a lil exercise & a surprising amount of food later (pics)

So I have no 'beginning' pics but I was looking through some old pictures after I started a bit of hiking and netting about 1700 calories a day and wanted to share because I think it's important for people to know you can get results without extremely cutting cals or exercising every day. In fact I felt all the better because I avoided those things.

I still have my days where I feel I'm not where I want to be (I want muscles). But after looking at these pics I gotta say, exercising a bit and eating enough to make my bfs jaw drop has done nothing but good:



Left - sitting on what my bf called 'the tree of life' haha on a Hawaii hike through the seven sacred pools
Right - sitting around at Universal studios Months before after walking around all day in Flordia


Left - Breaking into one of the castles after a hike near the east coast trail in Newfoundland
Right - Months before after walking around the blueberry festival all day in Newfoundland


Right - Me trotting off trying to convince everyone to hike Signal Hill

...Who says you can't lose weight and eat?

Netting: meaning sometimes on my longer hikes I was eating above the 3000 calorie mark without guilt because I needed it.

Exercise: I'm a big "your body needs breaks" believer but I do have to admit on occasion (as in not all the time) I overdo it. This is because for exercise I chose hiking and the hikes I find tend to be long or I get lost lol, not because I need that much exercise or want it haha. I just want to get through the entire view because it's beautiful. Some of the hikes I've been on have been upward to 20km. That may sound like allot to some but many I do are a quarter that and you do not have to go far to get results. A pal of mine mentioned something along the lines of "people will think you worked really hard to get where you got" and I laughed because it's true, it wasn't much work, I'm not hiking 20km every day nor did I ever need to. When I do it tends to hinder my performance instead of help it. I tried to make sure to fuel my body as well as give it a break which usually lasted a couple days to a week depending on the hike. You wouldn't believe the amount of injuries you can avoid just by eating enough and watching TV instead of running yourself into the ground and still get results because your body needs the break. You wouldn't believe the "if I didn't exercise this much" comments I hear from some because they don't get how science and the body works.