Stephanie’s 145-Pound Weight Loss: ‘Avoid All of the Crazy Diets — Period’

 

 After I gave birth to my last baby, I told myself, This is it, Stephanie. You better get your stuff together  or you are going to be sad, lazy, and die an early death like your mom. I felt like a horrible mom, getting winded from simply looking at my kids. I had been approved for the Lap-Band [gastric banding surgery], but I decided I needed to give it one last real shot with diet and exercise alone before I went down the surgery route.

The Changes

While I was pumping milk for a few months for my baby, I really concentrated on changing my diet. I even followed the Weight Watchers plan for nursing women for a while. Using a food scale was (and still is) the greatest help. From August 2011 to December 2011, I lost 40 or so pounds following Weight Watchers and using a food scale. At the beginning of January 2012, my sister-in-law challenged me to see who could walk more miles. Walking five miles per day, combined with logging what I ate on Sparkpeople.com (and eventually transitioning over to MyFitnessPal.com), helped me to drop even more weight.

After that, I did an entire cycle of P90X Lean and began using a BodyMedia armband to monitor my calorie burn. Through all of this, I had gotten myself down to 220 pounds. But once I had lost 100 pounds on my own, I found myself stuck. I had to make a change, so I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I began doing INSANITY workouts and went to spin classes. Around that time, I switched from using my BodyMedia armband to a Fitbit, because let’s face it — who wants to wear a bulky armband all the time?

Finally, I had lost enough weight to get a tummy tuck. When I healed from that, I stuck with clean eating and got back in the gym, and I lost the remainder of the weight. I also started going to a boot camp to get outside and do something different. Of course there were times when I felt like I didn’t want to have to work so hard and wanted to give up, but in those moments I’d remind myself that this was a lifestyle change and if I wanted the weight to stay off, I had to keep at it.