Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

My personal trainer likes to mix up the work out every few weeks. This week, he has me using the free weights, which is more challenging than using the Cybex Smith Machine.

All the exercises are done on a weight bench. I'm doing exercises for all the muscle groups. The most challenging one for me was where I had to step up to the bench while holding onto weights. You have to make sure you have the proper balance for this exercise. I did this exercise before and it always had me confused. He taught me how to do it properly and I think I'll do better on this one than I did in the past.

If you are trying to eat properly & live a healthy lifestyle, chances are that you don't want an INSANE amount of pesticides entering your body in the process, right? I'm sure that most of you on here are aware of the importance of buying organic produce & meats these days. I'm a huge stickler for this in my household. I also know how overwhelming & expensive it can be so I've decided to share two lists from an app I have on my phone with you. The Dirty Dozen list (produce to buy organic versions of) & the Clean Fifteen (produce with the least amount of pesticides so you can purchase the cheaper option). Dr. Oz recommended the app one day on his show & I use it often when shopping on a budget.

DIRTY DOZEN (buy organic versions of these)

Allow me to introduce myself to all of you fabulous fitness friends on here! My name is Jackie & I am a busy mom of 2 AMAZING girls. I am passionate about health, fitness & overall well being. My fanatical routine that I currently possess has not been that way for long, though. It will be 2 years, next month, from when my journey began. Allow me to share.

My youngest daughter was turning 5 & for her birthday, she wanted to go to Build a Bear! My in laws made the drive over to our place & we all headed out. Before heading into the store, someone was nice enough to take a family picture of all of us. The day was GREAT! As soon as we got home, I rushed to the computer to upload the pictures from the day. THERE IT WAS. The picture that changed my life. It is my now famous "before" picture.

I went out to eat for lunch today. I should have brought my phone with me but instead, I had to guess what foods were lower in sodium.

When I entered the food in the online food journal after lunch, I found out the food that I ate had a whopping 1440 mg of sodium! That's almost the entire day's worth in one meal. I usually have around 1,750 to 2,400 mg of sodium a day, so this was a lot to me!

You know how it is near the holidays.  Life overwhelms you to the point that everything becomes a fire fight and somethings fall by the wayside. I've neglected my weight-loss updates so here we go!

In my last post... about a month ago I had announced that I won the weight-loss challenge held at the Torrington YMCA from mid September through mid November.  In that time I lost nearly 30 pounds in 8 weeks.  As of today I am down an additional 12lbs.  That is a total of 40lbs since mid september when the challenge started.  The holidays have made it tough with my new eating habits as I find myself indulging frequently.  But I am still losing.  I will fall back into my routine after the holidays are over and hope to see some more aggressive weight-loss as I still have 44lbs to go until I reach my goal.