New personal trainer

In the past few weeks, I have enlisted the help of a personal trainer. If you remember, or even if you don't, I used to have one for about a year and a half. She was great and I did amazingly well with her. I was in the habit of exercising and even trained for the mammoth feat of riding 200 km from Toronto to Niagara Falls on the Ride to Conquer Cancer. She left about a year and a half ago and since them I've been lost. I joined a gym and did the classes but I didn't work out with weights because it was intimidating working out with these "buff" young men and scantily clad young women. After my membership lapsed, I did not renew. I've also been going to Weight Watchers for the past three years and after an initial 10 pound loss, I basically plateaued (but in reality, I wasn't really following the plan - I just liked the group meetings).

My friend had been working with a trainer and was doing incredibly well. But I couldn't commit to traveling up to his office north of Toronto. Well, a few weeks ago I said to myself "enough is enough," I quit Weight Watchers and called him. It's been two weeks and I've lost 3.5 pounds!!! He's got me on a healthy, "clean" eating plan and a 7-day exercise routine (WHICH I'M STICKING TO!!! ...much to my surprise) involving cardio and weight training. He believes I can be down to my goal weight by October. I'm trying hard not to sabotage myself, which I have a habit of doing. It's difficult being your own worst enemy, because you can't get away from yourself. So I'm dealing with it...

I'll try to post some updates because I think it's important to learn how to eat well, exercise and maintain a healthy lifestyle. For me, attending the Weight Watchers meetings showed me I needed support, but WW doesn't go the distance and provide the one-to-one support that I really needed.

Busy, busy, busy

OMG...have I been busy! Too busy for Bellyfit and Yoga, both of which I signed up in the spring session and attended hardly any classes. What I (and by 'I' I mean me and my family) did was adopt a dog!! A beautiful, 7-month old Labradoodle. So, as I continue to be busy with work, I am now also busy learning to be a dog owner.

Weight-wise, I have been stable. Deviated a bit from clean eating, but am back to monitoring the food I eat. It's actually quite easy to "stay clean" - it's the emotional eating that becomes an issue, that's when I backslide into eating junk.

Anyway, here's a photo of the newest member of our family...enjoy!

Bellyfit!

I just signed up for a Bellyfit class AND am thinking it would be cool to become a Bellyfit instructor.

I was getting geared up to sign up for a belly dancing class as I've been really not exercising a whole heck of a lot in the past few months. When I was scanning down the list of classes, I found Bellyfit! I googled it and it's actually a "new" fitness class created by someone in BC. It's a fusion of belly dance, bollywood, African dance, yoga and pilates all done to beats set by a DJ. (Well, that's what my summary is...) When I was surfing on the Bellyfit site I saw a tab on "Instructors Training" and surfed on over to it. It's one weekend in July and costs about 300 bucks! Doable. Soooo...I started "dreaming" and thinking "why not??"...then I had to get back to reality.

As it stands now, I will be starting Bellyfit in a couple of weeks and decide then if it's something I would like to do as an aside. (BTW, teaching a fitness class does not come out of the blue for me...I've always wanted to be a yoga instructor...though I've never actually told anyone so shhh...)

Power Walking

Ever since I turned 50, I committed myself to trying everything I've ever wanted to try. For my 50th I road 200 km on my bike in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Since then, I've given myself permission to finally study art (which I'm doing at a local college), participated in a marathon, and studied belly dancing to name a few. This year, my goal is to learn to power walk and to improve my time in the Toronto Marathon! I've enlisted the help of WoW Power Walking and am looking forward to my first lesson on Friday. I think I'll enjoy it as I'm a fast walker to begin with, I'm hoping I will learn the proper form so I can go longer distances faster. Cheers!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Down 1.4 lbs two weeks in a row

Happy, happy...for two weeks in a row, I've lost 1.4 pounds. At last week's WW meeting, Maureen gave us a challenge to lose 1 pound per week until Christmas. Full of confidence and armed with the Eat Clean plan, I took on the challenge and lost 1.4 this week. If I can lose 1 pound per week until Christmas, that would bring me to my goal weight, that would truly be a Christmas miracle! I'm so pleased that the Eat Clean Diet perfectly complements Weight Watchers plan. I use the points for tracking my portion and the eat clean food plan as a way to guide what I eat. And it works perfectly!

I was also able to upload some of the photos I've taken of the things I've made from the Eat Clean cookbook. My favourite recipe and most useful was the olive oil-butter spread. It's essentially equal parts of butter mixed with olive oil, put into a container and you can use in place of butter spread or when sauteing. It's fabulous!

Recipe

Mixing the butter and olive oil with my Braun stick


Voila! Finished product...refrigerated and it's a little harder than margarine, but works great.

Feeling good

It's been a couple or more months since I began eating clean. I was gun-ho about cooking the recipes from the Eat Clean cookbooks I bought, I went as far as photographing the different things I made. Well, all that great food went into my tummy and the photos are still on the camera waiting for upload.

A quick summary, I've "tested" a bunch of recipes, the ones from the Eat Clean Diet book haven't been so successful but the recipes from the Eat Clean Cookbook are far more consistent in their ingredient proportions and cook time. I will upload the photos of food I do have and talk about the recipes soon.

The diet itself is not a diet...as cliche as this sounds...it's a lifestyle...and it's working for me!