First post in awhile!

            So this blogging thing is a lot harder than it looks! I feel like I am so boring that I have nothing to write about. Overall, this past week my eating has been pretty good…there were a couple of days where I went out to dinner with friends and probably went over my calorie range, but I honestly tried to make the best dinner choices and eat a proper portion instead of the whole thing they give you. I don’t like to beat myself up for eating like this because I am trying to change my eating style rather than go on a “diet”. I want this to be something I can stick to the rest of my life, and I can’t go the rest of my life without going out to dinner with friends!

I have started running more, I really want to do a 5k in the spring so I am working towards that. I am not doing the C25k program exactly, but kind of modifying it. I run as long as I can and try to go longer each day. I am up to being able to run for about 8 minutes without walking. But I am no speed demon, I run at about a 10-11 minute mile pace. I am also using the elliptical, and when my schedule permits I go to spinning. My weight is back around 162. I was at my lowest point 2 weeks ago when I was 161, then I gained and went to 163, this past Wednesday I was 162.2. So hopefully next week I will be 160….but it is TOM and I’m not sure how badly that will damage my efforts. I am trying to keep my water intake high, but sometimes it’s kind of hard.

I made some really good – super easy - stuffed mushrooms last night for dinner. They were stuffed with spinach, garlic, bacon, and feta cheese. 2 medium sized portabella mushrooms had around 100 calories. I want to tweek the recipe a little to make it a little more unique before I post it though. (it would be nice to have readers before I post it too haha).

Recap

I think I am doing really well this week so far. I do my official weigh ins on Wednesdays every week. I was down to 161 last Wednesday, but I don’t really trust that number…I weigh myself pretty much every day and pretty much I’ve been hovering around 163, even before that 161 came up…so we will see.

            Anyway, I went to the Big E, a huge fair in Mass, with my dad on Thursday…we had a lot of fun. It was a lot of walking and shopping. I wore my pedometer and it said we did a little over 4 miles. My eating, however, was horrible. We split a fried dough with apple over it, we each had an 8^th of a pound of fudge, baked potato’s with sour cream and butter, and topped it off by splitting a big éclair. I kept my breakfast light, and tracked all my fair food though and still was around 1400 calories…mind you it was almost ALL fat, I think I had 7 grams of protein at the end of the day. But when I came home I managed to do a 30 minute Walk Away the Pounds DVD and 20 minutes of some kettle bell work. So overall I feel pretty good about it.

            Today I was back to my crazy days at work. Our posts changed and I am back to working in a unit that basically my whole day is running up and down 3 flights of stairs. I was sweating my butt off after about 10 minutes. I would normally count that as my workout for the day and call it quits, but I decided to go jogging with one of my friends. So we headed to the local high school and ran laps and did some strength moves in between laps. Was fun, and my HRM said I burned 400 calories! My eating was really good today though. I only had 1100 calories. I was so busy at work I hardly had time to eat.

            I definitely do think the HRM was a good buy though; it has already made me want to work out 3 times in 3 days when I didn’t really feel like it, and in the past probably would have talked myself into not doing anything. So, here is hoping for a good rest of the week!

New Toy!

I got my newest toy in the mail today; I’m super excited about it. It’s a heart rate monitor, a polar FT7 to be exact. I took it out of the package and had to go for a jog asap to test it out, even though I had already gone to spinning class this morning. 2 mile jog – 272 calories! I really think this will be an awesome tool to finish up my weight loss. I can tell that it will be a huge motivator to me; I love that you can check it throughout your workout and know when to pick it up a little. And it is sooo much more accurate than the machines and online calculators.

Also I figure I should post a more recent picture of myself seeing as how the first one was 3 years and at least 40lbs ago. So here I am this summer with my dad. Approximately 175lbs.

Starting out.

My name is Elizabeth. I am 24 years old and currently weigh 161 pounds. I have struggled with my weight for as long as I can remember…in fact I currently weigh the least that I can remember in my adult life, but I am still not completely happy with my weight. My goal is to be 140lbs.

My sophomore year of college I began to eat and drink a lot more than ever before, mostly this was all emotional eating due to the loss of my mother from cancer. I managed to balloon up from a size 14 to an 18 in one year. When I had to buy a pair of size 18 jeans was when I realized I needed to do something. I began to use sparkpeople.com to track my food intake and started to work out. I quickly lost some of the weight and got down to a size 16. I weighed approximately 210 pounds. But I stopped there; I was busy in school and was more focused on graduating with good grades then loosing weight. It also didn’t help that my eating habits were HORRIBLE. I used to order a “family feast” from KFC and eat it myself and then there was the 3 hour road trip my best friend and I took to New Jersey for deep fried hot dogs.

This is me with the hot dogs I mentioned...approx 200-210lbs.

Once I graduated from college in 2008 I dropped about 20 pounds without really trying. My eating habits changed drastically once I got back home. I still was by no means eating healthy, but I wasn’t eating a family feast any more. I also got a job where I was walking for a good portion of my day.

In October of 2008 I weighed about 190 pounds and was back in a size 14. I changed jobs and went from one fairly active job to one that I was on my feet even more. In order to get my job I had to pass a physical test, it wasn’t hard at all but did involve a quarter mile run that had to be completed in under 3.5 minutes….that’s a 10 minute mile…I realized I really needed to change when I almost didn’t complete the QUARTER mile run, the only thing that got me through it was knowing that if I stopped to walk – even once – I would loose my job. So, I started working out again. I got down to about 175pounds and wearing a size 12 by the middle of 2009, but my diet was still not good. I stayed there until about a month and a half ago.

I weighed in at 176 pounds at the beginning of August 2010. I decided to start using sparkpeople.com again and track all food that I was eating and I began to work out 3-5 times a week. I eat between 1200-1600 calories a day and aim to burn at least 500 through exercise. In a little over a month I have lost 14 pounds and am now at 161. I truly feel that I am committed to making this change be a permanent one. I am tired of being fat. I want to finally be healthy, but I am determined to do it in a way that I can maintain, I have no desire to cut carbs out, or only drink liquids…I want to do this the right way, by changing my eating habits and working out.