Teacher Fitness Thursday - Eating Healthy

Hey yall! I'm so excited to kick off my very first week of Teacher Fitness Thursday! This will be a MONTHLY linky party starting on the third Thursday of each month and remaining open for the rest of the month. Each month, we will focus on a new topic for how to stay fit.

This month's topic is eating healthy. Feel free to link up with a story, what's inside your lunchbox, a recipe, or just some tips! There's a few different ways you can go with this. Mine is a combo of my story (especially with this being week 1) and a few tips for eating healthy!

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Before I got pregnant, food was never an issue for me. My metabolism took care of everything! I mean, it slowed down some when I went off to college and was eating more frequently, but it didn't take a lot of work to get it back off. A few days of being sick and I was right back in the game! I actually weighed 95 lbs before I got pregnant (I know some of you are sick reading this, but bear with me), but I never worked out or tried to eat healthy.

When I got pregnant, I still ate what I wanted and actually brought a pair of regular jeans with me to the hospital thinking I may go home in them. Boy was I wrong! I had gained close to 50 pounds during my pregnancy, and I only lost 11 naturally by my 6 week check-up. I knew it was time to do something!

So I downloaded the MyFitnessPal app on my phone and started tracking calories. It was really hard at first because my portions had grown immensely while I was pregnant, and I had to scale back a little at a time. For a while, I just focused on eating as close to 1200 calories as possible - forget that 500 may have been from one slice of Chocolate Creme Pie. That still worked for the first month, but after that I HAD to change things up.

I pinned a million things on my Pinterest board every day, but one of my favorite weight-loss pins is from Bob Harper. The link was broken, but the picture is all you really need!

I liked that this list was very specific with the rules. I don't follow every single one of these and I don't do them all the time, but it helps to have them in the back of my mind and take a few of them to heart. For me, I started with not drinking my calories (water only MOST of the time), going to bed hungry (I read somewhere that you shouldn't eat 3 hours before you go to bed, so 7:00 is my cut-off time), planning my splurge meal (although I usually just have one and say "That will be my splurge for the week!", and I TRY to eat my carbs before I leave school - so as close to lunch as possible. This actually means that I usually try to do my dessert with lunch instead of dinner. For dinner, I try to stick with veggies and a meat. This is a little harder now because my husband does not need to lose any more weight and has to have heartier meals now, but I stick with it pretty well for the most time.

What do you do to eat healthy?