Well, were to start.  My name is Amber.  I have been married to my best friend for 19 years.  We have 3 kids ages 14, 12 and 8.  I have had weight issues most of my life steaming from puberty.  I have been on so many diets and eating plans, I just got frustrated and gave it all up.  I decided one day enough, I am going to just eat healthy food, control my portions and spend time at the gym.

With my husband’s encouragement I have decided to share my journey of weigh loss. Please remember I have no training, degree and my results are mine. I am not an expert, nor claim to be.  I am proud of my failures and my success.

From day one I have called it my lifestyle.  In my opinion it’s the only successful way.  I have been on fat diets, weight watchers, curves diets and others. None of them got me where I wanted to.  I have nothing against any of these, for me they weren’t what I needed.  I needed to be accountable on my own! Responsible for what I put in my body and what I put myself through at the gym.  I put aside my excuses and for once do something that I wanted.  Little did I know it’s one of the things I needed so much in my life! I gave myself one year.  One year to see what a change I could make.  A year and half later 155lbs are gone.  Sweat, tears and time.  That’s what it took.  Was it easy? No!

I’m not going to bore you with menus and calorie counts.  Would you believe I didn’t count calories or write anything down? Honestly, I just replaced my food with the stuff we all know we should be eating! To start, I call them brown foods.  Brown cereal for breakfast, whole wheat bread, brown rice, browned (cooked) fish for lunch, dinners were a little different. I pretty much ate what my family was eating.  Lots of grilled chicken, veggies.  No, not every day, but at least once a week.  Replaced baked potatoes with sweet potatoes.  Did I have mac and cheese, why yes I did! Just not the whole box! When in doubt if I knew it was a high calorie meal cut the portion! If I didn’t allow myself somethings during this, I would inevitably reach for the wrong thing.  There are so many options with food now.  If there was a food that I was craving that wasn’t good, I looked for the low calorie soups to cook with, if my family wanted hamburgers, I bought ground turkey and made turkey burgers for myself.  More on this later!

For my workouts I started with, trying.  Trying with everything I could do.  At my gym I would think of goals for each day.  First day I was there, elliptical.  Ugh.  It was hard for me, but you know I was so dang mad at myself, I was happy to beat myself up.  Then on to the recumbent bike. I made myself stay in that gym for an hour. Everyday.  Two weeks after I started I weighed myself.  Let me tell you, I was shocked.  I had no idea I weighed over 300 pounds. Well that just sealed it, I was going to the gym every day.  Constantly competing with myself to smash my goals.  Cardio was my best friend.  I would stay until I just couldn’t anymore. Usually an hour/hour and half.  When you are lugging around that much weight, it was all I could do.  But I forced myself to feel good about it.  Every week I got better and better. When I was there I was doing it for myself.  I can say that is something that rarely happens, doing something for myself.  Today, I can’t live with out my gym. More on this later.

Here I go lecturing, but alas, it was the way things started for me.  So my goal for this blog is to help others who felt like me realize what anyone is capable of.  I will try to post everyday and talk about different topics that I have learned on eating, feelings and exercise.  No education can teach me what I have learned in the last 2 years.  I hope encourage everyone and in turn encourage myself to keep on my journey. I was hoping to just do a little introduction on myself for the first blog.  I am a talker though! Sorry about that.  Stick with me, I have so much more to share.