Day 9 : Ab and Leg Tuesday
Happy Day 9 of the New Year, New You Fitness Challenge! Today's workout focus is strengthening the legs, butt and abs! Today's daily workout is alittle bit more involved because it is a video for my favorite girls at Tone It Up! This is one of my favorite workout videos by them. Be sure to stretch before and after because taken form personal experience, if you do not stretch, you WILL be sore tomorrow and that is no fun! At the bottom of this post I will be explaining portion control and my personal experience with it to help you understand more about the topic. I hope you enjoy and have a wonderful Tuesday! <3
Day 9 Daily Workout
Portion Control
I am probably not alone when I say this, but before I started my healthy eating program, the thought of Portion Control scared me! i have always been the type of person who has "eyes bigger than your stomach", where you get a large amount of food thinking you will be able to eat it and then after eating it you realize it was way too much! Of course, you then say "I will NEVER do that again" but what do you do? The same thing next time around! 2013 is our year to break our bad habits, including overeating! When I started my program of consuming only 1200 calories a day, I thought I would be starving! But what I realized as I measured out my food according to the calorie amount, is that when I was finished eating, I felt great! I didn't eat too much or too little. It was the perfect amount! After two and a half weeks of portioning out my meals to the correct size, I took a night to myself and had Pizza Hut. All I can say is ew! What I noticed as I had a huge pizza and pasta box in front of me is that I was making excuses to increase my portion size! So of course, i used the "I have worked hard this week, I deserve it!" excuse. I only increased my portion size to about 1/4th more than my what I had been eating these past two weeks. And guess what? I could NOT finish it and even with what I ate, I felt gross and sluggish. i also noticed when I ate the high calorie, greasy, fattening foods that it put me in a horrible mood! I was mad at everyone and everything. After I went back to my correct portions and healhty food choices, I felt like a new me! This is my personal account with portion controls, not everyone is exactly the same but why not give it a try! You may be surprised to see how different you feel and look! I am not making these Fitness posts to just flood you with research information, I want to give you my personal accounts of these topics and how to make them work for you, not some scientific nutritionist mumbo jumbo that 1% of the world understands! My Challenge for you is to calculate your Calorie Consumption Number using the formula given to you in THIS POST. Then start researching recipes and how many calories they contain, figure out a rough amount of how many calories for each meal and snack. When you make your meals, pay attention to serving size (most times I cut the serving size in half) and measure accordingly onto your plate. It may not look like much but try it and see how you feel. Another tip is to try and span your meals out longer, to about 15-20 minutes, it takes longer for your body to tell you it is full. If you eat your meal too fast, you might have eaten way too much for your stomach to handle which brings on the stomach aches and pains. I hope this helps and let me know if you would like me to go into more detail on anything covered in this post!