Weigh in and picture day.

Today was the weigh in day, for the Slimming The Soo Challange, I was happily surprised to find, I had lost another pound or even maybe pound and a half, since my last weigh in on thursday, I was basically overjoyed about it. 

In the spirit of joy that overcame me when I realized this, my family and I went to celebrate to my favorite restaurant, which is of course up the mountain, and I got the picture that follows taken so I can show how I look after losing 12 pounds. 

So yeah, still got a long way to go, so far I've lost 40% of the total weight I want to lose this year, but the change keeps happening and I cannot complain. At this point my weight is 158 pounds and my bmi is 28.7.

Steady as she goes...

Well, this is the fourth day of exercising while a little sick and I can feel it, the tiredness is present and my spirits were quite low this day because of it.

The awesome point is that even if I feel pretty much like a dishrag this day on the outside, guess who lost two more pounds? ME! This certainly made me feel much better today, the body is not happy right now but it was worth it, I kind of dragged myself to do the exercising this week, but the results makes the sacrifice all worth while. My weight so far is 159 and my bmi dropped to 28.8 :)

I can only hope next week, when I am no longer on antibiotics, I will go back to actually even looking forward to my exercise in the morning, it truly is a very enjoyable activity, I feel much more relaxed afterwards, I have come to realize that while lounging in bed does make one feel relaxed, exercising makes one feel relaxed also. but in a whole different level, it's like drinking warm tea with milk every morning and suddenly someone gives you a cup of coffee with milk and cocoa and then bam! your world is just not the same ever again, being relaxed by just doing nothing is nice but exercise relaxed is just off the charts.

I also have enjoyed the fact that I have not seen so many sunrises in my life, I really get a kick out of it, here are two pics of what I see every morning while I do my 300 rope jumping stunt:

View of the east bound wall in my yard.

West part of my yard.

What I have found very fascinating is that I usually walk a bit in the yard en between jumping sets and every time I return facing the west side, the image becomes so much brilliant, as the sets start to add up, on my resting walk after the first set, the image looks normal, but after the second and third, I feel the image becomes sharper and brighter, my theory is that the pumping of blood through my eyes, that must go up as I strain myself must make me able to look better. 

Obstacles

This week is gonna be proof of my mettle, when it comes to this goal I've set for myself. I have a little infection and am taking antibiotics, this morning when I exercised, I really felt the strain, at least the infection is not in my lungs, so I won't become ill if I exercise, but still it is hard.

I was really proud this morning when I ended my routine, even though I felt slightly bad, usually when I felt slightly bad in the past, I would just stop and lay down and rest and never go back to exercising, this time I'm not stopping, unless I get sick in my lungs. Breaking patterns seem to be very important, breaking eating habits seems to be very important too, but the upside is I have found out after keeping my diet (which is not extreme, it is mostly healthy controlled eating) I actually feel bad physically if I over eat, I'm very happy about this development, as I feel it will help me keep my regime.

Weigh-in day!

A few months ago some online friends and me found out we were all trying to lose weight at the same time talking about it we came to the idea of creating a losing weight challange, and so it started, it started sometime in february and the ending date is Christmas day.

We all decided that weigh in day was gonna be on saturdays, I personally weigh myself on saturday morning and sunday morning.

So far since the start of the challange I have lost six pounds and altogether since I started exercising I have lost nine pounds, I am really excited and happy about losing all that weight. My starting weight was 170 pounds and my bmi was something like 30.1 I was right on the path of obesity and reading those results on my screen scared me a LOT.

So gotta keep strong, I don't think I do a big amount of exercising nor do I starve myself basically all I have done so far is not drink soda anymore and also stopped the cookies and sweet breads.

So my weight today is 161 and my bmi has dropped to 29.2.

Progress is happening :)

The Shock Factor and Starting Point

What was the shock factor??? it was my pants, that's right my pants did not fit anymore, my working period ended on late december and this year it started at the ending of january, I was trying to find the perfect first day outfit and tried most of my pants on, I was shocked and appalled to find that only two pairs fit, all the others did not even go up my legs.

I had tried doing the gym thing but it didn't work out for me so well, the good thing about the gym experience is that I got to try most of the exercise machines they had which also made me able to realize what was the best machine for me.

I was very lucky to have found an elliptical machine I could afford, immediately I bought it and that was the starting point for my exercise regime, I think the machine made all the difference for me, I started slow doing like 15 mins a day and then worked my way up to 20.

Using the machine like that was fine and at that point I wasn't bodily able to do much more than that anyways, I did that for a couple of weeks trying to do it fast in the middle of my 20 mins until I could do it fast for about five mins or so.

I then started reasearching for other exercises I could do, that would complement the whole elliptical training, that is how I found jumping rope and armed with a jumping rope given to me by my friend Edgar I was able to start doing it too.

I felt that I was not doing everything I could do with the elliptical trainer so I did some research and found out that the way to go was interval training (doing it as fast as you can for a minute and then slowing to a comfortable pace for two minutes constitutes an interval) so I incorporated that to my training.

I think that was a very good idea, I feel I have a very good exercise regime now I am doing five intervals in each elliptical sesion and adding 25 jumps a week, my goal is to be able to jump about a 1000 times right now I'm up to 225 jumps a day.

Early Days

I started this challange with myself some months back and I finally feel that I am on the right track this time.

My goal: to get healthy and lose weight.

Sounds easy but most of us know it is not.

For me it has been about leaving sugar behind and stopping the whole eating entire bags of cookies in three days, that was basically the beginning for me and after that adding some much needed exercise to my life.

This is a picture of myself on my last birthday:

You can see I don't even look happy and I looked pretty fat. That was probably one of the lowest moments in my body image history, I felt fat and really unhealthy all around.

But even then I had already started making changes, one of my cardinal rules is to always have cake on birthdays especially my own, on that birthday I felt so fat I just did not buy a cake.

My birthday is on october so for the last part of last year I strugled against my sugar adiction and tried so hard to let it go, since the beginning of this year I've finally managed to get it under control. Since this year started I've only drunk 354 ml of soda.

On january I bought an elliptical machine and I think it has made the difference in my goal towards health, I've been working out on it for the last three months and I've lost some weight already but mostly I've lost volume.

I used to be anemic (oh the irony) before I started this process and apparently all I needed was exercise, last month they did some blood work and yay my anemia is gone.

So far I've gained some small but very important changes through my sacrifice and work.