Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

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.

Help I’m Stuck!... Well while having people’s hands get stuck together is one of my favorite hypnosis demonstrations that would not be a practical way of writing this blog. So while I am not physically stuck right now I have been busy working with many clients on keeping them from getting stuck and abandoning their New Year’s Resolutions.

Statistically only about 45% of Americans still make a New Year’s Resolution and of those, about 29% have already abandoned the resolution all together and in 10 days that number will jump to 36%. Even more surprising is that by the end of the calendar year only 8% of people will have been successful in keeping their New Year’s Resolutions.

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.

The new year is approaching, and everyone that wants to lose weight will begin to think of their resolutions. Some people will get gym memberships, others will try the latest fad diets. Instead of diets, you have to remember that true, sustainable weight loss only comes from lifestyle changes.

To achieve your weight loss goal, I think you need other goals too. You know what helped me lose the weight? I didn't only concentrate on the weight as I was trying to find foods to lower my blood pressure. I was on a mission to not be on hypertensive medication and I changed my diet because of it. The result was weight loss! Of course I knew I needed to lose weight… my doctor told me to lose 90 pounds, after all. But I don't think I would have made all the necessary dietary changes if it weren't for the other goal of lowering my blood pressure.