Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Weight Loss can be such an interesting journey! Let me preface by saying that back in 1999, I had joined Weight Watchers and ended up losing over 50 pounds on that journey. By summer of 2000, I started teaching fitness classes at the gym (go figure!). I was successful with keeping that weight off and even lost another 10 pounds through separation and divorce in 2003/2004.

New life begins in 2005 when I meet my now current husband, love of my life and we LOVE our life, we do things, we go dancing every week, we eat out nice dinners with friends or just ourselves A LOT, and we enjoy a nice glass of red wine several nights a week. Well, hello weight gain ~ go figure. So I could see 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds creep on me, try to lose it...it becomes this roller coaster ride with my weight. We go on great vacations and gain weight, come home and try to lose the weight...endless, vicious good circle! LOL Anyway, finally the scale tipped at 39 pounds gained since the day we met-- NOT HAPPY.

Like I said, I have been a weight watcher for years, followed the program, logged everything: good, bad and ugly. But still wasn't losing weight. Yes, I had cut back on my taught classes at the gym, but was still working out. Christmas 2008, gift from husband - "The Body Bugg". For those who are not aware, this is the same arm band computer that the contestants on The Biggest Loser t.v. show wear to track their calories burned. Well, I was excited to receive this gift (almost as much as the Diamond rings that I also received), but this new tool was an enlightening tool. I came to learn that a spin class only burned 300 calories on average and with weight watchers, they would give me 8 activity points for that workout...which would mean 800 calories burned. No wonder I wasn't losing weight-- I was over-calculating my activity points. My body has just become way too efficient in burning calories via a spin class!

Now I have been working the Body Bugg/Apex workout system, logging my calories consumed each day and then getting the readings from the Bugg for my daily calories burned and the science is there and it is accurate. Burn an average of 500 calories per day in a week and you lose 1 pound, burn 1000 average calories and you lose 2 pounds. I was over ambitious when I started and wanted to lose 2 pounds per week, but over 40 this is a very difficult task when you are not willing to give up the dinners out or the fabulous bottles of wine?!?!! I have been doing this program now for 10 weeks and I have lost 10 pounds!! Yeah for me! But because I have been active and been teaching classes at the gym for so long, I have to work soooooooo much harder to lose the smallest amount of weight week to week.

I am very proud of my achievements thus far and can't wait to meet my goal- it will still take a few months to get there...but I will get there. This is a great program.

1 comment:

Pam Harper Horst said...

Still working the program, but getting frustrated. I'm starting to notice a pattern with my own weight loss journey. There are just some weeks that I eat way more than my allotted calories (PMS week)...GRRRR! But then the following week, I tend to eat way less...! So my pattern seems to be have two weeks of weight loss and then two weeks of either a small gain or staying the same. I feel like 3 steps forward and 2 steps back all of the time.

I do know that I have to step up my resistance training ~ that has been lacking and hopefully now that I've had a good 4 resistance workouts in 10 days, I'll start to see things pick up in the losing weight arena!

However, vacation #1 this year is on the horizon and I really don't want that to be "back to square one" again!