A 4 Letter Word

(Originally posted July 13th, 2009)

I've been avoiding this post for a while, and no, not the vacation post. I'm still working on getting one of the video's to work right. This particular post I've been avoiding because I didn't want to really make public what I'm doing. I've spoken to a few people about it, but I haven't gone into detail here because I don't want to fail and have to admit it.

That 4 letter word is DIET. When I got pregnant I was already overweight. Then I gained even more and ended up heaver than I've ever been. Even now, I'm still heaver than I've ever been and I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that.

Anyways, I've lost weight before so I know I can do it again. 6 weeks ago I joined a weight loss/exercise class at the gym. It meets 3 days a week for an hour with a personal trainer and a nutritionist. The nutrition part I pretty much know, eat sensibly, control portion sizes, mostly animals, vegetables, and fruits. The great thing is that it holds me accountable. I have to write down everything I eat and I get "in trouble" if it isn't good.

I also really like the group that I'm in. It turned out to be all women, and all of us are mom's. There are 11 of us total and 3 of us have little bitty babies. It's an intense work-out but the girls make it entertaining.

Another factor I'm having to learn to balance is the elbow. For those of you who don't know, 3.5 years ago I shattered my left elbow and all hell broke loose. It was followed by 4 surgeries, over a month total in the hospital, WAY to many pain meds, and what started me on this road to being overweight. It's frustrating. Before the accident I was super fit, felt the best I'd felt in my whole life, and I could kick just about anyone's ass. Now... not so much. I'm learning that I can't compare myself now to how I was then and I can't compare how I could exercise then to how I can now. And I'm having to figure out how to do enough with my arm that it gets work but not so much to keep me up all night in pain. That's the tricky part. I've discovered that if I work out on my non-class days all I can do is walk and maybe a little core stuff. No upper body stuff at all. And for now, that's fine. A big part of all of this is getting by body used to moving again and getting my arm strong. Given that, I've taken on not complaining about going. I often times find myself having to bite my tongue and hopefully I'll still have one when this class is over with.

So far I've lost 11.5 pounds and dropped 5.3% body fat. Not too shabby! I'm eating about 1500 calories a day and working my butt off, literally. :-) I have shrunk out of some of my maternity clothes, thank God, and I'm going to have to take the sewing machine to some of my night time bras soon.

This is all a life style change. When you're pregnant it's very easy to eat however you want and as much as I'd like to continue that, I don't want those results.

There is a $750 prize package for the person in all of the weight loss classes who looses the most weight. I think there are about 40 of us total and from what I hear it's any ones at this point. So I'll keep ya'll updated... however it goes.