My Why for weight loss

I could sit here and say that I wish that I didn’t gain weight so fast, I wish that I wouldn’t find sitting around watching television so enjoyable, which are true statements, but that’s not going to get me anywhere.  I need to get myself back into shape, not to be skinny (because I don’t care, I love my curves) but to have energy to be able to run with my kids and to enjoy another 60 years with my family.  That’s what I want, I don’t care about the number on the scale anymore, but I do care how many hours a day I can spend chasing after my kids who are bundles of energies and I want to be that grandma that can play with my grandkids in the next 30 years. 

So because I’m going to run the Seawheeze in August I have a short term goal (in the grand scheme of things) that  is just for me that will help me gain more energy.  But in order to do this, I have to lose the baby weight (and lazy weight) I’ve put on since I started trying to get pregnant with my Prince T.  So that’s almost 15 months of not focusing on my eating habits, my exercising habits or anything that would look like healthy living.  Now I have to decide what it is that’s going to help me to get back on track. What habits am I going to replace my bad habits with, because let’s be honest, bad habits are only broken if you have a better good habit to replace them with.  I mean you can break a bad habit without replacing it with a good habit, but it’s hard.  And I don’t like to do hard, I like to do easy, the easier the better.

Back when I was getting married I was going to the gym 3 times a week and I was really watching what I was eating and I was getting into great shape.  I really enjoyed it and because of the wedding it was a priority, it was something I had to do, much like many brides before me, after the wedding the necessity started to wane and then I started to want a baby and then I got pregnant, then I had a baby and then winter hit (I hate, HATE winter). So I guess working out now has to be a priority for me, I need to work out at least 4 times a week and I need to be running as well so I can build up my endurance.

There are many things I need to stop doing.  I need to stop eating junk food (sweets and chips), I need to stop drinking Pepsi (I have an addiction it’s terrible I know but I LOVE Pepsi), I need to stop watching hours and hours of television a day (or if I watch an hour of television I am working out as well), I need to stop making excuses or ‘blaming’ others for not doing what I know I need to be doing.  So how am I going to start doing this?  It’s so frustrating but I know that I can do this, history says I can so I will.

One of the things I did in the past was I used a tick sheet and I offered myself a reward for each tick.  For example for every 5 checks I would reward myself with $20 in a jar for savings to go towards a shopping spree.  Some of the checks were easy to get ( no eating Fast food) some were harder (drinking 8 glasses of water a day) but in the end I had a 80% success rate with all my changes and sometimes just seeing that reminder was enough to make it so that I didn’t want to partake in that certain habit that I’m trying to decrease. 

This time around I’m going to change my tracking sheet, I’m going to put my cheat days right in the chart so that I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.  These cheat days will decrease as time goes by but to start out you have to have some it lessens the guilt.

Goal/day	Sun	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat
Drink at least 3 L of water a day
No junk food (chips/ chocolate bars)				Free			Free
No Fast Food	free			free		free
No Pepsi				free			free
Eat at least 1500 balanced calories a day	free						free

The “free”s indicate a day that I am free to partake in that habit if I choose to, but if not that’s ok as well.

This chart will be replicated for each month and I can check them off each day and at the end of the month I can award myself a reward ($20 to a shopping spree for each 15 checks which is just over $30/ week if I check each of them.

Once I stop the bad habits, or unhealthy habits I’ll focus more on building the healthy habits.  Habits like Yoga practice three or more times a week, two aerobics classes a week, two runs a week and two home workouts a week for starters.