My Plan...

Sitting at 220lbs and miserable I decided something needed to be done about how I was feeling, how I looked, and how much energy I lacked. A wonderful friend of mine had been working on her weightloss/get fit plan and she was inspirational. She pointed me towards livestrong.com, with the usual helpful advice as well as some of her personal findings. Although skeptical, as I had tried every diet known to man (atkins, grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet, starvation diets, cleanses, etc etc) I made an account but didn't track anything. That was Jan 19th 2011.

Talking one day to my bestie, the lovely Jenn admitted that she was in the same funk as I was. We decided that we both needed to do something for ourselves for once. Being she is in Edmonton, nearly 5 hours away, making her a less than ideal workout partner. She also set up a Livestrong account, and together we muddled through the beginnings that would get us going the right direction.

Backing it up a bit - I always felt like such a lost cause. I tried numerous diets, including Herbal Magic and never lost an ounce. I also worked at the Curves location in Camrose when I lived there, working at the fitness centre for nearly 8 months and unfortunately the scale went down 1 whole pound, no matter how hard I tried. I took a nutritional course, and was able to look at what I was eatting and it still didn't seem to matter. I ate a high protein, low carb lifestyle and still nothing. It was depressing to do all I could think of without the scale needle even budging.

March 1st 2011 I plugged all my information into the Livestrong calculator and started reading food labels. I took into consideration all sodium, carb and protein counts, and watching closely as my daily caloric intake added up to it's "maximum" level. I had set Livestrong to "lose 2 lbs a week". Stepping on the scale only two weeks later, on the 14th, I found I had already lost 20lbs. Now, to be fair, we all know how water retention works, my body was a specialist at it. So two weeks of watching what I ate, watching my salt intake, and ensuring that I drink my 64oz a day, I chalked the weightloss up to water -retention-loss. I decided that if I wanted to keep losing like I had I needed to pick it up a little and do something a little extra. Lucky dog got to go on some pretty intense walks, poor thing wasn't entirely sure it was a good idea.