I have never been an overweight person, but felt like if I could workout on a regular basis I could be better.  I wanted to be tone, have defined muscle, slow the aging process just a little.  In February of 2014 my guy started working out on our Elliptical faithfully 3-5 times a week and struggled with loosing and gaining the same 5 to 10 pounds.  I joined him on the cardio-junky roller coaster with the same results(down a few pounds, up a few pounds). In May of 2014, with the help of my co-worker Nicole from hopepraysweat.com (because lets be honest walking into the local gym, for the first time, all alone is insanely intimidating!) I joined the a local YMCA & started a weightlifting routine.  In the first two weeks of lifting I GAINED 6 pounds!  I knew I gained some muscle but I kept the weight on without losing a pound! After lifting & doing cardio faithfully 4-5 days a week for 3 months, combined with Jeff’s inability to loss the weight he wanted to, I knew something had to give.  Our struggle spurred me to google “clean eating”.  HOLY COW!!!!!  Can you say OVERWHELMED with information!! But I read for an entire weekend on clean-eating, what exactly was clean eating, how to convert, what we could and couldn’t eat and came to the conclusion “Clean Eating” has MANY different levels and you have to choose the level that is right for you and your family.  I won’t get into all of that today but on Monday I went to work & asked my friend Nicole her  opinion on clean eating.  She informed me she had recently started clean eating to achieve her goals and she suggested I go to bodybuilding.com – Jamie Eason “LiveFit” trainer,  I found Jamie Eason’s Live Fit Trainer breaks “getting fit” into three simple phases of lifestyle change….after reading all of Jamie Eason’s information and watching a few of her video’s I was ready to focus on getting healthy.  We made the jump to clean eating in September 2014 and have not looked back.  Within one month I had lost the 6 pounds I had gained when I started lifting and lost an additional 5 pounds as well as lost inches and gained solid muscle.  I have never been in this shape in all of my 41 years! Jeff has lost to date 50 pounds!!!  I am so proud of him for not giving up!  We now hit the gym Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and are still faithful clean eaters.  It truly is a lifestyle change that has changed the way we look at food!

My “before” pictures below after 4 weeks of lifting weights 3-5 times a week. (I am KICKING myself for not taking “before I started the fitness journey” photos.)