Day 36

Hello,

It's been another successful day.

I finally created a workout routine. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and one of the weekend days I do at least 30 minutes of cardio and alternate lower and upper body strength training each time. I'm excited about it because I will start building muscle as well as increase my heart health. So when the fat comes off, there will be muscles there already!

I am slacking off a bit with tracking my food. I haven't done it for the past few days. I usually track everything up until dinner. Since we make all of our dinners at home, I'm never sure what to enter. Basically, I'm lazy and don't feel like calculating it all out. I'm not sure if I just need to get over it and track it or if I can try to keep my day calories low enough to have a rather large bumper for evening calories. I think if I continue with stopping when I'm full, it shouldn't be too hard to keep everything under control. I think I'll try this for a week and see how it goes.

Youtube is going really super well. I'm doing two challenges right now. One is a 5 week challenge that this girl, Monica, and I created. The main goal is to lose 10 pounds in the 5 weeks and then to meet three individual mini goals. Mine were to exercise 4 times per week, drink more water, and keep calories under 1400. I really think I'm doing good so far. This challenge started on Saturday. Then, I'm doing a 6 week challenge with Greg, that deals with the 100 push up program. Basically, the jist of it is to follow the series of push ups outlined for your rank 3 days per week for 6 weeks, and at the end you'll be able to do 100 push ups. I started out with 18 consecutive girly push ups. I'm excited to see how much I improve.

Another thing that I'm doing is learning. I don't want to change my lifestyle and not know exactly why it's good for me. I have been doing research on food labels (MSG and maltodextren recently) and it's a little scary what manufacturers can put in your food.

Also, I am trying to balance out my days. The purpose of this is mostly to spend much less time on the computer and more time being productive. I tried to create some categories and my goal should be to do one thing from each everyday. Some of the categories are:

• Cleaning/Organizing
• Meditating
• Reading
• Being Creative (wedding planning, scrap booking, playing flute, etc.)
• Exercising

Just balancing out my day will probably be one of the hardest things I will have to learn to do throughout my whole 'weight-loss journey'.

My only fear is that I am piling to many things on my "plate". In the past, I think that I have failed because I have tried to do too much too quickly and when I can't I give up. I don't want to do that again. Already I think I have made significant strides. I am finally open about my weight issues with my boyfriend. After almost three years, I just couldn't discuss things like that because I thought that it would make him not love me and it helped me avoid the truth. Now we talk about what ever I've learned or my most recent weigh-in almost on a daily basis. It is truly amazing how open I feel with him now. I can now think (and truly believe) that it's okay to discuss these things (which I tried so hard to keep inside) because I'm fixing it. I am taking such huge leaps in the right direction and when I think about how amazing I feel because of them... why on earth would I ever go back?

I know this is really long, but it's been a while since I've really blogged and I putting these thought down clears my mind of all the 'clutter'.

Weigh-in tomorrow!

xo Megan