I am convinced that there are people who know me who must look at the food blog I write and wonder how I've gotten to eat a lot of the things I've eaten in the past year while still successfully losing fourty-seven pounds. I can honestly promise that it wasn't dumb luck, though I'm sure there are some who think it was.
When I got pregnant with Joseph I wasn't a very healthy person. I wasn't active and we ate fast food ALL the time. When we did cook at home it wasn't healthy. I ate hardly any vegetables or fruits and we had a sugary and rich dessert almost every day, sometimes more than once in a day. In the three months after marriage before we got pregnant I gained at least 25 pounds (going from 155 lbs and a dress size 10 to 180 lbs and a dress size 14). So yes, 180 was my pre-pregnancy weight.
When we got pregnant I had plans to start exercising again and eat healthy but that didn't happen. I guess you can't expect to change overnight.
By the time I was forty weeks pregnant I had tipped the scales at OVER 200 lbs (207 to be exact) and even though I knew weight gain was just a part of pregnancy, I also knew that I had gained more than the recommended amount (for a woman who was overweight before getting pregnant) and that there were things I could have done much differently.
In a moment of complete discouragement, just a few days before Joey was born, I sat down and wrote a plan for my weight loss. Ironically my computer died for good the other day so I have no way to access this plan at the moment but since I reviewed it often I remember it well. I set a goal for how often to exercise (6 times per week), how long to exercise (60 min), how to exercise (walking- I figured it was a good place to start for a sedentary person). I had a goal weight, 155 lbs, and a time frame for when to reach that goal (by the time Joseph was 18 months old). I also wrote extensive lists of the foods I knew I should be eating that I planned on NOT slowly adding back into my diet after Joseph was born. What I mean by that is I was going to try to go from eating super unhealthy to eating like the perfect healthy person, one huge change all at once.
Fast forward 6 weeks post-partum. At my doctors appointment I weighed 188 lbs and could barely fit into those size 14 jeans and dresses I had worn just before I was pregnant with Joseph. This was probably partially because I had just had a baby, duh (it's amazing how different your body composition changes)! But also because I weighed nearly 10 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight. At this point I SQUEEZED into my muffin top size 14 pants only every once and a while and wore my maternity clothes more often than not.
For the first four weeks of weight loss I counted calories using myfitnesspal.com, and after four weeks I had lost 11 pounds, and weighed 177. My size 14 pants were the right fit for me at that point. I will say that I always felt starving during this time. I was trying to lose two pounds a week which was 1200 calories per day. Even though I had made those lists of foods that I was supposed to be adding into my diet, I wasn't eating any of them. I felt starved and deprived, but I was happy about the number on the scale so I kept eating that small amount of calories filled with foods that provided me little to no nourishment.
Then we went on a month long vacation. My consistency with exercise during that time wasn't great and I was eating like CRAP. Since I had only been eating 1200 calories of junk-food for the month prior to vacation even a small jump back up in calories and less exercise proved detrimental to the "progress" I thought I had made. By the time we got back (mid-late August) I had gained 8 of those 11 pounds back (185 lbs and a TIGHT fitting size 14).
At first I was angry. I thought, "I've worked so hard! How could this happen to me?... There must be something wrong with me! I'm doing everything right". But sooner or later I had to face the music. I was doing hardly anything right and there were a lot of changes that I needed to make IF I wanted my success to be lasting instead of momentary.
The first thing I stopped doing was counting my calories. There were so many reasons behind this choice, and I think I will explain this reasoning in another post sometime--- it'd add way too much wordage to this post. But to be brief I essentially started listening to my body to tell me when I was hungry and when I was not. You can count calories all you want, and you might experience some success but chances are it won't be very permanent (at least it isn't for a lot of yo-yo dieters), that is unless you want to count calories for the rest of your life. We all know those people. Listening to how your body feels is so much more powerful in my opinion. Like I said, more on this in another blog post.
Second, instead of focusing on the weight I wanted to lose I changed my focus to a new goal: creating a happy and healthy home. I had this epiphany one day that my attitude towards my health, food, and exercise would have a great impact on our children and I realized that it would be the choices I make that would determine whether that influence was positive or negative. When I took the focus off of a number on the scale and turned it toward the people I love most (including myself) the weight loss just followed, almost magically.
When it came to how I was eating and how I chose to exercise, I took it all one step at a time. I didn't try to change everything overnight because I would just have been setting myself up for failure. The eating and exercise will also have to comprise another post in the future--- there's quite a bit of info there. But I will say that I never once felt restricted, deprived or starved. I felt energetic and alive, and I also felt like I didn't have to give up the foods that I love like
boneless wings and
cheesecake. I never felt like I was on a "diet".
I started at 188 lbs and lost 11 pounds the wrong way--- at least what I consider to be wrong. Then I gained back 8 of them. I started over at 185 lbs (I still count those other three pounds I didn't gain back toward my total weight loss) and lost 47 lbs total. I usually don't share my current weight with people but you'll probably do the math anyway so it's 141 lbs. I'm now a dress size 8. More importantly I am healthy and my family is healthier than we ever were before. We're still making changes here and there, because it's a long process and I'm not entirely sure if it ever ends.
Making these changes over time has led to the lifestyle we now live, one year later. It's filled with fruits, veggies, and whole grains--- things we didn't really eat before. We still eat meat, which David is happy about. We eat WAY less sugar and treats and for the most part we eat real, un-processed food, including full-fat cheese, butter, and other full-fat dairy products--- not something I ever thought I'd say after losing this much weight. We are both much more active; I'm currently doing Insanity as of three days ago and David actually walks to class now, something he didn't do before.
I really do plan on writing more in depth posts about how we eat and how I exercise, so stay tuned if you are interested. I guess the whole purpose behind this post is to explain that there was actually a thought process and intention behind every choice I have made in the past year that contributed to my success. I didn't just get lucky, though I do feel incredibly blessed.
