Tag: exercise videos

I was never known as the cook in my family.  My mother is a fantastic cook.  She can “burn” in at least five different cultures.  She learned to cook from her mother and from spending summers on a farm in Tennessee.  Later, she made friends of different nationalities and took a little from each culture.  She learned to cook Haitian food from her Haitian friends, Jamaican specialties from her Jamaican friends, Panamanian dishes from my father's family, lasagna and other Italian dishes from her Italian friends and so on and so forth.  Growing up, our house was always the United Nations of food.  I never knew whether I was going to get smothered pork chops, curry goat, bacalao, black rice  or lasagna for dinner.  I just knew it would be good.

I never had any excuse for not knowing how to cook.  My mother tried her very best to teach me.  I was her main helper for holiday dinners.  I spent so many hours in her kitchen peeling sweet potatoes and helping her mix up sweet potato pies and cakes that I should know how to make those things by heart with my eyes closed. 

My mother did manage to teach me how to make fried chicken and one corned beef dish though.  I learned those two dishes in desperation because she didn't cook on Friday and Saturday nights.  So, on Friday nights, I would make dinner and on Saturdays, we would have takeout. 

They say that practice makes perfect.  I guess that's true.  My friends will tell you that I make a mean fried chicken and some of my siblings remember that corned beef dish very fondly.  I was surprised a few years ago when one of my sisters mentioned it. 

My mother always made balanced meals, but, in college and in law school, I opted for the meal plans and ate most of my meals in the cafeteria.  Since I was a dancer for the first three years of college, it didn't have any effect on my weight at that time.  In my senior year, however, I stopped taking dance classes (the advanced classes were too early in the morning for me) and that's when I began to put on weight.  In law school, I gained fifty pounds and, over the last 17 years of practice, I gained eighty more. 

As a young lawyer, when I was single, I ordered delivery or picked up from somewhere night after night.  I was too tired to cook at eight o'clock at night (or later) when I returned home from work.

When  I got married, my husband cooked.  He was an amazing cook who specialized in Jamaican cuisine, so we ate fish or meat with sauce and rice and peas most nights and not very many vegetables.  While my taste buds were very happy, I steadily gained weight. 

I knew that I had gained weight, but I never fully realized how my eating habits were affecting me until, in October, 2007, I decided to do something about it.  I bought some exercise videos and signed up on Team Beachbody's website – http://teambeachbody.com .  It's a great site that allows you to track your workouts and your weight loss and to team up with exercise buddies online.  You can even chat with other people who are doing the same exercise program as you or who have goals similar to yours. That feature came in handy when I misplaced the instructional DVD for the Slim in 6 program and needed to find out when I  was supposed to move on o disc 2.   The site also has great recipes on it.

Anyway, in filling out the profile information for the team beachbody website, I weighed myself and discovered that I was 267lbs.  It was the heaviest I had ever been in my life.  I knew then that I had to get serious about weight loss, but I didn't yet have all the tools I needed to do that.

I started working out and slowly began to lose weight; however, it was extremely slow going because I needed to change my eating habits.  In March of last year, a friend of mine referred me to this doctor of Chinese medicine she had been seeing.  The doctor gave me acupuncture and nutritional counseling and got me eating 7-11 servings of fruits and vegetables per day.  She also took me off dairy and made me keep a food diary listing everything I ate.

To make sure that I got in all those servings of fruits and vegetables each day, I had to learn how to make vegetable soups, different types of salads,  smoothies and other “veggielicious” dishes.  That's when I discovered the vegetable recipes on the CDC's website – www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov    I also got numerous recipes from the Foodnetwork's website and the Teambeachbody website.  I printed the recipes out, stapled them to index cards and kept them in index card boxes in alphabetical order.  Now, if I want to make a chicken dish, I go to tab “C” and either pull a tried and true chicken recipe or a new one.  If I don't like how a new recipe comes out, I toss the recipe and recycle the card.

I started watching cooking shows and following the recipes, and, over the past year, I've become quite a decent cook.  I knew I had acquired some skills when I made vegetarian collard greens for my mother and she sang my praises. She is reknown for her collard greens and she cooks them southern style with a smoked ham hock  or a turkey neckbone for seasoning.

At first, while cooking (as opposed to ordering in or driving through) and eating my fruits and veggies did wonders for my health, my skin, and my energy levels, it did not do much for my waistline.  I lost twelve pounds during the six month period from March, 2009 through September, 2009.  In September, 2009, I joined Weight Watchers.  In that program, I learned portion control and how to “lighten up” recipes (i.e. how to make subsitutions to reduce the amount of  calories in a recipe without sacrificing flavor).  In the past 23 weeks since I've been on Weight Watchers, I lost another 23lbs.  All told, I have lost 35 lbs in the past year and 45 lbs. since October, 2007. 

Being more in control of what I eat through learning how to cook and how to modify recipes has helped me tremendously in my weight loss efforts.  When I started this journey, losing 100 pounds seemed an impossible task, but now I am halfway there and the goal is in sight.

If I can do this, anyone can.

Peace