1st Weigh-In

Roman took this picture! Hee Hee!

Yeah, I know, I'm late in getting this on here, but to be fair to us, you gotta understand that we aren't starting our gym workouts until the first week of August due to a lack of funds and the boys being out of daycare for the summer. It was a pretty okay 2 weeks. I should have been more adamant about drinking my water the last few days and I would have lost more weight, but hey, I'm just happy to be in the 150s. Also, we celebrated my birthday this week, so it was hard not to eat too many extra sweets. My favorite part of my report is that I haven't had a soft drink in 16 days!!! YAY!!!

Renata: Starting weight (7/5/08): 160 lbs.

1st weigh in (7/20/08): 158 lbs.

My goal for the next 2 weeks is to start my running program. I'm going on vacation so I'll have a little extra help with the boys.

Hitting the Road

After I got the boys to bed tonight, I hit the road on my bike. It felt so great to get out there and ride. I haven't gotten out there in a while and it felt so good, but gee, what a different muscle group! My legs felt like jello when I got off.

So, I signed my contract with Carteret County today. I have to admit though, it was a little overwhelming. I had to fill out all of these papers in a short amount of time. A lot of them I had to make decisions about health, vision, dental without really thinking about them. It was a little frustrating, but the good thing is that it's behind me and I can get started on my career here!

Well, keep thinking thin for me, especially tomorrow. It's my birthday and you know how easy it is to eat lots on that day! We are waiting til Saturday to eat out, since we are weighing in on Saturday morning. Tim has been doing really good, but I'm going to work EXTRA hard this week!

Water Weight

Although it's only water weight that I've been losing this week, it does make a girl feel good to lose some pounds pretty quickly. The rest will not be so easy.

So, in honor of water:

Water is important to the mechanics of the human body. The body cannot work without it, just as a car cannot run without gas and oil. In fact, all the cell and organ functions made up in our entire anatomy and physiology depend on water for their functioning.
Water serves as a lubricant
Water forms the base for saliva
Water forms the fluids that surround the joints.
Water regulates the body temperature, as the cooling and heating is distributed through perspiration.
Water helps to alleviate constipation by moving food through the intestinal tract and thereby eliminating waste- the best detox agent.
Regulates metabolism

In addition to the daily maintainence of our bodies, water also plays a key role in the prevention of disease. Drinking eight glasses of water daily can decrease the risk of colon cancer by 45%, bladder cancer by 50% and it can potentially even reduce the risk of breast cancer. And those are just a few examples!

And you know what the best news about drinking water for health benefits is? It's virtually free! You can drink over 4,000 glasses of tap water for the price of a six-pack of your favorite cola.

Detox Complete!

My caffeine withdraw headaches are GONE! I haven't had any soft drinks since Friday Night and today is the first day I haven't woken up with a headache since Friday. It may be because Raiden woke me up at 5 AM before I even had time to think about a headache, but even so, no headache. As I say every time I quit drinking softdrinks, I AM NOT GOING TO GET ADDICTED to them again! What a PAIN, literally, to try to get off!! It's not like Tylenol really takes care of the headache either! Anyway, so I'm now drinking my 64 ounces of water a day (and floating to the bathroom every hour or more) and occassionally sipping on a nice cool homemade smoothie with fresh fruit! So exciting to be more healthy!

No more SOFTDRINKS!

Part of my new campaign is no more softdrinks. You have understand that I am absolutely ADDICTED to them. I guess I have always drank them, and other than a few short stints here and there, I've NEVER been without softdrinks for more than a few weeks, maybe even days. So NO MORE SOFT DRINKS. Our biggest loser idea actually started with a bet to see who could go the longest without softdrinks and evolved from there. So ADIOS Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, all my favs! See you on December the 6th at my celebration party!

Just for the fun of it....Here's all the bad facts I found about drinking soft drinks:

The carbonation in all soft drinks causes calcium loss in the bones through a three-stage process:
1. The carbonation irritates the stomach.
2. The stomach "cures" the irritation the only way it knows how. It adds the only antacid at its disposal: calcium. It gets this from the blood.
3. The blood, now low on calcium, replenishes its supply from the bones. If it did not do this, muscular and brain function would be severely impaired.

In the spring of 2005, research showed a strong correlation between esophageal cancer and the drinking of carbonated beverages

The salt in these "beverages" may reduce the amount of water in your cells. Salt increases dehydration, which is why sailors don't drink seawater.

The sugar in these "beverages" (other than the diet kind) increases hunger.

The obesity and nutritional deficiencies typically suffered by heavy soda drinkers bring on back and joint pain.

The various colorings and other substances in sodas aren't noted for cancer prevention.

So if you ever needed a reason to quit drinking sodas, there you go.

A Couple of Big Losers

Welcome to the Biggest Loser Tim and Renata Style! Okay, so we've been inspired by our good friend in Thailand, Matt Jones, who was able to lose 48 lbs. while competing with his missionary friend in Poland. Theirs of course was Missionary biggest loser. We'll just call ours A Couple of Big Losers. We decided that we're tired of looking at that extra fat hanging around our bodies and we just want some more energy. Tim and I are very competitive and we've been competing for years in just about everything. When we first started dating, we started our annual March Madness Hoops competition, and it evolved into everything from NFL football to who wins Survivor or Big Brother. So we are at it once again to see who will be the Biggest Loser!

Here's our stakes:

The competition begins tomorrow, July 7th, and runs through December 6th

That's right! 5 months of competition!

Weigh-Ins: At first we weren't going to do them at all, but we then decided we'd need a little bit of fuel for the fire, so we'll be weighing in every other Saturday. Also, we'll have a weigh-in on Saturday, October 4th for a mini-prize (dinner at the winner's favorite restaurant).

Obviously, we're not going by pure pounds, we're basing it on percent of weight lost.

Diets and the Gym: The rule is you can go on any diet you want as long as you don't go bulimic or anoxeric. Also, Tim will join the gym near his work, and I'll have the gym at my work to use.

The Prize: If I win, we will remodel the bathroom, complete with a new bathtub with jets, a shower, enclosure, an additional sink, new paint, and most importantly a water softener with filter. Right now the water smells like rotten fish when you turn on the water, something about underground water smelling like sulfur for some purpose?? I don't know it just stinks and that's my biggest nemesis since moving here.

If Tim wins, he gets a small boat. One of the exciting things about living down here at the beach is being able to get out on the water. Unfortunately, so far we haven't been able to do that much without a way to get out there. So Tim wants to remedy that with a boat.

We'll post blogs each week to let you guys know how it's going! Wish us luck!

Renata starting weight: 160 lbs. <---I'm definitely not happy with this, but I do have to say that it is less than where I was at when I started working out last November. Unfortunately, I stopped working out mid-February due to hip bursitis.

You can read about Tim's progress on his blog at http://deanempire.blogspot.com/