January of 2016 was the point where we had finally had enough. We were on the same page! In the past one of us would decide to be healthy while the other one would, well...not! That just never seemed to work. After all, who could say no to a beer and pizza...as a midnight snack. Yeah you get the picture.
Now, in the past we had tried different things ranging from at home workout equipment (does anyone remember the Gazelle?
Anyhow, by this time we decided that we were so out of shape that we did not really need specific equipment, the simple THOUGHT of walking would raise our pulse, cause us to be short of breath and make us crave a beer. So that's what we did. WE WALKED.
Starting in January we really changed four things...
1) Eat Less:
No matter how you slice it (pun intended) we can eat a lot of calories and fast. We started tracking our calories. I know that this is a pain, but we did find MyFitnessPal as an App seemed to work really well. We decided to drop our calories down to about 1500 calories. Once we started paying attention to calories, I realized just HOW MANY CALORIES I would eat in a day. Probably 3000 a day, easily and that does not count the weekends. So, once we started cutting out our calories, I was grumpy (that is the nice term, we had other terms for grumpy that I won't put on here). That said, a friend of mine put it simply, you can EITHER not eat a snickers bar (which is good for the 30 seconds it takes to eat it) OR you can eat it and then run 2 miles. Do the math, if I was eating 3000 calories, I would need to exercise all day every day, just to maintain my current weight and I knew I couldn't do that.
2) Plan our meals:
Something that would ALWAYS get us in trouble was talking about what we were going to eat at 4pm. At that point you only have an hour or two to figure it out, GO to the grocery store, AND then fix it. Who in the world wants to do that after a full day of work? So, what would we do...eat out. Believe me, there are very very very few options where eating out is a good idea (and we didn't choose those). We started planning our meals 2 weeks out and we would stuck to it. That didn't really make our kids happy, but we were making many more healthy choices, which made number 1 (eat less) much easier.
3) Exercise:
We started walking. As I had mentioned earlier...we did not need to do much to get our heart rates up. So we would walk, at first it was about 2 miles and it took forever. Then we found a path that was 3.2 (yeap about a 5K). We starting walking it at least 3 times a week and Kara would usually walk 5 or 7 times a week. Now our little stat trackers would tell us that this would between 600 and 900 calories, but I don't know if I believed it AND we did not get to eat that many more calories because of the walk.
4) We did it together:
For us the walk time became a time to chat. It was one hour with no TV, kids, cell phones, or work. Just regular communication, old style. We knew from the past how important talking was, but this was at a whole new level because it was a regular thing and was also associated with something healthy. We would bond in the past, but it usually revolved around food or beer. This was something that was healthy and made us feel good about ourselves. Plus we were changing and growing youngerish together. Don't get me wrong, when we walking faster, we may not say a lot (because we would need to breath) but we were still there together.
I don't know if this is something that would work for everyone. These are not brand new ideas. We even took a class for 15 weeks about Eating Less Moving More and Losing Weight. That said, what we were doing was a just enough for us. In fact, the first month we each lost 10lbs. Talk about a motivator. The second month, again, we lost about 10lbs. By then clothes stop fitting and maybe we would even treat ourselves to a new shirt. After 2 months of that we started to do the math of where we would be by pool time. Between the seeing the results and sharing the trip with each other it just seemed to work.
So, here we are now...January 2017. Between the two of us we have lost about 150 pounds. The weight lost has slowed down (they say we are gaining muscle, but I'm not sure). Back in the fall, we started doing Gold's fit at Gold's Gym (it is their version of cross fit). We are sticking our healthier life style, but it isn't always easy. There are weeks were we feel like we are winning and weeks that maybe we don't. We like to try new things, continue exercising together, hike, and whatever seems to be a good idea (note that these are not always healthy). So, we have decided to share. We share what was fun, what wasn't and even how things are going (the ups and downs). Please feel free to join us!
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