5'4. From 165 to 136! Pictures!

Thank you y'all! Really inspiring. The last ten pounds were hard. I had to admitt to myself that my activity level was sedentary because I was a student sitting in class all day, and when I did that and changed my settings on MFP I realized that as a girl who is only 5'4 I need to realize that I only really need 1200-1400 calories a day if I am not excercising. I tried to think of being almost short and female as a blessing instead of a curse, because my boyfriend easily gets away with eating 2,000 calories while maintaining a healthy weight.

So I tried to run at least every other day or at least walk all the way home from work. I also always tried to keep my net calories around 1200-1300 most days, and to do it without feeling like I was going to shank somebody I had to make sure I ate well. I tried to eat a salad at least once a day as a meal. I love mixed greens with turkey, cranberries, walnuts, cucumbers and basalmic vinegar. I also know that running can make me extremely hungry, and I was running a lot before MFP but I was eating waaaayyy too much to compensate.

The biggest thing that helped me lose weight besides MFP was the movie Food Inc:

http://youtu.be/5eKYyD14d_0

I took a Biology and Society class on Food and realized how much Genetically Modified corn and soybean oil is in all processed food, and I just couldn't eat the stuff anymore. I had bad cravings for Taco Bell when I first started dieting, but after watching this movie and realizing that its basically dog food... I didn't want it anymore. In the class we researched the ties between processed food and cancer, diabetes, ADD (which I have), as well as heart disease, poor working conditions, and toxic chemical exposure..<br />



I also learned about the concepts of bioaccumulation and biomagnification, which provide a good reason to not eat meat very often, or at least go organic. Biomagnification is the increase of a chemical in an organism (bioaccumulation) which is greater than the chemical concentration found in the environment. We are at the top of the food chain, so all the toxic chemicals in the environment get magnified exponentially each step below us. For example, you have pesticide sprayed corn with a .20 (parts per million) DDT concentration, a cow eats said corn and its meat now has 2.0 DDT bioaccumulation.


So when we consume that cow tissue we accumulate all the toxins that cow has ever consumed, breathed, or been injected with. It exponentially magnifies that corn .02 DDT into a 20.00 DDT concentration in our body. It gets deposited in our fat tissues because it is fat soluble. This makes it and harder to get rid of and metabolize than water soluble chemicals (think THC). Fat has a purpose, and it will hang on to help dilute toxins. So if you are eating somerthing lower on the food chain like fruits and vegetables, especially organic ones, it doesn't have as high of a concentration of toxins as a chunk of meat.

-http://science.jrank.org/pages/893/Biomagnification.html
"Fresh evidence from the largest study to date to investigate dietary habits and cancer has concluded that vegetarians are 45% less likely to develop cancer of the blood than meat eaters and are 12% less likely to develop cancer overall." -http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jul/01/vegetarians-blood-cancer-diet-risk


"Among middle-aged men meat eaters were four times more likely to suffer a fatal heart attack, according to the study." -http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/12/garden/personal-health-new-research-on-the-vegetarian-diet.html?scp=4&amp;sq=vegetarians and obesity&amp;st=cse


I am not a vegetarian, but I try to eat organic when I consume meat. Because its expensive, I don't end up eating it that often. As you can probably tell, I became extremely mindful about food but I was a lot nicer to myself and not obsessive. My mindset was really messed up before I did MFP, I would criticize myself constantly and eat in a state of high stress which put a lot of weight in my stomach area. I looked pregnant constantly. Then after stressing about my weight I would be super strict with myself and run a lot and then repeat the cycle. Being consistent is the hardest challenge in my life, but it is the thing that helped me lose weight the most. Shocking my body by starving it then binging was freaking my metabolism out. Wow, jeez - maybe I should write a book or something, I had no idea I had that much to say.