Happy Thursday! -- Size 38 ... WHOA

What's up everyone? Did about 12-13 miles on my bike tonight on high intensity, so feeling good!

Guess what, I'm back on the losing side! I lost about 1.2 pounds this week. 


Last week 255
This week 253.8

I have some family visiting in town this week so I wasn't able to get my full update in last night, but I wanted to give a quick update and share this Article I found that is really interesting. 

Here's the link if you want to read the whole thing ....  but I found these tips really useful.  

From Bob Harper's Article , "Here are my best suggestions:

1) Improve the quality of your sleep. New research shows that those getting 7-9 hours of sleep are less likely to be overweight. Sleep improves blood sugar regulation, reduces stress hormones, and balances out hunger/fullness hormones (leptin, ghrelin). Are you getting good sleeps? If not, is there anything that you can change that would help?

2) Increase and/or preserve muscle mass. The only way to push your metabolism back up is to gain muscle mass. The only way to gain muscle (or improve your ratio of fat to lean muscle) is to engage in strength training week (a goal of 2 times per week isn't enough because often, you'll only get 1 of those in).

3) Be very selective with type of carbs. Choose lean protein, lots of veggies (cooked and salads), and stick with higher fiber carbs (brown rice, high fiber cereal, high fiber bread, beans, and fruits). You could experiment with replacing 1-2 of your carb servings each day with veggies and protein.

4) Practice stress reduction. There is evidence that lower stress levels are associated with lower body weight. Regular exercise, hobbies, yoga, meditation, breaks at work, getting sunshine, etc. all help you lower stress level, balance hormones, sleep better, and be able to make healthier choices.

5) Revisit your eating. Are you writing things down or are you guess-timating? In fact, You may not be eating enough and under-eating can actually undermine weight loss as your body goes into starvation mode.

6) Revisit your exercise program. You body adapts to your exercise program which means that you burn fewer calories doing the same thing. You may need to increase the intensity."

It's a funny coincidence because these are all things that I found when I was doing research on getting over a plateau. 

Anyways, this first week of plateau fighting has been going pretty well , but not as well as I'd like. I'm going out this weekend to get small set of weights to do some strength training. I'd honestly rather do that then join a gym, just because I don't want to waste time driving somewhere 3 nights a week.  


On a brighter note I bought my first pair of size 38 shorts this week! It felt really amazing to buy a size since I haven't worn since High School. Also, the t-shirt I'm wearing while I'm typing this is from a family trip to the Outer Banks, also when I was about 15-16 yrs old. 
So good things happening.

Thanks again to all of you for your wonderful encouraging notes, texts, messages, posts , etc. 


Thanks to my Mom for sending me this quote for the week :-)


"By Perseverance, the snail reached the Ark." - Charles Spurgeon