It's never too late to start a new journey to improve your life...
This is my first post on my shiny new blog... which as the title of this post indicates, will be a fitness journal blog. This will be my little place on the internet where I will share this important part of my life. But before I continue, let me introduce myself...
Who am I?
I am Eve Perez, a soon to be 26 years old Latina woman (I am from Honduras, a tiny country in Central America). I live an ordinary but very blessed life in my beautiful country, and I feel happy and thankful to God for how things are going, though positive changes are always welcome for personal growth and satisfaction.
Disclaimer: I want to take the time to clarify first and foremost before continuing that I am not a nutritionist, dietitian, health, or fitness professional. The purpose of this blog is to share my personal experience, my thoughts, and my progress which could help and inspire others to start their journal or if they are already in a fitness journal, then to keep them motivated through their own.
My Fitness Journey
To start a new journey in life, it's important to set realistic goals that you would like to achieve under a certain period of time.
I started my fitness journey back in July 2020, right in the middle of the COVID quarantine. Ever since then, I have made several changes as I continually learn more and more through health professionals (my dietitian and gynecologist) and what I have read online.
At the beginning of July, my weight was around 60 - 61 kg (my height is 1.55 m or 5'1 ft), my diet included fried meals, many cookies, chocolates of all kinds, chips (in my country we call these churros), and junk food; my activity level was sedentary and had issues falling asleep (still do to a certain extent). I wasn't happy with my weight and how my body looked but I lacked the motivation to exercise or the self-control to stop my cravings.
I tried several times to make positive changes that would take me to a point where I could feel good about my body and improve my self-esteem but those changes usually lasted less than a month before returning to my old habits. Plus, these changes were always focused on eating healthier but I wouldn't do anything to improve my activity level. It wasn't until July came along where I had the opportunity to make drastic changes in my life that for the first time have been able to maintain for more than a month.
My current weight is 47 kg (I lost 13 kg between July and November), changed my diet to a plant-based diet, and workout every day for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how busy I am. I feel so much better with my body and I have seen how that body fat keeps reducing and instead is being replaced with toned muscle, especially my arms (I am working on overcoming this major arm complex I have). I have become more active and enjoy moving around in my free time instead of laying down on my couch like I used to.
Background Story
I was never obese but I was overweight.
As a little kid, I remember being slim but I gained weight rapidly during my preadolescence and it never went away. It was during this time that someone very important to me would criticize me for my weight gain, the stretch marks appearing in many parts of my body, and how my body looked in general. I am not the type of person to be affected long-termed by the criticisms and hurtful comments from other people but because this was a very important person in my life, it ended up affecting my self-esteem for many years. To this day I still struggle a little with the image I have about myself.
During high school, my weight was around 63 to 65 kg and I sucked at gym class. Sweating was very uncomfortable for me back then so even jogging wasn't a favorite activity for me. The cafeteria did not exactly offer the healthiest food either (culturally, Honduran cuisine is high in carbohydrates and bad fats). I started wishing I had an eating disorder so I could get thin (before you criticize me, I know how serious these disorders are but I was desperate to have the perfect body so I could feel better about myself. I hope that anyone who is going through one of them can recover and have a healthier relationship with food) but I never got to the point of suffering from one.
At the beginning of my first year at the university, I discovered some Chinese weight loss pills that made me lose a lot of weight. I reached a weight of 55 kg and I was thrilled because people noticed I was thinner. I received mixed reactions with my new weight: some people gave me praises and encouraging words due to my change and others would tell me that I didn't need to lose weight (I knew they were not right because I was never obese but I was overweight). I took those pills for a few years but not constantly, I would mostly take them if I noticed I was gaining weight again. Apart from these pills, I didn't make any other changes in my life but I was able to maintain my weight for a few years... until I didn't.
As I started nearing my university graduation, I gained almost all the weight I had lost because junk food became more constant in my meal choices. At this point in my life, I already had a job and was earning my own money. This meant I could go to the grocery store, and buy many bags of cookies, chips, chocolate, instant noodles, and just a few healthy foods. I tried many times to change my food choices and bring my food to my workplace but because I worked for several hours every day, I sometimes didn't feel the energy to prepare my meal for the next day, I would end up buying lunch (as I mentioned before, Honduran cuisine is high in carbohydrates and bad fats). I also tried working out but those attempts lasted only a week or two.
One of my new year's resolutions for 2020 was to change my lifestyle but I wasn't hopeful that I would accomplish it due to my many previous failed attempts. Then COVID spread throughout the world and it reached Honduras in March. The government declared a national lockdown and I started working from home so I had two more hours of my life back because I didn't have to commute to my workplace.
How it began
Something magical happened, I started enjoying my workout sessions with the youtube videos. But I still didn't see much progress...
At the beginning of the lockdown, I would use the extra two hours I saved for not having to commute to work to keep the house cleaner, spend more quality time with my dog, call my family more often, and mostly to work more on my youtube channel (I had an ASMR channel). I also started appreciating more spending time at the kitchen cooking delicious but not necessarily healthy food (I realized how small my kitchen is during this time. I wasn't the cooking type of girl but I do love eating.. eating is one of my favorite moments of the day). As I was active on youtube, I started seeing many people uploading videos of themselves working out or mentioning in comments that they were working out. In April I decided to look for a short workout video for arms as I have felt insecure and ashamed about them for as long as I could remember. I didn't see much of a difference in my body because I only did an 8 minutes arm workout every day but this was the beginning.
As the weeks passed by and the government was still keeping the lockdown, I started adding more youtube workout videos to my new daily routine. And something magical happened, I started enjoying my workout sessions with the youtube videos. But I still didn't see much progress between April to June because I was still eating unhealthy food. Feeling a little depressed, instead of giving up I decided to make a complete change in my life: eat more healthily (more vegetables and fruits and eliminate all the cookies, chocolates, chips), started counting calories (going into a very low-calorie diet which I now know is not healthy, at least not with medical supervision. I am slowly increasing my calorie intake to a healthy number) and working out in the morning and it the night.
I want to make another post where I talk about my progress so far in a more detailed manner as I didn't want to bore you with a long post. So far I have written what I wanted to share for the opening post of my new blog. Hope this wasn't boring for you and for now, I say goodbye. Have a lovely day/night!
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