Hello Calf Muscles

Ow!  Ok so between the walking, and the half hour on the elliptical today my calf muscles are screaming.  I don't seem to mind though, it's like my body telling me that this hurts, but my mind is saying deal with it and get used to it!  The elliptical proved to me though how out of shape I am though, I was wiped after only a half hour!  I used to be at the gym for an hour to an hour and a half!  Well guess I'll just be working back up to that

Kitchen Karaoke Burns Calories, and inproves your mood! Day - 24

First I want to let you know about something I did while I traveled back home to see my family.  A friend of mine I have known since High School, Natasha, is a photographer.  She asked me if I would do a session with her so that she could use it in her portfolio.  Although I'm not a huge fan of getting my picture taken, I wanted to help a friend out and I thought it might be a nice way of chronicling this journey since I had just begun.  So I went to her studio and had a few shots taken.  She hasn't shared all of them with me yet, but she did share one of the two of us.  This was an informal picture taken more for us than for use in a portfolio.  I love it!

Natasha Epperson and I at her studio

Sluggish...Part 2 A Guessing Game

Okay so after I posted earlier this morning I began to think about what was going to motivate me.  I looked online for what other people have used for motivation and found this website...Ben Does Life.  His transformation is amazing, and what I'm looking to do.  Now yes he is a man, and men and women lose weight differently, and yadda yadda blah blah.  I know.  His story made me begin to think about my bucket list though.  (Yes I have a list of things I want to do before I die.)  Although I've crossed things off through the years in the past two years I've only crossed one thing off.  I want to cross off more.  So Ben's story encouraged me to work on 3 of the things on my list.  Can you guess which 3? (Red items I've accomplished already.  Oh and if you can help me accomplish another I'd gladly accept help!)  I add things to the list all the time, so maybe I'll post this list and try to cross off a bunch as I am on this journey.  I'll let you know which 3 Ben inspired me on soon!  =)

Sluggish

I admit it, I'm slowing down.  It's almost been a month since I began this journey, and although I have been really happy with the results so far, I'm beginning to slow down.  I know this is not a sprint but a marathon and after you give it all you got out of the gate, you have to set a pace for yourself so you can make it to the finish.  Maybe I'm just trying to find my pace.

I'm doing really well with my diet.  I have added so many fresh foods, and grains to my diet that I really enjoy.  I'm also learning to create my own meals that are balanced and low in calories and fat.  With the exception of missing chocolate (darn you Easter Bunny and your temptations!), and occasionally missing the mark on how much a portion really is I am maintaining.  With the exception of one day where I miss calculated due to being confused on a portion size, I have remained under 2,000 calories a day.  I've also been staying at or under my 60 grams of fat a day.  So my diet seems to have really improved over the past 3 weeks.  I've also been really happy that I've felt satisfied, I don't feel like I am starving myself, and I know that I am receiving more vitamins and nutrients from my food than I used to.

Two Weeks - Five Pounds!

All right so I said this wasn't going to be about weight, but rather how I feel.  Well I've been feeling really good, more energetic, more laid back, and motivated.  This morning I weighed my self though for the first time.  After two weeks I have lost 5 pounds!  (4.8 pounds to be exact but I'm going to give myself the few tenths of a pound.)  Also 2.5 of that weight lost was from this past week!  See I'm participating in a March Madness weight loss challenge over at a friends blog, Finding the Thin Within, and I must admit that I have been weighing myself before today.  I decided though that I am only going to record my weight every two weeks or so since there can be a lot of fluctuations in shorter amounts of time.  I'm still not focusing on the weight, but rather the lifestyle changes and feelings associated.

Home Again, Home Again...To Make a New Goal?!

First allow me to say that I am working with a headache today, so if this post doesn't make sense, or is random in nature that is why.  I've struggled with headaches since I was a child.  Of course they are not just simple nuisances with me, but knock me out for 24 hours, get sick to my stomach, want to crawl under a rock and die type things.  I get several headaches a month, sinus, stress, TMJ, and hormones being the main cause of these.  Every few months though I get a whopper of a headache, a migraine.  If you've never had a migraine I'm sorry but you cannot understand the pain a person has when they get one.  When I was a teen I got migraines a lot more frequently, once or twice a month.  When I began to get dizzy spells with them the hunt began for a solution because my life was being impacted even when I wasn't having a headache.  My migraines are apparently not typical, they present in an unusual way, and cause different pain for me than for most people.  For instance my head doesn't really throb like many people's does.  Instead I tend to have intense pain in one area of my head, ringing in my ears, and INTENSE sensitivity to light.  Due to this different doctors have debated whether or not I am actually having a migraine, or if it is another type of headache.  This is why I don't take prescription medication for the headaches and basically just allow them to run their course.  The doctors can debate all they want, I call them migraines and just want them to go away!  The discovery of TMJ, a misalignment of my jaw and teeth grinding, and it's subsequent treatment has greatly reduced the occurrence of my migraines though so I'll take one every few months rather than every few weeks.

Day 6...Travel

So I am home visiting family, which is really nice, and makes me happy to see my family and friends.  In my family though we all have different ideas about what nutrition means.  Some members feel that it means cutting out all carbs, others think that it means lowering your food intake to one or two meals a day, and I think that it is a combination of diet and exercise.  You see I have been on this weight loss path before.  Several years ago I hired a personal trainer, joined a local gym, and put my life in this trainers hands.  She not only gave me an exercise routine to follow, but she mapped out several meals for me to help me get the most out of what I was doing.  I followed both plans she gave me and I lost around 20 pounds.  I couldn't afford the trainer anymore and had to quit, and even though I had these tools she had given me, and was still a gym member I just couldn't make this plan work anymore.  There is one thing that I learned from all of this though, with my body I need to reduce my caloric and fat intake, as well as increase my activity level.  This is hard to do outside of my comfort zone at home.  Here I have little to do with what foods are available to eat.

The Before Picture

The Before picture taken on March 8, 2011

All right this is the starting point.  I don't think I look horrible, nor do I think that I look my weight since I am almost six feet tall, but trust me I am overweight.  Everybody's gotta start somewhere though, right.  =)

Day 3...I don't like waking up!

Ask my mother about getting me up at 5:45 am everyday so I could have enough time to get ready for school in High School.  Living across town from my school meant that I needed to wake up earlier, and my parents drove me to school every morning for three years (I drove my Senior year).  My mother though made sure I woke up with my alarm every morning, knocking on my bedroom door and encouraging (the nice way of putting it) me out of bed.  By the way, thanks mom for this, I know I was a pain!

Although I have the ability to wake up at those hours, in more recent years that is more likely the hours that I am going to bed!  I've always said that one should never wake up before the sun.  Now 5:45 am is not when I'll be waking up anytime soon, but I do think that I could wake up at 8 am if I tried a little harder.  I'm slowly working on my sleep schedule since I know that in order to have any other form of a routine during the day I need to begin with when I wake up and fall asleep.  So far, I'm still working on that...

Let's get this Started!!! Day 1

Hi!  My name is Liza and I am a 28 year old graduate student living in Indiana.  This blog is hopefully going to chronicle some of my weight loss journey.  First let me tell you a little about myself, and why I am choosing to do this.

First and foremost I am overweight, and not just a little.  If you were to work it out based on my Body Mass Index (BMI), height, and actual weight I would be classified as morbidly obese.  I rarely use those words because frankly they scare me, there is something about the word morbid that just doesn't give you any hope, and depresses you.  Needless to say that doesn't help you feel any better about yourself.  Although I am now morbidly obese, I have always been overweight/obese.  I don't remember a time when I wasn't the biggest girl in my group of friends.  Several times I remember not being able to participate in things my friends were doing because I was too big.  Don't get me started on amusement parks!  Needless to say there have been several very embarrassing moments in my life because of my weight.  I don't want to say that everything that went wrong in my life is because I am overweight, but I do think that my weight has had a major effect on factors about me such as my self-esteem, and introverted-ness.