Tag Archives: Zumba

by

Reflecting On My Journey

While I was driving to work this morning, I was listening to Oprah Radio and just doing some self – reflection about my health, wellness and fitness journey. My thoughts were triggered last night while reading the book about the P.I.N.K Method. The book also serves as a journal in which you write your starting measurements, goals etc. While writing my goals, I realized a number of things that I am doing to hinder my health and fitness journey. Some of the things I am going to mention in this post may be a repeat of a earlier post so I apologize in advance.

1. I am an emotional eater.

2. I  snack out of boredom

3. I sometimes skip breakfast

4. I eat certain things out of weakness (giving in to what my daughter and man want to eat for dinner)

5. I lay in bed most of the weekend in the dark either sleeping or watching TV

6. I spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself

7. I am allowing my depression to run my life instead of continuously seeking treatment (this is my biggest obstacle).

8. I have not made any short or long-term weight loss goals

My biggest obstacle is depression and I have decided that its time to contact my insurance and seek treatment. I was under treatment before at the Veteran’s Affairs but I stopped going since the main focus was medicating me and not allowing me to face my issues and learn new ways to overcome those issues.

I have also realized that I do not need to have everyone in my house on the same page with me. I find that I want EVERYONE in my house to change their lifestyle because I am trying to change mine. I am unsuccessful with my change because I am not focused on just me. It is okay to be selfish so that I can reduce my risk of heard disease, diabetes, high cholesterol etc. I have to make a change for ME and not anyone else.

I initially planned to start the  P.I.N.K. Method on March 19th but since I have not finished reading through the book I have decided to start on April 1st. The first 90 days of 2012 did not go they way I intended on this journey (only a 3 lb weight loss so far), so let’s see how the 2nd 90 days of this year will go. I have some upcoming events to get jazzy for as well as being healthy overall such as my daughters graduation and my birthday. I will discuss my short-term and long-term weight loss goals in a future post. :-)

by

My journey to getting healthy and fit

On January 16th, I started my health and fitness journey. My goal is to lose weight and eat better than I used to. I don’t feel that I was eating badly at all, I do really well at work by bringing my food with me to work which includes breakfast. My main issue has been with exercise, I used to be really physically fit. However, over the past few years my physical activity decreased and my weight slowly increased. One day I woke up and I weighed 197 pounds!! I have tried and failed many times on my path to lose weight but now I feel like I finally have myself together.

What helps more is that my family wants to get involved. It is quite difficult to get healthy when the others in your home are still eating the junk food that you are trying to avoid. We also bought a juicer so we have started to buy more fruits and veggies to eat as well as juice. My daughter is starting to want healthy snacks such as fruits and while she refuses to give up bagel bites or taquitos, I do not mind buying those for her because those are foods/snacks that I do not crave. My boyfriend has also made the move to take lunch to work with him daily and he stopped drinking Coca-Cola (we almost had to stage an intervention…lol).

Another thing that is helping me is work. My team is a part of a 10-week program called Active for Life, as a team we decided that we will take a 15 min break together and walk around our building twice. It’s actually gotten to a point where I look forward to it because we get fresh air, Sun and it helps me to refocus. I also take long walks about four days a week. Last week I started out with a 30 minute walk on my treadmill 4 times last week. This week I walked at 60 mins on my treadmill on Tuesday,Wednesday and on Thursday my daughter and I walked for an hour with our dogs. I have burned tons of calories and it has proven to me that I do not have to power walk or run to burn calories to lose weight. You see, I was upset that I could not do vigorous exercise such as Zumba, Tae Bo, or anything like that because of my knee osteoarthritis. I can get the same results with low impact exercise.

My next goal is to start incorporating weight training to start toning my upper body. I usually feel self-conscious at the gym and although I have a membership, I barely go to the gym. My plan is to just take things one step at a time and start going to the gym twice a week to work my upper body, then gradually move to three times a week and include attending a water aerobics class. Every two weeks I will Vlog about my progress on YouTube and if time permits I was thinking of doing a daily blog about what I ate and how I felt throughout each day. So far things have been fun and I really want to continue my “journey to jazzness”.