Hello Iron Family! I took a short blog break but I am back!! Home life has been a little crazy and I haven't had much time to write.
So you're probably wondering how my weigh in went this week. I would say pretty good...
I am finally getting this weight loss thing! Even on bad days I've learned how to just pick myself up and dust off. I've been hitting the gym 6 days a week and logging every bite that goes into my mouth. I get so excited seeing my number of days logged in go up on myfitnesspal.com. So far I have logged in 84 days in a row! I am going to have a big happy dance when I hit 100!
I also took a progress photo this past week. I personally don't see much change but I think that could be due to how baggy my shirt is. The black shirt is from the start of my journey and the gray shirt is from last week.
I've been thinking of a few goals I want to hit that are reasonable. My first goal is for December, I want to hit 50 lbs total loss. Right now I'm at 29 lbs total and think that it's doable. The next is for my birthday. My birthday typically falls the weekend of The Arnold Sports Festival in March. We already have plans in place to go including our hotel already booked. I want to try to hit between 80 to 100 lbs total loss. I think it would be neat to be able to compare this year's Arnold photos to next year's.
I can't wait to see what this journey has in store for me!!!
Until next time, Stay Strong Iron Family!
We all go through it at some point in our lives. Whether it comes from the outside or from within. Some people do it to us without even meaning to. We have family members who voice concern because we are trying a new way of eating, a husband who brings home the newest Oreo flavor, or friends who want to go out for drinks. The hardest is when we do it to ourselves. We slip up on one meal and that one meal becomes two, then a week, a month and so on. My biggest obstacle is the internal sabotage. It's easy for me to tell other people no thank you when they put something in front of me. However, when that little internal voice pops up and tells me it's okay to eat that ice cream cone or stop through a drive-thru on the way home because no one else will know it's hard to say no.
I've been doing so well diet wise until this week. I wish I could say it was due to a large 4th of July party spread with loads of temptation and goodies, but no. I actually did really well at our family's yearly cookout. I planned ahead, ate before going, and took water with me. The sabotage came later in the week in the form of a that horrible little voice. That bitch can be the biggest sabotager of all. She told me on Monday that since I hadn't broke my fast at 2pm that eating a crispy buttermilk chicken sandwich from McDonalds would be okay. Can you believe I listened to her!!!! I wish I could say that I at least enjoyed that sandwich and savored each bite, nope I wolf that baby down. I had a short drive back home and wanted it gone before I made it home. That inner voice didn't want my husband to know that she had won. I wish I could say that my little spree ended there. After I had an awesome weigh in on Wednesday I decided on Thursday I could relax on my diet for that day. I ordered from my favorite Greek restaurant and ate a huge meal of hummus with pita, chicken shawarma with delicious garlic sauce , grape leaves, and rice pudding. The meal alone was well over 1000 calories. My husband was working late that night and not only did I order pizza, breadsticks, and cinnamon sticks for dinner, I also ate past my cut off time of 7pm. Did it end there.....nope.....It went into Friday as well. I ate a whole Dairy Milk caramel candy bar and a package of twix. On top of all these poor choices the inner bitch sabotaged me with, I didn't go to the gym yesterday or today.
So...why did I just tell the whole world I did this to myself? Because I know that I need to stop this cycle. This inner voice works in secret and tells me that if only she and I know then it didn't really happen right? I need to be accountable to not only myself but to you guys as well. This cycle has been what caused me to fail in previous attempts to lose the weight. I can't let this cycle stop my progress so far. Even though I ate these horrible things, I did something that I never did in the past, I logged every failure I put in my mouth on myfitnesspal. Before I would have just not logged anything and acted like it never happened. Not this time! I will stop this cycle and reach my goals. I need to shut this inner voice up and not feed into it. I am stronger than this inner sabotager and I will defeat it this time. I may have slipped this week but today is a new day.
Until next time, Stay strong Iron Family!!!
Soooo if there's a lot of errors in this post, I'm sorry ahead of time. During this mornings workout I smashed my little finger between a 50 lbs barbell and a barbell rack. Thank goodness it was leg day and I was still able to finish my workout. I don't think I broke it but I'm still taping it to the finger next to it just for today. I'm just happy that 1) it could have been worse and 2) there was no damage to my wedding ring.
This week's weigh in was shocking to say the least! GOODBYE 290's!!!!!!! I haven't been real clean with my diet and I skipped a workout last week. I have still been keeping all my meals within my marcos, even if some of the things haven't been on plan. I also learned that I can no longer tolerate dairy products. I ate a kiddy size ice cream and not only did I have an IBS flare up but also my face broke out. Looks like we may have found my IBS trigger.
I'm keeping this post short only because it's hard to type right now and I plan on doing a longer post tomorrow. Also I've almost hit 1000 page views!!!! If I get a few more followers and hit 1200 page views I may do a surprise giveaway.
Until next time, Stay Strong Iron Family!!!!
I've never been a real small girl and I've always have had issues with my weight. However, the social anxiety that I experienced didn't happen till after my first pregnancy. Before becoming pregnant with my oldest son, I was serious about weight training and losing weight. I was working out 6 days a week and playing competitive softball on the 7th day. Then we got the positive pregnancy test and I slowed down big time. I still played ball but the workouts stopped and the pregnancy weight piled on. I was around 215 when I became pregnant and ballooned up to 285 by the end of my pregnancy. I did what a lot of first time pregnant women do, I ate what I wanted and became inactive. I thought that the weight would just drop off once I had the baby. Oh how silly I was. When I went in for my check up after my son was born, the scale flashed back 285!!!! WHAT!?!??!?!?! But I just had an almost 9lbs baby! Surely I would have AT LEAST dropped 9lbs!!
This was me a few months before getting pregnant
2 days before my son was born
At my son's 1st birthday
I started to really hate my body and I tried to hide from it. I refused to look at myself in the mirror and hid my body in pictures. Half the time I was the photo taker and refused to even be in photos. I was ashamed of my body and what I looked like. Even though this body housed my son for 40 weeks, I thought that it had failed me. In reality, I had failed my body by filling it with over processed foods and being inactive. This was just the start of this mental downward spinal.
I felt alone the first few years of my son's life. Not only was I unhappy with the way I looked, I was also dealing with my son's developmental delays and finding answers for him. We didn't have much support the first year of Dylan's autism journey. Many people made me feel like I didn't know what was best for my son and that Dylan was "just behind." They would say things to make me feel like I was just a lazy mother and that's why he was behind. This didn't help when I was already in a dark place with myself.
The anxiety and depression grew along with my waistline. It was getting so bad that I didn't want people to see me. I dreaded running into old friends that I hadn't seen in a long time. It became so bad that when my best friend would call and ask to do something I would make excuses not to go. I wanted to hid away and only go to places that I knew we wouldn't run into people I knew.
My lowest point with my anxiety happened when our oldest was just a baby. A friend of my husband's was getting married and invited us. I had never met any of my husband's work friends and I was scared of what they would think of me. My mind kept imagining what his co-workers were thinking. Phrases such as "Wow, Daryl could do so much better." and "Wow, she is fat!" kept popping up in my head. I didn't want people to think less of my husband because he had a fat wife. After we dropped my son off with my mom, we headed to the wedding. I felt a knot in my stomach and it kept growing with every mile that we got closer. We sat in the parking lot of the venue and that knot made it's way up to my throat and poured it's way out of my eyes. I sobbed so hard because I was so scared to meet this people and have their judging eyes on me. My husband is one of the few people that can calm me down in situations like this. He loves me for who I am and not for what the number on a scale reads. He calmed me down and all night he would just tell me how beautiful I was. All those people that I thought would be passing judgment on me, turned out to be a great group of people. I knew after this that I had a problem with social anxiety and I needed to overcome this demon. I never wanted to feel that way ever again.
I still have challenges with social anxiety but I don't let them control me anymore. I know that I can't let this get in the way of living. It's a daily battle that I must push pass. Somedays are better than others and other days I just want to stay hidden inside. But I know that in order to do the things I want to do in life I have to be willing to put myself out there and let the World see me for who I am.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came from my trainer. He told me to remember the saying "I am you, and you are me." Which basically means that we are all the same. We are all particles of matter thrown together. No one is better than the next person, we are all the same. This phrase has helped me get through a few situations. Examples would be my son's IEP meetings and an incident that happened at my youngest son's therapy. A trigger for me has always been authority figures. I had one of the therapist talk down to me (Not my son's, it was another therapist using the room at the same time we were) in a condescending way. I repeated the phrase over and over and it calmed my nerves. Before this technique I would have been in tears.
I know that many people have anxiety far worse than I do. Please know that it doesn't make you weak. You don't have to battle anxiety alone. There are many doctors out there that specialize in anxiety disorders. Everyone has their own triggers and knowing what mine are has helped me greatly. If you know someone who is battling anxiety the best thing you can do is be there for them. Having a support system has been my greatest help.
Until next time, Stay Strong Iron Family.
