and chat with your friends who also have my fit pal accounts to gain support that way.  They also have a bar code scanner which has just about everything in existence in their database so it is very useful.    I have not used My Fit Pal in years so I do not know all of the new features.  I will update this post after I use this product more once I am finished nursing.  But I love that it is free.

Another great program that I have recently learned about is Feel Great in 8.  This is basically an 8 week challenge that tackles not only weight loss but helps you become more well rounded.  To enter into the challenge you pay $18 and you are given points for completing tasks and points are taken away for making poor decisions (such as unhealthy food choices).  Whoever has the most points at the end of the 8 weeks gets half of the money that every contestant put in!  It is definitely great motivation for those who are competitive.  http://feelgreatineight.blogspot.com/

This is also a good way to boost your weight loss if you have stalled or plateaued or are lacking in motivation to keep going. This is directly from their website " Feel Great in 8 is an eight week competition that challenges you to become healthier physically, mentally and spiritually. For eight weeks challenge participants gain and/or lose points based on healthy or unhealthy choices. Weekly points are reported to Tiffany (me! the challenge creator/host). Each participant contributes $18. $10 to the prize money "pot" and $8 to pay me for my time as host. At the end of the eight weeks, the competitors with the most points will get a share of the prize money! There is also a small prize for the participant with the greatest weight loss percentage.

I have been hosting these challenges for almost 4 years now. In the past, winners have gotten as much as $250, and the greatest 8 week weight loss so far is 36 pounds!"

Getting Started Tips: Making the Decision

I have had several people ask me lately about what I am doing and how I lost 50 pounds, which inspired me to write a series of Tip posts and I want to kick off today with the first one: Getting Started.

When I think of getting started I think of that very first decision we make.  Many people talk about having an "ah ha" moment where they realized that they need to lose weight and that moment motivated them to change their lives.  If any of you are lucky enough to have had an "ah ha" moment then you probably have already lost weight.  More often though I find that the majority of people are like me- they know they need to lose weight, most have tried to lose through various diets but then gained all the weight back maybe because they just couldn't maintain the eating regime, or they felt starved on a diet.  So now you are back at square one and maybe even square zero, because if you are like me you end up gaining even more weight on the rebound after a diet.

There was no "ah ha" moment for me.  I knew I needed to lose weight.  I knew I was unhappy with my image, energy, fitness, and basically everything physical about me.  I needed to make a decision to change my life because diets don't work.  If you say "I am going to go on a diet to lose weight" I promise you that you will fail or end up gaining all the weight back because diets don't work.  Typically diets restrict one food group or another (carbs, fats, eat only protein, etc) and then your body begins to go into starvation mode because it is not getting the nutrients that it needs.  When you make your decision to lose weight, you have to make it with the right mind set.  You have to be ready and willing to change FOR LIFE!  You need to understand that you are going to make a lifestyle change and therefore you should not change anything that you cannot maintain for life.

This is where most people get themselves into trouble, including myself.  I used to think "okay, I am going to do this diet for a little while, and once I lose the weight I won't need to do it anymore".  That is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves when we first venture into weight loss.  We need to be thinking "My desire to lose weight, become healthier and happier, and improve my self esteem and self image is strong enough to willingly change my lifestyle."  Now I want to point out that desire is not the same thing as motivation.  Motivation comes and goes, and as many of you know, while your motivation will start out strong at the beginning, once things get hard, a lot of times your motivation disappears and you feel like giving up or quitting.  What is going to hold you through these tough times until your motivation returns?  I believe that your desire, which never dies, is the lifeline that you need to cling to during these moments.  We all want to lose weight, we all want to be successful, even when things get hard and we don't want to try, we still want the end result and if we can keep that end result in mind that can be enough to carry us through.

So what was different for me this time around?  After all I have been on Weight Watchers two other times and tried countless other diets.  Honestly, it was my mindset and my desire.  This time I was willing to make a long term commitment.  I was willing to change how and what I eat (more on that later).  My self image and self esteem had hit an all time low and I didn't believe that I could get better unless I lost weight.  I believed that if I lost weight, I would be happier with myself, I would have more energy, I would be able to do more things with my children, I would be able to keep up better with the demands placed on my by being a stay at home mom.  Lets face it, being a mom is HARD WORK!  So my desire to lose weight and more importantly to BE SUCCESSFUL was very strong, so much so that it was almost all I could think about for a long time, and I am still very focused on this.  We eat 365 days a year!  So you might as well invest the time and energy into figuring out how to do it right!

Lastly, I want to close with a word on determination.  On one of my all time favorite blogs: www.runsforcookies.com Katie talks about motivation vs determination.  Being completely honest, you will not stay motivated the entire time you are losing weight.  I have not stayed motivated the entire time, and there was a time in July when I almost gave up.  I sure wanted to in that moment but I am glad that I didn't.  Why didn't I give up?  Because I had determination and desire.  Determination is being committed to a decision, doing the daily tasks it takes to get there no matter how mundane they may seem, and never losing sight of the end goal.  Being determined means that you are going to achieve your goal whether or not you have the motivation to do it.

http://www.runsforcookies.com/2012/01/difference-between-motivation-and.html

 This time around I am determined and dedicated to this goal.  I am going to reach my goal weight of 125 and enter a healthier and happier time of my life, that is why I have made the changes I have, and I am sticking to it.
You can read Katie's post on Determination VS Motivation HERE