This is kind of long, but if you are interested, I want to start at the beginning and tell you guys a little about why I decided to cut back on sugar and start a healthier lifestyle.

I have been cheerfully chubby or pleasantly plump most of my adult life.  A BMI calculator would have told you I was borderline obese, but I never saw myself that way.  I mean, of COURSE I thought I was fat because I’m a girl hello.  But being as active as I was, I never would have described myself as heavy, just curvy.  Even after a stint with Weight Watchers and Curves, my weight never really changed much.  I still ate lots of junk, just smaller portions. So I fit comfortably in a size 12 from my early twenties until I got pregnant in my early thirties.

When I got pregnant, I ate all the things.  I gained weight at the rate I was supposed to, but towards the end of my pregnancy, when the scale tipped 200 pounds, I stopped weighing myself all together.  After Stevie was born, I dropped the weight – plus some – really fast.  Between the stress of his heart diagnosis and pumping every 4 hours, I lost 50 pounds over the next few months.  I was still eating everything I wanted, but was of the mindset that boobies are simply magical!

Being the size you want or the weight you want is a tricky thing though.  Because I felt like I was a healthy size, I didn’t realize that my insides were so unhealthy.  I was struggling tremendously with allergies and asthma. I’ve had them my whole life, so I thought that was just who I was and what I had to deal with.  But taking Benadryl every night just to get a few hours of consecutive sleep  was the worst.  It made me feel like crap all the time.  I could go through an entire box of tissues in a week and I was trying to avoid prescription meds just in case I got pregnant again.  So I carried on with my regimen of Benadryl and a few puffs of my inhaler several times a day.

I stopped pumping right before Stevie turned 1.  And gained 5 pounds in like a day.  But I was wearing a size 8 and hovering right around 148 pounds.  Which felt great to me!  I started downsizing my wardrobe and as soon as I got rid of like 10-15 bags of my bigger clothes, I gained another few pounds.  And it very slowly crept up from there over the next 4 years.  I never gained outrageous amounts of weight, so one day when I found myself in the dressing room having to buy the next size up, I was pretty disappointed.  But worse than disappointed in my weight, my overall well-being was not good.  I felt plain terrible most of the time.

Stressed.  Tired.  Cranky.  Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Rotten.  But I never in a million years thought it could be food making me feel that way.  I just assumed it was lack of sleep and getting older and hormones and those nagging allergies.  Having to go buy clothes, not because I wanted to, but because I had no other options, was just the icing on the cake. So I’ve really had to take time get to know my body a little better and make adjustments.

The first big thing I cut out of my diet was dairy.  I knew I was sensitive to certain things, but it turns out a significant amount of my “seasonal allergies” were actually coming from milk products.  When I gave up my favorite food in the whole wide world – cheese – I started to sleep through the night for the first time in years.  It was a sad new reality for me.  A life without cheese.  It still makes me depressed talking about it.

The next big change was when I started working out.  My husband is a great workout partner and so motivating. I would never have done it on my own.  But with him and our personal trainer, I started to whip my body into some kind of shape.  However, even cutting dairy and adding a couple workouts a week did not help me lose weight.  I could see my shoulders becoming more defined, and I knew I was getting much stronger overall, but other than that, I wasn’t seeing the physical changes I was hoping for.

— This picture makes me laugh so hard.  We did not plan to match —

All these changes came around very slowly over time.  And it was just a few months ago that two things happened to jump start me in the right direction. I not only watched  the documentary FedUp, but I also got great advice from a girlfriend who was making healthy changes in her life.  She was full of energy and excitement and I just wanted a little piece of that.  I wanted to feel awake.

She spilled her secrets of healthier eating, so I spent a few days doing more research and deciding which direction this was going to go.

…And in my next post (groooooan!) I will tell you more about my diet plan and how I make it work for my busy lifestyle.

Stay tuned!

DISCLAIMER:  all these articles are written based solely on my personal experiences.  I am not endorsing any diet plan or sponsored by anyone.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m also NOT a professional nutritionist, athlete, or trainer, so I can only tell you what worked for me.  But you can’t like turn around and sue me if it doesn’t work for you.  Do your research.  K thanks.