Operation: Lose 18 lbs by Mother's Day

There is no particular reason for losing it by Mother's Day...that's just how it turned out. First I will give some background information. I got married about 4 years ago and on my wedding day I'd like to say I was a bit chubs. You would think I would have started a weight loss program BEFORE my wedding day...but, as those people who use annoying cliches would say (p.s. I'm one of them.)...hindsight's twenty twenty! A couple years after I got married I decided to lose the weight. I lost about 15 lbs in 2 months and it was great! I ate wheat bread only, no white bread, pasta or potatoes. I ate sweet potatoes, grilled chicken and fish, fruit, steamed vegetables...no sweets, no creamy dressings or sauces and I only drank water! I didn't exercise very much. I line dance and I might have been doing west coast swing dancing then but I wasn't doing anything hardcore. So I got pretty comfortable after I lost those 15 lbs and I slowly but surely started eating WHATEVER I wanted. I don't know about ya'll but I LOVE food. Food is what makes my day worthwhile and my trips interesting and my parties fun and my holidays memorable. If you invite me somewhere, I will think of what great food we can have when we go! Camping?? Awesome! We can have hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips, s'mores!! Christmas time? Gingerbread cookies and milk, deep fried turkey, maccaroni and cheese, my grandma's homemade candy!! Anyway, I pretty much gained those 15 lbs back and a few more to grow on. All through the 2 years when I knew I was gaining back I kept searching for that willpower I had before. On top of my addiction to food, I was diagnosed with a hormone disorder. Basically when your hormones are out of whack...don't expect to be in tip top shape. That brings me to the start of my current weight loss program that, with only God to thank, I have been on for almost 3 months!

I started this weight loss program on January 10th. With my hormones still not entirely on the right track, I was worried. The first week I did everything I knew to do. No white breads, pasta or potatoes. Lean meats, veggies, fruit AND I was exercising like you wouldn't believe. On my cable I have an Exercise On Demand channel that has tons of different workouts you can do. Every night I was doing one. One night would be Bootylicious Buns...the next would be Gilad's Abs! Well I wasn't getting bootylicious buns and my abs definitely did not look like Gilad's. After about 2 weeks I was still the SAME weight! I started to worry that I wouldn't be able to lose weight at all. A couple weeks later after only losing about 1-2 pounds I knew I had to make a change. I got to really thinking about the whole weight loss thing and if you get down to the nitty gritty of it...weight loss is about one thing. Burning more calories than you take in! According to SoYouWanna.com:

A pound of fat represents approximately 3500 calories of stored energy. In order to lose a pound of fat, you have to use 3500 more calories than you consume. It's best not to do this over the course of a day; you'd probably hurt yourself, and your body (knowing it, the uncooperative creature) would probably have some extreme reaction which did not involve you losing any actual weight. It's better to spread this out over a week, so that you aim to exceed your caloric requirements by 3500 to 7000 calories per week, resulting in weight loss of one to two pounds per week. It's not healthy to try to lose more than two pounds in a week, and if you do attempt to do so you're unlikely to be successful. Let's say you want to lose two pounds per week. To do so, you need to figure out how many calories a person of your age, sex, and weight usually needs in a day, subtract 500 from that amount, and follow a diet that provides you with that many calories.

Here's how!! I'll just use a random number as an example.

1. Take your current weight (150)

2. For women, multiply that number by 11. (150 X 11 = 1650)

3. Take a third of your body weight and multiply it by how many hours you are NOT asleep. Usually this is about 16. (150 divided by 3 = 50. 50 x 16 = 800)

4. Take your first number (1650) and add it to your second number (800) and you will get the amount of calories you require per day. (1650 + 800 = 2450)

So, since you have to take in 3500 calories less to lose one pound, to lose one pound in a week you need to take in 500 calories less per day. (2450 - 500 = 1950) If you want to lose 2 pounds in a week, you would need to take in 1000 calories less per day. (2450 - 1000 = 1450)

After I learned this valuable information, I could understand why I wasn't losing weight. I was eating healthy foods, but I was eating a lot of them! I was probably taking in around the same amount of calories that I was before, just with healthier foods!! I decided to stick to a calorie budget and let me tell you it works!!! I have lost 9 pounds so far. I have 9 more to go and I'll be at my goal!! Just remember that you also want to keep your fat grams and sodium low. Another important thing to keep in mind is DRINK WATER! Drink a lot of water and it will help with weight loss. I've heard that it flushes out the fat that you are burning. I don't know if that's true or not, but for whatever reason, water aids weight loss. What has helped me tremendously is an application called Lose It! on my iPhone. I enter everything I eat and it tells me how many calories I have eaten so far and how many I left for the day. It has tons of nutritional facts in it. It has most foods and it even has some restaurant foods. If it doesn't have something, I will go on the internet and find it then manually enter it in the application. If you don't have an iPhone, there are tons of these programs online. A good one to try is FitTracker. It's free!

Good luck to everyone out there trying to lose weight!! It's not easy but you can do it if you have the correct information and a little bit of willpower! I'll be posting weight loss tips and information along with some healthy recipes that I've made. Let me know how ya'll are doing! We can all support each other!