Transformation Tuesday

I read an amazing book recently about one woman’s journey through weight gain and loss. I saw myself in so much of what she said, but nothing hit me quite like this quote she included:

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

That was so true of who I was before we began this journey. I was “content” and “happy with myself” because I didn’t know any different. I just was, and wasn’t moving. I was stagnant in so many ways, physically and emotionally. And because I didn’t “move” I didn’t feel how tied down I was…I didn’t notice my chains.

But looking back on myself at that point from this point…oh man! I was completely a prisoner to the food I was eating and the lifestyle I was leading. Bad choices, and too large of portions, and drinking pop, and sneaking treats, and eating whole loaves of bread in a day. I didn’t see those things as holding me down…I thought that meant I was in control. But things were out of control and I was completely captive to it. I was being held by invisible chains.

And then something clicked in my head and as we started to make changes, drastic ones, I could really see and feel those chains that were holding me down. And I wanted to bust free! And so we’ve been working hard together as a couple to bust free of our chains.

In preparation for this Transformation Tuesday post Chris and I went to our favorite photography spot and recreated some pictures from when we were at our heaviest. The wind was blowing like crazy, so don’t mind my hair!

Images on the left are from October of 2011. Images on the right are from March 16, 2014.

I am truly blown away by these pictures. Our clothes are just hanging off of us. We have really come a long way these last few months, and I think you can see it in our faces. We feel freer… we are freer! We’ve still got more work to do… weight to drop and muscle to build, but the changes we’ve made have been internal and external and monumental.

We’re busting free of our chains!

March Squat Challenge

This month I’m taking my weight-loss and health goals one step further and adding in some exercise now that we’re done with Phase 2 of our HCG diet. I’m doing a squat challenge for the month of March and invite you to join me! Here is the plan for every day and my goal is to work up to 200 squats on the 31st!

What are the benefits of doing squats? They are a functional exercise that help you perform real-life activities better. They help promote balance, mobility, flexibility and body-wide muscle building. They are awesome for your legs and butt, but also impact your abs and lower back muscles. An overall amazing choice of exercise. I’m really excited to work on this for the month of March.

I decided to keep track of how my body changes so I took before pictures (who me? hehe). I got that TimerCam app on my iPhone for taking self-portraits and it worked really great for these.

So will you join me? Feel free to start with 35 tomorrow, or start at the beginning and just go a couple days into April. I’d love to hear your story and motivation for wanting to try the challenge. Lets encourage each other! I’m using the #marchsquatchallenge on instagram during the month to stay connected. Feel free to join me.

Have you done a month-long fitness challenge before?
Were you successful? What struggles did you face and how did you overcome them?
Please share your stories below in the comments.

Transformation Tuesday

It is a very powerful thing to have pictures like these…at times when its been a few days since the number on the scale has changed and I’m feeling stagnant, I need reminders like this. And these reminders turn into motivation to keep going! Before and after (or during, as the case may be) pictures are my jam! I have been pouring over them on Instagram and meeting new people on similar journeys or those who have almost reached their goal weight and who are keeping it off and living a healthy and thriving lifestyle. They inspire me. #transformationtuesday has been one of my favorite hashtags on Instagram lately, so I thought I’d share a couple transformation images of my own to chronicle the journey and show my progress.

The picture on the right is from October 2012. I just just started working at Horizon Credit Union. The picture on the left is from a couple weeks ago. I see the changes in strange places like my nose; my bra fits so different, and I’ve lost at least a half size in my feet. That jacket on the left picture…I can wrap it around my front now. I feel like my eyes sparkle more now.

Picture on the right is from May 2013, just before we made the change and the one on the left is from last week. I have a much more pronounced chin, and I can almost see my collarbone! Yay! This encourages me to keep on going, and maybe it can encourage others too. Set your mind to something, do the work and you’ll see and feel the results. And take pictures!! I think its so important to have these to look back on and compare. I’m sure grateful for them.

Something I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on in regards to my health is the reason that I put on the weight in the first place. I want to break this physical cycle, so I need to understand the mental one too. We live in such a food-centric culture, where everything revolves around food and meals. We celebrate with food, we comfort with food, we eat when we’re bored, we eat when we’re sad, we eat to gratify our emotions….we rarely eat because we’re hungry. It is so common to never experience that true need for food because we never stop eating. But in these last few months I have come to really understand that food is a fuel, and I need it to thrive and be healthy and active, but I need another outlet for my emotions.

“I must learn how to eat to live, not live to eat.” –Tweet this!

I have been doing some reading on the topic and there were a few questions in a book that really hit home for me: Can you find a different hobby when you’re bored, instead of eating? Can you deal with stress without using food as a pacifier or distraction? Can you create happiness without having to eat?

There have been so many times that I use my “celebrating the everyday” motto as an excuse to eat and justify bad food choices. I need to break this cycle!

What it comes down to for me, and I think for everyone, is to understand hunger and need and how food fuels the body. So I am working on developing a genuine desire to eat less. This is where HCG protocol comes in so handy. Because of the effect the HCG has on you, you can eat significantly less food than you ever have before and really test your body. It has given me a chance to retrain my mind so I think in terms of physical need instead of cultural norm. Just because its “lunch time” doesn’t mean I have to eat if I’m not hungry. This break in eating has given me a chance to rethink the role that eating (the act itself) has in my life, and to develop different coping mechanisms and build emotional strength.

This is huge to me.

I know that my desires to eat in the past have had nothing to do with hunger. I am so susceptible to commercials, advertising, seeing others eating, thinking that you have to get popcorn at the theater…I have to retrain my brain to recognize true physical hunger to control these desires, which I know will ultimately result in me reaching my goal: thriving in health.

I’m working on this…letting my emotional wounds heal, breaking the cycle of overeating to compensate for those wounds, and eating less because I want to, not just because it will result in weight-loss.

Glad for these lessons and the results. Thanks for letting me share.

Is this something you struggle with too?
What things have helped you better understand your hunger and motivation to eat?

My Favorite Phase 2 HCG Recipes

Phase 2 of the HCG diet can be really difficult because the food choices are so slim. You can have 100 grams of protein plus one vegetable and a fruit per meal. I usually split up my fruit through the day, unless I want to count my tomato as a fruit and add to it a meal. If you’re creative you can create so many different meals, and there are lots of recipe suggestions to be found, even on Pinterest. Here are a few of my go-to favorites.

This pesto sauce is just amazing, and I can’t wait to add it to lots of different veggies in the future too. I mixed basil, garlic, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, chicken broth and a little bit of stevia in a food processer and added salt and pepper to taste. Then I cooked up the chicken with some onion and once the meat was browned I added the pesto sauce and water to the chicken. Let it simmer a little and then pour all of this over a bed of spinach. So full of flavor!

This one is super easy, and one of the cases where I counted a tomato as my fruit for the meal. It helps to have more than just meat and lettuce on a salad sometimes. This is 100 grams of lean ground beef flavored with Mexican spices. I love to mix up my lettuce a lot and this time I used Iceburg. Its got a lot of crunch and the moisture picks up the flavors in the meat very well. Chris adds hot sauce to his, but I can’t handle that stuff. For me all that its missing is some olives! wink*wink.

This is one of my FAVORITE ways to eat cabbage. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and spread some MCT oil over a cookie sheet. Slice a heal of cabbage into 3/4” slices. Lay it out on the sheet and brush on some oil on the tops. Add seasoning (salt, garlic, etc.). Flip and repeat on the second side. Cook for half an hour and then flip the steaks and bake for another half hour. The edges will get dark and crispy. That’s my favorite part because it tastes so sweet. We pair this veggie with lots of different things…steak and grilled chicken breast are my favorite.

I love how easy this one is do at lunch time…quick and easy. I usually buy the tail off, precooked frozen shrimp and so you just need to run water over them and then give them a quick seer. I start my frying pan with the coconut oil and lost of garlic. I add the shrimp and it makes a bit of a sauce with the water from the shrimp. I throw this over a bed of spinach and I’m good to go. Super fast and super delicious.

So I’ve been on Phase 2 for 11 days and I’m down to 192.2 lbs, which is 17.8 lbs lost already! Feeling really good about my progress already. I drink a ton of water a day and triple-shot Americanos with cream are my jam! It feels so good to be the one cooking my food and making menu plans and shopping for real food. Not even 2 weeks in and I feel so much better. My energy is up and I’m sleeping better. I’m excited to keep watching the pounds drop and my smile get bigger.

What are some of your favorite healthy recipes?
I’m making a collection of them for our maintenance phase!

Thriving in Health

I knew when the word Thrive came to me that a huge part of thriving this year would have to do with my health. This is something that I’ve really struggled with for most of my life…being overweight, having IBS, and dealing with the effects of PCOS. I needed to take back control! So Chris and I started our weight loss journey in May of last year. I shared the beginning of this whole thing back in July in a post. Looking back I’m still blown away by the before and after (really, “during”) pictures. Pretty powerful, especially on days when you don’t feel like you’re doing anything right.

We have been on the HCG program, where you take drops of HCG (a synthetic hormone which pulls fat from your stored fat cells to power your body, but leaves the important fat, like around your heart and organs) in combination with a very low calorie diet for 40 days. After that is a period of 21 days with no sugar or carbs, and then 6 weeks of maintenance before you can start the cycle all over again. Its very strict, and can be hard mentally more than physically, but the results are staggering, and if done correctly, lasting.

Here is where I was at the beginning. My very first “before” shot in May 2013. Notice my little baby puppy. So tiny!

 

I was so thoroughly embarrassed by these pictures. I don’t look happy and they were a real wake-up call. We did 2 rounds of HCG last year and I lost 60lbs! I was feeling incredible, like my old self again and really strong. I started doing Crossfit workouts and pushing my body in ways I never had before and it kept up. October was the beginning of maintenance after this round and my weight was down to 182lbs from 245lbs.

And then life got a little crazy. I’ve shared a bit of the struggles with Chris’ parents moving in, but the worst way that we were effected is that this upheaval threw us out of our schedule and new habits and ways of eating. Chris’ mom finally had a kitchen again, and she started making all of Chris’ old favorite foods and we just ate it. We ate and ate some more and didn’t stand up for ourselves in our own house. Mentally, this has been a really hard hole to crawl back out of…again. I became surrounded by so much that was out of my control that I gave up control of this too.

I think I ate my body weight in Red Vines. No joke… I just couldn’t stop eating them!

And we had planned on starting another round of HCG in January, but our drops got held at the border (we order from Canada) and so we didn’t get them when we planned and things went from bad to worse. In the end, I put 20lbs back on.

But now I am taking back control and I thought that the best way to be accountable would be to share on my blog. It’s a very personal thing, especially sharing these very raw pictures of myself.  But I just think forward to my final “after” pictures and how amazing the contrast is going to be and I know I’ll be glad that I shared…

We started HCG protocol on Saturday January 25th and I wanted new “before” pictures for this round and this year.

And I plan on sharing throughout the rest of this journey. I want to inspire others to take back control of their health and the things they feed their bodies. And I want to be a success story for HCG and whatever else is to come.

So here are my beginning again stats: after 2 days of loading at the beginning of the protocol I topped out at 210lbs. This morning I weighted in at 202.8lbs. We will be doing the drops and the very low calorie diet until March 5th and my goal is to average a pound a day.

We have found some amazing protocol friendly recipes that I’ll see if I can convince Chris to cook and let me take pictures of to share. Let me just say: cabbage steaks! You wouldn’t believe how delicious they are. And I’ve found some very helpful resources for those on the HCG protocol. Some great videos and tips.

I know that I’m the only one who can make the changes necessary to be true to who I know I am and be happy. I need to stop handing over control of things. I have learned so much already, but I know I have a big journey ahead of me. I hope that sharing and staying accountable on my blog will help me. And that I will really thrive in health this year.

Have you ever embarked on a health journey?
What were the most important lessons you learned?