End of Week 1!

Today is officially the last day of my first week to a healthier, happier life! I feel great. Even though I technically have a "rest day" today on my workout calendar, I snuck in one video from Blogilates because I just really wanted to try her new Love Handle Hysteria video. Love handles have always been one of my biggest problems. Even with having a flat stomach in high school, I still had a good chunk of meat on each side of it. I think it partly comes from having a big booty; it just kind of spreads to everywhere near its core.

Another reason I really wanted to do at least one video today was because I'm kind of afraid that if I even stop for a day, it may encourage me to take another day off and then my whole calendar is ruined. It's happened before when I've gotten on workout frenzies. I know I should give myself a break, but I'm not really that sore and I only limited it to one workout. As long as I stay safe about it and don't try to injure myself with pushing too hard, I think I should be just fine.

So along with today being my break day, Fridays are the one day a week I'm allowed to weigh myself. Last week I started at 172.4 pounds and today I weigh 171.2. Is it what I had hoped to see? Not exactly, but I still lost a little over a pound! And any progress is solid progress. Who knows? Maybe that was a solid pound of fat I lost! Being a little more strict with my diet definitely would have helped that number, but maybe instead of amping up to two healthy meals this next week, I can spend more time focusing on all of the rules established for my healthy meal of the day.

For example, yesterday I ate this:

It was good in the sense that I ate tuna with raw carrots and broccoli. The down side is that I added a little over a tablespoon of mayo to the tuna. The dip I dunked my carrots and broccoli in, I'm not exactly going to knock. Yes, it is processed, but it's greek yogurt! I can't really feel too awful about that. But the mayo was definitely bad. So next week, I hope to entirely eliminate those "baby cheats" in my healthy meals. So that's my food plan for next week.

Next week's workout looks like it's going to be pretty interesting, combining workouts I've already did with a few new videos thrown in. I'm thinking I'll wait til the third week to start adding in extra videos that aren't scheduled.

Getting back to my progress for this week, I want to say that my tummy looks phenomenal! I was really starting to develop a gut in the past couple of months and now any skin barely hangs! No more tucking my fat into my jeans! And part of it goes to eating a little better and doing lots of ab workouts, but the other part goes to something Cassey taught me. In all of her videos thus far, she's talked about "pulling your navel into your spine" for proper form. She says it also engages your abs further and kind of trains your stomach to appear that way all the time. Now I've heard a lot of this before from her and other philosophies, but something clicked about actually doing it myself during the workouts. I found it really did make it harder to do the workouts while trying to maintain this part of your form. And I really kind of do think it is "training" my abs and tummy to stay in that fashion. In the last couple of days my jeans felt loose around my waist again! And it felt awesome! I didn't feel like a stuffed sausage!

So even though I've ranted about girls sucking in their stomachs before just to try to "appear" thinner, there really is more to it, I've found. Cassey's amazingness strikes again. I don't know what it is about her, but she is truly becoming one of my heroes!

Soon I will be figuring out my healthy lunch of the day. Hope it goes well!

TTFN