 TRACEY'S STORY
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Tracey's Biography  NAME: Tracey My name is Tracey and I'm a 33-year-old mother of three girls, ages 8, 4, and 1. While giving birth was one of my great joys, I found it very hard to spend time exercising and losing body fat with kids at home. After the birth of my third child in 2006, I'm proud to say I went from 148 pounds and 37% body fat to a lean 118 pounds and 15.6% body fat, and I'm going to tell you how I did it. PRE-BABIES Before I had babies, I was a regular at the gym. My husband and I would go to the gym several times a week after work and workout together. We tried to eat healthy, but in retrospect we could have done better. We always wanted to have nice bodies with low body fat and lots of lean muscle, but we never quite got there. We love good food, and we loved to go out to eat together. Then we had babies, and that made it even harder to achieve our goals! THE BABY YEARS From the time I had my first child in 1999, I quit going to the gym. I just didn't have the time to go to the gym anymore. I had an exercise bike I would ride at home on and off. It helped to keep my weight down, but for seven years I was missing a critical component - weight training. THE TURNING POINT After the birth of my third child last year, I've begun to do weight training and focus on my diet in order to achieve the body I really wanted. I didn't want to settle for the "mom" look. I wanted to be lean and strong. Too many years had gone by without achieving the body I wanted. NUTRITION I've gone to a diet where I eat six times a day. 30% of my calories come from fat, 30% of my calories come from carbohydrates, and 40% of my calories come from protein. I eat oatmeal, lean meats, protein shakes, cottage cheese, and lots of vegetables. There definitely is a lot of effort involved in preparing healthy foods to eat, but I like how eating healthy makes me feel. EXERCISE As all moms know, having a newborn at home leaves little time for anything else, but I made a promise to myself to do cardio everyday and resistance training four days a week. After the baby was born, I'd workout while she napped in the afternoon, but often she'd wake up before I was finished. Sometimes my husband and I would have to take turns holding her while we worked out, and sometimes I even had to hold her while I rode the exercise bike. For more specifics about my exercise, click here. PICTURES SAY A THOUSAND WORDS Using "before" pictures as motivation, I kept a record of my progress using Body Tracker software. With three kids at home keeping me busy, it would have been easy to just forget about diet and exercise. But every Saturday morning I would get up and record my body fat percentage, body measurements, and pictures of myself in Body Tracker software. Actually seeing the progress I was making was critical to achieve my body fat goal. ME TIME Believe me, I wanted so badly to use the excuse "I don't have time to exercise - I've got a baby to take care of and two other kids, too!" When it was time to work out, I would often have dishes to do, laundry to do, cleanup to do, and a million other things, too. I would moan and groan about how I didn't have time to workout until I'd realize, halfway through the workout, how good it felt to spend time doing something good for myself. And after taking care of myself, I was much more prepared to take care of my family for the rest of the day. YOU CAN DO IT, TOO I am no different than any of you. I have a family to take care of at home, very little time and lots of excuses why I can't focus on eating right and exercising. It's not easy to get the body you want. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and planning, but the results are worth it. It's nice to walk by a mirror and know I look good. I'm healthy, I'm fit, and I feel good about myself. And that makes all the effort worthwhile. |
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