Trying to Live a Healthy Life: Easier Said Than Done - Comments

See, this is what I love! Reading all these comments make dieting and working out much less scary and you feel much less alone. I plan on updating at least once every week about progress. I think this will really help motivation, and I'm happy to see I'm motivating others to start their work outs and diets again! I hope you all follow me through this journey and I hope to continue seeing your comments so I know how you're doing as well.

P.S. starting a journal like this may actually help, and documenting what you eat helped me too.

P.S. starting a journal like this may actually help, and documenting what you eat helped me too.

I've been trying to eat healthy for like two years now, and I think what always causes me to relapses is money, eating healthy is ubber expensive! Some people don't realize it. This holiday season was the worst, I still havent stopped my horrid eating. I hadn't had a soda in over a year till this season and now I can't stop drinking them. I've always done the cold turkey method and it works for me...when I have the money. I drink TONS of water, and I found one particular detox that worked for me to at least loose some water weight. But getting me to a gym... I could laugh. I found working out at home was much better so I used the handy dandy pinterest, found some at home work outs and I got into it. It's easier to do when you don't have to convince yourself to drive somewhere. Because by the time I got to the gym I didn't want to work out anymore. The buddy system helps too. If I know someone depends on me to get something done I'll do it. But I never have a workout buddy for more than once and it doesn't matter what they say, abs are most definitely made in the kitchen, you can do 1,000 crunches but if you eat horrid nothing will happen.
Reading this, I think tomorrow I start again, cold turkey no sodas, no pizza no poop food!

It's HARD AS HELL to live a healthy lifestyle. I had to do it, like, all at once, no wiggle room, no easing into it, for six weeks before my wedding because I realized my dress didn't fit anymore two months out. It sucked.

I'm working on doing the same thing. Here's what helps me: I'm taking baby steps. I'm going to cut one or two things out at a time, and/or add one or two things at a time. For now, that means cutting back on soda (no more than a can every other day--though the last couple days I've been awful about that since I'm trying to adjust to a new sleep schedule), rather than one or two cans a day like I'm used to. It also means eating until I'm satisfied and not until I'm full, though I'm going to keep eating the same stuff I normally would until I get a better idea of how to change my nutrition on a budget. And I do just a few minutes' worth of workout each day--situps daily, pushups or squats on alternate days, three sets of ten each.

That's all I'm doing. For now. There's a lot more that I want to do--introduce more vegetables into my diet, cut out a lot of the pre-prepared foods that are high in fat and sodium, make sure my diet is more balanced (currently it's pretty much all either high-fat or high in carbs), start doing cardio, etc. But that can all come in phases.

I guess my point is that my strategy is less about converting to a healthy lifestyle but allowing a handful of exceptions, and more about maintaining my current lifestyle but altering it little by little so that it will be a more manageable change. That way it can hopefully be more long-term, because when I had to diet for my wedding it was like...every meal I ate was mostly fruits and vegetables, any meat I had had to be white meat, no soda, no juices with added sugars, counting calories for every meal...I hated that. It made me miserable, and I could never have maintained it any longer than I did.