One Month Blog-iversary!

Yay! It's been one month since I've started être svelte. A momentous occasion, to be sure.

My little blog started as the random rantings and ravings of some anonymous girl into the vast, cavernous depths of the internet.

You have no idea how happy I am to have such lovely followers. I couldn't ask for a better audience - I am, to be perfectly honest, surprised that I even found an audience to listen to me blather on such a regular basis. ;)

So thank you, lovelies, for making my blog what it is today.

As my weight loss journey continues and I find myself progressing through my mini-goals, I still find myself dissatisfied.

Yes, I'm happy to be losing weight. Anyone would be. But it's hard when you're constantly comparing yourself to how you were at the same weight two or three years ago.

I'm at 123, perhaps less - I haven't weighed myself properly in a couple of days now, and all I can do is think of how I looked at 127 a couple of years ago and feel like I'm not measuring up.

I know most of it is probably in my head. I definitely look slimmer and my clothes are getting looser and people are actually noticing. I got lunch the other day with my aunt and she actually commented on my weight loss, which may or may not be a good thing because I don't want to have to start explaining how I'm losing the weight. I'm a notoriously bad liar.

I did take some before and after pictures. Unfortunately, I don't have any of me at my highest weight. So these are a comparison of me at 130 - about a year ago, and 124 - a few days ago.

This also doubles as a before/after picture for my skin cancer.

Even at just 6 lbs of weight loss between the two pictures, I've definitely slimmed down my stomach and legs. I'm still grossed out by my stomach, though. Somehow everyone else in my family can have a flat stomach despite their weight, and I can have lost almost 20 lbs, be in the mid-range of normal BMI, weigh less than them, and still have rolls of fat dancing around my tummy.

I've come to the conclusion that losing weight by restricting is simply just not enough to kill the beast that is my stomach. Thus, the boyfriend and I started going to the gym - yesterday. We got a free 2-week trial at Anytime Fitness. Yesterday was rather successful in that I actually broke a sweat. I literally came home soaked. I ran/jogged/walked 2 miles on the treadmill and did 2 sets of 15 reps of leg extensions and tricep presses.

I've also started using SparkPeople's exercise regimen. Two days of core workouts, two days of upper body workouts, one lower body workout, and one full-body workout per week. You can customize the workouts depending on how much time you have, what equipment is available to you, and what types of workouts you want to do on certain days. They also have descriptions and little demonstrations of how to do each exercise.

SparkPeople Workout Plan for today.

The boyfriend and I are planning on going back to the gym today, once I finish digesting the ridiculous amount of Russian food I ate.

Hopefully I'll burn more than 280 calories this time around and I'll try to fit in an ab workout.

A bientôt, lovelies.

- parisienne.love