The beginning: Where procrastination comes to die.

Hi, and welcome to my first ever blog post! I decided to create this blog to share my fitness journey, and basically to have something to hold myself accountable to.

This is kind of how I feel when it comes to exercising:

Yeah. I’d pretty much rather be doing anything but.

So, I guess I’ll start off by telling you a little bit about myself, my fitness goals, and how I got to this point.

My name is Holly Love. I am 30 years old. I am 5’5″ and at the present moment I weigh 156 lbs. Which, according to the BMI calculator puts me just inside of the “overweight” threshold.

Now, it wasn’t always this way. Just a little over a year ago I weighed 125 lbs. I had been in the 140s for quite a while, but had worked hard and lost 15-20 lbs. I went through some rough years, and stopped exercising, but I worked in a job that constantly kept me moving and active for 8+ hours a day. So, i managed to maintain that weight.

In July of 2014, I met my now husband. I am Canadian born, my husband is American. He was working in Canada on a work permit. We met on match.com, and hit it off right away. He eventually lost his job and had to move back to the United States, and we continued our relationship long distance. When he proposed, we decided that I would move to the United States.

Long story short, I moved to the US in June of 2017, and we got married shortly after. This transition was a lot harder on me than I had ever anticipated. I got home sick, and had a lot of down days. I wasn’t able to work for 8 months (I had to wait for papers to come through) and I wasn’t able to import my car. So basically, I was stuck at home in a place where I didn’t know anybody except for my husband.

I’ve been living in the US for just over a year now, and in that year I have gained 30 pounds. I used to wear a size 5 in jeans (US 6), and now I’m wearing a size 10. I’ve gone up 2 sizes in just the span of a year, and I’m worried if I don’t do something about it now then the scale will just keep creeping up.

I know that just by looking at me, I’m not what a lot of people would consider “fat”. This is more about the way I feel in my body.  I’m just not comfortable in it anymore. I look at myself, and quite honestly, I hate what I see. Not to mention, I just feel yucky. I feel like my stomach’s all up in knots most of the time. I guess that’s what eating junk and lack of exercise will do.

This might be a little TMI, but it’s gotten to the point that  when I sit down I have a major muffin top going on, and I can feel this fat roll forming. If I look at my stomach after I’ve been sitting down, I can see a red line across my stomach from my pooch. It’s like I have a kangaroo pouch that i stuffed full of cookies (and bread, and ice cream).

I’ve tried a couple times over this past year to get back into exercising – I have an app on my phone called Nike Training Club (NTC), which  I used before and found to be very effective – but it seems like I always do one or two days, and then I keep pushing it off saying I’ll do it tomorrow. So, I’m hoping that by making this public and putting it out there, that I will have something to hold myself accountable to.

I’m going to start looking for some healthier recipes, instead of eating pasta all the time. Kind of stinks, ’cause I love pasta! My husband asked me if I wanted Arby’s for dinner tonight, and I rather unwillingly turned it down. Curly fries are my weakness. 😦 But nobody lost 30 pounds eating curly fries and mac and cheese.

So, I sit here on day one, having just finished my salad and yogurt for lunch, and rather grudgingly set up a fitness plan on my NTC app. I’ve decided to ease into it slowly, and do 2-3 workouts a week. I know if I go full out right away, I’m probably not going to want to continue with it, especially since I know how much it’s going to kick my butt!

It has me starting tomorrow with the Start Up Benchmark. This is just a short work out to gauge where I’m at physically, so the app can tailor the plan to work most effectively for me. Then I have three days of recovery, Friday is Endurance, another recovery day, and Strength on Sunday.

Wish me luck!