Five Ways to Get Started on Your Health and Fitness Goals (And Three Things to Skip)

Ever since people started to realize that I've been to Blob Town and back, I have had many friends tell me that they want to make a change but they aren't sure where to start. I find myself giving out the same advice over and over again, so I thought it would be helpful to put it all down in one place. There's a lot of information out there and I personally found it to be very overwhelming when I was starting out. Here is my by no means professional opinion on how to get crack-a-lackin':

Progress between Thanksgiving and Easter. By the next holiday I should be able to arrive at family dinner wearing my booty shorts. Calm down, I'm kidding. In other news, I'm definitely getting stronger and faster. Watch out, world.



1) Track your food. You don't have to (and probably shouldn't) do this forever but it's the best place to start for a few days. Diet is really the key to feeling better and losing weight. You can exercise until you fall over in a pool of sweat but if you aren't watching your nutrition and your calorie intake, you won't see the results you want. It's easy to tell yourself you've eaten fairly well that day but it's another to see it all laid out with the nutritional value and calories added up. Even healthy foods, such as natural peanut butter, really add up if you aren't careful with your portions. You might be surprised at how little vegetables you actually eat (I was not one bit surprised because, when I first started, I was passionate about the fact that vegetables were generally gross.) A very popular and easy-to-use (well, as easy as this tedious stuff gets) app for this is called My Fitness Pal. Give it a go and have a good cry at seeing your typical real-life eating habits! It's a fun time.

2) Learn about food and clean eating. Diet is everything and, if you want to see results, you need to have a (fairly...more on that later) clean one. If you hate what you're eating every day, you aren't going to be able to keep it up. Read this great article on clean eating. Research healthy substitutes for the junk you want to take out of your diet. Explore clean-eating recipes and try them out. When I first started, I thought I would stock up on bags of frozen veggies and eat them every day. Such a bad plan. That was a gross sad soggy time in life! When I realized that you could roast broccoli, it was a game changer. If you want this to be a lifestyle change, you should probably not hate that life. Find a way to like the new way you're going to have to eat most of the time.

3) Drink more water. Up that water intake! Flush out those toxins! Keep yourself feeling fuller longer! Stay hydrated! Have to pee every two seconds! You probably need to be drinking a bazillion times the amount of water than you currently are. People will start to wonder about your bladder issues but truly, water helps. I also have a tea and sparkling water obsession that keeps water from getting too boring.

4) Pick one small, manageable food goal and stick to it. Like your white bread? Switch it for brown. Do you eat two pieces of toast in a sitting? Have one. Crave juice? Switch to lemon water. Do you like to stuff your face with treats all day long? Try indulging with a treat once a day instead. If you incorporate little changes over time, you will be able to stick with it and not feel overwhelmed. These little changes and substitutions are what make the biggest difference because they become a habit instead of a chore.

5) Pick a reasonable workout goal. Aim to go for a quick walk, ride a bike, or do a twenty-minute workout three days a week. Sign up for a class that happens twice a week. Pick something that's realistic or you will set yourself up to fail. When you accomplish your small goals, they too become habits that you can be proud of and build on.



What Not to Do:

1) Extremes. Saying you will never so much as lick a piece of chocolate again is ridiculous. Promising yourself that you are going to do two-a-days until you have rock hard abs is making a promise that is not going to happen. It's going to take time and that is ok! Extremes are overwhelming, mentally draining, and a good way to set yourself up to fail. If they aren't maintainable over a long period of time, they probably aren't the best idea.

2) Buy a bunch of products or spend money on quick-fixes. Seriously. I cannot stress this enough. No pill, no wrap, no shake, and no voodoo magic is going to do this for you. It takes consistency and determination and a lot of self-ass-kicking. Don't waste your money! Even if those products do work in the short-term, as soon as you stop taking them, the weight will come back on and the laziness will creep back in. It's much better to make changes that will lead to a maintainable healthy lifestyle.

3) Give up when you don't immediately start to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or when you eat two cupcakes at your kid's birthday party. It. Takes. Time. Mistakes will be made. It might be slow progress but slow progress is better that no progress, right? This will probably be the cheesiest thing I'll ever say but you just gotta think of that quote. You know, the one about a year from now you will wish you had started today - Dora the Explorer. Ask yourself if you want to use today to move closer or further away from your goals.



There you have it! My sage wisdom that I know intuitively learned through a lot of trial and error and frustration. This is what works for me and I hope it's helpful for you as well. Remember to take progress pictures when you start! It's painful now but you'll be glad you did when you're looking back, sitting on your newly-toned healthy butt.

Note To Self

I can't believe that I'm actually going to blog about this, but I'm kind of feeling like I need to. I need to write this down so that, every time I see it, it's like a smack in the face to keep going, and never give up. This is probably going to be the longest and most personal post I ever write in my life, but it's more for myself than anyone.

I used to be fat. I didn't really know that I was fat, but that didn't change the fact that I was. Not only was I fat, but I was unhealthy, and showing a bad example for my kids, and that is even worse. Ok, starting at the beginning of this story.

I was never one of those stick-like girls, but I wasn't really big either. I was somewhere in the middle. However, when I was younger, pre-teen age or so, I had some really strange ideas about my body. I remember not even wanting to wear shorts. Everyone used to bug me about it in a good natured way, but I stuck to my guns and wore pants in 30 degree heat. Somewhere along the way, the body issues went in the complete opposite direction and I was wearing all sorts of wild things that I wouldn't be caught dead in today. Call it teenage rebellion, because it probably was. Somewhere down the road into highschool, I started losing weight. Quite a bit of weight, and friends started to get a bit concerned. I didn't realize it at the time, but I think the things that I was going through emotionally had a big impact. That and I was really busy and didn't eat enough. In grade 12, I think I lived off the school's breakfast burritos and slurpees from 7-11. Somehow that led to me being the thinnest I have ever been, and I don't even know that I noticed. My eating and sleep habits also led to me not being very healthy mentally, though I didn't know it at the time.

Hopefully, my best friend Katie won't kill me for uploading all these photos. It wasn't really the original plan, but they really show the change.

Then came marriage, and baby number one. I was so in love with my son and concerned about his well-being that I sort of forgot about myself. I also had somewhat of an identity crisis as I struggled to be this young mom, the first of my friends to have a baby. I didn't know who I was for a while. I didn't know what to wear, what to say, how to explain a life of diapers and motherhood, and I didn't know how to relate. Post-partum depression and too many huge life changes at once came next, and with them came what were probably my worst eating habits yet. My husband and I decided to live like a bunch of college kids and eat all the foods we missed out on in childhood. I'm talking corndogs, Lucky Charms, and those gigantic chocolate muffins from Costco. We lived off that stuff. I'm serious. I remember watching Gilmore Girls and rationalizing my eating habits along with the Lorelais. It was kind of funny to me. Healthy people were weird, and missing out and I was so happy not to be one of them. Power to the candy! Obviously, this wasn't exactly helpful to my weight. To top it all off, I got pregnant again with my daughter fairly quickly after having my son. Just as I had started to make the effort to at least go for a walk every now and then, bam! Pregnancy and laziness struck again! By the time Lu was born, I was a whale. No, I am not being overly hard on myself. It was bad. The worst part was that I didn't even see it.

Somehow, I managed to tell myself that this was ok, and made every excuse in the book. I could see my face had gotten a little rounder, and my belly was sticking out a tad more than usual, but it was alright. I had time. I had my babies to focus on. My husband loved me the way I was. I'm just naturally a bigger person. Blah, blah, blah. One day, I went shopping with a friend and saw myself for the first time in a full-length mirror (mine had been broken in one of our many moves and just hadn't been replaced). What a wake up call that was. I barely recognized myself. For months afterwards, I was so upset. I had all this ridiculous anger about metabolisms and all my skinny friends who spent their days eating icecream and candy, and are still only 75 pounds. I spent copious amounts of time googling quick fixes and imagining myself falling ill with some grave sickness and dropping 20 pounds just like that. Surprise! It didn't happen. To top it off, I was hit with more post-partum depression and was all around miserable. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't just my weight making me miserable. I'm not as shallow as all this sounds! My eating habits and all of the sitting around were contributing to my depression. Then one day, I saw this quote, which is probably going to sound cheesy but it helped to wake me up. It was something along the lines of "happiness is a decision". Something just clicked. I realized that I could wallow and I could pat myself on the back, feed myself another excuse and another chocolate bar, or I could get a grip and do something about my misery.

Ugh. This was taken during a night out with friends and I remember the utter horror afterwards. I really didn't feel that I looked like this! I remember feeling really great that night. Then the pictures started to show up on Facebook....I would never have worn that outfit had I known.

So get a grip I did. I radically changed my eating habits, and the eating habits of my family. I had never let my kids eat the kinds of things I was eating, but now I was especially determined that they would have only the best. I kicked my extreme carb addiction, which was very difficult for me because carbs are always the quickest and tastiest things to grab. I replaced my unhealthy sweets with healthy ones. I started to eat things like quinoa, plain yogurt, and - get ready for a shocker here, folks - vegetables! I started to work out. Alot. Slowly but surely, I saw the pounds start to leave me. I know they say you shouldn't obsess over the scale, but for me it was my competition. Every day, I would check and see if the numbers went down. If they didn't, I would kick my own butt even harder the next day. If they did, it would only egg me on. From the time after my daughter was born until now, I have lost 50ish pounds. Hurray!

Here we are in a recent photo, on our way to Coldplay with our other best friend, Sarah, and Katie's sister, Anna. A little bit of an improvement!

Now hold up, because this isn't just a post to talk about how wonderful and sexy I am. This is a post to put it out there that I am struggling again. After I lost the weight, I had everyone telling me how great I looked, how skinny I was, how I inspired them, and on and on and on. So what did I do? I decided I looked so damn fantastic that I could slack off again. My motivation was gone. I felt like saying, "Hey world, I've arrived on the Island of the Fit and Skinny!". Only you know what? I haven't. Eventually, my lazy ways crept back, my diet was letting a few too many things slip by, and my moods have been starting to swing again. My all-or-nothing personality has chosen to do nothing, and that is just not ok.

I have such a long ways to go. I am not just talking about the last 15 or 20 pounds I'm wanting to lose. I'm talking about continuing to keep up my lifestyle change. I'm happier when I'm healthier, and it's as simple as that. I can't give up now. I just can't. I can't go back to how it was. So I'm putting it out there that I'm going to pick myself up and keep going. I am doing a 30 Day Challenge and I am going to try my very hardest to stick to it! I know now that even if I don't see a change right away, there is nothing more rewarding then working for what I want. I mean that for any aspect of my life. So you know what? It's great that there are tiny people out there who can do nothing and still look and feel like runaway models in Tahiti. Good for them! But I am one of the lucky ones who have to work for it. It's frustrating, and I could sit around and get all in a huff. Or I could just accept that that is how things are and change what I have the power to change. I'm all-around better for it.

The current plan?

- Start with continuing my 30 Day Challenge. No skipping, excuses, or laziness. It's just 30 Days.

- Clean up my eating. Why exercise if you are going to cancel it out by eating like crap.

- No more obsessing about how I look in comparison to other people. Let sticks be sticks, and people who want to be chubby be chubby. How much other people weigh shouldn't have any effect on how much I weigh. Only I have to bear the consequences if I make excuses. I'm doing this for me.

- No more pretending that things are fine the way they are. Have I been feeling down, had no energy, or been irritable? Heck yes, I have. Do I look like a brown version of Zooey Deschanel? I most definitely do not. I'm not done yet.

- No more upsetting myself about all the time I've wasted. What's done is done. All I can do is start over.

- If I still don't see the results I want after the thirty days, kick it up another notch. Being a slacker isn't going to help anything.

- Even if I will never fully rid my body of chubbery, it is still worth it. Health is worth it. The feeling I get after a workout is worth it. The example I set for my kids is worth it.

One of my biggest annoyances in life is people who don't take control of their problems, and just do something, anything, about them. I'll be damned if I become my own worst enemy. So for now, I'll still be crying along with Betty Draper in Mad Men when she says things like, "I lost a half a pound and I feel like I should pat myself on the back, because it was really hard." I feel ya, Betty, I feel ya. Anyways, just in case this post wasn't already enough of a snooze, I'll be sure to update you on this after 30 Days! I'm holding myself to it.