Winner!

Winner winner Chicken Dinner!!! The winner of my #worththefight giveaway with Strong Confident YOU is: Jonessa McKenney!  Congrats Jonessa, I'll be in touch shortly about how to claim your prize!!
Don't forget, if you still want to purchase your own tank, use coupon code BABEBEFOREBABY for 10% off your order! And if you want the exact tank I was wearing in the giveaway, here's the link :) Babe Before Baby Tank

Getting Serious

Ok so I’m being honest here…I haven’t exactly been on point these past 2 weeks since finishing my first round of the 21 day fix.  I’ve been inconsistent with my workouts, and even though I’ve been tracking my food (mostly), I’ve had a LOT of social events, including a work event last night where my dinner consisted of wine and cheese (what? That’s not healthy??).  I’ve been making MOSTLY good choices, but it just goes to show you that without serious effort, especially when you’re close to goal, that scale is so hard to move.

I really haven’t made any progress on the scale in 2 weeks, and this week with all the drinking and eating out I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m up a few pounds too.

So, the plan: a new round of the 21 day fix starts Monday.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping to drop another 10 pounds this round, but in an effort to try and take some emphasis off the scale, I just purchased this:

It’s a body fat anyalyzer!

I’m hoping it will help me focus more on building muscle and less on the number on the scale; I’ve heard these things can be pretty inaccurate at times, but if you measure yourself under the same conditions each time, it’s at least a way to measure your progress.

I also ordered this program:

Les Mills PUMP.

This is my effort to start adding more weights into my routine.  I’m really looking forward to using this program, and it should arrive sometime next week, so I may even start doing it while I’m still on the 21 day fix too!

I’ve said it before, but I thrive on routine.  I need a plan.  I need to be able to make it mindless, so that I know what my next workout is, and I know what my next meal is without thinking too much about it.

I’m hoping this next round gets me some killer results, because that summer weather is right around the corner, and we’re running out of time!

**The 21 Day Fix will officially be OFF pre-order status as of 3/31! If you’re interested in joining my next accountability group, starting 4/21 (the day after Easter), shoot me an email at babebeforebaby@gmail.com and I’ll get you the info you need!

Lastly, don’t forget to enter my giveaway, contest ends at MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!! (EST)

Thank you

I just wanted to take a minute and say thank you, your comments after my video upload from yesterday were amazing and I'm so grateful to have this community for support! I'll definitely be doing more in the future, hopefully shorter, and hopefully with better camera quality :)

Don't forget to enter the Giveaway for a free workout tank from Strong Confident YOU, it ends tomorrow!! Want the exact tank I was wearing in that post and can't wait until you find out if you win tomorrow? Here's the link to purchase your own!

Video

Trying something different today...uploaded my very first You Tube video!

This is a little about me and how I got to where I am today, I'd love to hear your feedback, and what you'd like to see more videos on in the future!

GIVEAWAY!!

I am UBER excited today to bring you a fantastic giveaway with one of my favorite Etsy shops, Strong Confident YOU.

Last fall, I bought my half marathon hoodie from this shop and I loved everything about it, and get a million compliments every time I wear it.. not to mention its super comfy and light weight, so it’s perfect for chilly runs without adding bulk.

I contacted Lola to see if she would be willing to do a giveaway for my readers since I loved her shirt so much, and she agreed! She was really awesome to work with, very accommodating and was willing to work with all my crazy ideas.

She sent me a super cute workout tank to review, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. 

First, a quick back story….I wanted to show continued support for those that I coach, regardless of the exercise program they follow, so I recently started a new private support and accountability group on Facebook called "Worth the Fight".

Because YOU are worth the fight, regardless of what it is you're fighting for. Whether it's confidence, a scale number, or that bikini you've been eyeing for the upcoming summer, I promise you that it's worth the fight, and I want to help you get there.  We use the hashtag #worththefight on IG to share our progress and stay accountable.

Lola agreed to design a custom tank just for me to share this message, and I LOVE the final product:

I worked out in this tank this morning, and I have nothing but good things to say! I actually already contacted Lola about buying a second one! (she did provide this tank to me for free, but these opinions are my own and were in no way influenced by this fact).  I’m in a size large here since I was worried about it being too short for my tall self, but my next purchase will be a medium, this one is just a tad bit big on me J

SO…it’s GIVEAWAY TIME!! Do you want this tank in your workout wardrobe? How about another tank from Strong Confident YOU?

Use the rafflecopter tool below to enter, giveaway ends Friday 3/28 at midnight!

As a prerequisite to enter, you MUST be a follower of this blog.

Go over to the sidebar and click "Join This Site" in the followers section if you haven't already…if you enter using rafflecopter below, I’ll verify you’re a follower of this blog before announcing the winner, so don’t try and cheat J You have several ways to enter, so good luck!

CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY

Don’t want to wait for the giveaway? Head over to Strong, Confident YOU and use coupon code BABEBEFOREBABY to get 10% off your next order (not valid on custom products).  Coupon expires on April 15, 2014.

Staying on track over the weekend

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday!

Friday means the end to a long week, and hopefully 5 consecutive days of staying ON TRACK with your goals to eat healthy and get your workouts in….but it also means the start of 2 (or sometimes 3) full days of non-structured eating, social events, and temptations to eat crap and be lazy about your workouts (at least for me it does!)

So how do you combat this?  One word: ACCOUNTABILITY.

Keep yourself accountable.  It doesn’t matter if it’s just to yourself, to a buddy, or to a whole group of people, make your goals known by saying them out loud and/or writing them down somewhere.

There are 2 tools that I think can really help with this, and they’re both free!

The first: My Fitness Pal.  It’s an app for your phone, and if you don’t have it by now, go get it.  It doesn’t cost a thing, and there’s a whole database of food and exercise to help you track your day.  If you shove it in your piehole, track it in the app.  You’ll be surprised how quickly you slow down your eating when you realize how many calories you've consumed!

The second: Instagram.  Whether you realize it or not, people following you are helping with that accountability; post a screen shot of your calorie tracking log, or maybe a sweaty selfie after you got that workout in.  Taking a rest day? You should still focus on your water intake, so snap a picture of that gallon of water you just chugged!

I know accountability goes a LONG way in helping me achieve my goals, so I’ll be posting my healthy habits this weekend on Instagram (I’m babebeforebaby if you don’t follow me already) and logging all my food into MyFitnessPal (again, babebeforebaby if you want to friend request me). 

My goal: Stay within my calorie range each day, and get a good workout in both days.  Leave me a comment and let me know what YOUR goals are for this weekend, and I'll do my best to help you with some accountability too!

Someday I'll...

Someday I’ll hit my goal weight.

Someday I’ll wear a size 6.

Someday I’ll rock a bikini.

Someday I’ll be proud of my body.

Someday.

We all have these grand ideas of what we’ll do or look like when “we get there”.  That elusive point in time, when we've reached all of our goals and we’re overly happy with our body and proud of everything we've accomplished.

But why do we have to wait until that exact moment in time to be proud of what we've done?

Why SHOULDN'T we rock a bikini now, knowing that we’re so much closer to our goals now than we were a few months or even years ago?

Why SHOULDN'T we celebrate the milestones along the way, like running faster, lifting heavier, or losing inches instead of pounds? Why do we focus on what we still have left to do, as opposed to how far we've come?

It’s such a difficult thing, and a hard line to walk.  To be proud of your accomplishments, but not to the point of complacency.  To know that you still have work to do, but to be happy with the changes you’re seeing in your body along the way.  To accept that your body isn't perfect, and possibly never will be, but that you can still push it harder to see what you can do with it.

I’m not at my goal weight yet.  I have cellulite and stretchmarks, and my body is FAR from perfect. 

But this body ran 3 half marathons.

This body lost over 50 pounds.

This body keeps going, even with an autoimmune disease that has debilitated so many others.

This body has been tested and pushed to the point of soreness more times than I can count, and while it’s not perfect, I’m thankful for this body I have, even if I don’t quite love everything about it at this point in time.

One of the things I've ALWAYS wanted to be able to do is to work out in just a sports bra – no tank top or t-shirt.  I used to see those girls at the gym, or running on my street and say “whatever, a BRA ISN’T A SHIRT, put some clothes on!” …and don’t get me started on the workout videos and all the super fit women showing off their abs!  But really, I was secretly envious of the fact that they had the body to do that with confidence..that they had the CONFIDENCE period.  I would be too self-conscious to do this myself..too worried about what everyone else thought about me while constantly criticizing and second guessing myself.  But now when I work-out in the privacy of my own home, in my basement where no one else can see me, I do it in just a sports bra.  I don’t know that I have the confidence built up just yet to go for a run like this, but I’m working on it. 

Baby steps people.

I’m putting go for a run in my sports bra on my goals list for the summer…regardless of my weight, I want to have confidence and learn to love my body, and this will force the issue for me.  

So tell me, what are you celebrating today, and what goal do you have in mind for this summer?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Side bar, special thanks to my sister for inspiring this post, and I’m so proud of you for what you've accomplished in the past 7 months! J

Summer Goals

        Yes, I said it…SUMMER GOALS.

Elle Noel pointed out yesterday that summer is right around the corner…for me in this part of the country, today marks exactly 10 weeks before the “unofficial” start to summer, Memorial Day weekend. I’ll be linking up with Elle in her #operationredbikini challenge, where we define our summer goals and check in with weekly posts to talk about how we’re making those goals happen.   So that got me thinking, what ARE my summer goals? I have to be honest with you here, I’d LOVE to hit my goal weight in 10 weeks’ time, and go into summer feeling AHHMAZING about myself and my body, especially when it comes to bathing suits and short shorts. But here’s the reality.  The scale is not the only measure of progress. 
Gaining muscle sometimes means the scale doesn’t move, but the inches do.  Sometimes inches don’t move, but you can lift heavier this week than last, or run further or faster than you did the last time….getting STRONGER is just as important as the scale number, so why do we put so much emphasis on that number?? (sometimes, the ONLY emphasis!) The reality is, I’m not really sure if my goal weight is realistic, since I’ve never, EVER, weighed that little in my entire life, it’s really just a number I picked before I knew anything about weight loss or how my body looks now, 20 pounds more than that “ideal number”.  Could I really lose 20 more pounds from where I am now? Maybe..but it’s going to take some serious discipline to get there, and I’m not sure if that’s a level of dedication I’m ready for. I’m definitely putting another round of the 21 day fix on my goal list, there’s no question there.  If I can drop another 5-10 pounds that will bring me that much closer to my goals, and I’d love to push the weight of the dumbbells I’m using with the workouts. I also want to (need to) get back into running more regularly.  I haven’t been running on a regular basis since the winter set in, and running on the treadmill is torture to me so that’s sporadic at best.  With the warmer weather on it’s way (fingers crossed!) I’m going to aim to hit the pavement at least 3 times a week in addition to whatever other routine I’m doing. There’s that word….routine.  I do SO much better with a routine.  I need someone to tell me exactly what to do, and when to do it.  I thrive with routine.  When I don’t have a specific program to follow, I tend to flounder a bit.  I’m considering investing in a new program to shake things up a bit after my next round of the 21 day fix; everyone RAVES about Body Pump classes at the gym, and there’s an at home version of this class that’s on sale this month, and it even comes with a weight lifting bar! I’ve been toying with the idea of adding more weights into my routine, so this may be the answer I’ve been looking for.  I see serious results from the women I know who have added heavy lifting into their routines and cut back on the cardio, so I think this may be the direction I’m headed in, but I haven’t decided for sure.  The nice thing about PUMP is that it's only 3 days a week, so I'd still be able to keep up with my running too.
So my 10 week goals are: -Complete 1 more round of the 21 day fix -Drop at least 12 pounds from where I stand today -Run at least 3 times a week -Add more lifting into my current routine So there you have it.  What do YOUR summer goals look like?
 

 

My 21 day Fix Results!

Sorry for the late post today, it was a busy day, and it didn’t help that I overslept this morning thanks to Daylight Savings time!

 

As promised, today I’m going to recap my 21 day fix experience and results.

Let’s start with the workouts, which I LOVE.  All of the workout DVDs are around 30 minutes (some a few minutes more, some a few minutes less), and there’s 7 different workouts so you do a different one each day of the week.

There was a lot of variety between the workouts, with focuses on different areas, like upper body, lower body, total body, abs, etc.

There is also a Pilates workout and a yoga workout, both of which I am not very good at because I’m so inflexible, but I did them anyways and they weren’t all that bad J  I think my favorite part of these workouts was Autumn herself…girlfriend has an AMAZING body, so it was pretty motivating to watch her do the moves, and she wasn’t about speed throughout the workout, it was about form and getting the proper movements down to be as effective as possible.  

 

Now let’s talk about the nutrition.  As you might know already, the program comes with 7 color coded portion control containers, based on the major food groups, and then based on your starting weight, you get a certain number of colored containers each day to use.

I will say this about the program: while it’s not impossible to go out to eat while you’re on it, it’s a little difficult to do unless you truly know the proper portion sizes (or unless you’re comfortable breaking out your containers in the middle of the restaurant, which I did do a few times!)  The inherit problem, though, is that you really have no concept of how they’re cooking that grilled chicken (did they use a cup of oil on the grill? What about added butter or other fats? What about sodium?).  There’s just so many unknowns, that I would suggest staying away from dining out for 21 days if you can manage it.

 

That being said, I followed the program to a T the first week, and was down 4.5 pounds in 7 days!  I was doing well, and had been weighing myself daily, so I made a pact with myself not to weigh myself again until my 21 days were over.  I’m really trying to get away from being so tied to my scale, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try it out.

 

By week 2, things had gotten easier, and the cravings for bad foods that I was having in week 1 were pretty much gone.  I also found myself feeling full without eating all my containers, so most days I didn’t eat even close to my allotted number.

 

Fast forward to week 3, and I was seeing amazing results in a few ladies that I was coaching, and after day 17 (a little more than 2 weeks in), I decided I couldn’t wait any more and jumped on the scale. 

And I was SHOCKED.

I hadn’t lost anything since my 7 day weight in.  What the EFF? I was working out like crazy, eating the right foods, I had only eaten out a few times…what gives?  I immediately contacted Beachbody, and asked them what I was doing wrong.

 

They responded with a simple question: are you eating all of your allotted containers?

 

Well, no, I admitted. 

 

I don’t really cook with oil, so I almost never got any of my teaspoons of healthy fats in, and I wasn’t eating salad after the first week, so I wasn’t eating my orange container (designated for dressing, seeds, or nuts), and I would always save my blue container (cheese) “just in case” I had cheese at dinner, but then I always forgot about it by the time dinner rolled around, so I usually skipped that too.  Basically all of the healthy fats that were supposed to be an integral part of this diet, I wasn’t eating.  They asked me to track my calories for the day, and I was shocked to see that I wasn’t even hitting 1000 calories, even though I was feeling full….I was supposed to be eating over 1700 by their calculations!

 

So I immediately changed course, and made an effort to eat each and every container the next day.  And you know what? The scale moved.  I kept at this for the remainder of the program, and still had a great loss overall, but I am admittedly a little mad at myself for letting the one week I decided to not weigh in be the deciding factor in my results here; if I had paid closer attention, I might have addressed the situation sooner! Let this be a lesson people…eating less food is not always the answer, and yes, you can eat too little and stall your own results!

 

So, all that being said, here are my results (don't judge me here, I know I'm not there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday!):

 

 

I’m down a total of 9.2 pounds in 21 days!

Did I mention how FLOORED I am with my inches lost!? I'm amazed at the visible changes I saw in my body in such a short period of time, and 13 inches!? HOLY COW! I'm happy to report my clothes are fitting MUCH better now!

 

I do think 9.2 pounds is an AWESOME loss, and one that I’m very happy with, but just for comparison sake I offer you the following:

 

My friend D, who finished the program a few days ahead of me, lost 17 pounds in 21 days! And she didn’t even do most of the workouts, that was really just through diet!

 

Another friend, Ashley, who is getting married NEXT WEEKEND, just dropped 18.2 pounds in 21 days! Her finally dress fitting was last Saturday and they had to take the dress in again since it was falling off her!

 

I plan to do another round of the fix next month with my accountability group when they all get their shipments in; now that I know I really need to eat all my containers to be successful, I know I’ll get even better results this next round.

Wanna join me? Shoot me an email at babebeforebaby@gmail.com for more details!

 

But when will I see results?

I saw an article today that had a great blurb on results that I wanted to share with you all:   When will I begin to see results? 
While there is no accurate timetable to seeing results you can generally feel results happening on day one. Are you sore? Results are coming. Are you hungry? Ditto. As your body adapts to exercise, you are making internal changes, meaning results are on the way. Your body will resist the change. That's because its natural defense (law of homeostasis) is to protect the state it's in, even if that state is unhealthy. Its response to this is to fight it with hormonal releases. How well it adapts varies with every single individual, which is why we are constantly advising people not to look at their scale all the time and, instead, trust measurements and pictures. Some people start seeing results in a few days. Others may take many weeks. And none of that matters because the healthy lifestyle will always win in the end. If you keep at it, train hard, and eat well, your body will—absolutely, as it has no choice—change over time. Stay consistent for long enough and you'll look like a Greek statue. It's a physiological law.     You know what part resonated most with me on that? "None of that matters because the healthy lifestyle will always win in the end".   How powerful.  Don't get hung up on immediate results, or the scale number.  If you make healthy decisions throughout your day, change WILL come, it's just a matter of time.  Yes, it's easier to keep going when those results are immediate, but if it doesn't happen for you overnight, don't get discouraged.  Everyone's body is so different, and what might be easy for one person to achieve in one week might take you one month.  And that's ok, because in the end, you're making decisions that lead to a healthier lifestyle.  Don't think about the time it will take to get there, it's not a temporary thing, it's a lifestyle!