A few of years ago I had hit my highest weight ever, even heavier than when I was nine months pregnant, pre-eclamtic and swollen to the hilt! So I set out to drop the weight. It helped that I had just had braces put on my teeth and thus my mouth was often to sore to eat anything.  It wasn’t something I had planned on doing, in fact it happened the exact opposite way!  I blogged about it in my 2011 New Year’s Resolution post.

Over the period of a few months (around 6) I managed to drop 37lbs! This amount was even a shocker to me! I was so thrilled to have gotten control and to see a weight I had not seen since I was nineteen. The kicker was that I did it without any deliberate exercise. I simply cut my calorie intake WAY down, down to between 1,100 & 1,200 calories per day.  People would often ask me what I was doing and were surprised when I said I was not exercising.  Now I know that exercise is healthy, and I should be exercising, but for some reason I would try that and just get overwhelmed and frustrated.

I was recently reading an article written by Brian D Sabin, who is a writer and editor for Livestrong.com with the same title I have chosen for my post today (How to Eat When You’re NOT Working Out).  I almost wanted to pat myself on the back a little bit because there was actually some written word out there to support what I have been feeling and thinking!  “You don’t have to exercise excessively to lose weight. If you don’t take the calories on in the first place, then they won’t add up in your body!”

I recently punished my body, and regretted it, by trying to do the Insanity Workout.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a great program, just not for me. This brought me a renewed belief that extreme exercise is not the answer for me.  Watching my husband pound the pavement running this past summer and dropping weight quickly really made me feel bad about myself.   He seems to be able to take extreme punishment to his body, push through, and come out the other side. <sigh> Not me.

I am now sitting here two years after writing about how thrilled I was to have lost 37 lbs, facing the fact that I have gained 20 of it back.  I am so embarrassed and disappointed by the weight gain.  I am not even comfortable in my own skin!  In his article  Brian says, “Most of the time my victory of the day was in something I did NOT do.”  That is my goal for my weight loss this time around.  According to Nate Miyaki, an ACE Certified Personal Trainer, LIVESTRONG.com writer and author of Intermittent Feast: An Evolutionary & Scientific Approach to Weight Loss,  “While glucose is the primary fuel for your brain and CNS, fatty acids are the primary fuel for the body at rest,” Miyaki also said. “As long as you’re in a calorie deficit, some of those fatty acids will come from body fat stores.”

So each day I am logging my food, water, and exercise into my Livestrong.com App on my iPhone.  Each day I am celebrating what I did NOT eat.  Each calorie I don’t consume is one I don’t have to worry about burning off later.  I am currently exercising, but in moderation.  I am walking on the treadmill and using the Winsor Pilates 20 minute workout.

http://youtu.be/YW2eRv4kCag

My goal is to drop 2 lbs a week, improve my very disintegrating posture, and hopefully find myself happier and healthier.  As Joey often says, “You have to have a day one.”  If I don’t start somewhere, I won’t start.  So as I sit here facing a New Year, and talk of resolutions, I pick myself up, dust myself off, and start again….at day one.