Why the Living and Active Challenge

Here is some random information about me ......I don't diet as I feel it makes things worse ( being a daughter of a chronic dieter and I can see now that none of it ever worked and has now caused serious health issues. I refuse to do that to my kids). I believe eating healthy/ regularly and staying active  is how I will do it, however my problems are with regular eating I am never really hungry so I have to remind myself to eat and with staying active. We tend to get into a cycle and then something comes along and bumps it off track and before I know it its been a month or more. We do eat tons of fruit and veggies (my kids love snacking on carrots and homemade hummus), I make most of our meals from scratch and I don't drink alot of soda (only when hubby brings me home some as a treat or we go to town). We do have sugar and other treats but not often. I am trying to learn how to switch out sugar with honey in my baking.

Now here is why I am doing this challenge, I am a 31 year old mother of  four kids that hasn't been below 200 pounds in over 6 years. At that point I was at a high of 245 pounds which scares the crap out of me even now. I was a size 26 and barely able to keep up with my kids. We moved out of the city and almost instantly (first 6 months) I dropped to 220 pounds. Seeing that I started trying to lose weight then I found out I was expecting again... baby #4 was on her way, not a big deal I could do it but it did put a damper on my weight loss. Now here I am with her turning 4 years old in 6 months and I am still over 200 pounds. I don't want to be dropping  80 pounds in the next year but if I can do 30 or 40 pounds and actually KEEP IT OFF I will be happy. I want to help teach my children to enjoy working out and I want to be able to do fun things with my kids. One of my biggest goals is to be able to ride my bike with the kids when we go to the lake. There are a few trails that I think would be amazing, but I am not nor have I ever been a hiker. I did however LOVE my bike when I was younger. My biggest problem is right now I can barely do 20 minutes without my legs turning to rubber and having to coast some of the way. I do realize that I am just months away from being hit with snow but I want to ride as often as I can this winter. I don't have a specific weight or size in mind that I want to be, I just want to be healthy. I am taking this challenge to jump start my body before winter hits and I get stuck in doors.

I am planning on following the workouts Clare puts up on the site for the challenge but since we do PE in our home-school and its something that the kids NEED daily I will be doing more then just her 4 workouts. Our PE is very simple, we either do a circuit, a timed exercises, a walk (depending on weather) or a DVD. I have all of it written on index cards and then the kids rotate who draws the card each day. I will be doing the challenge early mornings and PE will be later in the day. I may even add some of her workouts into our schedule if my kids can do them.

Come back tomorrow night as I will post an actual photo of me and tell you just how hard Clare's Favorite Full Body Workout  and Ab Workout really was. I will also include what we did for PE just so its out there.

 

Blessings,

Cris