My journey to getting healthy and fit

On January 16th, I started my health and fitness journey. My goal is to lose weight and eat better than I used to. I don’t feel that I was eating badly at all, I do really well at work by bringing my food with me to work which includes breakfast. My main issue has been with exercise, I used to be really physically fit. However, over the past few years my physical activity decreased and my weight slowly increased. One day I woke up and I weighed 197 pounds!! I have tried and failed many times on my path to lose weight but now I feel like I finally have myself together.

What helps more is that my family wants to get involved. It is quite difficult to get healthy when the others in your home are still eating the junk food that you are trying to avoid. We also bought a juicer so we have started to buy more fruits and veggies to eat as well as juice. My daughter is starting to want healthy snacks such as fruits and while she refuses to give up bagel bites or taquitos, I do not mind buying those for her because those are foods/snacks that I do not crave. My boyfriend has also made the move to take lunch to work with him daily and he stopped drinking Coca-Cola (we almost had to stage an intervention…lol).

Another thing that is helping me is work. My team is a part of a 10-week program called Active for Life, as a team we decided that we will take a 15 min break together and walk around our building twice. It’s actually gotten to a point where I look forward to it because we get fresh air, Sun and it helps me to refocus. I also take long walks about four days a week. Last week I started out with a 30 minute walk on my treadmill 4 times last week. This week I walked at 60 mins on my treadmill on Tuesday,Wednesday and on Thursday my daughter and I walked for an hour with our dogs. I have burned tons of calories and it has proven to me that I do not have to power walk or run to burn calories to lose weight. You see, I was upset that I could not do vigorous exercise such as Zumba, Tae Bo, or anything like that because of my knee osteoarthritis. I can get the same results with low impact exercise.

My next goal is to start incorporating weight training to start toning my upper body. I usually feel self-conscious at the gym and although I have a membership, I barely go to the gym. My plan is to just take things one step at a time and start going to the gym twice a week to work my upper body, then gradually move to three times a week and include attending a water aerobics class. Every two weeks I will Vlog about my progress on YouTube and if time permits I was thinking of doing a daily blog about what I ate and how I felt throughout each day. So far things have been fun and I really want to continue my “journey to jazzness”.