Road to Health

I thought I would share my journey to losing my pregnancy weight, learning to eat healthy, and maintaining that accomplishment while trying to reduce our grocery bill.

Part One: Weight Loss
My daughter's first birthday was coming up in April and I wanted to lose all the pregnancy weight before she turned one. I'd been trying to use Weight Watchers for four months losing one pound a week most weeks but sometimes nothing at all to a total of 10 pounds. I was losing motivation due to the slow progress so my very supportive husband told me about a program called Take Shape for Life that he heard about on the radio to see if that would work better. I went to the website and it seemed worth a try so I signed up in February. The first week I lost 11 pounds (some of it was water weight) but the best part was I continued to lose weight. The program promises that the typical results a person can expect to lose is between 2 to 5 pounds per week. I always lost at least 2 pounds if not more each week which made it easy to keep motivated and stay on track. I started at 145 lbs and in 11 weeks I reached my goal weight of 120 lbs. That's a total loss of 25 lbs!

I began the maintenance phase of the program where I gradually re-introduced normal food to my meals replacing the Medifast food. I found this stage to be a bit of a struggle using the guidance of the program. It didn't make sense to me. I decided to quit that program since I accomplished the goal of weight loss. Actually found a more simplistic program that's not really a diet, more of a community for education on food. The Beyond Diet Program is a one time fee of $47 to gain lifetime access to the e-books and community website. It has a lot of the same values as the other programs but explains how to implement it into your life much better (in my opinion). Basically eat as much organic as possible, eliminate processed foods and ingredients. That sounds simple but educating yourself on what foods are bad can be overwhelming with all the contradicting information available. This program lays it out for you including what ingredients to look out for on nutrition labels. Once you read the information you realize it's common sense that you might have already known but I think it's worth a one time fee to always have the latest news on it for supporting your healthy lifestyle.

Not all programs that claim to be safe and healthy actually are so be careful. All safe and healthy programs work but you have to follow the guidelines in order to succeed. It's a matter of will power! Everyone is different and that means not every one's needs and priorities will work on the same program. One size does not fill all! Considering that I never did dieting until this point in my life I'm pretty happy that it only took me three tries to find the program that fit me and my family.


Part Two: The Grocery Bill
During this phase of finding the right program the grocery bill was getting bigger to the tune of $700 for a family of three. Once I settled into the Beyond Diet Program I was able to use that shopping list to purge my kitchen of all bad foods/ingredients and buy only the staple items that would always be an option in any recipe. This is where we are right now so it is still a work in progress. First month we were able to reduce the bill by $100. My dream goal is to get it down to $400 if that's even possible but I'll be happy if it gets down to $500.

Until then I'd love to hear of other's success stories!

Update: Well our grocery bill has improved. We now have Sprouts Farmers Market in our area and I subscribed to their weekly sales add so that I can make our list for double ad Wednesday shopping. This has saved us about $40 dollars a week which adds up to $160 savings per month and $540 total groceries for a family of three. That is significant enough to make me happy.