Eat, Sweat, Lose

Depending on who gets this up first weekly you should know I don’t weigh in until 4:30 PM on Wednesdays because that is when my group meets. Then I tend to run errands while the kids are at church so I might be a bit late getting up my results. From now on I will try to at least get the linky up so you have a place to post.

I am at my same weight this week no loss and no gain for me. I guess that maintaining is a good thing but I would have loved to see a little shift! I leave for Mexico on Saturday for a missions trip and I have a feeling that it could be a challenge to get planned exercise in.

How did you do this week I would love to see you link up! Also don’t forget to check out our challenge! I hope to wrap it up March 1st. That should give you all plenty of time to hunt up your goodies. I have a plan for follow up too so don’t lose them. If you aren’t using them put them in a tote for now and hide them in a closet.

If you are like me you likely have a few weight loss items roaming around your house.  I want to challenge you to join in and find them all.  Am I serious?  Of course!  What are you going to do?

1. Grab a box
2. Run all over your house and collect anything (except food) that is health, exercise or weight loss related all the while adding them to your box.
3. Put up a blog post about your findings and come back here and link up!

I hope to have mine up soon as I have already gotten a head start. In order for you to take me serious I have a couple prizes.  I am not going to tell you what they are but here are your categories.

• Largest stash (I need pictures on this one, if you don’t have a blog email them to me check the Meet Heather page for the address)
• Most original item
• Best blog post (make sure to include a link to Eat, Sweat, Lose)

I’m so excited to be putting up our first every Wednesday Weekly Weigh In! I hope that you join us in our weight loss journey.

This last week has been quite busy for me, and at times I think that I must have forgotten to eat, because I lost 7 pounds from my last weigh in! WOW! that’s a pound a day! Maybe the stomach bug had something to do with it, or even that I started back on the sauce water I don’t care just hope that it will stay off.

Go weigh yourself this morning, post about it how your week went on your blog, then come back and link up! I hope you had a great week, and with a little change in eating, and sweating a little more you will lose all of that extra poundage!

Oh that sounds so negative and I don’t want to be that way but to be honest it is really a lot of the way I have been feeling for the last couple months.  In the spring last year I found out I have hypothyroidism.  I started on meds and worked my way up in dosage.  While I felt better in some aspects and started to lose some weight I had this nagging nausea daily.  I got to the point where I was so frustrated I quit taking my meds.  I just couldn’t stand another day of wanting to throw up but not being able to do so.

With the meds out of my system I was no longer nauseated unless one of my standard migraines hit.  However I quickly gained back the weight I lost plus some.  In the past two months I have become so drained emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually that I barely function most days.

It is enough!  Tomorrow I will head to the doctor’s office.  I will get rechecked and see what my options are.  It really is a bit crazy that I just quit with everything.  Feeling this way I am definately not the best mom, wife, volunteer, teacher or me that I could be.

Do you have anything that you just ignore about yourself?  What changes do you need to make to feel and function better?  Leave a comment and start some conversation!

I wrote my story out thinking oh yeah, this will be easy. It wasn’t. I cried. I cried hard and long. I wrote hard and long. It brought up so many memories that I couldn’t even write out. I hope to change it over time, yet I wanted to share it with you today. To keep it in a place where I can add to it over time, and not cut out anything to keep this post from being so small I wrote My Story and published it on my personal blog as a page of its own. I hope to add pictures as I find them along the same time line.

I hope that this insight helps you in some way. I hope that you feel the need to write your own story and how you came to weigh what you do today. I hope that my story ends one day on a high note and a low number, but if not I’m still going to be Eating better, Sweating more  and striving to Lose til I’m at an ideal weight for me.

Tell us your story.

I am really glad you stopped by to check out my menu plan for the week!  Eat, Sweat, Lose is a new blog that my friend Christi and I started.  We hope to build an encouraging community for women wanting to lose weight the healthy way.  We will be weighing in on Wednesdays and hope that you will find it fun to join in so sign up to follow and come back often!  Onto the menu…

Here is my attempt at a weeks healthy menu.  We are trying to eat balanced while staying in control with our portion sizes.  This is one thing we are trying to do as a family instead of mom just trying to lose some weight.  I will definately have other things to share with you later but this is a good start.

• Quarter pound extra lean burgers on light wheat buns with all the veggie fixins, cauliflower and choice of fresh fruit.
• Whole wheat rotini with marinara and meatballs and side salads.
• Baked crispy fish and homemade potato wedges.
• Salsa chicken and black beans with brown rice
• Taco salads (this can be so healthy with the right toppings and portion control)
• Ham egg bake
• Leftovers and soup

What are your favorite family healthy meals?  I would so love for you to share them with me.

~ Heather

What better way to start off the new blog than to be up front and tell you my long weight story.  First off I have not always been overweight.  As a teen up until I had my first child I only weighed up to 120 at my highest.  Looking back at pictures now I almost wonder if I was too thin but honestly maybe it is because of relating it to what I see now.  I was an active teen not highly but I took opportunities to go walk up town with my friends after school and I rode bike or went swimming when I could.  I didn’t play sports as I would have rather had my nose in a book (I am still that way).

A month before I turned 19 I had Jesse. I had gained a lot of weight because I had been on bed rest for months and was in the 170s.  I was tired and struggling to wake up every two hours to feed a baby that didn’t want to eat.  Honestly between the lack of sleep and the fact that my husband had been laid off and we were living with my parents I suppose I was depressed on top of everything.  I didn’t gain more weight then but I think I started a cycle. 

A few months later I was expecting Ethan.  I once again was back on bedrest and luckily it wasn’t so bad because Jesse still couldn’t walk.  My only problem was I was incredibly sick and I would keep getting sicker until I couldn’t even keep down a glass of water.  The culprit was my gallbladder and I needed to have it removed at 36 weeks of pregnancy.  I made it through the surgery okay and with a lot of help delivered Ethan two weeks later.  I actually weighed less than the day of conception.  However my marriage was struggling and in four months I would be separated with a pending divorce and two small children.  The weight would start to creep on.

I soon started a relationship with my second husband and it was rough and I was young and stupid in that rebound stage.  I got pregnant with Kyle and had some incredibly stressful life events with my second husband.  Once again I was on bed rest and incredibly depressed because I didn’t get to care for my two young children.  They were being taken to daycare every day so that I could rest.  In the evening they would come to bed with me for a short amount of time before falling asleep and being moved to their own beds.  Kyle came 6 weeks early and was in the NICU for 2 weeks.  When he came home we had a heart monitor that frequently went off like a car alarm.  I really started to turn to food for comfort.  I was in a bad relationship and all I had done for most of the past three years was lay around in bed watching tv, reading and doing needlework.  The one thing I had to do was eat and people would on occasion try to bring me great food to cheer me up.  So the habits started.

Several times in the next few years I would be beat, bruised and degraded by the man I couldn’t figure out how to get away from whether that was physically, mentally or emotionally.  The only thing I could do was cook or bake my way out of it.  Or at least that was how I saw it.  I escaped in the kitchen and then ate when no one was watching.  I packed on more weight, fought for my life and eventually escaped temporarily.

I was a single mom now with 3 boys under the age of 4.  I decided to go back to school and eventually work also.  I was left with little time and when I had time I was too tired to cook.  Food that was quick and affordable became key.  I quit exercising and gained more weight.  After finishing school and finally getting on my feet I met my husband Andrew. 

Andrew and I were together almost a year and then married.  I went from 3 boys to 6 boys and a girl.  While we didn’t have Andrew’s children full time it still created a need for organization.  I started South Beach Diet and lost a little over 50 pounds.  I was looking good but still could have lost.  I was however comfortable where I was.  I got down to a size 10 in jeans and we moved. 

I got a new job and worked my way into assisting a physical therapist in the nursing home.  After doing that for a year or so I had a work related injury that tore up my shoulder pretty good.  The doctor I had didn’t take any images and left me hanging 4 months until I got a new doctor and found out my cartilage had torn away from my shoulder.  Another couple months later I was able to have surgery but it took a long time to heal.  I still struggle with upper body exercise to this day.  During that entire time I really packed on the pounds with inactivity and cortisone shots.  Little to say I struggled emotionally with a job loss in the end and I had gained a lot of weight.  About a year and a half later I would have a hysterectomy and a year after that find out my thyroid wasn’t working correctly. 

I am currently at 242 and on no meds.  I hope to get back on some when I can put away a bit of money for the doctor appointment again.  I need a change though my last ones were making me nauseated non-stop.

So there you have it my honest, embarrassing truth!  I need to make a change and do something.  This is my first step and while I don’t expect perfection I hope to go in the right direction!