Overweight!

Well, after 45 weeks, 64 pounds, 756 miles walked/biked/stepped/zumba'd and 337 hours of exercise I am officially now overweight and no longer obese! Woo Hoo!
# inches lost – 23.75, % weight lost – 27.47%

Am I stopping there? No, I am not. In roughly 35 more pounds, I will be at a healthy weight. My target is by May, when I go see the cardiologist again, but if I don't make it by May I'm not going to give up. See, I'll have all summer off from school and I figure I can go every morning, six days a week, to classes. I WILL get there!

I'm starting to have a lot more energy, and can now do jump rope, jumping jacks & jogging. I don't mind looking in the mirror at the gym any longer, and am really starting to enjoy the Zumba classes, because I can do the moves so much easier now.

Life is good. When I go to the next Biggest Loser meeting, I'm going to tell the nutritionist that I've decided I do want the nutrition counseling, rather than the personal trainer. I want to get a handle on how much I can cut my calories down to a day without starving. I want to keep in my snacks, and I might need to adjust my diet so I can keep the weight coming off.

This week I kept pretty strictly to the diet and I lost 7 pounds (so far). I'm also doing 1 hour of cardio a day, for this weeks challenge. It's nice, but I would like to get back to a weights workout, so I'm going to take tommorrow for a strength training day instead of cardio.

Another good week, even though I struggled...

Okay, so I was totally prepared to go in and explain what a difficult week I had staying on my diet tonight. I was totally prepared to have gained weight, or just stayed the same. You know, like Bob & Jillian giving that gal grief over just losing one pound on the current season of The Biggest Loser? Well...I still lost 2 pounds from last Monday's weigh in! How the heck did that happen?

Thursday I was bad...Friday I was bad...Saturday I was bad....Sunday I was bad....today I was bad! According to my scale here at home I've gained.

I won last weeks challenge to eat 8 servings of vegetables a day, get in a different workout, and lose the highest percentage of weight. I puzzled over whether to go with the dietician consultation or the personal trainer session, but CB convinced me to go with personal trainer and win another challenge so I can get the dietician as well. So I have to work really hard to win another dietician consult.

Anyway, I haven't made my soup yet, but I still feel like I'm getting back on track. I still worked out at 6 different classes last week. Now to get my snacking back under my control and my calories back under my control. Here's hoping for another great week!

This week's challenge: 25 - 35 grams of fiber per day. Guess, what, I just tallied my fiber count for today and I already made my 25 grams today. I don't think it's going to be as hard as they were saying it would be. Wish me luck!

My new focus!

Has it really been almost a year since I posted to my blog?

I realized recently I should be updating my blog with my current life and my goal to improve my health.

In April 2009, I started having heart issues, my BMI had just turned morbidly obese, and my weight was 233. I couldn't lean over and tie my shoe without getting seriously out of breath. I couldn't walk around the block without getting seriously out of breath. One day, I looked up symptoms and drove myself to the hospital. The E.R. diagnosed me as having adult onset asthma and put me on an inhaler & prednisone. It didn't really help.

About three weeks later, I was driven back to the hospital by a coworker. This time a cardiologist came in to check me out and decided I should get an angiogram. What he found was that I had developed diastolic dysfunction, which meant that my heart was not pumping correctly and was not relaxing all the way in the diastol portion. His advise, it was reversible, but I needed to lose 20 pounds and get exercise 3 times a week. I was sent to cardiac rehab at the hospital to exercise with the geriatric patients. That was an eye-opener! How did I get to this point?

I spent the summer focusing on my health: and through diet and exercise I lost 35 pounds over the summer. School started back up...and my concern was could I keep losing weight and exercising once I went back to work?

I joined Cindy's Gym, a local gym for women only, and started taking zumba classes 2, then 3 times a week. I lost another 15 pounds and then hit a plateau. I no longer had the nurses to tell how much I weighed 3 times a week, so I was accountable to no one!

Over Christmas vacation, I gained 9 pounds!

Starting on the new year, I joined a Biggest Loser support group at the gym, and have lost the 9 and another 5, for a total of 60 pounds lost. My current target is a total of 70 pounds, which would put my BMI at overweight, instead of obese. But my overall goal is a healthy BMI, which means I have to lose another 40, or 100 altogether.

I'm now exercising in step classes on Monday & Wednesday nights, Zumba on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. My latest addition was Friday Yoga classes. I have attended 2 classes so far, and was surprised at how well I can do the positions now, but learning to relax for 15 minutes at the end is a real struggle for me. The first time I tried I turned my cellphone off because it kept interrupting the class, and I wound up crying for 15 minutes because I was so stressed turning it off. Chase was home alone and I couldn't relax without my phone off. This last week I left my phone on, but it was on vibrate and my bluetooth was on so I would hear if he called.

I'm supposed to go back to see the cardiologist in May, and I'm really pushing for the 100 pounds gone by then. I have my setbacks, though. This week I blew off the diet on Thursday and Friday and have eaten like I used to.