I have a fairly long history of self-help diet and exercise. I was a normal weight kid, gained weight like many do in college. Then lost weight by adding in exercise and make small changes to my diet. All in all except for a few bumps in the road, I was able to get my BMI into the high end of normal and keep it there through my 20's mainly by walking and doing a home weight routine that in retrospect was embarrassing. But I was vehement that small sustainable changes were the way to go and until my first pregnancy that worked great. After baby number 1 who is a darling sweet girl, I was left with about 20-30 lbs that would not budge. So at a friends prompting I started doing Weight Watchers on line. I still think that is one of the most awesome programs- I lost all but 5 of those baby pounds and kept with my easy exercise routine, stopped counting points but continued watching my diet and kept said weight off until baby #2. This handsome boy left me about 50 lbs heavier. After giving us both 3 months to get used to the world, I started WW again and did home exercise. Then I did Curves lost a good bit more weight then they shut the curves down and I started on the road to my love affair with running. Again I have kept the extra 5 lbs that belongs to my overeating with baby#1 and #2 and my exercise is significantly more intense then ever before. I have done 3 races in the past month and in general since I started running well I guess honestly ever my weight training has been spotty at best. Last year I started New Rules of Lifting for Women and loved it and for the first time ever saw a difference from weight training. But now with motivation flagging I feel like I've gotten about as far as I can with trial and error. Of course meeting with a trainer has gotten me thinking of body weight and body fat and how awesome it would be if I was 1 size smaller. But honestly the goals I gave him were such:
Run a 5k in under 30 minutes
Be able to do 50 good push ups—I used to not be able to do 1, now I can do 3 sets of 10 pretty well but my form gets sloppy and I have kind of stagnated
Be able to do 1 pull up
Get better upper body definition.
I have never been willing to pay money for something I think I can research on my own and I still find it to be shockingly large amount of money but I am committed to giving it my all for the 3 months I signed up for and hoping like running it can help me move things up the next level. I'll be honest my very favorite thing about running is how it allowed me to lose a lot of my body image/weight obsession and also how for once I was doing something not just for the calories it burned. It has been so much easier to sustain training for races rather than hey I want to drink some beer and eat dessert this weekend but I don't want to gain weight so better exercise. I hope this will continue that step forward and not be a step back
