The day the change began . . .

It’s time to lose the weight. I never really paid attention to my weight in high school. I thought I was chubby, but looking back, I wasn’t at all. When I got to college, I started to gain weight, but at the same time I would lose it. My weight went up and down and back again many times. Then during graduate school, the pattern shifted – it stopped going down, but kept going up. I pretended it didn’t bother me. I said I was happy with my size and my body. But underneath it all, I really wasn’t. I also wasn’t ready to make a change that would get rid of the weight. Well, that time has come. I am 28 years old, I will be 29 in August and I want to get to a healthy, sexy weight by the time I am 30. I just weighed myself and I weigh 259.6 lbs. Because I’ve never obsessed over the numbers (and I still don’t actually), I don’t really know what weight I should/want to be. Based off the height-weight charts, I need to lose 100 lbs. (I’m 6’ tall). So here’s the deal, I am going to post my daily successes, challenges, failures, questions, etc so I can track my progress and hopefully receive and provide motivation. I also think it will be a good way to hold myself accountable. I plan on posting what I eat and how I work out. So let’s start this party!

I am going to be using this plan as a guide for workouts and food. I will of course tweak it as needed, but it is my starting platform.

For breakfast (7am) I had a bowl of flax cereal with dried strawberries and half a banana sliced in it with soy milk. I realized after the fact that I should have mixed protein powder into the milk to make it more filling. We will see how long it holds me over. Calling a cereal organic flax plus with omega-3 makes it sound horrible, like it would taste like cardboard, but this cereal is good. Actually, it has nothing to do with the cereal, it’s the dried strawberries. Maybe I should just buy tons of strawberries while they are in season and dry them myself . . . hmmm. Add that to my to do list for next weekend.
Ok, started to get hungry at 10am – ate the rest of my banana

Took my dogs for a 45 min walk. I try to keep our walks at a moderate pace but sometimes, today included, they have their own idea. It is in the mid 70s today so they were getting a little hot. I got pretty hungry on the walk, so when I got home it was lunch time:
I made a wrap out of a tortilla, with dijon mustard, peppered Tofurky lunch “meat”, lettuce, sprouts, cucumber, and avacado. That lunch meat is one of my favorites, I have to stop myself from eating the whole package everytime I open it. I also had half a dozen strawberrries, a REALLY big pickle and a handful of Annie’s organic snack mix bunnies. All the veggies in the wrap and the strawberries were fresh from the farmers market.
By the way, in case you haven’t made this conclusion already on your own I am a vegan. I am still learning the ins and outs of veganism, so I actually hesitate to use that word. I am still trying to figure out how to decode the ingredients labels.

Worked out at 3pm!!! I followed the day one on the lose 12 pounds in 6 weeks plan on the women’s health website. It took me a while to decode the exercises, but I did it. It might be time for a small snack.

I went to a movie at 4pm and had an iced passion tea from Starbucks and I brought raw almonds with dried cranberries for my movie snack. I got from the movie at made myself some dinner. I had a side salad with cucumbers, pine nuts, dried cranberries and strawberry vinaigrette. I made a pizza with a frozen crust with pesto sauce, soy cheese, sun dried tomato soy sausage, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and tomato slices. I always put the tomatoes on after it comes out of the oven, because I don’t like them hot. It was all excellent!!!