Some background....

So I am going to use today's update to give you a little background. This may take awhile so bear with me. I have struggled with not only my weight for quite some time, but also my body image. In high school, I was the average size 4-6, but I never felt skinny or even good about myself. I have always related this to low self esteem. After high school and the short stint at college, I got married and had my first child (Brendan, now 11), not exactly in that order..... : ) ...... My self esteem and self image went down hill quickly after this. I dealt with depression, anxiety and a wealth of other issue's brought on by you guessed it, ME. It wasn't until my 2nd child (Alyssa, now 8) and a divorce that I started caring about my self image.

About a year after my divorce, I met a girl at work who always had a passion for working out or at least staying fit. We hit it off immediately and started hanging out outside of work. We decided that we would start exercising and getting in shape together. We also decided that we loved to eat and drink beer and wouldn't change that, that would be no fun (lol). We thought as long as we were working out religiously, that the eating and drinking were okay. Don't get me wrong, we didn't eat junk all of the time. We watched what we ate, but didn't starve ourselves or deprive ourselves of the things we loved. We joined the Carmel gym together. We started going to the gym near work about 3 times a week during lunch. They offered a variety of classes during the work week such as kickboxing, step aerobics, circuit and basic weight training. The classes were awesome. As long as we went together, we were very dedicated to working out.  We went members for 3 years or more so we saw alot of trainers and class teachers. We had one that we LOVED. Her name was Stacia and she was awesome. She made us push ourselves very hard. I could bounce quarters off my butt (lol).

Although we were always working out and we were in great shape, I still didn't feel great about myself. I still had a little bit of a tummy that I couldn't get rid of, I still wanted to be better. I tried various supplements and never got the exact results that I wanted.