My journey to a healthy life. This is my progress:
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More wow😀1
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Huge difference! Well done!1
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Congratulations on what you’ve achieved in the last two years.1
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TravisJHunt wrote: »Wow is all I can say. Amazing!
Thank you!0 -
sheena_shewell wrote: »Huge difference! Well done!
Thank you! :-)0 -
Pogostickers wrote: »Wow that is really inspiring! Pretty awesome and I hope to get there one day too.
Thank you! You sure will. :-)0 -
Hi!
If I were to put a title for my last 6 months journey, it would be 'From cow to wow!'. No disrespect to anyone or to the cows. I love them. But have you seen how they just sit in there comfort zone and chew all day? That was me. Sit, eat, sleep, repeat. I usually write VERY long posts so I'll try to keep it short.
All my life I've been lazy when it comes to sports (cause I always hated them) and brought the sedentary life to the rang of art. I was eating poorly and with no limit. I was well for a while but along with age, health issues started to appear (ankle pain, back pain, a pain in the back of my knee for which I couldn't find the cause... I was popping ibuprofen like candies, so I've ruined my stomach too).
On Saturday I've cried of happiness because I've touched my goal weight and didn't know if I really have it in me. The last time I had this weight 10 years ago. I couldn't stop crying because it haven't been just weight loss but I've also put on some lean mass, making the scale go down slower.
My birthday is on January 11th. In the first days of the year, depressed and disgusted of how I looked, feeling older than I was, I've contemplated about the situation I'm in and asked myself how long I'll indulge my bad ways. So I've decided to change my life into a healthy and active one and so I did starting January 12th.
I had no strength and endurance so I couldn't workout with dumb bells, or do a knee push-up, or... do anything that meant exercising with some weight. Climbing the stairs felt like dyeing.
With eating clean, calorie counting, a 25% calorie deficit, increasing the protein and working out at home I've managed to lose 8.2 kg this year and 10.8 kg in total from my heaviest self in 2018.
I've also put on some muscle mass. Yesterday I worked on my before-after photos and they are worth a thousand words. There's no diet that will do what a healthy and active life style will do for you... I was looking at the one month (only for the last month!) progress photo with my arm and I can actually see muscles shyly showing! That must be the push-ups/chin-ups training and increasing my dumb bells weight. :-)
From the start I've worked on my discipline because I knew I'm doing something I dislike and it will be very hard. I've worked on my mindset, my patience and perseverance and it has paid off. I've meal-prepped, I've prepared my workout schedule 1 month in advance and I've set many short-term and long-term goals (I'm happy to let you know that I've achieved most of them before the deadline and some are still pending with due date end of the year).
During the lock-down I saw my biggest opportunity and pushed myself to the max. Sometime at the end of March something happened inside me and I started to enjoy working out. I was looking forward to do my morning workout and on the rest days I felt like something was missing.
I've chanced SO much inside-out. I really feel WOW! and it shows. Leaving aside the improved looks which regained back some of my self confidence, my blood tests turned out perfectly, I haven't been depressed in months, I generally feel joyful, I've inspired MANY people around me to start exercising and to change their lives, I have a healthy life style group that after less than two weeks has 400 members without me sending invites (who knew so many people were following my posts?) and I've never in my life thought that I'll become an example of living healthy through proper nutrition and working out.
I feel incredibly happy and my main purpose now is to keep pushing myself, test my limits and achieve new goals.
Thank all of you for the support and encouragement! ❤️
Photos will follow.
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WEIGHT GOAL ACHIEVED (3 days within the deadline
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Now going into maintenance and body recomp. I will slowly decrease the calorie deficit and find out my true TDEE.
Meanwhile I will do a DEXA scan to find out the lean mass and body fat percentages because the discrepancy between the tape and calipers is too big (4%) and I want to know which one to take into account.
I think I have 22% BF or so.
So here I go again!
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Awesome job Tina. Knew you would get there!2
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This is amazing, congratulations! It's great to hear about the goals you set yourself and then worked for. I'm really impressed by your discipline and glad to hear that it's helped with other aspects of life too. Hope you're feeling super proud of yourself. You've inspired me to think about my own goals and how I could reach them.1
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Hello, everyone! This is my progress after 3 months of healthy eating and over 80h of home workouts. 3.7 kg of them were lost in the last 6 weeks since I've discovered MFP and controlled my daily eating in order to have a calorie deficit. The most significant changes are: weight - 6.3kg (@August 6th - I took the pix a few days before), waist and belly -7cm, hips and butt -5 cm, tighs -6 cm and I'm toned - I've never been. 2 more kg to go and half of my goal will be done! Beside loosing 8 kg, the other half is getting my self as toned as possible until June 2019 (this was the due date for both goals). My goal is not to follow a diet but to have a healthy and active life style.
I’ll tell you my story (sorry for the long post)… I'm still at the beginning (it's been only 3 months).
I could never really understand how I should feel good after exercising, let alone energized (at the beginning, I could go straight to the morgue after a 20 minutes session of home exercising). I read about the chemical reactions but that’s not very helpful. Anyways. Now, after 2 months, I get it. I lost weight, I'm more toned, I've gained strength, I look better, feel better and confident but the first month was pure hell.
All my life I made an art of being sedentary - brought it to perfection. And I hate sports. Above this, I LOVE good food, all my family cooks great (including me, so moving out didn't help) and let's say that my food portions were over sized in comparison with how I should have eat. Thankfully, I realized a bit late that my cooking skills could be used to cook very healthy and tasty dishes. I’m not lazy at all but when it comes to sports, I can’t say the same… I’ was 32 yo, 1.68 cm and weighted 67.8 kg. And I always disliked sports. My problem was that I was so sedentary that my ankles started to hurt for months and I also had some terrible back pains (sitting 10h a day at work..). The worst thing? I got saggy... saggy butt, saggy arms and big, ugly, belly. I felt so bad about how I looked, that I started to avoid seeing myself in the mirror. I just decided that this is not okay, is not normal and is not who I want to be. I can be better. I WILL be better.
It was very hard at the beginning. I do the exercises at 6:15PM (after work) so I was already pretty tired. But even when I felt like crying, I did my session. I had my workout schedule and stuck to it.
I know myself and how I find excuses… so that’s why I decided to do my exercises at home. This way, I can’t say that I don’t have time to go to the gym, or that I won’t go to a run because it’s raining, or that it’s too snowy to get to the gym. The season won’t matter.
To get an idea of the state I was in, I’ll tell you that for me, one push-up meant laying on my belly and only pushing myself up with the arms (cobra push-up). It was impossible to do at least a knee push-up - now I can do 15 correct ones. After 50 squats I felt exhausted - now I can do 250 and breathe almost normally. And so on. My muscles were so atrophied that I had cramps even when I was doing the moves without weights. I was a mess with no strength at all. I gradually increased the time of the sessions, the difficulty of the exercises and the weights. The sessions got from 20 minutes to 90. Meanwhile I started to think about these sessions like something that I must do, routine (like eating or a taking a shower) and didn’t perceive them as awful anymore. It might not seem much to other people, but in the last 3 months I exercised more than in the last 20 years so for me… that’s amazing.
My point is… it doesn’t matter how bad is the state you are in NOW. It matters to do something about it and make a habit of it. A good habit. No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody in the couch. Also, don’t focus on losing weight. If you clean up your diet and exercise regularly, your weight will take care of itself.
My blood tests are almost perfect (according to my doctor I still have to get that cholesterol a bit lower but for me 212 is not high...), my self-confidence is back, I feel lighter, more sexy, I'm more confident, I have a general good state of mind and I can wear size Small clothes again. I love my life now. This change was long due.
Girl you looked hot before with that pic on the beach! Curves in all the right places. Well done and congratulations on your achievement
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fairy_daisy wrote: »This is amazing, congratulations! It's great to hear about the goals you set yourself and then worked for. I'm really impressed by your discipline and glad to hear that it's helped with other aspects of life too. Hope you're feeling super proud of yourself. You've inspired me to think about my own goals and how I could reach them.
Thank you! You should look up the Facebook group 'Team Never Quit (David Goggins)'. It's extremely inspirational and motivational. I post there pretty often too.0 -
@mynameisnobody1990 thank you but my BMI was on the verge of overweight even if my hourglass body type helped a lot visually. I also started to have health problems.0
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For those interested, here are a few rules that I follow for a healthy nutrition:
⚠️ I eat 3 main meals and 1-2 snacks (2 if I'm waking up at 5AM).
⚠️ Breakfast and lunch will be richer and something lighter for dinner.
⚠️ Fruits and homemade healthy sweets will be eaten in the first half of the day. 200-300g of fruits (carbs & fructose = sugar)
⚠️ Eat the meals rich in carbs in the first half of the day. Chose complex carbs like rolled oats, brown rice, wholewheat pasta, potatoes, musli, wholewheat bread etc.
⚠️ I often hear about 'not eating after 6PM'. I call *kitten* on that. If you have 3-4h before going to bed, you can eat at 11PM with no problem. That's dependent on your lifestyle and the time you go to bed. Imagine having dinner at 6PM and going to bed at 2AM. I'd be starving and unable to fall asleep.
⚠️ Have a balanced diet. Nothing must be eliminated 100%, not even sugar (I'm the proof... everything is perfect but I found out that I have low blood sugar. You can eat a little maybe with your morning coffee. I don't believe in reducing a macro nutrient very low (like 10% carbs for the keto diet). I do believe that if you want to gain some lean mass and define your body you'll need 2g of protein/kg body weight.
⚠️ Hydrate well! At least 2L/day. That does not include teas, soups, infused water etc. They are all digested but the water goes straight into your blood (immediate hydration).
⚠️ Plan and prepare your food. Don't eat bland food. Try new recipes! Cook, chose tasty and healthy options, meal prep a few days in advance. If you have a sweet tooth, make sure that you have desert 2 times a day.
⚠️When you feel hungry, your body wants nutrients, not empty calories... so eat white bread, white rice, white pasta etc only occasionally. There's no need to mention that you must not eat chips, biscuits and such, right?
⚠️Don't impose absurd restrictions to yourself. That's not sustainable. If there are things that you love and want to keep eating, find their healthy replacements. I still eat ice cream (made of frozen fruits, yogurt and sweeter), sponge cake and many pancakes. You want to enjoy your new lifestyle.
⚠️Have an Indulging day per month and be all in. Eat anything, as much as you want. But eat very clean the rest of the month.
⚠️Workout! Otherwise you'll get skinny fat. And I don't want to hear that you don't have time. Most of us don't have time but we make time. 1h, 3-5 times a week is fine. Don't overdo it.
⛔NO to soda and juice... even fresh juice must be consumed with a limit of 250 ml (lots of sugars) YES: water, unsweetened teas, fruit infused water, black coffee. You can have a smoothie or diet soda from time to time.
⛔NO to potato chips and oil fried peanuts. YES to all raw nuts - they have healthy fats! Almonds, cashews, peanuts, pecan nuts etc.
⛔NO to fried foods. YES to baked/boiled/steamed foods.
⛔NO to store bought fruit yogurt, YES to make your own with fresh fruits. You can also throw some chia seeds or oats in the mix and make a snack out of it.
⛔NO to cold cuts like sausages salami etc YES to traditionally raw-dry low fat meat (like they have on the country side)
⛔NO to sugar (well.. 95% of it), YES to natural sweeter
My most efficient tool in this journey was the Myfitnesspal application. Counting calories made me realize how huge my portions were...11 -
Forgot to state the obvious:
⚠️Eat daily vegetables (raw, steamed, baked, boiled and occasionally sauteed).3 -
Remember my push-ups goal?
✔️March-December: Push-ups challenge (app) to manage to do 30 correct full push-ups in one set. I couldn't do one correct knee push-ups in January.
I've crushed this goal much earlier, on July 11th! Now I'll aim for 50 in one set but I won't set a deadline because I want to focus on the chin-ups for now. I hope to be able to do at least one by the end of the year.
Also, because I was having the signs of over-training I've decided to reduce my workouts to 4/week for a couple of times. Regarding maintenance I've upped to 1600 kcal to see how it goes.
With 1557 kcal it was fine. I had +200g but lost some more centimetres so that is muscle mass.
I'll leave you with some more recent photos.
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Incredible! So proud of you!0
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Great work - not just on the weight loss, but that flexibility. I'm in awe of your yoga skills!1
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You look amazing. I can't believe how quickly you hit your goal. Makes me wonder what the hell I've been doing all year! Also: love the tat.1
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You have no idea how much I needed this today! We have pretty much the exact same "before" body shape and I've just re-started my journey. This is motivating me so much right now, you're story is amazing!2
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