Proof Positive – The PINK Method Works (Photo Update)
I can hardly believe how fast time is going. With a total weight-loss of 27 pounds and an overall total of 21 inches, I honestly look and feel like a new person. I have not yet reached my total weight-loss goal, but given the amount of success I’ve seen in a relatively short amount of time, I feel even more motivated to continue the work of the PINK Method.
Unfortunately, after consulting my physician, I am unable to use the PINK Method workout plan due to knee issues I’ve been dealing with for many years. The form and pace of the workout videos are not conducive to someone like me. This doesn’t mean the workouts wouldn’t work for others, but after doing a few of them and knowing the form that is encouraged by trainers and health officials, I’ve decided the work out videos put me at risk for knee injury.
The most vital component to my success on the PINK Method has been the eating plan and cultural mentality about being more in control of my eating habits and willingness to take care of myself. I have not worked out a lot, but my new focus will be to work out more frequently and focus on building additional muscle tone.
I will continue eating the way PINK recommends and have found a fitness program that focuses on the proper form and pacing I’m accustomed to when working out. I plan to review and share the details of the program on this blog in the next upcoming weeks for those looking for an alternative to the pink workouts. So, stay tuned for that.
Until then, I will share a few more contrast photos showing the progress I feel I have made on the PINK Method Diet.
As always, thank you for reading and for your continued support.
Here is the front view side by side:
…….and a back view side-by side
…now the back view side by side
I have more work ahead of me, but I do feel like, for the first time in a long time, I am finding my way back to me…one step at a time.
Leave a comment below with your feedback or your own personal success stories. If you have questions, leave them below or follow me on twitter at @liberatedmommy.
I try to respond to everybody.
Pink Primary Power and the My Fitness Pal website
I am entering into the 5th week of the P.I.N.K. Method diet and I am down a total 25 pounds. What’s even better is the fact that I lost 6 of those 25 pounds within the last week. This is at a time when some people are seeing a slowdown in their weightloss efforts. If this sounds like you, I want to help you get back up to speed, so I’ll share something that helped me this week.
Last week I loss one pound. I worked out a total of three times and felt I had done well on the diet.
Don’t get me wrong, One pound is a victory on the scale. But it seemed I had put forth too much effort for such a low number. Something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t going to torture myself. The scale didn’t go up. It didn’t stay the same. It went down. That’s a victory.
The number on the scale is merely a rating of our dieting behavior on a week to week basis. It is not an indictment on who we are as a person. If you want to see different results, you just tweak what you are doing a little bit and move forward.
So this week I decided to tweak things a bit.
One of the things the PINK Method lacks that I believe is truly instrumental in weight-loss success, at least for me any way, is the ability to track what I am eating. The PINK Method website doesn’t do a very good job of providing a reliable tracker. To compensate, I created a nice Excel spreadsheet to track my calories, but I didn’t have a resource to track my nutrient intake, like how much sodium, sugar and fiber I consume in a day. Then last week all of that changed when I discovered My Fitness Pal.com
Myfitnesspal.com is a great website that helps you track, not just calories, but nutrients too. You can pre-program all of your PINK food values and using it becomes even more efficient. I even downloaded the app on my android phone. I tell you it made all of the difference. If you don’t have an account, sign up, it is free.
When I entered all of my food, I saw an upward trend in how much sugar I was consuming on a daily basis. Even though the sugar source was from healthy foods like oatmeal, greek yogurt, fruit and even some vegetables, the amount I was taking in was keeping me from seeing larger numbers on the scale. So this week, I was more mindful of my sugar intake and the benefit was seeing a 6 pound weight-loss.
Now every week won’t be as big as this week. There may be weeks where I stay the same or don’t lose as much, but any loss is a victory. Using a tool like Myfitnesspal.com will give me the data I need to see my behavior trends. With this level of knowledge, I will have the Power to stay on track during the PINK Primary.
Monday starts a new RESET phase for 4 days…Next week I’ll be doing a pic update. Stay Tuned….
What kind of power moves did you make this week? Leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear about them.
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If you are interested in joining up with me at My Fintess Pal, my username is liberatedmommy.
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Practical Makes Perfect
Let me start off by saying, my expectations for this week ‘s results were very low.
I did not expect to lose any weight for a couple of different reasons. The RESET involved very minimal caloric intake. This week I moved from RESET to PINK Primary, which involves consuming additional calories and the infusion of the PINK workouts.
- I wasn’t sure the scale would move because I didn’t meet the exercise goal.
- I worked out 2 days and not the recommended 6.
- I ate well, but I was eating more than I had the week before.
- I wasn’t perfect.
Well I got on the scale today and I am down 4 pounds since last week’s weigh in.
This is when it hit me. It is not about being exact. The P.I.N.K Method does not require you follow the path of perfection. Instead, it encourages you to follow a path of practicality.
This diet is about knowing better which leads to doing better and doing better leads to feeling better.
Here are four Practical Tips for the PINK Method.
1. Seek out your rhythm on the PINK Method. The book says what to do; you have the liberty to decide how you do it.
2. Be practical, not perfect. Trying to be perfect leads to overeating and feeling defeated.
3. If you give up on the diet, it’s okay. I do it every night. I just remember to renege the next day and get back to it.
4. Following the diet to the T, doesn’t guarantee a good result. Strengthening your own intuition and using PINK as the guide will create a sense of knowing better, doing better and inevitably feeling better.
Keep pushing until the scale says P.I.N.K.
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
Reset Weightloss Results……
This means I went from 201 last week to 196 this week.
This makes…………
The equivalent of the average sized…….
I feel good. I feel like I can do this. One day at a time and one pound at a time.
Phase 1 begins tomorrow………………………
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
Pushing through the P.I.N.K. Method Madness
I’ll be honest, there is an element of madness to the P.I.N.K. Method Diet.
Let’s take off the rose colored glasses for just a moment. Don’t worry we will put them back on in a minute because success on this diet is all in how you see things.
When it comes down to it, many women are going from consuming nearly 2200 calories a day, a massive amount of carbs and sugar to consuming roughly 700 calories with very little carbohydrates and no sugar for the RESET part of this diet. This is a steep change and for lack of a better word, you begin to feel mad in the process. Feelings very similar to withdrawal. Now, feelings of madness will vary from woman to woman and in some women not exist at all. I can really only speak from my own experience and some of the comments I’ve seen posted in various forums.
You may begin to think things like:
“This is insane… What do I have to do? STARVE myself to be thin???”
“This whole time I thought I was a nice person only to find the carbs were keeping me sedated.”
Or my personal favorite, as one P.I.N.K. Methoder on RESET stated,
“I’m so hungry I could eat the @$$ of a flying duck.”
Somehow that one really captured it for me. LOL
No, you are not starving and you aren’t really going mad, but part way through RESET, you may begin to feel like you are. A strange blend of hunger and boredom begins to take over.
Or worse, maybe you are like me and you begin feeling like you can do it on your own. I think this has to be the most dangerous madness of all. This is the madness I have to contend with most often.
Thinking, I can cut the RESET short. I’m in control now. Or, “ FOR CRYING OUTLOUD, I PASSED UP FREE PIZZA – TWICE.”
But, I know better. That is my inner fat girl screaming to get her own her way and not the rational thinking of the Pink Method Woman I know I am becoming.
So, It’s day 10 of RESET and the fat girl loses. I CAN’T do it on my own, at least not now.
I may be a little crazy, but there is method to my madness.
How are you pushing through the P.I.N.K. Method madness?
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
New Results Post coming Saturday so stay tuned….
The Weight is Over…Week 1 Weigh in Results
Today, I weighed myself officially one week after my official Pre-PINK Method weigh in and…..
YES, 9 pounds. This is a strong start and definitely the motivation I need to stick to a program that requires the level of sacrifice the P.I.N.K Method requires. However, the battle is far from over and I will not be doing any victory laps until I reach my final goal.
In dedication of the 9 pounds I’ve lost. I’m counting down 9 Pink Tips that worked for me during week 1 of the RESET.
Here they go:
9. Involve yourself in the community. Overeating has a lot do with alienation. Connect with other women on the P.I.N.K journey or any health and wellness journey. My cousin had to talk me off the brink a few times.
If you don’t like the P.I.N.K website, find a facebook group. I have two I really like. Here and Here.
8. Food doesn’t have to equal fun. Food is has always been recreational to me. I eat to create the sensation of having a good time. Yes, I have had a blast, but being FAT is really not all that fun. Yes, the food will get boring, but in the process your life should be getting better. Find your way to the point where that is enough.
7. Find default foods. The 9 Key foods I’ve basically lived off during Reset Week 1: Canned Tuna, Hummus*, Cucumbers, Red Beets, Green Bell Peppers, White Onions, Starbucks Strawberry Vivanno Smoothie*, Chicken Breast, Soup, Green Tea, Blueberries.
6. Vitamins, Vitamins and More Vitamins. I am at least 60% more vital than I was 7 days ago and I think that largely has something to do with the Energy Vitamin I have been taking from GNC. These 4 little large pills are amazing.
5. Water. Drink it. Lots of it. Especially, when hunger pains are kicking your butt. It didn’t make me feel any fuller, but I now try to respond to feelings of weakness with a powerful counter-punch. Water is powerful. Look at what it did for Life on this planet. It can do the same for your Life.
4. Don’t compare stats. If somebody else is losing more weight than you, so what? You could lose 5 pounds, and it could visually may make you look better than another person who has lost 10 pounds. Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Your Apple is the only one you need concern yourself with.
3. Don’t confuse commitment with obsession. The P.I.N,K Method requires commitment, but it is easy to let that slide into an unhealthy obsession with getting it PERFECT or just RIGHT. The method is a training ground for you to mend the broken relationship with nutrition and movement. You are the most important factor in mending that relationship.
2. Take it one pound at a time and one day at time. Send your pounds off peacefully, otherwise you can guarantee you will see them again in the future as unfinished business. FINISH THIS.
1. Wake up and Do it again.
What is a pound worth to you? Happy Losing.
*Not an official food on the P.I.N.K. Method, but it was a reasonable adjustment I made to suit my needs.
P.S. I also lost 2 inches on my bust, 2 inches on my waist and 2 inches on my hips.
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
The Hunger Games
I wanted to give the P.I.N.K Reset a few days to set in before I spoke about it. I wanted to do a sort of data collection period to get a well rounded picture of what a good day is like and what a bad is like. I have been everything from euphoric about my weight loss goals to desperate to lose all the weight RIGHT NOW and at times disillusioned with the program altogether. Sometimes, I went through all of these emotions in the same hour and this is a good thing. It means I am in the battle. I’m fighting again. Making executive decisions about what enters the mouth of my temple. I like to think of myself as Dieter in Chief and as Dieter in Chief, right now, I’m winning.
I will be honest, I have been hungry. At times, very hungry. But isn’t this the point? How else can you learn to play the Hunger Game?
If I’ve lost you, stick with me. We are supposed to be hungry. For anyone who loves food, the sensation of hunger in many ways can feel like original sin. Many of us have lost the ability to differentiate between hunger, appetite and thirst. All three feel like deprivation, when each is distinctly different.
THE DIFFERENCES
- Hunger – The body needs specific fuel. Nourished Satiety is the goal.
- Appetite – the taste buds/palette needs stimulation. Euphoria is the goal.
- Thirst – The Body needs hydration. Replenishment is the goal.
This reset is teaching me how to be responsibly hungry. It is cleansing my pallet so that I can listen to my body again and respect the signals by nourishing it with food, not numbing it with food. Oddly enough, I have been craving things like oatmeal and un-buttered wheat toast (items forbidden on the RESET but permissible in later phases). Foods I would have frowned at a few weeks ago when I was at my most over indulgent.
I have had very few cravings for things I know are detrimental to my goals. Again, I am only 3 days in so this could change.
If I am honest with myself ,I haven’t been truly felt hungry in over a year. I had two settings: STUFFED and STARVING. The fact that I feel hunger again tells me I am healing and my body and I are on speaking terms again.
My head is reconnecting to its temple and it feels good to be back in the game. Getting healthy is not a spectator sport. You have to make contact and face down your opponent.
Hunger is a game. Right now, I’m winning. What are you doing to win?
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
Hitting the Reset Button (CTRL+ALT+DELETE)
P.I.N.K. Method Reset (BEFORE)
I thought long and hard about how transparent I wanted to be. Should I reveal my weight or shouldn’t I? Should I disclose my dress size or shouldn’t I? And then it dawned on me. I am ALREADY exposed. The world sees me and it is the hiding that has gotten me to this point, so the truth is going to set me free. I can’t change it unless I deal with it. That is what P.I.N.K Reset is about for me. It is about dealing with it, so I can move to the next chapter of my life.
Do I think I look completely awful? NO
Have I and can I look and feel better? YES
Today is the first day of P.I.N.K. Reset.
I plan to be in Control of what I consume. I will Alternate the way I think and feel about food and in the process Delete a few pounds.
I’m hitting the reset button. How about you?
Check out some other Bloggers I’m linking up with for this challenge:
Preparing for P.I.N.K.
I officially start the P.I.N.K. method program on January 2, 2011. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that in order to make something work you have to do two things: Prepare and Invest.
With three days to go before I start, I decided to go out and purchase some of the key items I will need for this program ahead of time. Among the things I picked up was an On The Go Blender, Whey Powder Protein and an energy boosting multi-vitamin.
I plan on winning and it is not easy to win if we won’t prepare and invest in the things that help us get closer to our ideal self.
You have to ask yourself the question, “Will my failure to prepare end up preparing me to fail?” In my experience, the answer to this question has always been, YES.
The Countdown to P.I.N.K begins. Are you with me?
P.I.N.K Method Mommy 