You are what you eat..

For some reason I really enjoy reading health blogs. It's fun to see how people go from overweight to healthy weight. Tipping the scale is very beneficial for your life.

Over a year ago.. I think it was February 2008. Alex started the South Beach Diet because his mom had recently tried it as she is pre-diabetic. Alex started at about 265. We don't know the exact weight, but we're guessing it's around there. His current weight is about 203. That's about 60 lbs.. it's crazy! Crazy good of course, but nuts to know that he dropped 60 lbs.. and about 20 of it was in the first month! I now call him my skinny minnie because i've never seen him this small since i've been dating him (2 years and 9 months). This is apparently where he was at weight wise in high school. I'm pretty proud of him.. plus not that he wasn't hot before.. but this makes him even hotter!

Moving on.. i'm currently on the SB to shape up a bit before the wedding/honeymoon. I started on Monday. I've been doing really well. One thing i'd like to mention though is scales are finicky.. it says i lost 4 lbs in 3 days. I'm not sure if this is accurate or not. I was thinking that my first weigh in was inaccurate, but hey, maybe it wasn't? 4 lbs in 3 days just seems crazy. I've been tracking my food intake.. calories, carbs and sugars and then how many calories I think i'm burning.. which really, might balance out because I'm eating an average of 750 calories a day. That doesn't seem like much compared to the 'recommended' amount that the gov't says you need, however i eat breakfast, snack, lunch, snack (sometimes), dinner. It's the south beach.. actually you're supposed to snack more on the south beach! I'm thinking that 4 lbs was water weight, and I know there's more water weight to come off (since i've done this a few times). Easter really threw me off last time with it's peanut butter cups! I just need to keep being strict with it. It's going to be hard to do that this weekend at my cousin's graduation party, but i'll do my best!!

Here's a fun website, 100+ Nutrition Facts about Well-Known Foods. It's very interesting. Count how many of those foods you eat on a regular basis. I'm 11 out of 25. I think that's pretty good?? it's only 44% but still!

I know it's hard not to eat processed foods, but you really are what you eat. If you eat a lot of junk, you're body will fill up with junk (fat) and if you eat foods that your body actually uses, then you're on the right track! So many of the foods on that list are anti-carcinogenic and can help cancer patients greatly by removing toxins from their body that they get during radiation and chemo.

Alex has a dream (yes another one) to one day be self sufficient on the farm and not need to go to the grocery store for anything (of course, somethings.. like toilet paper will need to be purchased) but you have a large garden in the summer where you grow all the veggies you'll need for a year. Obviously you'll have to freeze some or can some to make it the whole year but there are a lot of seasonal veggies. And he wants to have a couple chickens for egg production, a steer or two for beef production, sheep for lamb production, and of course a large garden. I agree with this dream, and though it will be a lot of work, we may live 10+ years longer because of it.

Sometimes I wish I lived in simpler times, like little house on the prairie. They didn't worry about much. Sure, Nelly was a biotch but other then her and her mother, everyone was super nice (from what I can remember). It just seemed like such a carefree life.. little to no bills to pay, no tv (which i couldn't live without but hey this is hypothetical).. no drugs (in your face, of course there were drugs).. no rehab though. It will never go back to that unless the earth becomes extinct and we start all over.. that's another topic tho!

Happy Thursday, Tomorrow is Friday!