Adina’s Cute & Perky Blog!

So a friend of mine asked me to write down some tips she and her husband could use to start their New Year off right.  She did not want a diet, per say.  She wanted guidelines.  Gradual changes to make.

I thought about this for a while.  It was harder than I thought.  I mean, what do you tell someone without actually giving them a diet to follow? 

Then I thought, what if I could go back two years ago and write a letter to myself?  What would I tell the Adina of just a few years ago?

It would go something like this….

Dear Adina,

You have within you the power to reach your goal weight, but you just don’t know it yet.  Losing weight is hard, and the battle will be long.  The good news is you will look back and say it was worth it.

Your circle of friends will change a good bit.  Right now you are spending too much of your free time with food as the focal point.  You haven’t learned this yet, but food does not equal fun.  Friends are fun.  You don’t have to go out to eat to enjoy your time with friends.  In fact, the less time you eat at restaurants, the sooner you will make it to goal.

You think you are getting some decent cardio in, but you’re really not.  You rarely sweat.  You don’t get your heart rate up.  You only do it for twenty minutes.  You need to do more cardio and harder cardio.  You need to do it five days a week, and you need to sweat.

You have terrible eating habits that you need to change over time.  If you do it too fast, it will depress you.  It’s overwhelming at first, but not if you take it one healthy habit at time.  Replace white bread with wheat.  Skim milk for whole. 

Junk food needs to go.  You are not going to work this hard only to go back to junk food.  If you think you will go back to the way you used to eat, you will never reach goal.  And you will reach goal.

You need to recognize that some foods just have no place in your diet, no matter what you weigh.  No one needs a triple cheese burger.

You will learn that alcohol dramatically slows your progress.  In fact, you will learn that one drink throws your cardio off for days.

You will eat healthy so long that you will actually CRAVE healthy foods.  The first time you have fries, which will be one year into your diet, they will make you sick.  And that is when you will know why you had trouble for so long.  The food you put into your body on a daily basis made you sick.  Sluggish.  Tired.

There is no diet that totally eliminates hunger, so you will have some hungry days.  The good news is, after those first two months, you will rarely be hungry again.  And two hungry months is a small price to pay for years of over-indulgence.

You will learn that no matter what you eat, you will be full in twenty minutes.  You will learn that if in the worst of your cravings you eat something healthy and on plan, twenty minutes later that craving is gone.  And you don’t think about it again.  Where as if you cheat, you will berate yourself that rest of that day.

You will learn to look at a piece of pie and weigh its worth by how long it takes you to work it off on the treadmill.  And it is rarely worth it.

Two years from now you will not even recognize the person you once were.  You will look at before pictures and wonder how you didn’t know you were that big.  How you didn’t recognize how out of control you were.  You see why your dating life was non-existent.  You will see why people stared.

Two years from now you will no longer worry about fitting into a booth.  You will no longer shop in plus size departments and, you will no longer worry that you are the biggest person in the room.

Even your personality will change.  You will no longer feel the need to please everyone, because you will have learned to take time for yourself.  You will learn that putting your health at the forefront is OK…and even necessary.

Losing the weight will change every aspect of your life.  Food is no longer that center of your world.  In fact, you will go out with your boyfriend on New Year’s Eve in a little black dress and giggle when you both order eggs at midnight.

And most importantly, you will never look back and wish you had cheated or given in more. 

You will be proud at the person you have become.

And in the grand scheme of things, two years really isn’t that long.

Adina

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Training, Nutrition, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.