GOOOOOOAL!

Day 10:I reached my goal weight of 145 today. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to go to the gym tomorrow. My focus now will be on toning and reaching my fitness goals. With the pushups, my arms are looking really nice. I had the beginnings of cellulite on my triceps when I began this weight loss journey, now it’s gone. My plan is to complete the hundred pushups challenge and then do 100 pushups once a week.At some point this month I will try the exhaustion test for the two hundred squats challenge. I have a feeling that I’ll be able to do 200 in one shot already. A few weeks ago I made it to 150 and I could’ve kept going. Once I can do those, I’ll do 200 squats once a week.I will continue to train on the treadmill to increase my speed and incline. Once I get to running 20 minutes at 6.0mph I’ll start utilizing the other equipment at the gym like the stair master, elliptical and bike. I’ll also be using the weight machines once or twice a week.In terms of diet, my plan is to transition to a diet of mostly whole grains (I don’t plan on giving up that occasional cup of white rice) and setting goals like getting my daily 8 cups of water and 5 servings of fruits and vegetables.A fellow pear shaped friend asked me if I’d found any interesting diet information specific to pears and I’ve decided to mention it here.

I had obvious success when I would evenly space out my calorie intake for the day. In the past I naturally didn’t eat breakfast (especially on days that I didn’t get up first thing to go to the gym) because I wasn’t hungry that early. I was more of a “bruncher” eating about 200 calories at 10:30-11:00 am and then having lunch around 1:00pm and a large dinner (usually two helpings).

Low calorie salad dressings and snacks DID help me. As well as measuring and limiting white flour and white rice. I only allowed myself one cup of white rice and no more than 4 slices per day (or 1 bagel) of white bread. If I had one, I didn’t have the other.

Reading the information in this article about how enzymes are produced during interval training made me decide that taking digestive enzymes on an empty stomach would be a good idea for weight loss. I noticed that in the weeks that I would take the enzymes, I lost more weight.

There’s another benefit of interval training for Pears: enzymes. Enzymes act as keys that open certain locks in the body. You can think of fat-burning as a sort of locked door that needs to be opened by enzymes.”One study found that certain substrate enzymes were increased in the high-intensity interval training group, compared to the steady-state group,” says Olson. “The interval group … lost significantly more fat from these different areas. So much of the fat loss had to do with changes in the enzymes and other kinds of things that you don’t see when you’re exercising.” In this case, the interval group actually burned fewer total calories during exercise, but the post-exercise effects of interval training made them fat-burning machines.

That same article gives recommendations for Pear Workouts that I’m thinking of incorporating. Essentially you lift heavy for the upper body and use lighter weights with more reps for working the lower body.

A Pear might work her lower body with a weight-loss, high-energy-expending type of program, but her upper body might need a completely different approach. Olson recommends trying a more traditional workout for the upper body, with heavier weights, three sets and a lower rep range.”There’s an idea that your whole body needs to either be on a strength program or a muscular-endurance program. No, no, no! It doesn’t have to be that way at all. You really have to think of yourself as having two personalities, since a ‘one size fits all’ weight training approach may not work for Pears,” concludes Olson.

I also want to share some of atypical things I did to improve my likelihood of reaching my goal.

I made a collage body parts depicting how I wanted to sculpt myself. I included arms, legs, butt, thighs and breast photos. I put this picture in my PAS where I would see it on a regular basis.

I had a handful of people that I would get into the minutiae of exercise with whom I would communicate daily.

I put up a picture of myself pre-kids when I weighed close to my goal weight on a highly visible spot on my office wall.

I said affirmations from Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life regarding the body parts that I wanted to focus on.

I started chanting Om Mani Padme Hum, especially when I was feeling down.

Since I haven’t had time to measure myself or take a final “after” photo, I’ll have to share those final stats later on this week.[ad name=”Google Adsense”]

Leave a Reply Cancel reply