Food & Fat

As you know (or not if you didn’t read this post), this life change originally started as a way to lose weight. This turned into making two lifestyle changes: the way I ate and actually exercising on a regular basis. Let’s look at these one at a time.

Food: I love food! I mean I reallllly looooove food! I don’t consider myself a picky eater (vegetarianism aside) but I never would have considered myself a healthy eater. Now I did improve significantly from where I was in high school or even college. Freshman year of high school sometimes consisted of a vending machine lunch of coke and splitting a zebra chocolate cake with my friend. I also loved fast food (like most of America). At some point in college I gave up fast food. Now the idea of fast food makes me sick other than Chick-fil-A. I also gave up soda other than the occasional drink at a restaurant or something. Ok, so maybe I wasn’t the worst eater but there was still plenty of room to improve. My biggest weakness has always been dessert. Chocolate! My sweet, sweet love. Chocolate is the single best flavor in the world. Probably followed by peanut butter. Even better, melt the two together. Yes I do this and eat it by the spoonful, judge all you want, it’s delicious. I have it with milk so there’s a healthy aspect. At the time I was already a vegetarian for about 3 years at that point.

Exercise: I already hit on this in an earlier post so I won’t go through those details again. I will say that for the most part I never liked working out. I loved cheerleading and honestly still miss it. Who wouldn’t love being thrown in the air (I was a flyer)? I also love yoga. When I lived in Pennsylvania for a year I did yoga religiously. I would do a few other things while at the gym sometimes but I lived and breathed yoga. Flexibility was the one thing I was always good at (and the only thing I can beat Ashlee in!). I loved the way I felt after yoga and I loved trying new challenging positions. When I got married and moved, yoga somehow fell to the wayside. I had a hard time making it part of my routine and didn’t have an instructor I really liked. Right before the bet started, I was essentially doing zippo.

Whenever I worked out or even ate healthy my focus was always to be thin. I never gave much thought to having a strong body unless it was needed for the workout. I never thought about wanting to look like I had strong, lean muscle.

Let’s fast forward to post bet. After the bet I continued to lose a bit more and bottomed out around 111 lbs, 20 lbs lighter than where I started. Although some (ok a lot) people said I was too skinny, I was so happy with my new body. Everyone has opinions no matter what weight you are but for some reason people think it’s more acceptable to verbalize those opinions when you are thin vs fat. For example, just today I was getting on my bike to head home from downtown and a homelessish looking guy says "You too thin girl, get off that bike, you don't need to lose more weight." Me... crickets. Normally I can muster up a response, a "yea" or at least a nervous laugh but this time, nothin. Unlike most women, I truly like it when people tell me their honest opinion so I would have preferred people told me when I needed to drop a few pounds instead of telling me after the fact (I’m looking at you Bill). So random comment guy, thanks for the comment... noted.

Since last year I’ve put weight back on and am currently floating around 120 lbs. I’d like to drop back down a few lbs but I have to remind myself that some of the weight I gained back was muscle. I have to admit, I love my muscles now. I never would have thought I’d like being muscular. I’m not overly muscular to a gross point but I’m proud of what I have. Some of my family likes to joke and give me a hard time about how I look now but I take it as a compliment. I saw a quote somewhere: Strong is the new skinny. I agree. Of the 10ish lbs I’ve gained back I have no idea how much is fat vs muscle so it’s hard to say what an idle weight is anymore. For some reason I have 115lb in my head but maybe that’s too light based on how much muscle I have and still need to build. Really I just want to lose a few lbs of fat so I can better see my muscles. I know there are good abs under there! Attempting to drop just a few lbs now so we shall see how it goes. Wish me luck!