Breaking My Rules & Paying the Price

Time for a reality check : Am I REALLY doing everything that I could be doing to break the weight loss plateau & slump i've been in for the last few weeks. I'm working out more, tracking everything I eat, but to no avail, the scale is'nt budging. So I thought I would get honest with myself (and my readers), and pick apart the things that could be self-sabotaging.

“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper” 
When I come home from work, or the gym - I whip open the fridge and fill myself with the contents of it. While yes its mostly veggies, fruit, and healthy snacks. The key to healthy living and weight loss is to fuel your body with food during the day, starting with breakfast and have a lighter dinner. This week i'm going to focus on “protein and produce” at dinner. Swapping my light lunch salad or soup for a light lunch salad or soup for dinner. This should also help fuel my evening workouts with a boost of carbs and proteins from lunch.

Controlling Alcohol Intake – This is so hard! I've given up drinking for the weekends but its also the number 1 behavior I see in myself when the scale sits at a stand still. When I think about weekends, with friends I can take in 2-5 drinks on a Friday or Saturday night. That adds up to over 800 extra calories that i'm not getting from food.  This week, we are going to limit alcohol to 1-2 drinks twice a week.

Getting More Beauty Sleep. According to researchers at Stanford, people with short sleep (5 hours a night) have reduced leptin (thin hormone) and elevated ghrelin (hunger hormone). Based on what the hormones do in the body, the researchers claimed the differences in leptin and ghrelin are likely to increase appetite, possibly explaining the increased BMI observed with short sleep duration.  

Sleep allows you to recover from your workouts. Which means you have to get sleep if you want to lose weight. With my new fitbit (click here to learn more about it) i've been able to track my sleep patterns into some sleek sleep graphs.

From these graphs i'm learning that I average 6hours and 34mins of sleep at night. For my age, it is recommended that i get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a night, and i get 26 min less of sleep a night. Another interesting fact is to see how sleep effects your sleep cycle.

See Sunday night, when I went out with some friends, for a little "girls night out" . We had been drinking, and while it only took me 5 minutes to fall asleep,  I tossed and turned and "awakened" 11 times that night and only got 5 hours of sleep, on a weekend! Ouch, its time for bed!