Before/After

Hi Everyone,

6 days left until I go back to work and I must say, I'm itching to return. Shh, don't tell anyone but I really miss my kids. :)

This morning, I stumbled upon an old picture I took during my student teaching and I could not believe my eyes.

Here's the "skinny", I've always been a pretty healthy and sporadically active person with a vendetta towards the last 10-15 pounds on my body. You know, the weight that you desperately try to shed, but never seems to go anywhere. Well before I started student teaching I was in a pretty good routine of running at least 5 days a week - I was determined to lose that weight. Then I got a stress fracture which forced me to stop running for a few months. Student teaching began shortly after that injury and I just never really found time to get into my exercise groove again. I don't know about you, but my body is the type to fluctuate in a short amount of time. No more time to run + stress from student teaching = instantaneous ballooning.

Needless to say I got kind of big and I knew I was getting big, but it was my first time lesson planning for 4 different subjects (I was student teaching in a self-contained middle school classroom of 6th, 7th, and 8th grader refugee students at the time) and surviving that assignment was my number one priority.

Flash forward half a year and now I'm a kindergarten teacher with my very own classroom. Has the lesson planning stopped? No, but if there's one thing I realized, it was that I needed to take back some control of my life again and not let work, or at that time school, be the reason for kicking my health to the curb.

So, I feel like a cheesy before/after advertisement for one of those brand name weight loss pills but here is my before/after shot for natural weight loss with of course, no photoshop.

I took the picture on the right this morning before my run to Balboa Park. Needless to say I'm very happy with my "transformation". I feel better about the way I look, but more importantly I just feel better! Being healthy is not about losing weight, being healthy is about actively making good choices. When I finally made this shift in my mentality that is when I started to see results. My brother always says being healthy is a lifestyle choice and it's true. I think this is why my body experienced that fluctuation I was talking about earlier because I would often decide, "I'll be healthy," but then teeter off for a few months and it would become an endless cycle of feel healthy, feel unhealthy, feel healthy, feel unhealthy, you get the picture.

I know a lot of people make New Years resolutions to lose weight but how about to be a healthier person instead? I lost weight by giving myself the time of day that I deserved but really I lost weight because I wanted to be a healthier person. I went hiking, I ran my first (but not last) 5K, I started running again, I shrunk the portions of food I ate ever so slightly, I stopped bringing work home, I made sure to get at least 6-7 hours of sleep every night, I caught a bad stomach flu (I don't recommend actively seeking to catch the stomach flu but I definitely lost a good 3-5 pounds from being sick courtesy of students in room 13 haha), I cooked my own meals, I started going to Zumba twice a week, etc.

These are just some of my recent choices in the last half year or so that have helped to keep me in shape. Notice, I didn't eat out, I got on some trendy fad diet, I did one million crunches a day, and I starved myself did not make my list. I love food and part of being healthy is being happy. So if you're like me and food makes you happy then by all means eat away. Just give yourself time to exercise and eat in moderation. There's no reason you can't have your cheeseburger and eat it too. Every person is different though, so I hope you can find what works for you on your journey to becoming a healthier person.

Teachers teach, but we're also life long learners. It took me all but 22 years to finally learn what worked for me, but you can bet now that I've found it, I don't plan on stopping any time soon.

Happy Wednesday!