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!