My journey

  My journey has not been one of deprivation. It has been a compilation of learning experiences, mainly, learning to listen to my body. Eating when I am hungry. Stop eating when my stomach says it has had enough. Drinking water when I am thirsty....
   Several things happened last year (spring of 2013). One, My husbands doctor suggested he and I start walking each day so we could talk away from our children and get the excercize we both needed because we were both overweight and the doctor wanted to see us lose our belly fat. I told my husband I would start walking with him when school got out. I didn't have time before that. The next thing that happened was that my husbands place of employment gave every employee a pedometer and the challenge to walk 10,000 steps. They said that everyone that walked 10,000 steps 20 days of the month would be entered into a drawing to go to Hawaii! The contest would go to December so that would be 9 months of walking. They handed out the pedometers in April. Again, I told my husband I would start walking with him as soon as school got out. In the mean time I began being sure I "ate like a queen for breakfast (3/4 cup oatmeal with one cup frozen berriess and frozen mango)  Like a princess for lunch, and a pauper for dinner. I worked on stopping eating when my stomache said "enough".
    June 6th? of last year school ended. That evening after reading the scriptures and praying as a family I announced that " Dad and I are going to start walking tonight. Please be asleep when we get home." We got our dog all harnessed up and went for a walk. We decided to walk the longest street on our block and clock how far it was. We walked up to one corner, down to the other corner and back to the middle. It was almost two miles. We had two challenges though. One, we have a black lab. They are spaz dogs. Ours wasn't used to listening to us and walking on a leash. It was a fight the whole way. And exhausting. The second challenge was that I was fine walking up hill, but downhill wasn't good on my hip. So I ended up limping all the way home. My loving husband walking slowly with me and handled spaz dog at the same time. For the next month or so we had to evaluate whether we were up to taking our dog with us or not. But I kept going, limp and all. After a month I remembered my chiropracter commenting that if I had better shoes my hips would be happier. My husband gladly took me to Big 5. We asked for a good pair of walking shoes. They had me try on Dr. Scholls. They felt great! The pain in my hips went away in a couple of days. Walking became easier. We were able to take our dog more often. She became easier to walk. I became the alpha female of the two of us. I was sore every day until October when I realized I wasn't sore anymore. I also realized I grown strong arm muscles from walking our dog!
    July of last year I notice my husband was using an app to record his food. It was My fitness Pal. It looked easy. So I downloaded the app and started to use it. I would record my breakfast and lunch and it would tell me how many calories I had left for dinner. I worked very hard to stay in the alloted calories allowed.