Meet Angela

A couple of months ago I introduced the majority of you to my Cousin Andrea and invited you to read up on her journey to get back to her running glory and train for her upcoming 10 mile run.

Now I am excited to introduce you to another family member of mine. My cousin Angela, has recently started a blog to help her see a healthier 2009. Recently she has seen the scale number slip a little higher and would like to make some lifestyle changes to stop it from going further.

Please help me in welcoming Angela to the blog world and let?s all help her along as she begins to understand healthy eating and exercise choices. She is just at the beginning of her journey, but I know with some great advice from all of you she will be on her way to being fit and active.

Here?s a little background story by Angela: 

http://angiismyname.wordpress.com/

I was always the skinny girl. I could eat anything I wanted, and as much as I wanted without any repercussions. I ate so much in fact that a few of my friends decided to dub me "lunchbox" because I could "pack it away." Even when I did gain weight, I could workout for a week or two and be right back to where I was. This seemed to be the pattern until a few months ago. I met my boyfriend and slowly turned myself into a certified couch potato. They have that saying "fat and happy", and it is all too true. I don’t know if it was the frequency of us eating out, the many nights we spent watching movies and snacking, the increased alcohol consumption, or a combination of all of it. How it happened doesn’t matter, but over the course of six months I managed to gain a whopping thirty pounds!

My high metabolism I would contribute to my athletic endeavors. Ever since I can remember I have been in some form of physical activity. When I was real young, my sister and cousins all did ballet and dance. Once I got a little older I was introduced to the sport of gymnastics. Gymnastics forced me to work out 6 times a week for a couple hours each day and over the summer, I would have sessions twice a day everyday! When I reached high school, diving became my main focus (since gymnastics was not offered and it was the next best thing.) Being a gymnast, I was a natural diver and made varsity the three years I dove. My junior year, however, I had a horrible diving accident that ended the sport for me. During an attempt at a difficult dive, I miscalculated and hit my jaw on the board. Since then I was too traumatized to dive.

Without diving and gymnastics to maintain my metabolism. I didn’t have any real motivation to workout, combined with starting college and the massive amounts of partying that I did while in college. my weight started to falter.

A couple of months ago my boyfriend and I decided to join the gym but I never really got that motivation back again until the other week when I had to find something to wear to my boyfriend’s cousin’s wedding. My mom, my cousin and I went shopping and I was trying to look for a dress. I had gained so much weight that none of my dresses fit me anymore. The kicker of it all was when my cousin Meghann offered me some of her "fat clothes" when our shopping trip was unsuccessful(all of you know of Meghann’s weight loss success, as you are reading her blog.) It was a huge wake up call. Out of all of my first cousins, I was always the smallest and now Meghann was giving me her sympathy hand-downs. The worst part was that her fat clothes didn’t even fit, they were too small!

So here we are. I started my blog as a way to chronicle my weight loss attempt, and so I could have something to look back at later on to see how far I have come. At first, I intended the blog to be just for me and never really gave much thought to having it be read by anyone else. Then, Meghann asked me to do this guest spot and I figured, why not. She had also commented on how it would be interesting to see what I eat on a daily basis since I have been having a difficult time losing weight despite working out semi-consistently. Because of her inspiration, I have decided that I will bite the bullet and start adding food to my blog. I have had many reservations about this angle of the blog because I am afraid to realize how much food I actually consume, and how bad it is for me. It would be more helpful than hurtful, so I figured why not.

Hopefully, with the support and help of future readers of my blog, I can achieve my goals to get back to normal (it would be really nice to be able to fit into my size 3 jeans again!) and maintain a healthier lifestyle. I am just a normal girl. Running and healthy food are not my passions like some of the other bloggers out there. I want to be able to prove that you don’t have to be those things to get healthy or lose weight. With simple lifestyle modifications, you can lose weight in a healthy manner. I will leave you with a photo of me taken today, thirty pounds overweight. I’d like to look back at this in a few months and witness the transformation that will have occurred. This is not the end, but the beginning of a new, healthy life in 2009.