Healthy Living

Do you ever find yourself wondering, "How is it 4:30pm already? Where has the time gone and what have I been doing for the past hour?!" Me too. It seems like I open up Instagram for a quick scroll and pop over to Facebook for a short scan, then I close them and look up and my afternoon is gone, the babies are waking up from their long nap waiting for their snack. I also found myself having short spans of time, checking my messages then - by default - tapping that Facebook icon or hitting the Instagram app. I admit, these are my two most commonly opened apps (besides My Fitness Pal), and it is amazing the amount of time that was being wasted throughout my day. So, in light of this, I decided last week to take a 48 hour social media fast. Day 1: I scrubbed the bathroom, deep cleaned the kitchen, reorganized the fridge, swept the floors and "mopped" without a mop (that is on my hands and knees with disinfectant wipes on my laminate floors). Day 2: My phone batt...

Hubby had an extended vacation due to the holiday, so we had a fun time at my family’s house and a good drive up to Reno to visit his sister! I was so surprised at how well our little ones did through the drive up and down, we were so blessed with the timing! The most difficult thing was the food. A lot of it wasn’t even really that tempting, but my poor habits are tough to break. When there is food: I eat! When I’m stressed: I eat. When I’m bored: I eat. When I’m angry, frustrated, feeling out of control/anxious, etc: I eat! Food is an addictive coping mechanism and breaking it is one of the hardest things to do.  I’m working through it, though. We were in Reno from Friday early morning through Monday late afternoon. I went with my hubby, his sis, her boyfriend and his brother for a walk and did a few quick HIITs and yoga stretches on the trail. The  next morning, things were (once again) beyond my control, and I did a brief yoga session before eating anything, so t...

On Sunday I took my two year old, AJ, to Disneyland by myself. We headed out after church and arrived at 2:20ish. Loading her in a Tula carrier on my back, I front-face our backpack filled with water, snacks and diapers, and headed for the parks. I like to get the extra steps, so I prefer not to take the tram. We climbed down 3 flights of stairs, trekked across the Pinocchio parking lot, passed the Downtown Disney parking area/Lilo parking lot, and walked through Downtown Disney before reaching the turn-style into the Magic Kingdom. Knowing her excitement for Moana lately, we headed straight to Aladdin's Oasis to see if she would be there, perfect timing! A 20 minute wait before she came over and 3 minutes in line once she arrived! After this, we darted over to Fantasy Land to ride the carousel, AJ cries out, "Horse!" She really enjoys it. Then we rode the Teacups for the first time (mommy does not spin hehe). She LOVED them! Alice in Wonderland was not a ridiculous l...

These past couple of weeks have been beyond accomplishment! I have been building up speed in cardio blocks during Team Training at my gym, Chuze. It has been so amazing to endure 3 minute stints of jogging just over 4.5mph! That may not seem like much for some, but I have never been able to keep up speed at an actual jogging pace for more than 30 seconds. Even those 30 seconds were constantly counting down and checking the time to see when I could just start walking. The first time I took it to 5mph to max out my effort in the middle of the cardio block for 1 minute. I almost began to cry in the middle of the workout because I had never done it before! I did cry after training ended and I was in my car. If you are part of the Half Size Me Community, I shared a * video on the Facebook group about it. That was what I worked on last week. This week was more focused on endurance, so we increased inclines (which was rough) and the strength block was about heavy weights. My personal bes...

Being in a position of needing to move, looking for homes, finding a place, running all of the errands, dealing with all of the unpleasant correspondence, still keeping up with all of the day-to-days and caring for 2 toddlers is stressful. I am grateful for my wonderfully supportive husband and for God's faithfulness through all of this, but these things do not make the reality less hard. Just more bearable. Working toward weight loss (and even maintenance) and a healthy lifestyle that is still in progress is really tough through this process. I have given into a lot of temptations and struggled against a lot of mental blocks over this last month. Tracking my workouts and food have suffered, grazing has reared its ugly head, lack of self-control has made justification after justification, and exercising has fallen by the wayside or been far less intense with the wrestle it has been to even get a decent start to our morning prior to 7:00am. Thank you all for going on this jour...

Knowledge is just information, unless it is paired with action, at which point, we may call it Wisdom. Did you know that proper rest and sleep are absolutely necessary for weight loss? We all know that under-nourishing our bodies (aka - not eating enough) will cause our bodies to go into survival mode, storing fat for nourishment, uncertain as to when it will receive more of the necessary nutrients to keep it going (if you didn't, then there you are). Anyway, when we deplete our energies and deny our body sufficient time to fuel up from rest, it does the same. Storing up nutrition for energy reserves until it is able to relax after a decent amount of sleep. Now, I am by no means a medical or nutritional professional. So, please feel free to take my thoughts with a grain of salt, I am merely forwarding my experiences and recalling information from my college nutrition class. However, let me share my week with you. After several weeks of operating on an average high of 6 hour...

It has been quite a while since Heather Robertson shared this point on the Half Size Me show, but it still rings true and continues to be a type of mantra for me:  1. Barely made it out of bed./2. Oh well, guess the day is just going to be "survive."/3. Workout done, kitchen cleaned, girls napping, ready to tackle the day!  "Motivation does not cause our actions,  motivation comes when we take action." It is quite difficult to balance life when you have such a heavy goal in weight loss (see what I did there?). Anyway... I began this journey on January 9 at 251 pounds. On June 9, when hubby and I took a short vacation, I had hit 187. It is almost August and I am maintaining between 183 and 185. My emotions have been all over the place with this:  Okay, maintenance, this is new Let's up the calories a little bit while we increase movement Let's switch up the food Maybe I'll change my exercise Okay, now I'm a little frustrated Ins...