The Great Purge: Part II

The past two Saturdays, we have continued our great purge. Last Saturday we tackled the upstairs which included the bathroom, play room, walk through closet, and attic. We once again divided everything up into keep, trash, or donate. The bathroom was fairly easy to go through. It included a lot of cheap jewelry that my sister and I had when we were in middle school. (Important note: My husband and I bought my parents' house a year and half ago so it still contains quite a bit of my childhood possessions.) The cheap, tangled, out-of-style jewelry was quite easy to part with. Even the random articles of clothing left in the drawers in the playroom were easy to toss. However, the childhood memorabilia in the walk through closet and the attic were a completely different story.

Apparently I've never thrown anything away in my life. I just boxed it up and put it in storage, which ended up in the upstairs closet and attic. I felt like I was walking down memory lane unpacking all of those boxes. I found 5 diaries from when I was in elementary school. Here was my favorite entry that I read. I wrote it when I was in second grade. I love that this was one of the best days in my life!

April 21, 1993
Dear diary today was one of the best days in my life.
My mom came and ate lunch with me and Ashley went to church with me.

I decided that I needed to condense all of my memorable possessions into one box. I picked out a box that my mom had written "Amanda's Treasures" on to use as my one box of keepsakes. I was surprised at how many items that I was willing to part with that I once felt too sentimental to let go. Now some of my most memorable childhood keepsakes are in this one box.

I wish that I had more before and after pictures to show because it is amazing how much we accomplished, but the angles of the closet and attic made it hard to take a good picture. A lot of what I got rid of was old clothes. Apparently I've held on to everything I've ever worn since middle school. A lot of the clothes were not in a good enough condition to donate so we ended up trashing them. My husband absolutely loves going to the dump and was so proud of our dump pile. This is his picture that he took.

Yesterday we really began organizing, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I mostly tackled the pantry while my husband worked on cleaning up the attic and garage. I went through and threw away all of our expired food. Then I took a few items that we will not need regularly to the attic for storage. I took items like spare lamps and seasonal decor. I love how you can really see the difference in the before and after photos of the pantry!

 Having a clean and organized house is so peaceful! I absolutely love it and I love all the room that we've made!

It's a Healthier Life

My husband and I decided last spring that we needed to start living a healthier lifestyle. Ever since then we have slowly been transitioning into our new life. We started with trying to stay active. We bought bicycles and a trailer to pull our daughter. We tried to find something active to do every night whether it was walking around the mall, riding our bikes, or playing softball. We also started tracking our calories with the MyFitnessPal app.

At the end of summer, we started doing the Insanity workouts. Every night after we put our daughter to bed, we would rearrange the living room for our workouts. The workouts included a lot of cardio mixed with strength training. As hard as it was, we kept it up for the whole two months. 

In August, I joined a Run for God group at my church. It was a fun group of ladies who met once a week for bible study and 5k training. I have always wanted to run a 5k so I felt like this would be a fun and accountable way to train for it. I had an absolute blast and successfully ran my first 5k the Sunday before Thanksgiving. 

My First 5K

 It started getting too cold for my comfort to run outside so I temporarily joined a gym. They had a special for returning members so I signed up for 6 weeks. Sadly I have been sick a little bit since I started so I've only been able to go 3 times the whole month of December. Every time I went in, I felt a little lost. I understood the idea of cardio and strength training, but I had so many options I didn't know where to begin. I saw this new workout on Pinterest so I thought that it would be a good place to start. I made it back to the gym yesterday and started the new workout:

6 sets of:

.5 mile running

10 push ups

20 squats

30 sit ups

 I only made it through 2 sets yesterday and finished with 10 minutes on the elliptical. It was a great work out! I felt like I was actually accomplishing something. I think I'm going to try to add a set each time I go and push myself a little further. I'm definitely feeling the effects of it today!

As far as my nutrition goes, I'm still transitioning. I know I should be eating better balanced meals but I'm not quite there yet. I decided that it would be better for me if I made the transition slowly. I'm afraid if I try to eat completely healthy all at once then I would treat it like a crash diet and just go back to being unhealthy the first time I eat pizza and cake. It's just really hard for me to eat enough vegetables because I'm really picky about them. 

My first step was to just eat whatever I wanted but in moderation. I tracked my calories and tried to stay in my allotted calorie range. I actually lost a good deal of weight doing this so it has worked great. However, I am wanting to try to go to a healthier lifestyle so I am in the process of trading in 200 calories of chips and dip for 200 calories of banana and peanut butter. I try my best to keep our fruits and vegetables stocked up. I always want to have the option to reach for an apple instead of crackers or candy.

I decided to start with breakfast since it's the first meal of the day. Plus I eat almost every breakfast during the week at home so it's a lot easier to control. My typical breakfast is a piece of whole grain toast, peanut butter, and banana. It is absolutely delicious. I toast the bread in the toaster oven. Once it's done I spread the peanut butter and slice the banana on top. Then I put it back in the toaster oven on broil for 3 or 4 minutes. This gets the banana all warm and makes it taste amazing. 

I have also started drinking smoothies for breakfast to help sneak in more vegetables. My first smoothies were orange juice, frozen strawberries, banana, and spinach leaves. I've cut down on the juice to eliminate added sugar. Most of my smoothies now are frozen strawberries, frozen pineapple, banana, spinach leaves, and water. The fruit is so good and completely covers the taste of the spinach; however, I actually do like spinach leaves. I recently bought some Greek yogurt so I'm going to start adding that to my smoothies for protein. 

This was my first smoothie I made with frozen strawberries, bananas, spinach leaves, and orange juice.

A couple of weeks ago I met with a personal trainer as part of the special promotion going on at my gym. He recommended only eating carbs at either lunch or dinner but not both. I've been working on that the past couple of weeks. I've been trying to eat a lot more salads when I'm home for lunch. My goal is to cook some chicken once a week in salsa or buffalo sauce to use as a topping for my spinach leaves. I'm still working on eating healthy and getting more vegetables in at dinner, but like I said before this is a transitioning process and will take some time. 

I attempt to drink at least half my body weight in ounces of water a day. I have a large Pineapple Willy''s cup that I fill with water. I've measured the ounces in it and know that I need to drink almost 3 cups of it a day. This makes it super easy to keep track of my water. The only times I run into trouble with keeping up with my water intake is when I'm out in town a lot during the day. I do keep a blue water bottle with me out in town so I plan on keeping track of how much of it I drink while I'm out. 

I'm proud to say that when I started taking my health seriously in 2013 I went from a size 18 to a size 14. Now I can't wait to keep making strides to increase my health this year! 

The Great Purge: Beginning

My husband decided not to go hunting today so we were able to start our house purge early! We decided to start in the junkiest part of our house, our bedroom and bathroom. Whenever we have company coming over we usually focus on getting the core part of the house clean: living room, dining room, kitchen, and guest bath. We usually throw stuff into our bedroom just to get it out of the way and since no one but us ever goes into our bedroom it mostly just stays there. 

We began by mentally labeling every item as either keep, trash or donate. We started with under the bathroom sink and bathroom closet. I am bad about holding on to different lotions or shampoos that I "might use" but then never actually using them. So we threw out all of my "might use" and only kept "definitely use". I realized that I owned 3 straighteners and 3 curling irons! Who even needs that many? I quickly noticed how this purge is going to save us a lot of money. I found a lot of items that I had considered lost and was about to purchase new ones. I was also considering buying some shelves for the bathroom to put our towels on. It turns out that after we cleaned out all of the junk in the bathroom closet that we had plenty of room for towels! Here is the before and after of our bathroom closet:

After cleaning out the bathroom closet, we were able to condense our storage containers and freed up several others to be used somewhere else. We then moved on to the bedroom and our closets. Our bedroom was mostly filled with junk that didn't have a real place to go. This is where our piles of donate started piling up. We put tons of clothes that didn't fit just right or were just never worn into the donate pile. I tried to keep a small assortment of clothes that don't fit just right just in case. (Side note: I've always heard that it's a good idea to keep a few items that are a size below and a size above for women who fluctuate in sizes. I really liked that idea because I gain weight easily and work really hard to lose it. It keeps me from being depressed about not having a single thing to wear if I do go up or down a size suddenly.) My husband's closet:

Back to talking about the purge: Next we worked on the laundry room. My husband and I have moved 3 times in the 3 and half years that we've been married. I still haven't completely unpacked from all those moves. We had garbage bags full of bath towels, washcloths, kitchen towels, and rags just laying in our laundry room. We went through those and sorted them out to be washed. Here is the before and after:

Finally we ended the day with the pantry. Our pantry is another room, like our bedroom, where junk is just thrown into and the door shut behind. It's amazing how much better it looks just by getting rid of the junk! I can't wait to see what it looks like when it's actually organized.

Our house currently looks like more of a mess than when we started but that's because we pulled everything out to make our purging decisions. Our organization day will come later. I've been gathering all of our storage boxes so that when it comes time to organize I'll be able to see what I have to work with and hopefully save money on not having to buy too many more. Being organized doesn't have to be expensive. Make sure you don't just organize junk and be resourceful. I found some Christmas storage boxes for less than a dollar and they store just as great the whole year round as they do in December. ;)

My Wrap Experience

A couple of weeks ago my sister-in-law started selling body wraps and other products. I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to detox so I became a loyal customer and bought my first box of wraps. They came in the mail yesterday so last night was my first go at it. 

In case you don't know what a body wrap is, it's basically a piece of paper with lotion made out of natural detoxing ingredients. The lotion is absorbed into your skin and helps to remove toxins. You place the wrap on the area of your body that you want to detox and leave it on for 45 minutes up to 8 hours. The detoxing ingredients work for 72 hours so you can only wrap once every 3 days. Each day you should drink half of your body weight in ounces of water to help flush out the toxins. 

At first I was wary of using the wrap because it seems to just be flushing out water weight, but the more I've researched it the more it makes sense as to why it works longer for some people rather than others. A detox is as temporary as you make it. The detox flushes out toxins in your body. If you eat unhealthy junk food then you're just going to put those same types of toxins back in your body. However, if you eat healthy food then you'll be able to keep those toxins from building back up. Hopefully I can make wise eating choices and keep those toxins out. 

The wrap can be placed on several areas of your body including arms, legs, back, and stomach. I chose to wrap my stomach. I placed the wrap on my stomach then wrapped myself in plastic wrap to help hold it in place. Since I chose to sleep in it I also wore my shape-wear over it to make sure it didn't move around too much in my sleep. Needless to say, I looked awesome! But that is one perk to it. I could have chosen to wear it under my clothes during the day and no one would even know. 

After I laid down with it on, it started getting really warm and tingling so I knew something was going on. I decided to wear it to bed because I didn't have a chance to put it on until then. I thought that I would just take it off when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Of course, this would be the first night in months that I didn't wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom so I ended up wearing it the full 8 hours. 

This morning I removed it and rubbed in the remaining lotion. I had taken before photos and measurements last night so I took my first round of after photos and measurements this morning. I've lost an inch and a half already. Another thing I noticed is that my stretch marks are faded which is an awesome perk to just wanting to lose inches. A full treatment is 4 wraps so I can't wait to see my results after my 4th wrap. As for now I'll keep monitoring my water intake and tracking my measurements. I'll be sure to post updates and hopefully some awesome before and after photos! 

Here's a link to my sister-in-law's website in case anyone who reads this is interested in trying it out for themselves!

The Great Purge

I think that it's because of the Christmas holiday, but I now have this great need to purge our house. We had a fantastic Christmas with both sides of our family and were both blessed with lots of Christmas gifts. But now comes the fun part of making room for our new treasures. I normally have a hard time with getting rid of things but I think that I have finally reached a place in my life where I am ready to let go. I used to either attach sentimental value to everything or fear that I would one day need it, but that all ends now. In my head I've been calling this "The Great Purge". I've decided that if it's not something I've used in the last year then I'm trashing or donating it. I'm ready to put my old ways behind, my constant "I may use this later" attitude. I can't wait to get my house organized. My hubby and I have set aside the second Saturday in January as our big purge day. I've been doing my purging/organizing research. From various sources, I've heard that it's best to purge before you organize, otherwise you're just organizing junk instead of your actual stuff. I kind of jumped the gun a little bit by buying some storage boxes but that was only because they were on sale. After our purge I'm going to go to the Dollar Tree and buy small storage containers for the closets and pantry. Organization makes me happy so this should be lots of fun! 

Chapter 1

Happy 2014!!! I'm so excited to be starting out the new year with my first blog! Being a stay at home mom, I need a place to be able to tell someone other than a one year old about what's going on in my life and to keep my husband from being bombarded with constant chatter from my lack of socializing. Haha! So here I am, ready to pour out my thoughts and day to day life-happenings. I hope anyone who reads this finds it amusing, funny, enjoyable, encouraging, or at least mildly entertaining. I know that I will at least enjoy blogging!