The Beauty Book

Get Healthy With Me

Good day everyone,

So I have made the life changing decision to change my diet and lose some weight/ get fit. I thought that this would be fun to share since it's the new year and everybody is making their new year's resolutions. I also think that making this public will kind of force me to stay motivated and stick to my plan.

There are a lot of things that I have to explain as to why I decided to do this and why I'm sharing this with you guys and also how I plan on doing this. So let's get started~

Why I decided to do this & why I'm sharing this with you

I am pretty healthy, if I do say so myself. I don't eat a lot of sweets or generally foods with a lot of sugar. I make sure that I eat enough proteins; I eat a lot of vegetables and I workout (sometimes). But I do eat a lot of salty and sodium-rich foods, I either overeat or I skip meals (due to stress). I also don't get enough sleep, I'm always stressed and I don't drink enough water. A lot of times I feel like I'm very low on energy and it's gotten to the point where even the slightest amount of exercise makes me feel dizzy and like I'm going to pass out. My goal is to change all of this by correcting my diet.

I'm pretty content with how my body looks but ever since 2015 I've been trying to get rid of my love handles and the little bit of fat that I have on top of my lower abdomen. I'm also going to try and 'fill out' my hip dips so that I can have more of an hourglass shape and tone my legs a bit more.

Hopefully by doing this I can change my stress levels and depression a bit. Maybe I'll feel more secure and in control of myself if I can manage to do this. But that is something only time can tell right now.

Diet

I'm going to start off with how I plan on going about eating my meals and then later on I will tell you guys how I want to change my diet and my drinking habits.

About 30 minutes before I even start my meal, I plan on drinking 1 or 2 glasses of water. This helps you to feel a bit more full before you eat and will also help you to eat a little bit less. I, personally, tend to overeat because I don't like leaving food in my plate, so I've decided to start using this simple mind trick that I heard about. By eating on smaller dinner plates, you automatically trick your brain into thinking that you're eating a normal sized full plate of food thus you prevent yourself from overeating. After waiting for 20 minutes after I've finished my first plate, I learned that I'm already full even though before I thought that I was still hungry and wanted to eat another plate. It's really important to give your brain enough time to process how much you've eaten and let you know that you're actually already full. I also want to try eating 5 small meals a day instead of two big meals and a teensy tiny breakfast and I'd like to try and cook more at home instead of buying take out pizza and Döner.

For my actual diet I plan on having most of my meals being pescetarian/ vegetarian because I really only want to eat meat once a week. I already rarely eat meat, but I would like to delve more into pescetarianism. To make up for the proteins, I like to substitute with seafood (I absolutely love fish) and eggs. I'm going to cut down on starch (i.e bread, noodles) and sodium and limit my desserts and sweets to one day a week (so basically a cheat day). I'm going to try and make my meals more colorful with a bunch of fruits and vegetables.

The main thing that I definitely need to change, and the change that will probably be the hardest for me to make, is my water intake. I just simply do not drink enough of water. I'm always so focused on other things that I forget to drink water and keep myself hydrated🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Keeping a 1 or 2 liter bottle around with you will remind you to keep drinking and will help you track how much water you still need to drink. In case you don't know how much you should be drinking daily, here's a simple equation to calculate that: 1500ml + 20(your weight in kg - 20kg)= x. The equation equals the amount of WATER you need drink a day which excludes things like juices and smoothies and especially fizzy drinks. The best thing to do is to completely cut out fizzy drinks which is what I've already done. I'll only drink a glass of soda when I'm at a party. I also stopped drinking fruit juices because a lot of them contain a bunch of processed sugar and are surprisingly not that healthy. And while we're at cutting out drinks from our diets, let's talk about alcohol. Alcohol is so bad for your body on so many different levels, so I think it's pretty clear why you should cut alcohol out of your diet. I live in a country where drinking beer is kind of like a custom. It's like everybody is a beer expert here, especially in the little town where I live. All we do is drink beer and schnapps and jägermeister...so please pray for me.

Exercise

I used to be a competitive swimmer and I'd swim 9- 10 hours a week. Last year I decided to quit swimming completely since I had to put all of my focus and energy into school. 6 months after quitting swimming I picked up thaiboxing but I never go to the classes since they're at a very inconvenient time for me. Honestly, I haven't yet figured out a way where I can take 30 minutes out of my day to exercise but I think I'll somehow manage to find a good daily schedule for me.

My exercise goal is to do an equal amount of cardio(I like to run on the treadmill) and strength training. Here's a short list of exercise videos I quite like on youtube (I highly recommend that you check out their channels and watch their videos because I think that all of their videos are really great):

-Chloe Ting: 250-360 calorie full body workout

-Stephi Nguyen: Glute workout without squats

-Stephi Nguyen: 10 min intense ab workout

-Whitney Simmons: Grow a booty at home

For me the best amount to exercise is about 5 times a week but this varies from person to person, so if you also plan on doing what I'm doing, you'd have to figure out what is best for your body. The same goes for your diet. Not everybody loses weight the same way. These are all things that I know will help me and might also help you.

That's all meine Freunde,

I hope you enjoyed and I hope this inspired some people to join me on this journey of being healthy. If you liked this chapter, please vote for it and if you like me, you can also follow me here on wattpad. It was super hard to find a decent structure for this chapter and honestly, I'm not quite happy with how it turned out. All throughout writing I kept on thinking how much easier this would've been if this was a youtube video lmao. If you have any requests or questions, you can leave them in a comment on this chapter or message me privately. You can also hit me up if you just want to talk. I'm always down to chat it up. I'm thinking of posting my 2017 faves for the next chapter and maybe also my new year's resolutions but I'm not sure yet.

Anyways, have a nice day and a nice new year. We shall talk again soon.

Tschüss & happy new year!