14 Day Challenge

Today I signed up for a "14 Day Take Control of Your Health Challenge" through Gabby Reece's Honey Line website www.thehoneyline.com (one of my favorite websites for inspiration and loaded with tons of health and fitness tips). I'm a big fan of this website. Gabby to me is really a huge role model for fitness. She practices what she preaches and stands behind the belief that there is no "easy" way to get fit and healthy, you must work at it and continue to work at it. Eat good for you foods and move your body. Most of us are not built like her or have as many resources as she does, but we certainly can draw some inspiration from her fitness philosophy. Anyway, I'll be talking more about the Honey Line throughout my journey, I'm sure as I am a fan. In the mean time see for yourself what it's all about. Getting back to the challenge. Basic rules, no fried foods, limit coffee and alcohol to 8oz. per day, no smoking (super easy as smoking is absolutely disgusting), workout at least 30 mins. per day, and get 7+ hours of sleep (challenging for me - love to stay up late w/hubby to catch up). Day one consisted of structuring my meals. A normal day for me is oatmeal and coffee for breakfast, salad w/protein for lunch, and usually a decent size dinner w/meat, more veggies, and some sort of carbs (I love to cook large well rounded dinners for my family because it's our time to connect for the day and I feel great doing it for them). Well, under this "structured meal plan", it sets the pace where I'm suppose to eat every 3-4 hours of meals consisting of 250-300 calories balancing lean proteins, good carbs, and good fats. I'm sure by now everyone has some sort of idea what are lean and good foods, so I won't elaborate too much. The objective is to stabilize blood sugar so that your body processes food more efficiently. I thought this would be a piece of cake, eat small meals more frequently. It actually wasn't that easy...I forgot to eat twice and had to quickly catch up. When I'm busy working or dealing with my young kids, my day can slip away just like that. So as it happens, I was busy today and forgot to fuel up then I finally got smart and set little alarms to remind me. I will plan my day better tomorrow. I really want to master this as it totally makes sense to continually fuel in small increments instead of large heavy less frequent meals. I did cook a decent size dinner tonight, but I had a larger amount of salad and only 1/2 my "sort of" lean hamburger. Not perfect, but still striving to be better...now I have to fit in a workout...just got to do it! Oh, I also have to limit processed foods as a basic rule...apparently protein bars are processed and deemed "low quality foods"...bye, bye beloved Balance Bars.