My Weightloss Journey..

This morning I went running (mixed with walking) as I do about 4 days a week. Only today I went the furthest I've ever gone. When I came home, I was so proud of myself and wanted the world to know and I considered posting about it on Facebook. The problem? I don't really want to post it on there because when I post on FB I feel like it's not for me, but for others. I want to post about it for ME! It didn't even cross my mind to put it on my blog where only a few people come and look. Until I was just on my sil's blog reading a guest post about a weightloss journey. It is very inspiring. Then it hit me, why not post my "journey" here on my blog??

So for starters, Josiah and I decided about 1/2 way through January that we wanted to shed a few pounds before taking our trip to Disneyland. He had just finished off the last of our supply of Dr. Pepper the day before and we committed to not buy anymore. Another thing we had committed to do (or NOT do in this case) was to stop eating fast food several nights a week, especially french fries...something that I love!

I was going to start fixing grilled chicken every night for dinner and for lunch we were going to eat turkey sandwiches on 100% whole wheat bread. We didn't cut out mayo completely, but instead of making sure the entire piece of bread was nice and lathered up with it, I would put just enough to moisten it and it didn't even reach the edges. For breakfast we would eat either low fat yogurt or healthy cereal or something of the like.

Aside from just eating better, Josiah and I started walking between 1.5 and 2 mi in the evenings, and I was running about 4 mornings a week. We also used the Kinect as a form of working out and would do that a couple days a week for about an hour. We were surprised to find how much of a workout you actually get from that!

We both had a realistic goal in mind for how much weight we wanted to lose by the day we were scheduled to leave on our trip. For me it was 9 pounds. I will admit the first 6 pounds came off pretty quickly and I knew it was most likely water weight. (I retain so much water when I consume Dr. Pepper! Which is why I've tried so many times to quit drinking it! It has been so much easier since Josiah has been staying away from it too!)

I've always read that you should only weigh yourself once a week, typically because it can be frustrating to see when you're up a pound from the day before. We decided we were going to go ahead and weigh ourselves daily anyway but only really look at the weekly weight for how well we did that week. But I've found that seeing my weight each day gives me more motivation to keep going. Even if my weight is down from the day before, I know that if I go running, it will be even less! But if my weight is up a pound or 2, I know I need to do better today than I did yesterday. It's all about control.

We did really well with how we ate right up to the minute we left for California. We rewarded ourselves a couple times with some Chipotle or something similar, but ate smaller portions and didn't get the Dr. Pepper! (From the fountain is my favorite form so it is especially hard, if we're out, to not get one.)

On the morning we left we weighed ourselves one last time. My total weightloss at that point was 12 pounds! 12! That's 3 lbs more than my goal!

We knew that while we were in California (especially while at Disneyland) that we weren't going to be eating as well as we had been the previous 4 weeks. I personally was a little nervous about that. We had plans to eat ice cream and chocolate covered strawberries, as well as fattening food at the restaurants around Disneyland and fast food for dinner, including french fries! Disneyland serves coke products but for whatever reason they don't have Dr. Pepper, so there was no temptation there, and we were awesome about just drinking water the rest of the time.

Josiah was really hopeful that all the walking that we were doing in the park each day would help to balance out all the crap we were eating. It was honestly weird to not weigh ourselves each morning and we felt like we should have brought the scale!

Needless to say, when we returned home, we had each put a few lbs back on. The worst part was we had brought home quite a bit of junk food from Disneyland, not to mention the Girl Scout cookies that we'd bought from our neighbor had come in the day before we left to California which didn't get eaten on the trip but were then still here waiting to be eaten. We had come home on Saturday and Monday was a holiday. We attempted to eat better but it was not happening right away with all that junk food sitting around! We decided we were still on vacation since Josiah had taken Monday off and the kids didn't have school so we would focus on jumping back on board Tuesday.

That was this past Tuesday and we've done really well. (Excluding Tuesday night when I tried to grill chicken but the grill decided it was too full of greasy drippings and tried to start a fire so we went out to Texas Roadhouse for dinner that night but only got 6 oz steaks and did NOT ask for more bread when they asked if we needed more and we drank water! /end run-on sentence...) I am happy to report that I have been able to take off every single pound that I brought back with me from California!

My walk/run this morning was 5.5 miles! The furthest I've ever pushed myself. It felt good knowing that I did it. I use RunKeeper to track my routes. It's an awesome website!

I am excited to continue on with losing weight. My next goal is to be down another 13 lbs by the summer. I think it's totally doable and I can't wait to get there!