So today starts our last week of the “official” fitness challenge. Yes, it’s true. It will be 63 days after starting out in March. When we started this it seemed like it would take forever, and now it’s nearly done! I am a week behind in my program because of the week when I was sick, blah. But I’ll still be finishing it. At the end of this week I get to take all of my measurements and “after” photos. I’m interested to see what those results will be.
I have to say that I’m SOOOO glad that I started this challenge. I did go into it a tad reluctantly because I was in a slump and LAZY and didn’t really want to put the effort into those insane workouts that I knew they would take. BUT a little competition goes a long way and now I can say that I’m super happy that I took that plunge.
The workouts are insane, especially this second month workouts, wow! I have seen myself grow stronger though. One day I actually did 16 pushups in a row, ON MY TOES!!! This, my friends, is progress! I have lost inches, I know, though I don’t know what the end result will be with all of my measurements, I’m a little nervous to take them. I’ve become more aware of my water intake (or lack of it, on some days) and now I rarely drink anything BUT water…. well, except my coffee in the morning, of course. 😉 I’ve been working on eating more fruit and veggies, and that has been harder than I thought. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t eating enough of them before I started this challenge, but now that I think about it on a daily basis, I’ve been doing better with those.
The scale still isn’t my friend, though I have not been on it for a couple of weeks. At the beginning of the challenge I anticipated losing weight right off the bat because of the crazy cardio I’d be doing. Imagine my surprise when not only did I not lose any, but I actually gained in those first few weeks!! That wasn’t pleasant, but I’ve been learning, slowly, that I can’t measure my progress by the numbers on the scale. One of the coaches mentioned a gal who weight 140 and was a size 12 and then she was a size 2 and STILL weighed 140. 🙂 That was encouraging to me because like I said before, if I could have those abs of the people in the video, I wouldn’t care if I weighed 200! 🙂 Ha!
I’ve started making my workout time my “me” time. So instead of plopping on the couch with a good book or browsing the internet when the kids are napping, I use that time for my workouts. It’s helped me look forward to them more, and helped me enjoy them more. Sometimes I can’t get them done during the day and I do them at night after Ella is down. When that happens, I get the boys occupied doing something else, and remind them not to talk to me because I’m exercising. Besides… it’s hard to answer them when I’m just trying to breathe! 🙂 And that’s another perk of the workouts. I thought that my breathing would be an impediment because it’s always seemed to be such a hurtle for me, but through these workouts I’ve gotten much better at controlling my breathing, and even when I’m breathing hard, it’s not going into that panicked asthma feeling. Nice. 🙂
So anyway, the challenge has been a huge boost to wellness/fitness for me. I’ve been tossing around the idea of starting my own challenge group for friends on facebook now that I know how successful they can be. Successful in lifestyle change for sure! I’m not sure if I’ll go for that right now or not, we’ll see. I also haven’t decided if I’ll publish my “results” to the blogospher yet either. There are so many intangible results that I’d hate to discourage anyone from trying it if they don’t think my tangible results are good enough. I will say though, that I did a little shopping last week and got several tops in a size SMALL!! And found a swimsuit that didn’t cause a complete mental breakdown. 😉 This is progress indeed! ha ha! Some of the gals on my team are interested in continuing the challenge past the official end, so I’m going to keep on going strong. Start the program again, and see if I can still meet some of my own goals… the biggest being to banish the jelly belly for good. 😉 Time will tell…..