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KJPugs Breaks Down her Amazing Weight Loss!

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Hi Kiddos! Today I figured we’d ring in a New Year’s Eve Party with the blogger life of the party – KJPUGS! KJ and I met many moons ago when we both were planning our weddings, and she has become one of my bestest bloggy buddies ever and she never fails to crack me up. Today she’s talking about her AMAZING weight loss! Read her inspiring story below and show her some comment love and don’t forget to “like” her at http://www.facebook.com/kjpugsblog !

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Hi everyone! I’m Kelly aka kjpugs, and I’m THRILLED to be a guest poster on the Double Chin Diary! Alyssa has become one of my very best blog friends (dare I say… life friends!?) this year and I am so glad. It’s wonderful to have someone to chat with who shares some of your challenges and goals. We’ve had similar journeys and struggles and I am so glad I have her in my life to chat with.

BF4L! (Alyssa's note: I pretty much cackled like a hyena when I saw this. AMAZING!)

BF4L! (Alyssa’s note: I pretty much cackled like a hyena when I saw this. AMAZING!)

If you haven’t visited kjpugs.com before, the things I seem to blog about the most are 1) pugs, if you couldn’t guess 2) nail polish and 3) my weight loss journey. Pugs are the joy of my life – I have three! – and nail polish is basically my favorite hobby and replacement for real life friendships. But my weight loss journey has been going on for a while, and I have lost more than 40 pounds towards my 60 pound loss goal! I was nearing 50 pounds lost, but the holidays have hurt me a bit… along with most normal people, I’ll be putting my butt back in gear in January.

I’ve been on this journey (this time) since September 1, 2011. I signed up for a work weight loss challenge and had to be weighed on the shipping scale at work because I was a last-minute joiner. I had to beg the shipping guys to avert their eyes! I started with Weight Watchers because it had meetings at my office, but after moving from Indiana to Florida this year, I switched to My Fitness Pal. 

Kelly's amazing weight loss!

Kelly’s amazing weight loss!

I have always had a problem with weight, mostly due to not making great food choices. I knew I had (have) two triggers, and they definitely were (are) carbs and sugar. I would binge on them all the time, and wasn’t getting enough nutrients from my diet. And to make matters worse- I could just keep eating, like a bottomless pit. I love quantity! I vividly remembering making Eggo waffles for breakfast at a sleepover in grade school… I made myself one, then two, then all of a sudden I had eaten five. And I could have had more! Sometimes my love for sugary and carby items feels like an addiction.

One of the best things I’ve found to replace my carb love is spaghetti squash. I blogged one recipe here, but I love trying new ways to prepare it. I’ll make it with my homemade carrot marinara sauceand frozen turkey meatballs, or my current favorite- General Tso sauce, green onions, and cashews. It’s very low calorie, but more importantly, it’s SQUASH, not carbs, that’s filling you up.

People who know me also know my obsession – BRUSSELS SPROUTS. I blogged recipes for both sautéed sprouts  and shredded sprouts. There are so many options- lots of people like to roast them also, which is very easy and hands off. It’s not a taste for everyone, but it’s an easy recipe that I can eat lots of volume for not a lot of calories. Another green option might be broccoli, if you’re into that stuff. Find new ways to spice and flavor familiar foods to mix it up. I find myself liking foods I hated as a kid because I’m trying them in a new way.

Eating right hasn’t worked alone though. Quantity is also important. My Fitness Pal allows me to set a daily calorie goal (based on how fast I want to lose, and how often I plan to work out) and track the food I eat. I can see how many calories are in the food I eat, and can track it, aiming to stay at or below my calorie goal. I also connect with friends on MFP – you can see if they’ve hit a milestone, lost weight, or tracked that day (and what they tracked, if they allow you to. I keep mine private.)

Early this fall, I decided to step up my game by attempting to work out. I struggle with being motivated, but lacking the funds. I don’t have the money right now to join a gym. So, I started running! At first, I tried Couch to 5k. And I liked it… for a few weeks. I had to do week 3 twice, and then accidentally did week 4 once. Bad idea. When I got to the point where I had to run 90 seconds straight or longer, I went from feeling confident and enjoying running, to feeling miserable, exhausted, and discouraged. One of my new Orlando friends, Lisa from Buffet Laps,  suggested I try the Jeff Galloway method with her instead. It’s interval running, where you run and walk in a set interval. I started training with a 1:1 interval and recently ran my first 5k, as well as a 3 mile fun run at SeaWorld.

KJ Pugs is On The Run!

KJ Pugs is On The Run!

I can’t tell you how amazing running makes me feel now. I feel strong, and proud of myself and my body. It’s something I couldn’t do before, and I now wish I had attempted to do it back when I was even more fit! I am planning a few more 5k’s, including the Critz Tybee Run Fest  with my sister in Georgia this February.

The most helpful part of all of this has been my husband B joining my efforts. I lost more than 40 pounds over 15 months. He has lost more than 65 pounds in seven months! His goal is to lose 120 pounds, and he’s more than halfway there. It makes it easier to be careful about what I eat when the person I eat most often with also cares! I got him doing the Jeff Galloway method running too, and hope he’ll join me for a 5k in 2013 too.

Feel free to friend me on MFP (and start hassling me if I am still slacking come 1/1/13!) and check out some of the recipes I shared in this post. If you are trying to lose weight or get fit, find a community for yourself! It’s fun to share tips and “little wins” with one another, and it makes the experience more enjoyable and often, more successful! Also, if you’re not succeeding as a runner, don’t be discouraged. Try a different method like the interval method, and that might work for you, too. My 13-14 minute mile runs are better than not running. And I’m always looking for more interval running buddies in Florida! Anyone want to do some races with me?

Or let’s just take up a collection so I can afford a flight to Cali to finally get to do Zumba and a 5k with Alyssa!

Thanks again for letting me guest post, Alyssa! Hope you are having a wonderful ‘Thaime!’ (har har)

You Better Watch Out…You Better Not Cry… A Guest Post from Amy!

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Hi Everybody, Alyssa here! My lovely friend Amy from Amy’s Writes wrote this post about the holiday season stressers – especially when trying to watch your weight. Amy’s been a great friend to me in Los Angeles and I often think she steals thoughts right out of my head! Read her post and chime in!

Fun fact! Amy and I once dressed as twins for Halloween. When we worked at the same company people confused us for eachother all the time! And NO, we don't usually wear sweaters like that.

Fun fact! Amy and I once dressed as twins for Halloween. When we worked at the same company people confused us for eachother all the time! And NO, we don’t usually wear sweaters like that.

I think I’m afraid of the holidays. Over the past view years, I’ve noticed a crippling anxiety that overtakes me during the holiday season, and each year it seems to get a little worse. Now as much as I pride myself on my talent for collecting obscure phobias, even I can see that this is one I’d be better off without. The holidays are supposed to be a time of joy, celebration, thankfulness, and family. And while I do feel all of that, each year those warm and fuzzy feelings are overshadowed just a bit more by sheer terror!

What’s there to be afraid of? It’s just a month long orgy of shopping with money you don’t have, eating foods you normally wouldn’t touch, and fighting crowds to go to places where people you don’t know will wish you “happy holidays” through gritted teeth…oh and guilt…don’t forget the guilt! What so bad about that?

Okay I really don’t want to sound like a Grinch, because the truth is that I do love the holidays and I want to continue to love the holidays. Just like most of you, the holidays hold a precious and nostalgic place in my heart. Unfortunately, that place in my heart is already padded with a layer of winter fat from the constant parade of holiday treats being served up by my coworkers on a daily basis. I wish I could just enjoy the seasonal goodies as the goodhearted and generous gestures they are. As a carboholic though, those treats leave me tiptoeing in and out of the office kitchen as though alerting the sweets to my presence will cause them to leap into my mouth and immediately attach themselves to my thighs.

Look at what was lurking in Amy's office. I couldn't resist, either.

Look at what was lurking in Amy’s office. I couldn’t resist, either.

I don’t want to have to avoid all my favorite things. I would love to just indulge carelessly the way many of my friends seem able to. But I can’t. Eating just one chocolate truffle from the office kitchen could easily drive me into a sugar spiral where I spend the rest of the day forcing as much candy-coated-fat down my throat as I can get my hands on. That’s just how my brain works, and until I accept that, I’m probably going to spend many holidays feeling more bitter than sweet.

So the holidays ARE a bit inconvenient. Okay, they can be downright annoying, and they certainly are stressful. There’s never enough money or time to get gifts, and each year the list of people who deserve and expect gifts seems to double. The food is everywhere, and putting on a nice cuddly layer of winter fat is pretty much unavoidable. But I have to admit, the holidays are still pretty great. Okay, I said it. They’re great. I guess I still do love this time of year more than I hate it, and if anything, the holidays are a chance for me to show a little love and acceptance to the one person I always leave in the cold…myself. I can’t be perfect over the holidays, but if I just stop torturing myself for a minute, I’m pretty sure I can be happy. After all, a little chubby, a little poor, stressed out and totally neurotic, I still have a whole lot to celebrate!

Monique’s Yummy Nacho Casserole

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Hi everybody, this is the first of several guest posts you’ll see in the next two weeks while I’m trekking around Thailand. Monique is a dear friend of mine and we met two years ago when I hired her to be a part of my social media team at my last job. She’s always got something cute and clever to say and tons of funny stories about her life, so check out her blog and don’t forget to “like” her at http://www.facebook.com/moniqueisblog.

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Hi there Double Chin Diary readers! This is Monique from moniqueis.com with a delicious recipe to share with you. My fiancé and I pull a lot of our recipes from allrecipes.com and we’re always looking for something quick and easy to make since we both have busy schedules. A casserole is always an easy choice for us and we absolutely enjoyed the Nacho Casserole recipe we found. It tasted so good but it’s really not the healthiest thing, the recipe calls for salad dressing and uses Miracle Whip as an example—Whaa!? So I adapted the recipe to be a little healthier and according to My Fitness Pal my adjustments lobbed off 141 calories per serving, not bad!

It’s hard to imagine tortilla chips ever being healthy but there are some better for you options out there, like Guiltless Gourmet No Salt Added Tortilla Chips or even one of the new Pop Chips Tortilla Chips selections.

Original Recipe: 497 Calories per serving

Improved Recipe: 356 Calories per serving

Each version makes 6 servings and takes about 35 to complete.

The red side shows the original ingredients and the green shows my improved healthier ingredients.

The red side shows the original ingredients and the green shows my improved healthier ingredients.

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
  2. Place ground turkey in a large skillet over medium-high heat with onion, garlic and green bell pepper. Cook, stirring to crumble, until evenly browned. Drain grease. Remove from the heat, and stir the salsa, corn and chili powder into the turkey mixture. In a 2 quart casserole dish, layer the ground turkey mixture, tortilla chips and cheese twice, ending with cheese on top.
  3. Bake for 20 minutes uncovered in the preheated oven, until cheese is melted and dish is thoroughly heated.

 

Enjoy!

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April’s Two Month Check In

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Well, dear readers, I wish I could write a joyous post like my sister did yesterday revealing her AMAZING 5 pound weight drop within a week but no… I must write a post of the opposite side of the spectrum:  failure.

I was doing pretty good for the first six weeks; I lost about six pounds.  Then the dark shadow of November came over me bearing down grief from the death of my cousin Josh, too much school, and a horrible neck injury that left me messed up and in pain for two weeks.

Whatever weight-loss wagon I was on, my fellow riders clearly booted me off for sitting on the couch and watching too many reruns of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” instead of attempting to go for a walk or eating something that didn’t come from a box.

But whatever, like my last post regarding my battle with math, my failure of the past month will only make me try harder.

I decided to take this past Sunday as a day to get in some fun exercise by walking for miles around the marina region of San Francisco.  I practiced my photography and trekked about four miles up and down the gorgeous water front overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.  I tried to keep my pace up enough to get my heart rate going and every time a neon spandex wearing jogger trotted past me, I only gained more motivation to boost up the speed.  I should have kept track of the amount of damn joggers I saw within my two hours of being at the marina.  Probably 100.  Of course, it was 65 degrees and totally clear in San Francisco that day, which is pretty rare for a December afternoon so I can’t really question.  Plus one day I’ll be a “damn jogger” rather than the “damn girl taking up the sidewalk with her walking”.  Oh, how I look forward to getting to the point when I look forward to running instead of dreading it.   I was there once, and it wasn’t really THAT long ago.   I just need to get there again.

Getting exercise by the golden gate bridge!

In January I will be joining up with some other friends from around my area in a weight-loss competition.   The contest goes for three months and has a $50 “buy-in” so the ending pot could end up being quite the pretty penny for whoever wins.   If I were to actually get serious about my weight loss, who knows!?  Maybe I could win!

I’m still enrolled in my Pilates and yoga classes for Mondays and Wednesdays.  I  also could utilize my free three-month membership to 24-hour Fitness and just get obsessive like my amazing homegirl Melody did and make the weight fall right off me.  With the combination of exercise and eating my “clean slow carb” diet,  I know that whether I win the contest or not, I could still finally get out of the 200′s and have a 1 for my single digit weight for the first time since I was 16.

I look forward to my future.  ;)

How about you guys?  Have you or would you ever do a weight loss competition?

Peace and monkeys,

 

 

Discovering the ingredients of our food – By April

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One of the most valuable things I learned while working at the women’s gym years ago was about nutrition and the way our bodies process our food.  I never really thought much about what went into the food I was eating.  Cheese could come in powder form within a dulled silver bag and I would eagerly dump that package of happiness into my already melted combination of milk and butter.  I would slowly stir my sauce and watch the electric orange color of the cheese slowly fade into a golden and buttery sunset over the ebony darkness of the pan.  Oh Kraft, you’ll always hold a special place in my heart.  Literally, because I bet a few of my overweight pounds are thanks to my adoration of Macaroni and Cheese.

My nutritionist taught me the art of reading labels and how our bodies respond best to products with the LEAST ingredients.  As in applesauce that is made of apples or peanut butter that is made from peanuts.

For example,  here are the ingredients of a popular peanut butter brand: ROASTED PEANUTS, SUGAR, HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (COTTONSEED, SOYBEAN AND RAPESEED) TO PREVENT SEPARATION, SALT.

The same company that makes that particular peanut butter also makes a “natural” version that lacks the funky hydrogenated oils but still has added sugar and palm oils.  If you spend some extra time checking out the other brands, you’ll probably find a peanut butter than only consists of peanuts.  It might cost more but it could end up helping your health which to me, is very worth the extra $1.

Once I learned to cut out the products in my life that had ingredients like hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup, my health dramatically increased.  I suffer from heartburn and on the days I manage to go without anything that has either of these food additives, I don’t get heartburn.    Plus, once I lost weight the heartburn was one of the quickest things to go as well.

I also discovered that products made with aspartame and other sugar substitutes seemed to have a direct correlation to these weird headaches I would get.  They were very particular and unlike any other headache I had before.  I noticed this problem when I was drinking a light lemonade every day for four days in a row.  While I do get headaches often, this just seemed wrong. I finally figured out it was because of the lemonade I was drinking and the artificial sweetener that was replacing the sugar.  There has been times when I had eaten baked goods or even broccoli salad unknowingly that this particular sugar substitute was included and would end up with a raging headache soon afterwards.

Learning about the ingredients in my food opened up a whole new world of obsession for me.  I would say knowing what I am eating is one of my top priorities in life not only because it greatly affects my health but because the direction the American food system is heading just plain FREAKS ME OUT…

::For the sake of not writing 1,000 words right now I am biting my tongue on everything I could say on genetically modified food::

With the help of amazing books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and the education I have gotten from my nutritionist and sustainable agriculture classes, I have a very deep passion for learning about our food.  My passion is so strong that I plan on volunteering next summer to do some WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) around Europe so I can further learn about our food. For those of you who don’t know, I am working towards a degree in environmental studies and sustainable agriculture so I look forward to being able to take my passion even further.

I tend to go off on this topic as you can plainly see so I would like to start writing some separate blogs about a few of the things I mentioned like high fructose corn syrup and the genetically modified foods.  My environmental studies courses expose me to a lot of worthy information that people just aren’t being told and I would love the opportunity to share that with all of you.

Have you ever had any health experiences when it comes to the foods you put into your body?  Does anyone else get heartburn from high fructose corn syrup products?  How about headaches from artificial sweeteners?

I’d love to know!

Peace and Monkeys,

 

 

 

A post by April – Starting Again – Getting Back on the Weight Loss Train

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Hi everybody! I have some exciting news. You know how this blog is called the DOUBLE Chin Diary? Well – it’s not just double because of the amount of rolls under your chin, it’s double because now there are two bloggers at the Double Chin Diary! Please give a warm welcome to my older sister April. Here’s some things you should know about April – April is 29 years old, an animal lover, a major environmentalist in that she spends her free time picking trash up off the beach (seriously saintly), loves working with kids, and she travels to all kinds of cool places all the time. April will be stopping by every now and then to chronicle her journey towards losing 30 pounds by the time she turns 30 in April. (That’s a lot of Aprils!) I’m looking forward to seeing how our stories match – and how they differ. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

 

Here I am on my 29th birthday – celebrating with yummy food.

Seven years ago I managed to lose 50 pounds with the amazing and classic style of eating right and working out more. It was irritatingly hard the first few months that I struggled through workouts and eating whole grains and it wasn’t until I had a break down on the scale that I finally started to see a change. The change surely wasn’t on the scale since I was in tears, the change was within myself.

A friend that I had met at the gym consoled me as I cried about my disappointment in myself and questioned why I wasn’t losing weight yet. My friend then stepped on the scale and showed me how she weighed almost exactly the same as me. Being the same height as myself too, her simple action made me A LOT better about myself. I had never thought of my friend as a fat woman so seeing that we weighed the same meant that surely my body couldn’t be THAT horrible.

I decided that I would just work harder on the exercise and keep at it. I even managed to get a job working at the small women-only circuit training gym. After that initial break down on the scale, my weight started to creep off pound by pound. I would go down two pounds one week then gain back a pound in the next. That pattern continued for a solid four months until I had lost fifty pounds. I hit a plateau and it seemed like no matter what I did to lose weight, no matter how much I worked out or how wonderfully light I ate; the weight just wasn’t leaving.

I managed to keep the weight off for a few years until I started to go back to my old ways of eating fast food, drinking soda, and working out MUCH less. As it tends to happen, that kind of behavior only resulted in me packing on the pounds until one day I noticed I was a mere 11 pounds from the heaviest I had been before I ever lost any weight at all.

That is where I am today.

I feel disappointed in myself for letting my weight come back but I have hope in knowing that I did it once before and now I’ll just have to do it again.

I’m starting small and cutting back on my sugar intake. I’ll give up my precious Taco Bell again that has been my treat of the summer. I’ve begun taking walks and hikes again. I have even been pretty routine about my doing my weighted hula hoop. It will take some time and a lot of effort but I know that eventually I’ll get back on the road I need to be on.

How do you deal with getting back on the “weight-loss train” when you’ve been off it for so long?