If you are anything like me and use the pinterest fitness section to gather motivation, by now you have seen plenty of images, articles, blogs, etc. that indicate that weight loss is heavily reliant on what you eat. In fact, many weight loss gurus will tell you that what you eat can sometimes be more vital to weight loss than the amount of time you spend at the gym. This is not a fact that I wanted to readily accept. I love food. I love going out to dinner with my parents. I love grabbing lunch at Chipotle with co workers. And I particularly love going out for a Friday night happy hour, where I enjoy indulging in the food specials more so than consuming the half priced drinks. So when faced with the idea of having to cut back on my eating, I of course was not a happy camper.
When I had the aha moment that caused me to begin my weight loss journey, I never imagined that going on a diet was going to be so challenging. I knew when I started this journey that I was going to have to diet. But I hated the word diet. I thought diet implied that my intentions were temporary. And nothing about the changes in my life were going to be temporary. I knew that I would never again be able to eat a whole frozen pizza for dinner and lose weight. I looked at my goal to lose weight as having to make a lifestyle change. Working out and eating right was something that I was going to have to do for the rest of my life in order to remain healthy.
I made a lot of changes to my eating in the last six months but I still had times when I binged, didn't count calories and didn't care what I was putting into my mouth. I just figured that if I was eating better and was working out, that I should be loosing weight. I had stopped eating full bags of chips, I had stopped slathering ranch on everything, and I had cut back on the amount of days that I was drinking. I wanted to believe that by shaping up my eating, I would be able to work out and lose weight. And this worked for awhile, but after 4 months of slowly dropping 20 pounds, I hit a wall and my weight stayed the same for around 2 months.
When I hit my weight loss wall, I assumed that I needed to go harder at the gym, so I went beast mode. After three weeks of this, my weight still wasn't moving much. So I have finally had the aha moment that was right in front of me but I just didn't want to believe. I still needed to change my eating. Though my eating had improved a great deal, it was still not perfect. I still had areas that I could cut back on and foods that I could eat in better moderation. After having this aha moment about a month ago, I decided to join Weight Watchers. Counting calories just wasn't working for me.
Joining Weight Watchers has really worked for me. I have started dropping pounds again, and I don't feel like I am depriving myself. The unfortunate part: what you eat does matter. Although I would love to tell you that you can lose weight and still pig out on onion rings and beer, this is not the case. Or at least not for my body. So I am here to tell you, from personal experience that diet really is a major part of the weight loss experience. I have found out that I cannot eat a whole plate of tater tots and expect to work it off at the gym. Weight loss is about balancing between eating right and working hard. And now that I have figured this out, I am confident that my weight is going to continue to drop every week!
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