It’s already over a month into the new year and I’ve started a new diet recently to get me seeing faster results with my body.

Okay, who didn’t completely pig out this past holiday? I found a new danger to my diet: macarons. Over the christmas holidays, I made my way to Thierry | Chocolaterie Patisserie Cafe on behalf of a co-worker’s recommendation. I’ve always seen pictures of these cookies, but I never actually tried one. Mainly because you just can’t get any here where I live. I always imagined that they would just be these hard crusty cookies with some cream in the center. It just wasn’t appealing to me because I know what meringues taste like, and I don’t think much of them at all.  Boy, was I ever wrong. I took one bite into the macaron and was surprised to find that the texture was crispy on the outside, but chewy and soft in the center! It literally just melted in my mouth. Now I have this serious obsession for them. I’ve even started following a blog that is dedicated to just pictures of the cookies. I’m torturing myself. Why? Because I’ve started a real diet. I mean, for reals.

I’m not going to lie, but I have cheated and eaten things I really wasn’t supposed to. Will power is something I’ve never been able to achieve when it comes to food. Food is one of my all time top loves. It’s been a slow and painful process saying no to food. Especially desserts or baked sugary goods. Originally, my diet was going to be extremely strict. Eating nothing but salad all the time, no sugar, and little to no meat. After about two weeks of this, I had to stop. I needed to eat a damn chicken. I was incredibly lethargic at the gym—not to mention, I was going through my monthly girl phase and I was putting NO sugar into my body while this was happening. I was depressed and sleepy. So the month of January was a pretty horrible workout month.

I feel like I’ve taken a step back with my strength. Over christmas break, I felt I was getting stronger as I was going up in weight with my kettlebell swings, and my cardio was improving. But in January, my swings began to suffer and I just felt too tired to do much of anything. My knees were bothering me, so I took a break from doing kettlebell in the hope that I just needed to let my body rest. Nothing was improving for me and my workouts just sucked. I took about two weeks off from doing swings and decided to go back to it a few days ago. I went down in weight just to get warmed up. Well! That turned out to be the workout of my life for my legs. I couldn’t believe how weak I had gotten! This weight used to be easy for me, but I was sore for days after only doing one drill!

All this really opened my eyes to what I needed to do to keep my strength up to workout. I was going about my diet the wrong way. This diet might work for someone else, but it just wasn’t working for me. I mean sure, I could feel my pants getting looser, but my energy had dropped significantly. Like most asian girls, I have a really small body frame. I know I need to work a lot harder to lose all this excess fat. But trying to cut out everything I thought was going to keep me from losing weight was just making my body hungry for nutrition. I’m not a nutrition expert whatsoever, so trying to figure out what to eat has been a challenge. I’m going though this by trial and error and observing how my body is reacting to certain things that I eat.

Today, I had a lot of bread, which I chose to cut out my first few weeks of my diet. My workout today was not bad. It was hard to get into at first because just before going to the gym, I was a playing a new game (Triple Town) that has turned me into a complete zombie.  But once I got into my workout, I snapped out of zombie mode and the workout was better than it has been in a while. My lower body is still weak, so I made the plan to work on my lower body strength today.  Actually, I’m going to make it the plan for the next month. I’ve been neglecting that part of my body because I’m so focused on trying to de-flab my arms. I need to work on everything! My lower body strength is such an important part for some of the exercises I do.

My goal is not just to just be skinny, but to be toned and completely fit. No more fat days; Just happy healthy fit days!

Goals for this month:

• Stick to a healthy diet
• Work on lower body
• Increase cardio/conditioning