A quick follow-up to my "8 week challenge"

Okay, I was looking at my last few posts and realize I really am not portraying the right picture of myself! I see that I began a couple posts about an "8 week challenge." It looks as though I gave up and never completed them because I didn't blog about it. 

Not true!

I did complete the challenge. In fact, I won the challenge! 

There was a little pot of money involved and that was fun :) 

I wound up finding myself eating sugary treats only once a week - which is huge for me. 

I also found I had a little more energy than before. The energy part took a few weeks to kick in.

I was pretty low on energy when I first began. My goal with this 8 week challenge was to go all out crazy and start a new work out routine and start eating healthier and avoid sugars. I needed to start with one newly focused habit; or I knew I would not succeed. 

My goal was to just to focus on what I ate. 

It was awesome. I lost weight and gained a new happy habit in return.

After the eight weeks I decided to incorporate working out.

This was just one new habit. After all, I had already been settled into a new eating plan that was going well. It was time to keep the upward momentum going. 

My body was happy, I was happy. I'm not sure that I was actually accomplishing much more on a day to day basis. I felt good on a day to day basis. Not sluggish, energetic. Ready for bed. 

That was/is so important to me. 

I wanted to follow-up on this, because the strides I made during that time - are notable.

8 Week Challenge! Day Two &Three-Week One

So it's day three and I am doing pretty well. I am getting all my healthy meals in and exercising is back up to an hour-yay! I had a southwestern burrito on a whole wheat tortilla for breakfast, followed by a fruit smoothie for a snack. For lunch I didn't get much in today, I mostly snacked today- I'm not sure why, but I had half a granola bar with some veggie sticks. Then a delicious slow cooked, bonless country rib pork, which I covered with onions, salt and pepper; and a homemade bbq sauce of: ketchup, mustard & honey..yum! I served it with rice and peas with carrots. I got 100oz. of water in and I am still thirsty. I worked out this morning by way of jogging for an hour outdoors-it was really cold, in fact colder than I thought it would be, but being out felt great, and I'll hit the trail again tomorrow.

I thought since I didn't recap my day two yesterday-it was a busy night; that I'd do it now.

I worked out for 45min. via the treadmill-I hate jogging indoors! If I had been outdoors I would have jogged an hour, but I wimped out-out of boredom, I know it's pitiful.  Yesterday’s menu went as follows: 

Whole wheat  toast w/ almond butter/honey

Turkey & Whole wheat Wrap w/ spinach

Smoothie

Protein shake with almond butter

Granola bar

Sorry about the ugly menu, I just copied and pasted it from my electronic food journal because I’m feeling lazy =)

Well, there’s my two days in a nut shell. I still have to fight it out with my cravings for chocolate and sweets in the late afternoon/evenings. But I am holding strong, this is the part I don’t want to mess up. I know I can do it!

8 Week Challenge!

Okay, so a friend of mine posts an open invite to anyone who would like to join her for an 8 week weight loss challenge. She found an interesting points/reward system from a blog called the sixsisters. Their site even gives you free downloads of journals to keep track of your food choices and points. I decided to join her along with five other women and we start tomorrow.
This is basically how it goes:

"This is an 8-Week Challenge that starts on a Monday (you pick what Monday to start on)
-Decide an amount that each person pays to enter the challenge (we did $25 a person)
-There is a weekly point calendar for each of the 8 weeks. You earn points by eating healthy, exercising, drinking water, etc... It's not just for weight loss!
-Beginning on Week #2 there is a double point challenge (highlighted in yellow)
-You can exercise each day, but you will only receive points for exercising 5 days a week.
-You can choose to not each sugar/treats each day, but you will only receive points for not eating sugar on 6 days (everyone needs a free day!).
-There is a sample food journal that you can use or you can use your own kind of food journal to keep track of what you eat.
-Weight yourself anytime each Sunday and tally up all points by 9 PM. Make sure that you weight yourself under the same circumstances each week (for example: Morning/Night, Empty/Full stomach)
-Choose someone in your challenge who will be the one you send a weekly email/text to with your totally weekly points and totally weight loss points for the week. They will have to keep track of everyone’s points and then have them send out an email or text with everyone’s standings on Mondays. We said that all points had to be emailed/texted by midnight on Sunday. If you didn’t send an email/text by that time, you received no points for that week. So each week you will send in 3 numbers: Your weekly points, you weight lost for the week, and your total points for that week.
-Daily contact with teammate: It’s amazing the strength that comes from encouragement from your teammates! We decided as a team that you could email, call, or text someone on your team to encourage them to have a healthy day. It helps knowing that you are all in this together and makes you accountable for what you do or don’t do.
-Example of weight loss points: You will get 5 points for maintaining your lowest previous weight AND 10 points for each whole pound. For instance, if you gained weight, you will report 0 points AND you don’t get any weight loss OR maintenance points in future weeks until you return to the lowest weight you had already achieved. If you maintained your previous lowest weight, you report 5 points. If you lost 1 pound, you would get 5 points for maintaining plus 10 points for that pound, so you would report 15 points.
-Cash prize money will given to the person who has the most total weekly points.

So here goes everything!

Falling Off The Wagon

This is not the meal of champions! Buuut, lately it's all I'm craving. Yum,yum! Although, when one is training for their first little 5k, they should be eating better, I don't like to rock the boat too much, ha ha! Not a brownie specifically, just anything sweet and if it's chocolate it's better.  I had to add the picture of the chocolate brownie with caramel frosting I ate. It's was way to moist and fla-va-full! The caramel frosting was mmm, mmm, good! Are you wondering if I could ramble on about for another paragraph or so...well yes, quite frankly I could. But I won't.   I have a bunch of fall dessert recipes I want to try these upcoming weeks. I think the first will have to be some pumpkin butter biscuits that a friend of mine made, I tried them and they were gooood. The next one I 'm going to make is a pumpkin muffin using yellow cake mix and canned pumpkin. You don't even need to add the eggs and oil-we shall see.  I'll post those later.

Registered!

Okay! So yesterday I registered for my very first 5K! Yay me!!! I am so excited! Can you tell by the use of all the exclamation points. So, my jogging buddy found this website,(they are hosting this 5K, so I thought I better give credit since I put up their pic.)
They are Bodies by Brad & Jen, they have a running
club that looks great. I may go check them out. We'll see... I am so looking forward to the upcoming events, stay tuned to see how it all turns out!

My Jog

Today I jogged early. 5:45am early! It was great!

I don't think I could use enough exclamation points!

Jogging under the stars, the sun not up.

It was a little chilly here in the mid west,

but I had my gloves on and my ears covered, 
I was good to go.

I'm looking forward to my first 5k in a couple weeks.

 I can't wait!

Feeling Fine

We were sitting in the family room laughing about how ridiculous the whole weekend turned out to be. I hurt my lower back(actually pulled my psoas muscle,it's in your hip and attaches at your back) last week during my workout and have been down and out for a week. With a family of seven to keep up with, this has been a major set back.
Then my husband goes and twists the wrong way and tweaks his back too. Ugh!!!
Thankfully his back resolved itself in a few days.
I made it in to the chiropractor and I'm really glad I did.


Anyhow, you would think that between my husband and the older kids we could keep up with laundry.
Buuut noooo. Everyone was so busy-between scout fundraisers, camp out's, family dinner to plan for(yep, at my house, and yep, I said they could all still come.) I had my hair appointment that I make six weeks in advance and I wasn't cancelling that, ha! We were running around in every direction. Then my daughter came down with a 48hour something-or-other. We were literally down and out, but not hopeless. My husband and I felt fine, we just couldn't move much.
Needless to say it's a new week, a new outlook and we're feeling...almost fine.

My Morning Jog

Got my morning jog in! Yay me! It was so cool out this morning and I forgot to layer up, eek! Took forever for my body to warm up. It was beautiful this morning. On the jogging trail there were wild turkey and bright yellow wild flowers; I'm going to have to get a pic of those. Today there was a young buck and doe right on the walkway. They stared me and my jogging buddy down for a while then meandered off into the tall grass. From there they kept a close eye on us. The buck walked away slowly, as if to say, "Yeah, I own this place, and I'm watching you." He was slightly intimidating. Although, while my friend just laughed at me, I tried sending mental messages to the buck not to mess with me. Ha ha.

I couldn't ask for a better start to my day than this. It was beautiful!

This morning

Wow! I haven't blogged in forever. Got my jog in today, and I really needed it. I was so bummed yesterday, I didn't even feel like working out. Today feels much better. I think the 80 year old woman who shares my body isn't liking what this cooler weather is doing to her bones. Thankfully the eighteen year old girl who inhabits my heart is on top of things today!

Karma or Consequence?!

Alright! If I didn't know any better I would think that Karma had just dealt me a bit of medicine. After re-reading my last post, I realized I may have sounded a bit boastful about my checklist of tasks that I was able to go through in my day. I mean it's not like I accomplished any grand feats or anything. The day felt like a whirlwind, all while being able to accomplish the things that were needed. 

Yet! This past weekend I have somehow managed to pull my hip and lower back out. Leaving me completely unable to get any chores done...for the last four days! This may not seem like a big deal, but in a family of seven, well, it's an avalanche waiting to happen.

So. One might say that if I hadn't felt so great about getting my two loads of laundry done before anyone woke(and posting it in my blog,) that perhaps I wouldn't now be seven loads of laundry behind for the week.

Well...I'm at least smart enough to know that it is not karma, but the consequences of my own behavior. Rather, the lack of my behavior that has put me in this position.

I know that when I don't exercise and keep my muscles strong that my back will eventually go out. Well, that 's exactly what happened. 

Here I find myself, the product of my own design!

The result of my own making.

Now, I must regrettably make the decision to..........................begin exercising again!!!!