You Are What You Eat

...At least that is how the saying goes right?
My name is Alicia and I asked Heidi if I could help contribute to this blog/weight loss challenge. I recently lost 15 lbs on my own get healthy/weight loss adventure. I have 3 boys. The youngest is 18 months old. I am nurse. After our 3rd was born I decided to try out the ol' stay at home mom thing. It has its DAILY struggles, but overall I love being home with my kids. I love to read and craft. Pinterest is now apart of my daily life. I love exercise but am not always perfect at doing it and I LOVE LOVE LOVE food!
First off I want to say congrats to all of you because you recognize that there are things in your life that need to change. Whether you win this competition or not, you are already on the path to success because you are wanting to take steps to become more healthy.
I am a big fan of food and that is why I would like to discuss it today. It is only one of the many parts to becoming healthier and losing weight. There are many ways to approach a change in diet when you want to shed pounds. As Heidi mentioned before she likes the South Beach Diet. I don't know much about it, but I am sure she can answer any questions you have. Weight Watchers in another effective way to lose weight. My hubby's aunt lost 160 lbs doing Weight Watchers and has kept most of it off. I am not going to list all of them, but my point is that there are a lot of tools out there and it is important to find the one that works well for you. I struggled for about 9 months on my journey to find something that fit me and my lifestyle. I met a lady at church that talked to me about calorie counting with myfitnesspal. She had lost 30 pounds counting calories. She ate Oreos and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups on a daily basis and was still losing weight! WHAT!? Sign me up!! Little did I know it would become a new passion of mine.
I am now down 15 pounds because I joined the myfitnesspal groupies. That is the calorie counter I use. I did not lose the weight I wanted until I started counting calories. I am a very type A personality so keeping track of what I eat on a daily basis is right up my alley. :) Plus it has an app for my iPhone that makes logging a breeze.  It makes sense to me. If you take in less calories than what you burn, you will lose weight. A negative balance meant a movement on the scale for me. AND I could still eat kind of what I wanted to eat. And I had friends supporting me along the way. It is kind of like a Facebook for weight loss. You have friends in the system and they can see what you log whether it is food or exercise. It totally helps with the accountability thing and every time you lose weight people see it immediately and congratulate you on it which only helps to perpetuate the cycle.
I have told a lot of people about it and some people it fits perfectly with how they want to monitor their eating and with others not so much. My sister has lost 16 lbs doing it and a couple of other friends 19 lbs and 14 lbs. Pretty cool, right?!
A couple of other features I love are you can put your recipes into the system and it will tell you how many calories are in a serving. For example, my mom's recipe for fruit pizza has 166 calories per serving. I ate some for dessert last night. As I said before I still can't eat everything I want. It definitely puts certain things in moderation. I could have eaten the whole fruit pizza last night but that would have meant I could not have had anything else to eat yesterday.
Another thing I love is whatever calories you burn while exercising (there is a calculator in there for that too) you can eat in calories. I love my food so I try to exercise everyday because 1200 calories is not enough to feed this girl! If the hubby and I want to go out to eat for date night, we decide early in the day so I know how much I can eat throughout the day to have enough calories for later that night or I know how much exercise I need to do in order to have enough left to eat what I want to eat that night. I also scope out the menu. Most restaurants have nutrition info listed online so I will go and take a peek to see what I can eat before we go. One time for Girls Night Out we were going to Cheesecake Factory (WARNING: if you need to lose weight do NOT go into this restaurant without planning ahead! Most entree items have at least 900 calories. Even the salads are around 1200 calories. YIKES!). I went online and decided what I wanted and knew that I could eat half that night and save the other half for my lunch the next day. It really is all about planning. AND if you fail to plan you plan to fail, right?!
Okay, enought about that. Can you tell I love it?! If you think it would work for you go to their website at www.myfitnesspal.com and join. My username is akurzawski so look me up and we can be friends!
If that doesn't sound like something you would like, take a look what you are eating and pick something that you can cut down or eliminate entirely. For instance soda. I am not a soda drinker, but my hubs is so I know that it is refreshing for lots of people out there. So maybe cut down to one a day or  3 a week. If your family eats white bread and white rice maybe try switching to more things with whole grains. Or add in more fruits and veggies. If you are a family that eats out a lot (and believe me we have our times when the drive-thru lady at Taco Bell knows me by name) maybe pick 2 meals to plan and eat at home. Baby steps are definitely better than no steps at all!
Hope this helps! Happy eating!

Alicia