In The Beginning

Hi I'm Jo. Mom to 4 sons and 1 adopted daughter. Kids now range in age from almost 21 this month to 11 years old.

In my teen years I was very fit. Did aerobics classes all through high school. Went to college fell into the not working out, pizza eating all the time trap and ended up gaining some weight. Dropped out of college and tried working for a while before going to a trade school. During my trade school days I lost all the college weight and then some with a lowest weight of 135 but it wasn't a healthy weight just a too busy and too broke to afford to eat much kind of weight loss.

Eventually I hit a somewhat healthy weight of 150 and maintained that for a while, got a job or several jobs I should say working in offices after I finished trade school and eventually met and married my husband. Through the years I tried working out but with little time, even less money and 4 rambunctious kids to keep track of I never really had time to be consistent with my working out.

So, here I am at 49, almost 50 years old and I have realized that I need and want to get back in shape. Now that my boys are all older and can at least stay out of trouble for the most part I have the time and the ability to workout on a regular basis. We are much more financially sound than we were when the kids were little.

I had several bad habits that had to be changed in order for me to even get started on the road I'm on now. It started with some health issues caused by over indulging in diet soda. I gave up regular soda over 20 years ago and only drank diet thinking it was better for me and wouldn't cause weight gain. Boy was I ever wrong.

It all started with pain in my feet. I work in the food industry now and am on my feet for up to 12 hours a day. My feet started hurting to the point that when I went to bed I felt fine but when I went to get out of bed in the morning I would literally cry because I didn't want to stand on my feet. They hurt so bad it was insane. Once I got up and started moving they were fine but it took a while to get to that point and if I sat down for too long the pain would come right back the minute I went to stand up. So one day I decided that I should try giving up soda and see what happens. So I gave it up for a few days and realized it was the cause of my foot issues. I thought it was the fact it was caffeinated but it wasn't. I tried drinking sugar free tea and found that it too caused the pain in my feet. Between the aspartame, caffeine, and carbonation the three were the culprits behind my feet issues. So I finally decided that drinking soda needed to stop if I wanted the pain to stop.

After give up the soda I lost 5 or more pounds and started to feel a whole lot better. I will admit that giving soda up was a very hard task especially since I have access to an unlimited supply of soda at the store I work at but I did it and have been off of it for months now and have really felt the difference.

So after that I started to realize that I wanted to get healthy again. I started finding some inspiration on Pinterest and made a health and fitness board that keeps me inspired to keep going. My husband and I both lost our moms in 2018 and it allowed us the money to pay for a local rec center membership for our family so we can work out when we have time. My schedule allows me to get a workout in every day before work. I tried to work out starting in October which is when we lost my husband's mom. So life kind of got in the way for a bit and then we had November and the Thanksgiving Holiday but I did watch what I ate and tried to get to the gym as much as possible. December is the busy season for my job so my schedule got bounced around quite a bit for a while there and so it made it difficult to get to the gym on a regular basis but I did manage to get there a few times during the month. Now it's January and there is nothing standing in my way of getting to the gym on a regular basis.

I started a week ago and keep track of my workouts on Google calendar as it has a goal set up where you can set personal goals and mark them off when you do them. They even have cool pictures to set up with them. This is the beginning of the second week and today I really wanted to come home and sleep but I started to push myself and looked up some of my pins. I have one that talks about sleeping a third of your life time so get up and go to the gym which got me to the building but not inside. Then I kept looking through pins and made sure to glance at as many as possible and finally motivated myself to get in there and get my workout in.

I have to admit it was harder than last week, I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to work hard but I did and now I feel amazing because of it. The pins I have on my health and fitness inspiration board are helping me to keep going. I reminded myself that even though I hate some of the exercises I'm doing they are going to make a huge impact on how I look by the end of the month.

This pic I'm including was taken at the beginning of my working out this month. It's my before photo for sure. Not my highest weight but this is where I'm truly beginning my transformation.