Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

I've learned a lot the past couple years on the correct way to lose weight, mostly from trial and error. I was like many others out there, and struggled to try and lose weight but not succeed.

Finally I realized... you have to eat properly too, not just exercise. Before I lost the weight, I would exercise two to three times a week but did nothing to change my diet. When I think about how bad my diet was back then, I wonder how I could eat all that I did. I mean a good majority of the food I ate had a ton of sugar in them. I'm talking about candy bars, ice cream, frozen dinners, cookies, the list goes on and on!

I know a lot of weight loss challenges are going on this fall and I thought this is a good time to remind people of the superfoods I eat. I did a post months ago where you can read my list of the favorite superfoods, click here for the link.

The list is pretty much the same, but I wanted to stress the importance of a few of the foods and a few more that I've tried since then.

Back when I was obese, I was lucky to get maybe two workouts in at the gym each week. I wasn't able to use the treadmill faster than like 4.5 MPH and I was lucky to stay on for 20 to 30 minutes.

I was also sitting most of the day at a desk. I would barely get up and move or even stretch my legs. I remember my legs would be so stiff they wouldn't even want to move.

I had such an awesome doctor's appointment today. For those of you who might not know, I was pre-hypertensive less than two years ago. My doctor wanted to put me on blood pressure medication. I told him I would rather lose the weight first than go on medication.

I had wanted to see if it were possible to lower my blood pressure through diet and exercise. If I was on medication while I was losing the weight, it would be difficult to tell if it were lower because of the medication or the weight loss. This way, with no medication, I now know that blood pressure can go back to normal with proper diet, exercise and weight loss!

As some of you might have read, I'm doing another challenge. But this challenge is all about getting the steps in so it won't be any extra work. I already do 10,000 steps a day, so why not do a competition for something I'm already doing?

The United Healthcare Walk-A-Thon begins September 16 and runs for eight weeks. I was in last year's challenge and logged over 1,000,000 steps. I don't expect to get as many this time as last year, the challenge ran for 10 weeks... two extra weeks of steps. This year, each business competes with at least five people per team. My team consists of eight co-workers.