Dear New Year’s Gym Goers,
Unless you are truly 100% going to stick with it, please do NOT waste my time by going to the gym the first two weeks of January and taking up all of the equipment only to go back to sitting on the couch watching sitcoms and eating potato chips. Phew. Look, I am all for people becoming fitness orientated and realizing that fitness isn’t a one month do-it-and-be-done thing. Fitness is a life change and it’s something you have to stick with – for life. So if you can commit, then by all means go for it and I will gladly shut my mouth!
I recently have had a few friends approach me asking what I do and how I have come to where I am at today. (Background story – I was quite a porker back in high school (5’3” and 168lbs), went to college dropped a ton of weight because I was broke and couldn’t afford to eat like I did when I lived with parents (aka THE WRONG WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT), got a job, gained a bunch of weight back, and then got smart, started working out, now I am obsessed with fitness.)
And guess what? I do NOT have to starve myself. In fact just the opposite, I eat 5-6 small portioned, healthy meals a day.
Okay, so that being said this whole 5-6 meals thing is new to me, I use to be one of those eat as little as possible and run as much as possible type people, luckily I figured out before it became a health concern that that is not the way to go about things. I owe a lot of thanks to this revelation to my boyfriend and his co-workers at GNC. I have been lifting weights (yes I am a female that actually weight lifts) for about a year now. No, I do not look like She-man, reality is women who weight lift do not become Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gasp. Yes, it’s true. Anyways… after a year of weight lifting, I was confused why I was not seeing the results that I wanted to. Well it was actually simple. I was not consuming enough for my body to build muscle; actually my body was so scared that it was starving that anything I ate would be stored as long term fat (this is called ‘starvation mode’). That’s exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve. So bump up the food! I mean seriously, I am not going to complain about being able to eat more.
Perhaps, I am going to change the tone of this blog (“is she really doing this to us again?” ).
C’mon now, this thing is just my rantings, I can make it however I want. It’s your choice if you read it or not.
So currently my meals look typically something like this with meals being 3 hours apart:
Meal One (9am): GNC Lean Meal Replacement 25 Shake (Blueberries n’ cream) 1 scoop with a banana, 8oz of water, and 3oz of non-fat Greek yogurt. Blend it all up and its one delicious breakfast smoothie! Yum!
Meal Dos (Noon): Salad (and by salad I mean spinach leaves, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever other veggies I happen to have at the time) with hot sauce as a dressing or if I am being ‘bad’ fat-free Italian dressing.
Meal Three (3pm): Hard-boiled egg white, celery stalks, some fruit, and the other half of my Greek yogurt from that morning. OR Whole wheat toast with natural organic peanut butter and the other half of my yogurt.
Meal Four (6pm): ½ spinach stuffed chicken breast (I make a ton of these at once as my boyfriend and I both consume them daily it’s just easier to prepare and heat up when you need it. But it’s simple: boneless, skinless chicken breast, pounded flat, steamed spinach with a tad garlic, roll up and insert toothpicks, sprinkle with Mrs. Dash and bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes), and I eat that with ½ cup of Quinoa or ¾ cup of brown rice.
Meal Five (post-workout usually): GNC Amplified Wheybolic Extreme 60 Protein Shake (I use 1 ½ scoops of Fruit Punch Flavor)
Meal Six: Slow digesting protein shake. Currently Muscle Milk Chocolate with a scoop of all natural organic peanut butter. This one is slow digesting so that it continues to keep your metabolism active throughout the night until you break fast in the morning.
I do take supplements as well. Daily, I take a fish oil supplement, OxyElite Pro, GNC CLA, Cellucore T7 Extreme, as well as a pre-workout such as C4 by Cellucore. Let me tell you, the boyfriend’s GNC employee discount helps out a ton!
Yep. That’s my health rant and what I am currently doing. Maybe I will try and be good and start recording stats like weight, measurements, etc…. we’ll see 😉
Until next time…
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