07/01/2002 : Thank you for dropping by! Welcome to My Body For Life website. First let me tell you about the Body For Life program. Developed by Bill Phillips, author and owner of EAS, Body For Life basically teaches you how to live a healthy lifestyle. The program is simple: it encourages you to alternate weight training with cardiovascular exercise and to eat 6 small meals a day. It's possible to do all of your weight training at home with a set of dumbells and there are no special foods to buy though you are required to use at least one EAS product if you want to enter the Body For Life challenge and qualify for cash prizes. ( The cash is a great incentive, though, and you can win up to $250,000 based on your transformation after 12 weeks!) Currently, I use EAS meal replacement bars which actually taste good and fill me up for a few hours. The Body For Life website has a lot of great information about the program, as well as inspirational 'before' and 'after' pics. The EAS website is also informative. Please check them out at www.bodyforlife.com and www.eas.com
Now a little about my self - I'm a student, wife and mother and like most overweight women, I have not always been a 'big girl.' Throughout high school I was thin, and rarely worried about what I ate. At 5'8" I effortlessly wore a size 9 or even 7 and was able to shop anywhere! It was a nice feeling. At school we were required to take PE. And I chose cross country running as my class. Maybe that combined with walking to school everyday kept me slim.
Fast forward 10 years....after 7 years of marriage and 3 children I'm 180 lbs, a size 16 (or 14 if I'm trying to be cute) and unhappy most of the time I look in the mirror. People say that I look fine and it's ok for me to be a little overweight because I'm a mom. The truth is, I can't blame my kids for making me overweight.I'm one of those people that actually loses weight during pregancy! For example, when I discovered I was pregnant with my 3rd child, Zuri I weighed 179 lbs. The day before I delivered her I weighed 178! When little Zuri was 2 weeks old I weighed 167! I was thrilled and my friends were jealous. The same thing happened with my other 2 children. I always lost weight during the pregnancy, but gained it back in the months following delivery.This could be due to 1) terrible morning sickness that lasted most of my pregnancies or 2) following a strict diet given to me by my nutritionist. Let me explain... with my 2 youngest children, Zuri and Pamela, I was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes. This meant that my body was not able to produce insulin due to a certain hormone produced in my body during the pregnancy. I forget all the science behind it, but the result is that I was put on a very nutritionally balanced diet that encouraged me to eat 6 times a day. I was instructed to include protein in every one of my meals. I never felt hungry and felt that I was doing something to benefit both mine and my baby's health. It could be that following this eating plan assisted me in actually losing weight during pregnancy...I'm not sure. But I do know that both my dr. and nutritionist suggested I follow this way of eating for life, if I wanted to try to keep from developing diabetes as I get older. Whatever the reason for the weight loss, I guess once the nausea, indigestion and heartburn go away after the babies are born, I go right back to my greedy ways, eat whatever I feel like eating and gain all the weight right back! It's like my body has a memory of tmyself at size 16 and makes sure I get back up there. So It's about 5 months since Zuri was born and I'm back to a size 16 (surprise, surprise) and I finally realize that I've had enough. I visited the Body For LIfe website and found very inspirational stories from people from all walks of life. I bought the Body For Life book from Half.com for just $9.99, read it and realized that the eating plan Bill Phillips recommends is somewhat similar to the one given to me by my nutritionist for my gestational diabetes. I visited personal websites of people who are following the Body For LIfe plan and decided to do it myself. I entered the challenge and started on June 23, 2002. I hope this website will allow me to share my experiences with others, get feedback and if I'm sucessful, inspire someone else to try this wonderful life changing program!
