April 2010: Down 5.8 pounds without counting calories!!!

As I sit here tonight all sweaty from my Total Body Sculpt with Gilad workout, I will look back at the month of April. On April 1st I had my second monthly weigh in. I was 133.8 pounds- down 5.8 pounds!! This was the highest monthly loss so far based on my starting weight since my entire weight loss from December 14 2009 until March 1st 2010 was only 5.9 pounds. None of my monthly weigh ins since this one have been this much weight either. I was still working out almost daily with Gilad and by now I believe I had removed all of the high fructose corn syrup food items in my cabinet and hiding in the fridge (with the exception of Brian's stash). In late April I came down with a cold and missed about a week of workouts.

For those of you who think 5.8 pounds is not a lot to lose in a month remember I was NOT counting calories at all. I ate when I wanted to but did not eat junk. Some of my favorite snacks are nuts (almonds, walnuts, cashews, brazil nuts) and dark chocolate (Ghirardelli Intense Dark 72% or 86% cacao). Another favorite is Kashi TLC Peanut Peanut Butter Chewy Granola Bars.


Do you enjoy documentaries? One I really liked that I watched a long time ago was Super Size Me. That is the one where the guy eats McDonald's for a whole month- GROSS!

Another one I watched that I found very educational was Food, Inc. and I think everyone needs to see this one. After watching it I did not eat chicken for a while and I am sure I would have done the same with beef but I really don't eat much of that anyway. Anyone who wants an inside look at the food industry should see this one.


If you have about an hour and 50 minutes available I recommend you watch The World According To Monsanto. Click on the link and you can watch it online for free. After watching this I have tried to not eat a lot of soybean/soy products because I do not want to eat genetically engineered food.

Another one I recommend is Sugar: The Bitter Truth. This one is about an hour and a half long and you can watch it free by clicking on the link.
Did you watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? If not there are clips of it on You Tube that are very interesting. Watch this clip about chicken nuggets. Jamie Oliver also did a show called Eat To Save Your Life that is worth watching. The link will take you to part one and there are 8 parts. I recommend you watch all 8 parts.

I hope I have given you enough homework to keep you entertained until my next post which will cover May.

March 2010: Thank You Gilad!

This blog post is all about March. March 1st is when I started doing monthly weigh ins. Back on December 14, 2009 at the doctor's office I weighed 145.5 pounds. My scale never weighed accurately so I got rid of it and got a new one. I started to notice my body changing and my weight dropping so I decided to start monthly weigh ins on the first of each month. I would weigh myself first thing in the morning before getting dressed. On March 1st I weighed in at 139.6 pounds. I had lost almost 6 pounds! This made me very happy. I was not counting calories or limiting how much healthy food I was eating. If I felt like eating I did but I ate healthy unprocessed food instead of junk.

I also continued my Total Body Sculpt with Gilad workouts. I was doing them 5-6 times a week. One thing I like about the Gilad workouts is that they have a variety of different exercises at different intensities. You may be going at a fast pace for a while and then you switch to something not as intense for a while which gives you time to recover so you can keep up with the workout. The first time I noticed my body changing was during the abdominal segment of the workout. When I was doing my crunches I could tell that my hips were not as wide as they were before- they had gotten smaller!! Seeing my body slowly change was all of the encouragement I needed. My clothes were getting looser. This was working! It felt good to see results.

OMG! I think I just thought of the perfect name for the blog. I can't call it "My soon to be named bloggy thingy" forever you know...

Ok- it's official! I just changed the name to "My Journey to Achieve Optimal Weight & Health" since that pretty much sums up what I am writing about here.


Now back to March. I read a very interesting book about hormones with some awesome dietary advice in it. It was Master Your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels. This book explains the impact hormones have on your metabolism and how your diet affects your hormones. It also has meal plans and recipes included. This book will make you think twice about what you are putting in your mouth.

My metabolism appeared to be working again. I am not sure if I should credit the Gilad workouts or the foods I was eating. I think it really was a combination of both. The results made me want to continue on this new road I was on and I was enjoying all of the new foods I was eating.

At this point I had very little interest in foods containing high fructose corn syrup. You could sit there with a bag of Oreos or Chips Ahoy cookies and it did not bother me. Once you stop eating crap you lose interest in it since the real whole foods actually taste better. There are Oreo Cakesters on the counter right now and I read the label and saw the high fructose corn syrup and for some reason they no longer seem appetizing to me. I think I have reprogrammed my brain somehow to reject all foods with high fructose corn syrup in them. I am ok with that. My next post will cover April.

February 2010: Learning more with Podcasts & Books

Let me start by saying I LOVE my iPod nano! I use my iPod while I am at my desk working and it really helps make the day go faster. If you don't have one you should get one.

Don't ask me how to work one of these new ones though since mine is a 3rd generation nano but it still works GREAT and I am not the type of person who has to have the "latest" technology. After all, my cell phone is a pre-paid cell phone that does not even have a camera.

I subscribe to a lot of podcasts though iTunes and enjoy listening to them while I am at work. I frequently jot down notes as I listen to them. I have a pile of paper scraps with notes on them that I am trying to add to a word document I made with all of my podcast notes. If you do have an iPod and want to listen to some of these podcasts (all are free)here are the health & fitness related ones that I listen to regularly:

1. Beyond Diet Podcast
2. BTR: Underground Wellness / Blog Talk Radio
3. Build A Sexy Body
4. Dishing Up Nutrition
5. Fat 2 Fit Radio
6. Healthy Mind - Fit Body (these guys are very into Paleo diets)
7. Logical Weight Loss
8. NPR: Your Health Podcast
9. Two Fit Chicks and a Microphone


In an effort to get as much information as possible I also read a bunch of diet and health books. Some were very informative, some were boring, and some totally sucked. The first book that stood out to me was The South Beach Diet Supercharged by Arthur Agatston, MD, with Joseph Signorile, PhD. This book teaches you how to make better food choices and appears to be a nutritionally sound diet consisting of a wide variety of wholesome foods. I used it as a nutritional guide only. I did not do any of the phases since my intention was not to be "on a diet" but to change my eating habits. The book includes nutritional guidance, workouts, and recipes. This is the book where I found my recipe for "Chock-Full-of-Veggies Chili" which I make frequently. I made a batch of it last night and am taking it with me to work this week to eat for lunch. I serve it over quinoa- very YUMMY! I do slightly alter the recipe since I do not eat mushrooms- ick!

I will try to review more books with each post since I have read so many of them. So let's look back to February. I continued adding more healthy foods to my diet and by then had finished off any of the highly processed foods that remained in the house. One thing I should note is that my husband Brian was not participating in my new healthy food diet so I had to give him his own cabinet and I had my own cabinet. So any processed foods that he liked ended up in his cabinet and I finished off the ones he did not like. The next thing I did was went through everything in the cabinets & refrigerator. I read all of the labels and got rid of everything that contained high fructose corn syrup, MSG & trans fats that I missed the first time I cleaned out the cabinets. It is amazing how much of that stuff is hiding in foods and condiments.

I continued my workouts with Gilad's Total Body Sculpt. I had recorded them on the DVR and I randomly picked one each day to work out. On February 16th I chose one that was called Total Body Sculpt PLUS, not realizing that those are one hour episodes. I did not figure it out at first and by the time I did I was already into the workout so I thought I would just keep going. That was really hard. The 30 minute episodes are actually about 22 minutes once you skip the commercials so I had only been working out 22 minutes a day. This was like doing two workouts in a row and it was a challenge but I did live to tell the story. If you want to watch a free preview (the frist 2 minutes) of one of his workouts you can click the link below.

I don't have a lot of notes about February. I was continuing my eating plan and my workouts. I feel the workouts were very important to help me build my muscles to increase my metabolism that had apparently slowed down over the years. I was not tracking my weight at this point. I did not start tracking my weight until March. More about that in my next post.