How did we get here?

Hello to everyone out there. My name is Mandi. Welcome to my crazy world.

This blog is inteded to help me release my frustration toward food, calorie counting and working out. All of the things that seem to both motivate me and stress me out all at the same time. I've struggled with weight my entire life, like most people who have a love/hate relationship with food. For the past (almost) three years I've been on a diet. I prefer "lifestyle change" over "diet". The word "diet" makes me feel restricted so I try to stay away from it but that's my reality.

I began my journey on a whim. In February of 2009 there were two ladies that I worked with that wanted to lose weight. One of them had done the South Beach diet with a good amount of success (80 pounds) but had gained it all back. Her, along with another lady, were going to start together so I thought why not. I had tried Atkins and lost a little weight but the amount of carbs (or lack of them) really effected my mood and how I felt from day to day enough to cause me to jump off the Atkins band wagon. I was as my heaviest I had ever been (278) so I figured that trying something new couldn't hurt. After all, why wouldn't I want to lose 80 pounds?!

I had borrowed the South Beach Diet book and decided I was going to do this. The first couple of weeks were brutal. No carbs and zero fruit, both of which I love! Eventually as I started to work those foods back into my diet it wasn't so tough anymore. What really motivated me to keep going was that I was starting to lose weight! It was only a pound or two a week but it was every week. I had done a lot of research on he South Beach Diet (and dieting in general) so I knew that a pound or two a week was a good average. To make a long story short, my weight loss continued until November 2009. Around that time my body plateaued. I was in the middle of moving into a house with my then boyfriend (now husband), the holidays had arrived and I was just plain stressed out. I was convinced that this is what was causing my plateau. I never gave one thought to the actual amount of calories that I was eating, just the type of food. South Beach doesn't encourage calorie counting, just eating off of their "foods to enjoy" and "foods to avoid" list. I have to be honest, I had my fair share of "foods to avoid" but nowhere near the amount that could stop my weight loss. Eventually I broke through the plateau and started to lose again, very slowly. My weight loss was up and down and the inconsistency drove me crazy. I was frustrated. The South Beach Diet worked really well for me but I felt like it had taken me as far as it could. For Christmas 2010 I received The Biggest Loser video game for the Wii. I was dertemined to pick up my weight loss even if it meant exercising, something I hadn't done until then.

Once I entered the world of Bob and Jillian I was obsessed. It sucked me in. I started to work out pretty frequently and that seemed to do the trick. Then I hit another wall! Seriously, how many walls does this weight loss journey have? This is when I started to count calories. It was a lot of guess work in the beginning. I would look at labels and figure things out in my head and sometimes write them down. That changed to writing down what I ate in a day, which evolved to writing down individual foods, which eventually led to weighing and calorie counting pretty much everything that goes in my mouth. I even have a cheat sheet in the back of my calorie notebook that lists calories/gram ratio of many of my staple foods. This all brings me to where I am now: a calorie counting, food weighing frustrated mess.

I'm not sure what this blog is going to turn into. I'm not even sure that anybody will read it but I'm hoping that it'll be a good outlet for me. If you've read through this, good for you :) I hope that anybody that comes across this blog will find it helpful. Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and concerns but be gentle or I'll kick your butt. After all, I train with the best (in my living room :)).