It's fun to look back on how far I came. Here's another picture I found, along with a recent picture. I have no idea what my weight was on the left, but I'm sure I was over 300 there!
If I can lose the weight, anyone can. It took me a while to figure out the best approach to lose the weight, but the most practical way is exercise and eating right! I never lost weight until I started to eat better!
I wrote about the dangers of aspartame a few months ago. I wanted to follow up on helpful ways to switch from aspartame to stevia, an all natural sweetener with zero calories that comes from the stevia plant.
First, give up the soda! It's not good for you at all. Diet soda contains aspartame and other chemicals that you should avoid in your diet. It is also considered a diarrhetic, which means it will dehydrate you. A good alternative for this is unsweetened iced tea. Add in your own stevia packets and avoid the Sweet N Low (saccharine), Equal (aspartame) and Splenda (sucralose). Unsweetened iced tea has a lot of antioxidants in it and soda has nothing good to offer.
Americans should eat healthier, that's a given. But for all the many good reasons there are to eat healthy, many of the low income families cannot afford the better foods.
Take organic food as an example. Why is organic food twice as expensive as the regular counterpart? It seems like they should actually be cheaper than the "bad" non-organic food because the farmers aren't using the pesticides on the organic foods. Pesticides must cost money, right? So, it got me curious, why would the non-organic food cost less?
As many of you know, I was in a walking challenge sponsored by United Healthcare. I was also in the same challenge last year when they ran one in the fall of 2012.
Yesterday was the final day of this year's challenge, so how did I do? I don't want to reveal my total steps yet until they announce the winners but I did comparable to last year. Last time around I had over a million steps in ten weeks. This year, I stepped over 800,000 steps in eight weeks. If the challenge were 10 weeks like last year's challenge, I no doubt would have the million steps again.
Elisha Bonaparte was morbidly obese and in bad shape. In fact, his diabetes landed him in the hospital as his organs were shutting down. Once in the hospital, he made a decision to live a healthier life and lose weight.
Elisha decided to join the Greater Waterbury YMCA and started his own exercise program. He's lost over 100 pounds, and the great thing is that he did it on his own, without surgery! He is now off insulin and other medications. He plans to keep at it and live a healthy life free of the debilitating illnesses he once had.