My fitness journey began five years ago. I weighed in just shy of 200 pounds at the time. I wore only black clothes, never jeans, never fashionable, always miserable. I wore my fat like misery. I loathed the extra weight. I despised it. I despised myself.

I lived my life in hiding. I couldn’t be honest when I began losing weight. I could’t tell people the truth about what was going on with me because it is not socially acceptable to hate your own body. People were always encouraging me to embrace myself, “You are beautiful Amber. Size doesn’t matter.”

I remember the day someone told me, “You’re just big-boned.” I wasn’t just flabbergasted. I was incensed at the farce. My bones are not big. I’m a petite girl with a tiny frame. I’d eaten myself into a distorted monstrosity. My own society could not recognize. I stood in the mirror and did not see my own face looking back at me.

It took me less than a year to get these results. How did I do it? The gym and clean eating.

I wish I could explain to people how easy it is to transform yourself. My body and my life changed in a matter of months and the formula for my success really is so easy that anyone can follow it and have the same success. The best part of my fitness program is that you do not have to pay any extra money for it. You do not need to hire a nutritionist, or a personal trainer, or start a cleanse or detox purge. You just need to choose to start. This is what I did to transform my body.

1. I got a gym membership at Lacey Ultimate Fitness Center and when I did I committed myself to going for one hour a day without exception. I told myself, “You deserve one hour for yourself, for your life. If you can not invest to make your life worth one hour then it will be worth less than one hour. Your life is worth more than minutes.” The truth of my commitment is that is became an obsession. I woke up each day thinking of that hour that is mine. It wasn’t that I looked forward to the workout as much as I looked forward to getting the hour over with so I could get back to business and real life. The hour I granted myself to change my life was intolerable. I often walked through the doors without any motivation. It didn’t matter. That one hour was my duty to myself. Like putting gas in a car, it was required.
2. Fuel. I stopped thinking of food as anything more than fuel for my machine. I restricted myself to only the right kinds of fuel: Vegetables and Meat. My diet was as simple as simple can be. I reached for chicken, or steak, or pork or hamburger. My side was always vegetables and on occasion I had fruit. I also kept fudge pops in the freezer because they are very low in calories and fat. I ate meat and vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snack. FUEL. My meals became fuel instead of flavor cravings.
3. Simplify. It’s easy to get a little crazy when you have hit the end of your comfort zone and you want to change so badly that you need all the answers. People ask things like, “How much should I eat? Do I need to eat every three hours? What if I am not hungry? You say meat and vegetables… Do you ever eat bread because I love bread. Can I have a cheat meal? I hate meat. I hate vegetable. Do I really need to go to the gym seven days a week?” I had all the same questions as you when I first started in fitness. The answers though, the answers are the complication. When I say my results came because I kept it simple I mean exactly that. The first two things I mentioned in this blog are the foundation. I worked out for one hour a day and when I wanted to eat,or needed to eat, I reached for animals and plants. #simple #clean
4. Revise after you have proven results. I did not need to be as restrictive as I was in the beginning of my weight loss journey. Fitness experts may even argue that my approach was excessive or impeding to progress. Seven days a week is more than the five recommended. Rest is needed for muscle repair. I went to the gym seven days a week because I did not want to lose faith in the program when my progress grew stagnant and it did. Of course I hit platues.They always ended with new progress. I did not change the program to get new progress. I waited for it. Seven months to lose 60 pounds. I transformed my body so easily and so fast that I now know I can add some pizza to the equation and then there are the occasional bouts of candy…
5. Journal: Writing played a pivotal role in my success and weight loss. I wrote about what I want for myself and I wrote about what I did not want for myself. I wrote to keep myself on track, some days I would simply write lists of small daily goals so I could see myself succeeding when I felt like I was failing. I checked each accomplishment off my list and when I did I felt like I was getting there, like I would win if I kept on target. Writing gives permanence to the tasks at hand.