My Shape for Success

WEEK SEVEN CHALLENGE Healthy Recipes As a young girl, my mother tried desperately to teach me to cook, but to no avail. I had zero interest and didn’t care for the labor involved. At the age of 18, I went to live on my own and that’s when the crap hit the fan. I’ll never forget looking through the glass of my oven, watching my lone chicken breast cooking atop a cookie sheet – no seasonings, no oils, no added veggies, no recipe of any kind - and realizing I had not a single clue how to feed myself. Fast forward to a few years later, my husband and I sitting down to our first meal together in our little apartment, and I had treated him to an extravagant dinner of Hamburger Helper and bagged veggies. This was fine for a time, and perhaps a step above my lone baked chicken breast (that was tough as nails and borderline unpalatable). But eventually, I came to a life-changing conclusion: I need to learn to cook. And I did! Over the past decade, I’ve developed an u...

WEEK SIX CHALLENGE Stretch Your Body, Calm Your Mind I’m guessing most of us aren’t all that interested in become contortionists. But there are some serious benefits to getting a good stretch in every day and it’s something we so often ignore. Including a stretch session in your day can: A.       Improve circulation. B.       Help you avoid injury. C.       Increase your overall coordination and range of motion. D.       Allow you to have better form during workouts. E.        Improve your sleep. F.        Reduce stress. For our challenge this week, you need to find 10 consecutive minutes to have a focused stretch session each day, 1 point per day, for a total of 7 points.  The goal is to get you to focus on stretching and take that moment to meditate, reflect, or revitalize yourself. Use this ...

WEEK FIVE CHALLENGE – The Importance of Sleep! Yup. Time for the sleep challenge. I saw this meme recently and actually felt like the complete opposite is true. Never before had I realized just how invaluable it is to get a good night’s rest until I had children. Of course, I’d had a taste here and there, with late nights talking with friends or doing school papers and such. But nothing quite compares to the extreme sleep deprivation that comes with mothering a newborn. Especially when your child sleeps like a newborn for 22 months. Getting a good night’s rest is actually pretty imperative to losing weight. Here is an excellent and very eye-opening study to illustrate that point: “Not sleeping enough— less than seven hours of sleep per night —can reduce and undo the benefits of dieting, according to research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the study, dieters were put on different sleep schedules. When their bodies received adequate rest, half ...

WEEK FOUR CHALLENGE Resistance Training Many gym-goers often go for the cardio workouts, which gets your heart rate going and offers excellent calorie burn. But some of us tend to ignore another type of exercise – resistance training. The purpose of resistance training is to push your muscles to exertion so they can build themselves up to be bigger and stronger. Maybe you don’t want more muscle? Oh, but you really should. With more muscle mass, you burn calories more easily, which is super helpful when trying to lose weight! As my mom would call it, you become a “better butter burner.” This is why men can usually shed pounds more easily than women. They already have more muscle mass to begin with! I read this little blurb in an article about resistance training and thought it was worth sharing: “ The benefits of resistance exercise are well documented, and ongoing research continues to prove that it's an important activity for Americans to be engaged i...

WEEK THREE CHALLENGE Because the “why” matters. Here’s the thing about dieting, exercising, and trying to lose weight. It takes time. Every day, we make decisions about our meals and our exercise. On their own, those decisions don’t seem very impactful. It’s just one meal. And yes, on their own, that one meal won’t have a lasting impact on your body. What harm are a greasy hamburger and fries going to do in the long run? Hardly any harm at all. Are you going to guarantee yourself a triple bypass surgery because you picked up that pack of donuts and ate it? Probably not. But meal after meal, day after day, it all adds up . Each small decision comes together to create our overall health. We either go one direction or another, toward a healthy body or a burdensome, unhappy, unhealthy body. Every day, with every meal, we make our excuses or we make results. And that’s why dieting takes such mental stamina . We have to see beyond the one meal and look at ...

WEEK 2 CHALLENGE (For the week of April 25- May 1) This week’s challenge is to help you eat healthier by planning ahead, rather than eating what’s quick, easy, or on the way.  Preparedness is key to success in a healthy diet! (6pts possible for Week 2 Challenge) Step 1: PLAN 6 MEALS BEFORE FRIDAY, APRIL 27. You are in charge of planning six separate meals this week , and these meals can include breakfast, lunch, and/or dinners. You can, for example, plan six lunches or six dinners, or you can plan three full meals for two separate days. However it pans out, you’ve sat down and written out six meal plans. Ideally, you are planning for meals that normally trip you up. For example, I have gotten into the habit of going out for lunch and I struggle to make healthy lunch choices at home. So it would be smart for me to include some lunch plans in my meal planning. It’s okay to have the same meal multiple times, but I encourage you to mix it up a bit. You ge...