Body After Baby Challenge

It's May 1st....time for a challenge! I'm joining "Mama Notes" and friends for the "Body After Baby Challenge". It's not limited to women who've just had babies but that's her motivation after she had a baby boy in March. She also talks about bathing suit season which has no appeal to me whatsoever but hey -- more power to her! :) Here's the rules, copied off her blog, with some of my own thoughts:



1. Post on your blog your long term goals. Generally a goal that you want to have accomplished in 4-6 months. Be specific. Speaking in terms of pounds, my long term goal for this 4-6 month time frame is 30 pounds. Can I find my scale?!?!



2. List your short term goals for the week. For example, lose one pound this week or exercise four days a week. For this first week (which is really 10 days, 5/1-5/10), my short term goal is to exercise at least twice. I haven't exercised since before I got pregnant with Lydia so I'm not going to push myself too much. I hope that doesn't sound like a cop-out....



3. List your plan of action. How you're going to reach your goals. General "diet and exercise". For the diet part, cut back on intake (duh!) and wean myself off caffeine, starting with pop. Will take a while to get me off of tea, I'm sure, as that's what I drink more than anything. Any day I don't have caffeine, I start to feel it around bedtime with a terrible headache....For the exercise part, I have several work out videos to use and also the treadmill if Jonathan gets it fixed. Right now it's stuck at a severe incline.



4. Re-cap every Monday. On Monday's we will review our goals and our progress. We will post our success's and failures and share them with other's! Be honest. Obviously the first re-cap will be Monday, May 11.



5. Leave a link to the post in your blog so that we can all motivate and support each other. Judgement is not allowed, only support and encouragement. (You can leave your link in the comments section for now.) You can see her blog -- and read the comments of other women -- at www.mamasnotes.com/2009/04/body-afer-baby.html



Honestly, I've been overweight since before puberty and have only ever been successful at weight loss one time, right after John was born. I won't say for certain what I weigh right now (or then) but I was, at my best, 5 pounds shy of breaking 200. I've weighed over 200 since college....Wish I felt more confident 'cause I really don't. How I did it before almost isn't an option -- I literally didn't get there by myself. I was working out wtih my friend, Kisha, and we were keeping each other accountable. Once we allowed ourselves to get busy with life and started cutting back on exercise, everything went downhill. We went to the beach that April, returning on 4/30/07, and I was determined to do it on my own. However, I found out I was pregnant with Timothy the very next day so I ended up talking myself out of it. Did okay with the pregnancy with Timothy -- only gained around 10 pounds -- but in between Timothy's birth and getting pregnant with Lydia, I put back on the weight and then some. I now weigh more than I ever have not pregnant and, to get to what the charts say is ideal weight for someone my height, I need to loose somewhere around 90 pounds (no joke....). Disgusting, I know. Anyway, pray for me and the other women who are joining this challenge, would you?!?! I've added a ticker under my Twitter updates that I'll update every Monday as well.