And the Winners are....

Good morning everyone!!!
Just wanted to announces the winners of the week of giveaways!!!

I will leave the DVD giveaway until Monday so there is still time to enter that one!

I used random.org to generate winners.

For our first probiotics giveaway
Winners are:
Valencia
Eric
Brandi

Congrats to our winners!! Remember there is still a 40% discount to all of my bloggers CBF40 so if you did not win you can still test them out for a great low price!

Next Giveaway was Chobani!!!

Winner was Mrs. JPT


Next Giveaway was a Fit Bee T shirt!!

Winner is -Re

Congrats to all the winners!!! Please email me your contact information tryn2bfit@gmail.com and I will forward it to the companies shipping out the probiotics and chobani.
For the t-shirt winner please email me your contact information and the shirt size you would like!!

Thanks everyone for participating!!!

Final Giveaway!!!! Fitness DVDs

Well many have asked what I am doing to work my muscles!!!! I have always done some form of strength training since the beginning of my journey a year ago. I believe it has helped me every step of the way by building muscle as I lost weight so that my body burned more calories and gained new muscle while losing fat. It is really the reason why at 161 pounds I wear a size 4. 

There is no magic secret you can do so many things with your own body weight as resistance or simple hand weights. Sometimes when people hear weight training I think they think weight room in a gym and big bulky weights. I used to think that way too.

Then I learned about hand weights and resistance and how doing repetitive sets with those hand weights could build muscle and help me get toned. I also discovered a kettlebell. I love my kettlebell and I use it at least twice a week. My favorite kettlebell routine? Shred It With Weights by my favorite Jillian Michaels. I have been doing her videos since day 1. She got me started a year ago with her 30 day shred. Then I moved onto her last chance workout, and No More Trouble Zones. I also like to do her Yoga Meltdown once a week for some heart pumping yoga moves.

The past 2 months I have been doing Shred It With Weights with my kettlebell and Jackie Warner's DVD Total Body Circuit. I love this dvd as well! It really targets all of your major muscles in circuits and the first time I attempted this DVD I was sore for almost a week! So it really is a good workout.

The beauty of these DVDs?? They can be done at home on your own time, on your own turf :) If you cannot leave the house, if you are stuck at home with a crying baby whatever you may let get in the way of getting out and working out then pop in a DVD and get to work! This is how I have done it so many days when I cannot get to the gym and this is how it gets done. And the weight training is how I got my muscles ;)

So to get one lucky blog reader going I am going to give away DVDs!!! One lucky winner will recieve Total Body Circuit and Shred It With Weights!!!!

This giveaway is from me so to enter:

Follow my blog and let me know you just started following
Tell me what your favorite workout video is
Follow me on twitter
Tweet about this giveaway
Follow me on facebook

I will wait until Monday night at 5PM ET to pick a winner!!!

What I can do I could not a Year ago

I had a great day celebrating yesterday and I thought today I would share what I reflected about yesterday. I went for a final run before Sunday and I was almost in tears at the end of it. I started really thinking damn I am actually a runner. This time last year I was a hopeless over weight, depressed, insecure woman and today I am a running, athletic, healthy mom.

Today I can run many miles and in 2 days I will run my very first half marathon in Hyannis!  This time last year I could not even walk up the stairs without feeling winded.

Today I can lift weights and swing around a kettlebell. This time last year carrying in the groceries left me breathless. And I can carry my daughter and my neice when needed!

Today I take no medications!!!! This time last year I was on 7 different medications.

Today I run and chase my daughter this time last year I barely left the house.

I am a better mom because I make time for me. I go run, I workout, I am less stressed out. This makes our time together much better .

I am a better partner to my boyfriend because I feel better about myself. It is true what they say you cannot love someone else and appreciate them until you love yourself. Plus I cook almost everyday and he enjoys that! And I even inspired him to hit the gym and we go together sometimes.

I even perform better at work. I have more confidence in the things I do and I have a much more positive attitude about life in general. This reflects on my work in all aspects of my life.

I never ever imagined that joining weight watchers and losing weight would change my life. No I am not trying to be skinny. No I am not doing this for vanity. I have changed my life completely. I have become healthy and positive and this is worth more than any size skinny jeans. 

My One Year Living Healthy Anniversary

Well we have had a great celebration week here on the blog it looks like everyone is excited about the giveaways and this makes me happy :)

Today is a very important day for me and it is one I hope to continue to celebrate each and every year today marks the day that I walked into my first Weight Watchers meeting and signed up. Now when I went there it was honestly on a whim. I joined with one of best friends to see what it was all about. I had reached my breaking point 2 weeks ago. I was at my largest size ever and I was crying a few days before valentine's day when I realized the things I had bought did not fit. It was depressing going to return them and I remember feeling so hopeless. I will never ever forget that feeling, complete and utter disgust with my own body and self. I was trying to comfort myself that day and I ate chocolates and cried. I was not alone physically because I had the love of my family, boyfriend, and daughter but I was alone inside. I did not even like myself let alone love myself. I was moody, depressed, and in pain.

My daughter was 5 months old, I was 26 years old and taking 7 medications. One for depression which I had struggled with after giving birth. 2 for my heart, 1 for my stomach, 1 for my arthritis and 1 for my immune disorder. I was feeling like a 70 year old woman instead of a young hip mom and it hurt a lot. So needless to say I walked into that first Weight Watchers meeting not expecting much at all. I figured hey maybe it can help me lose a few pounds and get going. I wanted to be skinny, I wanted to look like a model. I was desperate to be thin and was determined to get it any way possible.

Little did I know that I would learn so so much and make my journey about being healthy not about a size of jeans. And by doing that, I would change my size without focusing on being skinny. The first few weeks of Weight Watchers were good I was counting and losing and going about things ok. I began to realize that my portions were out of control, that I liked to exercise, and that i was not on a diet. What for years I had been on diets. This time I told myself I would commit to a life style change. And I did not set a goal weight. That is what I liked about weight watchers. When I went in it was not about ok you need to lose 110 pounds to be healthy. nope in fact a goal was set of 5%, yes lose 5% of your body weight and celebrate. For me  5% was 12.6 pounds. That goal was reachable and I did it within 4 weeks. Then it was 10%. After that I just kept saying ok 10 more pounds. I would look ahead but only to the next 10 pounds.

People would ask me wow how much do you want to lose? whats your goal weight? I would say I do not know I just am working on losing 10 pounds right now. Some would look confused, others were say ok good luck. It took months for people to even notice I was losing weight. but you know what? I stopped caring about everyone else. I made it all about me. Not about my boyfriend, not about my friends or family, it was for me. I went to workout everyday for myself. I began to feel more energized, I began to feel physically better. I was able to come off my medications. I was able to breath and live.

Stay tuned tomorrow I will continue blabbing about my journey ;)

Now I will share the numbers!

Starting Weight: 252.6 pounds
Weight today: 161.4 pounds
Weight loss average over last 52 weeks: 1.75lbs a week.
Weight loss percentage: 36.1%

I needed that. I needed to calculate the average weekly loss to realize how far I have come. Lately I have been getting down on ,myself because honestly I wanted to be at life time weight watchers goal weight by this anniversary and weight 148 pounds. But it looks like it will take me a little longer to get there, and slowly I am working on accepting that. The statistics prove that if you lose an average of 1 to 2 pounds a week slowly then you are more likely to keep it off for life. I am determined to keep this weight off for life so I am OK with losing 1.75 a week.

So you have waited long enough how about some pictures?!?
Well here is me a year ago this very day. I saved this outfit to remind me of what I will never be again.

 

And here is me in that very same outfit today! By the way yes the pants are a size 18 and yes the shirt is a 2XL. Yes it was my going out  outfit

I was laughing inside and out trying to hold the pants up. Then there was a moment where I wanted to cry only because at that moment I realized how big I used to be and how unhealthy I was.

Then I started snapping some progression pictures and for the first time it hit me, why not take a picture of my back? I wish I had done this in the beginning to see the progression of my muscles and my weight training progress but oh well. I have one now :)

You can see where I store my weight training supplies in that pic lol I noticed that when editting them. It fits nice 10lb hand weights and a 15lb kettlebell

I am most proud of this picture right here, I looked at it and thought to myself wow is that really my back????

So thank you everyone for cheering me on this past year and helping me get through what has been the hardest, most rewarding journey of my life!

Giveaway time Fit Bee T-shirt!!!!

It's T-shirt time!!!!!!!! 

Yes I promised a week of giveaways and that is what I intend on delivering. Today I will make it short and sweet since I already posted a lengthy weigh in ;)

I am giving away a fit bee t-shirt today!!! You can check out all of my designs at my little t-shirt online store.

And I will send 1 lucky winner a t-shirt just like this one:

This giveaway is funded by me so to enter just leave me a comment telling me where you will rock your fit bee tee!

Drawing ends 9am ET Saturday morning :)

Weigh in Wednesday Power of one Final Check In!

Wow I cannot believe it has been 8 weeks since the Power of One challenge began!!!! I kicked off the challenge here with very high expectations. I did not anticipate it to go this horribly. It has been very hard to lose weight while training for my first half marathon Sunday.To me this doesnt make sense, you would think since I am running more and exercising more than I ever have that my body would drop the weight quicker... But I cannot focus on only scale numbers and maybe that is why this challenge was so good for me.

I learned that even when you are not losing pounds as quickly as you may want to you may be losing inches and the weight will catch up. I also learned that you cannot get discouraged as you get closer to your goal the weight will take longer to come off. I guess my main problem is I am a perfectionsit. I wanted to hit goal weight in 1 year. Tomorrow marks my Weight Watchers anniversary and I just wanted to be in the healthy BMI weight range and waiting to hit lifetime status. I feel like I failed. I need to remember that my highest weight was 277lbs and that was not even 2 years ago. That the size 18 pants and I have parted ways a long time ago and we have come a long way.

I have not failed in the grand scheme of things, and tomorrow I will be recapping all of my accomplishments this year and maybe it will help me realize what I have accomplished. But for today and for this challenge I will admit I am disappointed. I think its the first challenge on the Sisterhood where I did not pull in big loss numbers and make it into the leader boards. It does not help that I am very competitive ;) But again these are my issues and this is my blog so I can complain about them :)

I wanted to lose 18 pounds I am seeing now this was unrealistic! I wanted to train for my half marathon, I did this. I also was in a size 6 pants, I am now in a size 4. So I am happy I dropped a pants size and I am happy to report the 4's now require a belt so it makes me feel good :)

I learned to measure my inches if nothing else in this challenge and I will continue to do this every 8 weeks. I think working on inches is a good way to whittle down your problem areas without focusing on losing weight. So I will share with you my spread sheet:

Date	Bust	Chest	waist	hips	thighs	knees	calves	upper arm	forearm
12/31/2010	37.5	35	31.5	35	22	16	16	11.5	10.5
2/23/2011	36.5	33.5	30	33	20.5	14.5	16	11	9

I started doing Jackie Warner's Total Body Circuit with 10lb hand weights during these 8 weeks and clearly between that and Jillian Michael's Shred It With Weights with my 15lb kettlebell, it helped me lose some inches!!!! I was pleased with my progress. I would like to lose some more in my chest area and my calves. I have a tough time fitting into skinny jeans because my calves are so big :/ but they are all muscle so I am not sure how to whittle these down!

Weigh in this week was not as pretty as it usually is:

Yup up .6. So sad but there is nothing I can do about it now. I have to focus on what is coming Sunday and just keep working harder to make to goal. I have to wake up to the reality that it may be as far as I want to go. I am starting to see the outline of my ribs and the veins are out on my arm as you can kind of see in my calories burned this week :

I am clearly working my ass off. I am burning 2300 calories a week working out about 6-7 hours every week. So I will celebrate this during the close of the challenge :)

Sorry this post is clearly longer than Ii expected!

Results for challenge:

Start 168 lbs

Current 161.4 lbs

Lost 6.6 lbs

percent lost 3.9%

how did you do on the Power of One challenge?

How do you feel about BMI standards?

Chobani Giveaway time!!!!

Well yes I promised a week of giveaways and today will be another one!!! I still cannot believe Thursday marks the 1 year anniversary of me walking into Weight Watchers and making the decision to change my life forever!

The lovely folks at Chobani sent me a case of their newest flavors to review and test out. Of course I was in love with every flavor! Today I am so excited to be giving one of my lucky readers the chance to sample all of the lovely flavors Chobani has to offer!!! 

I have to admit I was overwhelmed with having a whole case of Chobani sitting in my fridge! Which one did I want to try first? What was even harder was only having one a day! I had times where I felt like I could eat another but I knew I needed to control myself after all I needed to stick to my daily Weight Watchers points!

My favorite???





Yes thats the 2% pineapple!!!!!! I had this at work one morning and every single bite was delicious! I could not believe how creamy the 2% is and it is only 1 more point. I love the 0% fat plain Chobani because I do like to create my own recipes with it. But the 2% is only 3 points and I must admit it was awesome!!!! Worth every point in my opinion :)

The pineapple inspired me to create my own version of pineapple :) I took a half cup of canned crushed pineapple, and combined it with 1 small container of the 0% plain Chobani and 1/4 cup of gluten free low fat granola. It was like my own pineapple upside down cake treat :) It was my favorite combination yet!!!

 Some of my other favorite Chobani flavors were:

Lets be honest, I loved them all. No really, I did not anticipate liking them all. I never bought the flavors because I am normally a plain and do my own thing kind of gal. But the folks at Chobani are really master minds because not one of the flavors was bad!

And did you know Chobani makes a kids version Champions??? Well we found them at our local grocery store and Peanut was in love with the first bite!!!

We love clearly have a little chosession in our house ;)

Do you want to win a case??? Heres how!

Leave me a comment telling me your favorite flavor or the one you want to try the most.
Follow @chobani on twitter and leave me a comment here telling me you do.
Follow my blog and remind me here that you do.
Follow me on twitter @tryn2bfit
Tweet about this giveaway.

Good luck to all! I will pick one winner via random.org on Saturday morning 9am ET before I head to Hyannis for my first half marathon!

Giveaway Time Probiotics!!!!

Hello there! I am kicking off an important date this week. This Thursday February 24th marks the most important day of my healthy journey! It is the day I walked into Weight Watchers and began to change my lifestyle and improve my health.So to celebrate with everyone and thank everyone for their support I am hosting some giveaways all week long! So stay tuned!

My first awesome giveaway and promotion is Vidazorb chewable probiotics. I was approached by vidazrob to review their most popular probiotic +OPC

I must admit I was skeptical when I heard about Vidazorb. I did not know much about probiotics, I knew I wanted to try them with my celiac disease and gastrointestinal issues. probiotics have also been proven to help people trying to lose weight like me by helping the metabolism increase and regulating your body. It was tough because there are so many brands out there I did not know which would be best for me. Vidazorb is a chewable probiotic that does not need to be refrigerated! This is great for someone like me who is always on the go I can carry it anywhere.

What I liked about Vidazorb? It contains 30 billion live active microorganisms. This chart helped me see the benefits and calorie savings! I was eating actvia before and hoping for results for my constipation issues, but I was tired of wasting my Weight Watchers points on it. The beauty of Vidazorb is there are no calories!  How did it taste? I was pleasantly surprised, I had pomegranite flavored small chewable tablets. The tasted good, and the tablets were as small as an Advil. No big disgusting chewable tablets here, just small easy to chew little quick tablets.

Did it work? It took my body about a week and a half to adjust and say hey this stuff is good. What do I mean? Well the first few days I did not seem to notice much of a difference, but it did help regulate my stomach very quickly. I was able to be comfortable and get regular. After a week on Vidazorb I felt better and my stomach was less bloated. I was skeptical and proven wrong. I was concerned about them being gluten free, but they are and surprise recommended for people with Celiac Disease check it out here.

Anything I didn't like? Well it was annoying getting used to it, there was some extra flatulence in the beginning of starting them. But this is to be expected when putting good stuff into your belly! I would like to see an option for a childproof cap for those of us with curious toddlers this was my main gripe with the packaging. But that is about it!

Do you take probiotics currently? Or are you thinking about starting?

I would reccomend them to help your stomach and body. For me it is another step in my health journey and one I am aiming to stick with. The probiotics helped me regulate my system and made me feel better.

So I have a chance for you to win some today!! And even if you do not win the folks at Vidazorb have been generous and given us a huge promotional discount!!!! How does 40% off sound??? It sounds awesome to me and I know you will not be disappointed! Head on over to their informative website and check it out! And if you are like me and ready to start getting healthy and want to try them use promotion code: CFB40 to receive this generous offer today!!!

To enter this give away you have multiple options:

Leave me a comment telling me why you want to try Vidazorb!
Tweet about this giveaway and promotion!
Follow @bellytweet on twitter and leave a comment here letting me know you did!
Follow my blog let me know you are in the comments!
Visit the Vidazorb website and tell me what you liked about it here!

I will be picking 3 lucky winners on Saturday morning 9AM ET before I head away for my half marathon weekend so please enter and spread the word!!!