60 Day Body Make-Over: Day 18

My sincerest apologies for not blogging since my week-aversary! I had every intention of writing this past Monday, however I spent the morning in the E.R. About 1 a.m. I woke up with the nastiest of tummy aches which led to continuous vomiting for 8 hours straight. I got severly dehydrated to the point of not being able to move. My husband came home from work to take me to the hospital. 1000ccs of sodium chloride, bloodwork, an EKG, and a urinalysis later, I was released. Still not exactly sure what had me down, but I spent the next two days in a Phenergan endused coma in bed. The doctor proscribed soup and yogurt as my diet of choice for a few days which is what I've lived on this week. Not exactly juicing, but doctor knows best. Needless to say, I've been on recoup time since then. I do have the intentions of returning to juicing once I feel better, perhaps Monday. Until then it's chicken noodle soup and Yoplait for me. I am considering just juicing for breakfast and lunch and then eating a sensible dinner. I think my body just can't handle all juice all the time. Maybe that's why I got so sick. Who knows. But health comes before vanity (i.e. wanting to lose weight). I'll try to be better at keeping you posted.

60 Day Body Make-Over: Day 8

Shame on me for not posting on my one week-iversary. As of yesterday morning I have lost 9 pounds and still feel great! I can't really tell in the fit of my clothing yet, but I get a pudgy face when I gain weight and I can tell it's slimming out some. Things I miss: Diet Dr. Pepper, Pasta, Cheese. My husband ordered a pizza last night. He ate that while I had to smell it and drinking my juice. It's hard to stay motivated until I focus on the end results. You go through so much food so fast. I have found a blend of fruits and veggies I love, but it's starting to get old. I need to find a new concoction. As long as I don't tast the veggies!! I tried to juice a sweet potato a few days ago (I've heard it's great)...it was NASTY! And I LOVE sweet potatos! Oh well. Trial and error. My favorite combo right now (get ready!) is 4 carrots, 3 stalks celery, a handful of broccoli, 4 oranges, an apple, 2 bananas, and a half dozen or so strawberries. It tastes like heaven and makes close to 32 ounces. I have my trusty Nalgene bottle that I take to work with me. I usually drink about 12 ounces on my way to work for breakfast (I'm not a breakfast person) and then leave it in the fridge or freezer to finish the rest for lunch. So I'm still trucking on, although I would like a nice trip to the Olive Garden or something. Bread sounds awesome. Can I juice that? Ha!! Here's a look at this morning's juicing ingredients!

Happy Juicing, y'all!

60 Day Body Make-Over: Day 4

First of all, I would just like to say thank you. I have gotten so many words of encouragement and it really gives me a drive to not give up. Yesterday was a true test when it came to food tempation. The Fourth of July always brings fantastic food. My parents were in town and my husband grilled out. I will not tell a lie. I had a hamburger. And it made me feel so gross inside! I went right back to juice for dinner and felt so much better! I'm finally getting the hang of these recipes. It's still hard to get the right amount of veggies and fruits nutritionally while still trying to not drink something that tastes awful! Here's this morning's breakfast!

What do you think the delicious ingredients were?

Another weigh in on Saturday! I've almost made it a week, and after the first few days of detoxing and such, I feel really good! Happy juicing!

60 Day Body Make-Over: Day 3

Catch up! Day 1 was awful! I felt awful, I was so hungry, and had a terrible headache (I had been warned the first three days are the worst). I realized really quick that I just wasn't drinking enough juice. Also, the recipes I tried were awful! One tasted like blended up grass. Yuck! Yesterday I felt a lot better. I drank for of the juice because I started freestyling the recipes. My favorite was pineapple (omg YUM!!), oranges, lemons, a peach, grapes, and a few stalks of celery (for veggie nutrition...other wise I'd just drink fruit). I drank a total of about 64 ounces. I still started to get a headache by the end of the day, but not as bad. Today is obviously day three and hopefully the end of the "hardest part." I'm thinking of trying some sort of strawberry-kiwi concoction today. We'll see! On the up side, I've lost about 5 pounds! Talk about inspiration to keep going! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a juicer to attend to!

60 Day Body Make-over: Day 0

I'm not a health nut, a work-out junkie, or anything similar. I love time on the couch, Dr. Pepper, and large quantities of pasta. However, at the age of 24, I feel it's time to change that. I was a chubby kid, but the grace of puberty gave me curves in the right places and a tiny waste. I am 5'8" and weighed 130 lbs all through high school and most of early college. I was an active member of the Million Dollar Band, my University's marching band. I didn't know how much exercise I was getting until I graduated and put on nearly 50 pounds. In college, I maintained a size 5 or 6 and felt pretty good about myself. Now I'm a size 14/16 and weigh (as of today) 182 lbs. I have a 37" waist, 42" hips, 28" thighs, and 14" biceps (not muscle, I guarantee it). 
I stumbled upon a documentary on Netflix called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead that changed my view on health. As stated on the film's website, 100 pounds overweight, loaded up on steroids and suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease, Joe Cross is at the end of his rope and the end of his hope. In the mirror he saw a 310lb man whose gut was bigger than a beach ball and a path laid out before him that wouldn't end well— with one foot already in the grave, the other wasn't far behind. FAT, SICK & NEARLY DEAD is an inspiring film that chronicles Joe's personal mission to regain his health. With doctors and conventional medicines unable to help long- term, Joe turns to the only option left, the body's ability to heal itself. He trades in the junk food and hits the road with juicer and generator in tow, vowing only to drink fresh fruit and vegetable juice for the next 60 days. Across 3,000 miles Joe has one goal in mind: To get off his pills and achieve a balanced lifestyle. 

I decided this might be for me. I've tried everything before. Low calorie diets (didn't lose a pound), Low-Carb diets (lost 10 lbs, no more no matter what I did), and Vegetarian (again, didn't lose a pound). As a professional procrastinator, I thought I would give this juicing diet a try as soon as I could afford a juicer. I got married 6 months ago, and my husband and I just bought a house, so needless to say, a $50+ juicer just wasn't in the budget, but I had good intentions RIGHT!? 

I was telling my mom about the documentary and how I might give it a try whenever I could afford a juicer. She posted on a local Facebook marketplace that she was looking for a juicer and not 5 minutes later, we were on our way to one of her friends' house to pick up a nice, FREE juicer. Now what would my excuse be? Oh yes, I need groceries. We'll have to wait till I could afford LARGE quantities of vegetables. And before that I needed recipes! Well, 2 days ago was payday and today I went to the grocery store and bought more vegetables than I have ever in my life had in my fridge.

I have enough groceries to have 3 "meals" a day for the next week. And I only spent fifty-ish dollars! I did the math and was shocked when I saw the price of each meal. 

Yup, only $3.85 a meal! That's so much cheaper than ChickFilA! I decided to also grab some ZipLoc bags to separate my meals for the next day the night before. Anything to let me sleep in some! Here's tomorrow's meals! 

I've also decided I need to exercise. Not like run a marathon or bench press an elephant, but burn some calories. With this diet, I'm going to also start the Couch to 5K program. It's 30 minutes a day, 3 or 4 days a week, for 9 weeks. It's supposed to make a couch potato like me be able to train for a 5K run in a little over 2 months. I don't know if I'll actually run a race, but there is the Color Run 5K coming to my part of the country in about 9 weeks! If I had to run a 5K, this would be the one!!

So in close, of course I'm hoping to lose some weight and get my sexy on, but most of all, I want to get healthy. I plan on keeping a close watch on my blood pressure and such throughout this rebooting to make sure everything is still working properly, but hopefully at the end of August I will be able to go back to food with a better sense of what I should and should not eat. I will try to continue exercising and eating healthy. But don't think I won't eat a piece of pizza every once in a while. Just not for every meal ;)

Without further adu, the dreaded "before" pictures. Let's see what happens!

 

I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good

When I was in junior high, the school had a “brilliant” idea about having a literature class AND an English class. Me, being the avid avoider of reading was DREADING this. My teacher, though, read books to us. One chapter every day at the beginning of class. I can’t recall all the books she read to us that school year, but I do remember one of them was Holes. Eh. But then she announced she’d begin reading to us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Ugh. NERD BOOK! Coincidentally, the first movie was going to be coming out in theaters later that year. So that first day of this new book when I got to class, I begrudgingly sat down to listen to this book for losers. Within 5 minutes, I was hooked and simply could NOT tune my ears away. Here, over a decade later, I can still distinctively hear her voice reading that Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number 4 Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. Being as that none of the books were movies yet, I used my own imagination to draw in my mind these characters and places and creatures named and described within the 300 odd pages. This place was truly magically. The big controversy at the time was how Harry Potter was evil and promoted witchcraft and was a terrible influence on children. For this reason, my parents wanted to go see the first movie to find out with all this hubbub was. I naturally went along. It was fantastic!! The casting, the sets, they were just what I’d imagined and dreamt Hogwarts would be like. After that, “hooked” wasn’t even enough to describe me. I saw every movie as it came out (numbers 4 through 7 I’ve seen at midnight releases). I began to read. What? Me? Read? No…Yes! I hated reading from second grade on, and now, you couldn’t pay me to put these books down. As new ones were released, I’d begin reading them immediately.  I even pre-ordered a few of the books and went to the bookstore at midnight to snag my copy and begin feverishly reading. I FOUND movie number 3 still in the plastic wrapped case on the street once. Who knows how it got there, but I now would like to think it somehow bumped into a port key  or disapparated and found its way to me. When book 7 was finally released, I “thankfully” had mono, so I had a great excuse to lie in bed and read. I simply couldn’t put it down. It was so in depth, so heart wrenching, and so beautiful. The ending of this fantastic journey ended…perfectly. I couldn’t believe it was over though. Never again would Harry, Ron, and Hermione hang out with Hagrid or sip a butter beer at the Three Broomsticks. I’d never read another tale of Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle trying to sabotage every Hogwarts house but their own. Never again would I feel a shiver at the mention of “He Who Must not Be Named.” But wait! There were still more movies. SCORE! And thus, the midnight release parties continue. As I write this, I’m looking at this online Fandango receipt. It’s for the 12:01AM showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 on July 15. It’s the last time I will ever buy a midnight release ticket for Harry Potter. And it’s bitter sweet. Even though I already know the ending, this is still as exciting as waiting for the book to reach my hands back in July of 2007. I’ve grown up as Harry and his friends have. I’m 23 and now instead of dreaming about these fictional stories, I’m dreaming of one day having children, appropriately named Hermione and my new favorite, Phoenix (like Order of the Phoenix. Oh yeah, it’s genius). I can’t wait to share these stories I love so much with them. I can’t imagine my life without these books. They have so many times taken my away from the trials of everyday life and transported me to a magical world full of adventure and excitement. I am the proud owner of all the books, all the movies, nearly all the Lego sets, a few Hogwarts text books, the book Dumbledore gave Hermione, and a lovely little Harry Potter inspired tattoo. If I could, I would thank J.K. Rowling for making me love reading again and for opening my life to so much more than I could have ever dreamed of on my own. Nothing will ever compare to the boy who lived.

New Developments In My Oh So Exciting World

YAY for me! I'm officially a student again! I got in one of the two classes needed to finish my B.S. and am taking an education to get my feet wet a little before hitting it hard with my master's. It looks as if I SHOULD be able to start that next summer and if all goes well, COULD be done by the end of summer 2012. Roll tide to that!!!! I'm so excited to be back in school! I also have a job interview soon for a position in Tuscaloosa. If that works out, I'm hoping to be able to convince the parents to let me move back to T-town by offering to pay some of the bills. It seems like life might be getting back to normal soon. Not to mention then amazing convenience of only being 30 minutes away from Joshua as opposed to 2 hours! Life is shaping up for sure! Prayers are being answered for sure!