Big Fat Lifestyle Changes

Pardon those puns!  I can't seem to ever talk about my body and be serious.  But seriously, when did I get so freaking fat?

I promise this is not Mean Girls fat where I'm all "I really want to lose three pounds."  No ma'am, my weight can fluctuate by three pounds overnight and no one would ever notice.  That is a drop in the bucket.

I worked with a personal trainer in the past, in fact I blogged about it.  I lost 25 or 30 lbs, but it was outrageously overpriced and BORING and then I quit that gym.  I've been walking my dog and eating relatively healthy food.  But the weight piled back on, and then some.

I realized that if I didn't change my life now I would be forced to do so later, when something drastic gives me no choice.  And I think that by now we know I'm a girl who does stuff on her own terms.  I want to do this smart, and right.

So I joined a new gym and got a new personal trainer.  There's a new way of eating (5 small meals a day) and a new way of working out (heart rate monitor anyone?) and a new way of tracking my calories.  The only real rules are no carbs after 7:00 pm, drink lots of water, and track everything I eat.  Also, if I do only cardio for a workout it has to be for a minimum of 50 minutes.  And obviously, I show up and work out with the personal trainer for 30 minutes three times a week.

No point in buying clothes now- but cute GYM SHOES???  Whole other story....

Mornings are the key here.  The majority of my personal training appointments are at 6:00 am.  That means I have to be up by 5:15 at the latest to get to the gym by 5:30 and do some cardio to warm up before the real work starts.  Yes, I do sleep in my workout clothes.  And yes, it was my choice to do this in the mornings.  Then it is the first thing I do, it's done and out of the way for the day.  I don't have to sit around all day thinking "Oh man, I have to go to the gym tonight."  It also keeps me motivated to eat right for the rest of the day.

What would we do without technology?  My calorie counting app is on my phone and on my computer.  It is difficult for me to eat enough calories the right way.  I will be eating a lot of protein shakes. And chicken.

Ohhhh yeah, it's PINK!  Fancy!

 My heart rate monitor talks to the cardio machines at the gym and it also talks to my trainer's ipad. And the cool thing about working with a monitor is that I don't have to work nearly has hard as I was to get in that all-important "fat burning zone" (60 to 80 percent of my maximum heart rate).  I think before I was working too hard and that didn't help me because my body wasn't getting the oxygen it needed.

Music is so motivating.  I put a bunch of new songs on my workout playlist and every time a new song came on this morning I was like OH!  I love this song!  Lots of Fall Out Boy, Black Eyed Peas, and Muse.  They also have TVs on every machine so I can watch the news in the morning.  (Although over the weekend I went with a friend and we ended up watching Amanda Bynes in "What a Girl Wants" for almost an hour....  Yeah, that's right, the one where Colin Firth plays THE DAD.  That is just WRONG.  Mr. Darcy is not supposed to be a teenager's dad!!!!  Rant over.)

Anyway, we're doing mostly body weight exercises now.  Why not work with the weight I already have?  This means things like lots of squats and lunges, going up and down stairs in all sorts of different torturous ways.  BUT the sessions are only 30 minutes long.  I can take 30 minutes of rigorous training.  I told my trainer that my left knee hurts when I go downstairs.  He asked if I wanted to know why.  I said sure.  "Because you're overweight.  But soon your knee is never going to hurt again."

I love that.  Honest and encouraging at the same time.  I know my knee hurts because I'm heavy, but it's good to get the idea pounded into my head that things are going to be very different.