Fat Burning with Bri: Welcome 7/9/14

Welcome to My First Blog!!!

     Here I am, fighting constant battles in this war on fat! I have been fighting this battle for as long as I can remember & suddenly I am truly finding the motivation, the personal artillery & fellow armed militia in this wonderful world of social media! There seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of recipes, food pics & workouts that I post & my success, So HERE I GO!!!

     I am hoping that this will be a place for people to come to find motivation, inspiration, guidance & camaraderie! Too many of us struggle with losing weight, eating healthy, living healthy & simply living life to the fullest for us to think for a moment that we have to do it alone! I am in no way saying that I am an expert at this topic, but I am a fellow struggling individual who has been obese a few times & also fighting to maintain a healthy weight quite a few times in life! I know what is currently working for me, so maybe it will work for a few of you!

    So here is a little of my story... I had been in a car accident in the beginning of 2012 that took me out of work, took my pelvis out of alignment, took my active lifestyle & gave me tons of back pain plus pounds! My most recent war on obesity started February 2013. I weighed 267lbs, was squeezing into tight size 18 jeans & I didn't fully realize how much weight I had put back on after wearing bikinis on my honeymoon in 2010 prior to the accident. While recovering from the accident I tried my hardest to limit calories because I knew that suddenly being so sedentary would kill my waistline & all of the progress I made back in 2010 to fit into a gorgeous wedding dress. Every week I was visiting doctors to try to make progress with the pain I was experiencing and every week I was piling on the pounds! This is when I discovered a new condition I had never been aware of - Hypothyroidism. "GREAT! I'm destined to be obese!" was my first thought! "Oh! I'll just take my daily medicine & the pounds should start to melt off!" was my second thought!... Neither thoughts were correct!

     Fast forward to July 2014 & I've made a lot of progress, hit a few infuriating plateaus, back tracked a few times & wanted to cry for weeks & then picked up again where I left off to keep fighting! I've put on a lot of muscle (which I believe is important in looking fit, feeling fit & losing fat), I've lost 70lbs, I barely ever have back pain & I've reconditioned my knees which were once in terrible shape so that I am now able to jog once again!

    If I haven't lost your attention by now & you continue to follow me on this fitness & health journey of mine, you will see that I currently eat & prepare a lot of low carb foods, I try to keep my body in Ketosis by following keto recipes as well and I also try to put on muscle mass by weight training because these are the things that work for me! I believe that everyone's bodies' are different and respond to different things & I know from trial and error that watching my carbohydrates & maintaining a very rigorous workout program are the only ways I am able to actually shed pounds. I have done plenty of personal research, counted calories, ate only healthy complex carbohydrates, done full vegan fasts for months at a time amp; nothing works for me the way limiting carbs does if I want to continue losing weight!

     That being said, these are some things I am hoping you will find in my blog in the future!