My "diet"

Number one rule No Restrictions!

I have tried numerous diets, diet pills, weight loss trends, workout trends etc. But the number one thing I have found was that when I restrict myself from having something I usually break with time and lose all control. I then spend weeks trying to get back on track with what I can and can't have. So my number one rule is No Restrictions.

Here's what I'm talking about, the diets that give you a "cheat day" once a week. You are forced to stay on track with no carbs, sugars, or whatever your restricting from your diet, but are allowed one day out of the week to indulge in this restriction. The concept is that you are allowed this restriction because you earned it.

The thing I've learned the most is that food shouldn't be earned, food is a vital part of sustaining your life. There are good choices and there are bad choices, but there should never be restrictions to those choices.

I'm not saying that eating a candy bar for breakfast is the best choice, but some days it may be the only choice. You shouldn't feel bad because you have a screaming toddler, 6 year old asking for cheerios, a husband running late for work, the dog's whining to be let out, the dishwasher still needs to be loaded and you have yet to run a brush through your hair before the baby sitter gets there and you are on your way to work and all you have time to do is shove a chocolate bar in your mouth. It's a choice, at least it's food, it's fuel to get you to the next moment in your day.

So what's my diet if I have no restrictions? It's all about portion control. I'm not saying to weight and measure all of your meals.

Have you noticed that plate sizes have increased, along with the size of meals at restaurants (I will talk about this at a later post)? With the increase in plate size how do you know what's the best portion size?

I have found that my body has physical signs of knowing when I've had enough. One example is while eating you get to a point and suddenly you have to take a deep breath, this is a way of saying stop your full, before you become over full. When this happens I can usually take two or three more forkfuls before I hit the overload level.

I'm going to tell a slightly embarrassing story here so you can understand where I came from and where I am now.

When I was at my heaviest I used to be able to eat 10+ tacos in one sitting. The box you can order on the Taco Bell menu. Once I started paying attention to my body, listening to the physical signs of fullness I can reach about 3 tacos before I start to feel nauseous.

When I'm making my own dinner at home, with the large 16+ inch plate I find that leaving space between my food helps me a lot. For instance if I'm having carrots, chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner I form a Peace sign on my plate of some sort. Always insuring that my meat & veggies are larger than my carbs.

One last secret, don't worry about leaving food on your plate! Yes kids in Africa are going hungry, but it doesn't mean your a bad person for not finishing your meal. Besides they won't be able to eat what you left on your plate anyways. I know this sounds self conceded, but honestly just scrape it off into a self storage container & have it for lunch tomorrow.

My workouts

I have had many people ask me what I'm doing to loss weight over the last couple of weeks. Half the time I don't really know what to tell them because I just do it. I don't stop and think about it, I just do it.

So I stopped and thought about it.

I set goals, small goals! I have found that trying to obtain a large goal without small goals only sets me up for failure (this pertains to almost everything I do with my life). However, that doesn't mean I don't have larger goals, I just need to know the stepping stones to get to them.

As many of you know I've been sick for quite some time, but when I'm feeling better here is my general workout routine.

I usually swim 3-5 days a week between 1-6 miles. When swimming I focus in on every aspect of my body, I don't stick with one stroke, I do laps of just legs, just arms, with resistance, with speed goals, etc. All to mix it up and make the workout different and exciting.

The days I'm not swimming (2-4 days a week) I'm usually found biking between 7-10 miles and running 1-2 miles. These days are also my weight lifting days.

My philosophy is the same with my running and biking as it is with my swimming. I never try to do the same thing within a week. So one day I can be climbing hills while the next day its a speed race.

You may wonder why my running isn't as good compared to the distances I have with swimming and biking. This is because of knee injury that took over a year to heal with surgery and more months then I care to think about in physical therapy. But that doesn't mean I won't get up to doing a 5K or even a marathon, it just means I'm taking it slow because of how damaged my knee was, all a part of listening to your own body.

My weight lifting routine changes, all the time as well. Last year I set goals of lifting my own body weight. Within six months I was already there. So I started focusing in on each body area. My biggest fear where free weights. I just never knew exactly what to do with them. So I bought some and worked out in my room, facing the mirror with the help of the internet to figure out what I was doing right and wrong.

Once I became more comfortable with this I started picking them up at the gym and even found many of the guys watching as I did movements they never thought about. Guess I started a trend because the regulars I saw in there never worked their shoulders, as a swimmer this is very important and within a week many of the guys where doing the same maneuvers as I was.

I spend two days focusing in on my whole body when it comes to weights. This means from head to toe I am lifting weights, then I spend the other two focusing in on just upper body or lower body. These days all depend on how I'm feeling, what I already worked out and my schedule.

My number one dependency is my own body. It tells me when I can and can't do something. For instance, if I'm running and my knee starts to give out, it doesn't mean I stop my workout it means I stop running. I slow the treadmill down and finish the workout at a walk. I'm not a failure because the person next to me just ran ten miles, I'm still moving, I'm still finishing and that is a win all together.

The only way I'm a failure is if I decide to give up and never step foot in the gym again and never care about myself again.

I've been sick now for two + months. Barely having the energy to do anything, but I couldn't give up so every now and then I picked up those old free weights I had shoved under my bed and did a small workout. I wasn't giving up. This past weekend I needed to get out, to try something, so I headed for the gym. It was a saving grace, because I felt the worst I had in months and truly felt like giving up. The moment I hit the mile run marker I felt better, at least mentally.

This battle with food and weight is not just the physical. It's also mental and that's something many people don't understand. Your mind will race, you will have many moments of wanting to give up because it's hard and painful. But at the end of the day I know I tried and I know I can at least count on myself to get me to tomorrow.

Never rely on someone else to get you somewhere, you never know when they will give up on you, but when your focusing in on yourself you know that you will always have one person supporting you and that's yourself.

Before and after

I haven't placed a photo of myself on here in some time. Mainly because I didn't see the changes, however many people in my life did.

I would get comments about being skinnier almost daily within the last few weeks. Yes I've been sick and that's added to my sudden weight loss since being plateaued for a year, but there have been many changes that I'm starting to notice.

First my size 12 jeans are falling off of me, I apparently skipped size 10 and can now fit size 8.

 My shirts no longer require an X in them (although every girl needs some bigger clothes for those kind of days). 

I can wrap a normal size towel all the way around my body with no gaps.

When I look straight down I see my boobs, not my stomach and boobs.

And finally, my feet shrunk! I went from a size 8.5/9 to a size 7/7.5 in almost all of my shoes. 

So I decided to take a picture to see what I only get a few glimpses of when passing a store window. 

You can close your mouth now! I'm not near my goal, but I'm getting there. 

But what I find more exciting is seeing what everyone else sees. I don't see the girl in the blue shirt anymore. Although she likes to rear her ugly head every now and then, but I'm starting to see the girl in pink. 

Truthfully I still fear that I won't fit in a seat, or through an aisle or that I'm going to break this or that, but when I make it thought, or realize my legs don't spill over the side of the chair I know I'm no longer that fat girl.

Yes I still have a ways to go and I'm still pushing myself, but for now I'm taking it one day at a time. I'm still sick (hoping to have some kind of answers this week) but, I'm not giving up. This weekend I ran for the first time in over two months and while I had no energy to do it I pushed myself. I don't want to give in, I won't give in, because I don't want to be that girl again.

So I'm listening to my body, when it says it's done I'm done. I don't care if I only did ten reps out of my 50, my body is telling me to stop for a reason, but at the same time it's not giving in either. I know I will get back to swimming, running and biking my normal distances someday, but for now I'm happy just waking up and getting out of bed.