How I lost 20 pounds (and how you can too!)

         It was kind of an accident.

Whaaaaat?!?

No, don’t starting hating me yet – I didn’t start out with a goal of losing 20 pounds, but tiny changes led to a snowball effect and had me there without my whole life depended on it.

         It all started with my husband’s New Year’s Resolution to give up soda.  He had unlimited access to a fountain drink machine at work, and he had been chugging down the calories.  After he stopped ordering a Dr. Pepper at restaurants, I felt like I shouldn’t order sweet tea every time.  Mind you, I didn’t plan on giving up sweet tea altogether (I mean what is barbeque without it??), but I stopped drinking it every day.

         And if we were to stop right there both of us would have lost weight, but like I said, a snowball started.

         When we would order fast food, or go through a drive through, it didn’t make sense to order two meals without drinks, so we started ordering one with fries and a water bottle, and the other person just got the hamburger (or taco, or nuggets, or whatever it was!)  But then, we started thinking, what good is fast food without Dr. Pepper or sweet tea?  So, we just stopped going to fast food joints!

         And when we stopped going to fast food joints, the options became eat at a nice restaurant, or eat at home.  Since we’re not made of money, we opted for eating at home most nights. 

         When we were dating (and I was in my first year of teaching – yikes!) We ate a lot of frozen, easy to prepare meals.  You know the kind – you take it from the freezer, dump it in the pan, and 10 minutes later you have a meal.  Well, at this point in our lives we lived RIGHT next to a Trader Joe’s.  Which made me think, ya know, it’s not so hard to go grocery shopping!  I would swing by the store on my way home from work, grab a meat and a few veggies, and basically roast all of it in the oven for thirty minutes after smothering it with olive oil and salt and pepper.  Not the most glamourous cooking, but it tasted pretty good!

         THAT had to be the biggest change that started the pounds dropping left and right.  I started noticing my clothes fitting looser (and I could wear that favorite pair of shorts from college again!).  I weighed myself and I had lost 15 pounds in around 6-7 months! 

We could just stop here.  HUGE lifestyle change already.  And it was working!  But something else happened to add to the snowball.

We found our dream work out situations.  “Work out” to me sounds like sweating at the gym, and I tried to get into that lifestyle, but I would always end up paying for a gym membership that I wouldn’t use.  That is, until I found Pure Barre.  I had done ballet from elementary up through half of high school, and I loved it!  Pure Barre was hard, but it was the type of “working out” that I enjoyed, and because of that I actually went to class.  In December, I was going 5 to 6 times a week!  Which is where the last five pounds went. And – bonus – it toned up all the flab that was hanging on from losing the weight.

So, here’s what I’ve learned from this accidental weight loss journey:

1.     Don’t drink your calories

2.    Cooking at home is easier than you think

3.     MOVE your body in a way that you love – don’t let other people’s notions of the gym scare you

I also think it helped that we were committed to these accidental truths we stumbled upon without being so obsessed about a new diet or exercise program.  By slowly building up over several months we were actually able to change our lifestyle.