IF IT DOESN’T CHALLENGE YOU, IT WON’T CHANGE YOU

How have y’all been? Do you remember my post about my personal November Active Month? Ever wondered what happened to all the stuff I posted? Well, let me enlighten you!

As some of you may already know, I am currently a lot unsatisfied with my current way of life. Looking back on the last months, I’m a girl that eats a lot of crap in large amounts gaining weight and feeling absolutely not fit. The problem is not, that I am overweight – in fact, I can be glad to be still slim with all the stuff I eat. I’ve never been a BIG sports fan but I want to change. In fact, I need to change.

I am currently updating my lifestyle to a much healthier one so I can live more happy with myself. I felt really uncomfortable in the last months of the year and I have the motivation to get what I want! What I actually want is to lose a little weight, to do a lot of sports so I would feel more fit again. And I want to eat healthy. Not so much for losing weight but more for my personal feeling 🙂 Now the thing is, we ALL know the drill: Exercise on a regular basis, try to cut on carbs, eat more protein, drink a lot (water + tea), cut the sugar and throw out the junk. Everybody knows, yet only a little amount of people seems to be able to fulfill these. So far, I have been quite successful but also had a lot of hardships to encounter so I’d like to share my personal story with you guys and share tips that worked for me transferring from a junk food loving couchpotato to a healthy eating girl doing her duties! 😀

Don’t think your body will do wonders in a week. Because it won’t. Actually, the first weeks are the worst. When you try to turn your food into something better, you will get a lot of cravings. I read somewhere it can be even compared to a cold turkey only with less physical impact. I WAS IN SUCH A BAD MOOD THE FIRST WEEK! I just realized how many fat and sugar I ate every week, it was amazing.

 So if you fall back into old habits, don’t give up! Accept it, and start all fresh and new the next day. You won’t fall that easily again. And if you have a weak day that’s okay! Everybody has them. Just try to balance them out with an overall better lifestyle. Most important is to be realistic: What can you incorporate in your daily lifetime, what not? Do you have the time to cook? If not, precook everything you can on a day off, prepare snacks etc. For example it is highly over-ambitious for me to turn from carb-every-meal to a no-carb-ever mealplan, it doesn’t work that way. How I did it can you read in #2 as follows:

Everybody knows it, but I personally think it is SO difficult to do in real life. See, I’m a busy bee. I have university and/or work nearly everyday and barely a day off. I don’t have the time to prepare all the meals myself and sometimes need to get sth fast in my break. Also I think it is quite impossible for a normal human being to cut on carbs completely from day 1 to day 2. What helped me, was to slowly reduce the amount of carbs through the time. First I tried to eat a carbless breakfast (because I tend to eat in the night) most of the time, then proceed to try to only have carbs in my lunch but not in the other meals I ate. It works quite fine for me, but I love noodles so much that I just NEED to have them from time to time. I can’t cut on Nachos with cheese either when I’m in the cinema. 

Important thing is to incorporate it into your life that it fits your lifestyle. I try to have day without any carbs once or twice a week and try to reduce them to a minimum, without precise restrictions. It worked sooo much better than swearing off the carbs completely from day 1, your body needs time to adapt to changes!!

That was a point which wasn’t really difficult for me. I always drank a lot and I have always been a tea lover without sugar, so no problem here. If you have difficulties drinking enough, try to always have a drink around, most people are just too lazy to get it. Plus, USE A STRAW. You will drink so much more, believe me. Simple psychology.

Now again for all of you: I HATE EXERCISING. However, it is most important if you wanna become and stay fit throughout life. Just find something that you enjoy, there are 452395823 ways to do sports in this world. For me, dancing works the best. While listening to the music I completely forget the pain of exercising 🙂 I try to do little 15 minute exercises at least twice a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Really depends on my weekly schedule.

We all know it: You’ve been perfectly prepared and have an awesome first week, but somehow at the second week… and in week three, you didn’t even remember what you were doing back then. Staying on track may be the hardest part of it all. What really helps me are online advices like apps for smartphones. We use it everyday, why not use it for something useful?

I love to track everything I eat with the so-called app The Eatery. Simply take a picture, rate some other people’s food and yours will get ranked to, from fat to fit. I don’t really care that much about the ranking but for me, it really helps to see how much I’ve eaten so far! You will think twice about that damn cookie jar at midnight, believe me.

How it works

YAY I found out how to do screenshots on iPod Touch! (Just hold the power button and then press the home button… there it is!) Here’s my personal overview of last week 🙂

It’s not everything I ate because sometimes I forgot to snap my food. What’s missing here are nachos with cheese and icecream at the cinema as well as Spaghetti Arabbiata I had for dinner 😀 For my first week of trying to eat more healthy I think it’s pretty good! I ate a lot of salad, veggies, fish and curd with fruit 🙂 (Oh and in case you can’t tell from the pictures: I freaking love tomato! Tomato is the best veggie in the world, I think I eat at least a tomato a day 😀 ) Oh and good thing also is if you forgot to snap your food you can always type in text instead (although I try to not do that because the visual aspect really is important, SEEING WHAT you ate.) Wow now I sound like a diet-freak..

Just some days ago, while I was playing video games together with my boyfriend (we usually lay on the sofa kinda diagonal-on-top-of-each-other like two snakes) he was all like „oh wow, your belly really is more flat than it was before!“ It was just this sentence but it made me sooo proud. As a genuine couchpotato, it means a lot if my 24-hour a day Hercules sportsfreak boyfriend compliments me on my body (because usually he only says „Wow, you’re soft!“ because that’s all I am 😀 😀 😀 (He likes it though. 😀 ) )

At the moment, I am just really obsessed and motivated, I eat veggies and fish and lots of protein every day (despite little food attacks but I’m dodging them well!) I’m doing a little workout regularly and will join a new dance course in February AND I AM SO EXCITED IF IT WILL WORK. I really want this. I don’t wanna be the average soft girlfriend anymore 😀

So what are your thoughts? Do you try to stay healthy and fit in your everyday life? And also; would you like further posts with tips and my progress? Well, I’m so motivated I’m pretty sure even if you don’t want I’ll still post it 😀

All the best to you & Talk to you soon!

Sam

P.S. Making posts like this is a huge motivation boost for me so expect more!