How did Sarah gain the weight?
“I couldn’t control my eating. I used it as an emotional crutch. I was relieving my stress through my enjoyment of food, regardless of the consequences and emotional pain it caused. In addition, I hated exercise. I did not want to put forth that much effort for something that was so difficult, and that did not yield immediate results to the naked eye. It was really changing these viewpoints and unhealthy patterns that would end up being my most difficult trial. I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide when I saw people looking at me. It was hard to move around. It became increasingly uncomfortable to sleep, and made it difficult to breathe.”
How did Sarah lose the weight?
“On August 1, 2009 I started doing “Slim in 6” workouts and tracking my calories and workouts on SparkPeople.com. By December 2009, I had lost about 40 to 42 pounds, and my athletic ability had improved. Then I began doing “ChaLEAN Extreme” workouts, which gave me more strength, toning, confidence and drive.
By August 2010, a year after I started my journey, I had hit an interim goal of 80 pounds lost. Around this same time, I’d stopped tracking calories as regularly, because the tracking I had done had started to teach me healthy portions, what I could eat based on the energy I was expending, so I didn’t think I had to look as often.
I hit a plateau at this point, and had difficulty going below 160/159. It was time to start tracking my food again! When I started tracking again, and when I changed up my workouts and got ready for the challenges of another workout program, “TurboFire“, in Fall 2010, I saw results. I hit my goal of losing 100 pounds in December that year. By April 2011, I hit 125 pounds, which was a total of 115 pounds lost.”
You really owe it to yourself to read the entire article on Huffington Post. Please click here to read Sarah Brakke’s amazing story…
