Day 0

Today is Monday, July 22, 2013. I’m 22 years, one month, and three days old today and today is the day I turn my life around. I’m weighing almost my heaviest and I can blame it on every factor in the world but it all boils down to something: me. I’ve never been one of those skinny girls, even as a child. My arms stretched through my GAP hologram butterfly white tank top and my legs jiggled as I pretended to run the mile in 5^th grade at GVille. From ages 8-17 I was a cheerleader. I know you’ll think that that’s not an acceptable form of exercise but let me tell you something, you run around dancing, yelling at the same time, throwing people almost your same weight in the air… you build muscles and endurance. To this day, I blame my thunder thighs on basing. When I stopped and went to college, I ran into the typical problems: I could have a patty melt, French fries, blue cheese dressing, and a diet coke for EVERY meal! Keep in mind that WHATEVER I was eating at Charties was miserable and 1,000,000 calories per three bites but I could have made a better effort. By the middle of sophomore year, the dining hall made me so nauseous that I couldn’t eat there anymore and so began the plight of eating whatever I could fit into my mini fridge and heat up… and hope someone would take mercy on me and take me to GPS. Getting a kitchen changed things a little but I was still sedentary. No matter how “in shape” I’ve been my entire life, my face turns the color of a sunburned tomato during the heat wave we had last week- so working out in public was never a huge option for me. It wasn’t until senior year that I found the joys of working out at a gym, with a personal trainer, really helped. Granted, I still had to do cardio and stuff on my own, which is NO small feat (I’d so much rather be watching Netflix), but by changing most of my diet and trying to keep constant cardio going, I lost about 13 pounds in 5 months. I know, it doesn’t seem like much but it was a small place to start. So that’s why today is Day 0. Time to start over.

I’m really candid, if you couldn’t tell, and need to be open about this. I’ll share recipes as I make them, progress, pictures… all that good stuff you can expect from someone attempting one of these. I won’t be perfect, there will be time that I won’t remember what to do or I’ll fall off the bandwagon because, let’s face it, I didn’t get to where I am by not having any weaknesses. I wish I could list them all but the big three are: ice cream, sweets, and cheese. Seriously. Cheese may or may not be a life ruiner because you think it’ll be good but… it isn’t.

I’m keeping track of my daily calories on MyFitnessPal and am working out with a trainer two days a week. The rest is up to me. I’m shooting for 5 days of workouts a week, 1,300 calories a day; one day I’m allowing myself to cheat. I’m cutting out alcohol except for two days a week, carby carbs except for 1 at breakfast, 2 at lunch, and 4 at dinner a week. I’m giving up junky sweets save for 3 instances a week, I do love my dessert. I’ll only drink water except for a glass of OJ in the morning, some seltzer, and up to 3 “others”per week (not including the vino). Every two weeks I’ll do measurements, pictures, and a weigh in so… here goes nothing. Starting today.