Back in skinny jeans

Inspiring Fit Week: Mamacita Chilena drops 50 lbs and gets her athletic groove back

Blog: The Skinny in Chile
Tracking: Mamacita Chilena
Niche: Athletic but overweight
Health goal: To run a marathon sometime within the next two years. It might sound like a far away deadline, but I live in Chile, and I want to run a marathon in the U.S. but don't know when I'll be back.

Mamacita Chilena's story:

From a young age I was always chubby.  For a greater part of my life, I was first, blissfully unaware, and then, aware, but didn't care because I valued myself for other reasons beyond appearance.  I played soccer from the age of 6. I was team MVP as a senior in high school, and I was on the cheer team (fantastic stunter and tumbler aka pyramid and gymnastics). 

In spite of playing sports my whole life, I had always eaten horrible amounts of junk food and had an overweight BMI.  But, I never defined myself as overweight.  I defined myself as an athlete.  In college, I stopped playing sports, started drinking heavily.  All my muscle turned to a blobby jello-like consistency. No longer big and fit, I was just big and well, big.  But my love of feeling athletic was not going to settle…

Inspiring Fit Week: Zandria shares how gaining muscles gave her more confidence

Blog: Keep Up With Me
Tracking: Zandria
Niche: Working on muscles
Health goal: I want to be able to do at least one unassisted pull-up.
Zandria's story:

What causes a person who’s never worked out on a consistent basis to become interested in fitness? For me, it all started about six months ago.

Last summer I went from wanting to be more active, and thinking that I should be doing something, to actually doing it. What happened was, after too many years of putting way too much time and energy into retaining a certain number on the scale, I decided I was going to start focusing on how I felt.

Instead of being skinny and weak, I wanted to be stronger. I was tired of joking about my almost nonexistent cardio endurance, and my serious lack of upper-body strength. I'd never lifted weights regularly in my life other than a few halfhearted attempts at dumbbell curls using a 5-lb weight.

So why am I interested in fitness? And how do I continue to stay motivated?

Inspiring Fit Week: John wants to drop 100+ pounds

Blog: John is Fit
Tracking: John
Niche: 100+ pounds to drop
Health goal: Drop weight
John's story:

I started my journey from fat to fit back in August at 295 pounds and as I write this today I am at 262 pounds for a total loss of 33 pounds.  I’ve lost four inches from my waist, don’t snore as much at night  and have a ton more energy.  I still have a long way to go to goal (185 pounds) and I am taking it slow – my goal for 2008 is to get down to 220.  It took me years to pack on these pounds and I am satisfied with taking years to get it all off.  And then to keep it off!

At this point in my journey I have had the success I have had not by implementing any strict diet but simply by recognizing where I needed to make adjustments and doing so slowly.  For example...