It’s been a few weeks since we last checked in on our Your Healthy Life Made Easy!™ Contest Winners, so here’s an update on how they’re doing, and we have some great stuff to shout out!  For background on Cindy and Cheryl CLICK HERE

Contest Winner Cindy Musiel broke through an important weight loss benchmark in early December-getting back down to a weight she hadn’t seen since 2009!  Since my last post on 12/3, Cindy is down another 14 pounds-21 since we started working together in early October and 69 since she started her overall weight loss journey in April 2013!

Cindy was a little frustrated when the scale refused to budge over the holidays despite her keeping her workouts up-only losing about half a pound-but as I tell all my weight loss coaching clients, if you can just maintain your weight over the holidays when most people gain weight, you’ve done an outstanding job!  And in her case, like it is for most people, it’s just temporary as sometimes the body just needs a chance to catch up.

Getting close to the end of the 4th month of our work together (out of 6), now Cindy is focusing on increasing the intensity of her workouts as she’s lighter and more fit, increasing the speed on the treadmill and elliptical, doing some HIIT (high intensity interval training) using work-at-home videos that she’s modifying for some prior injuries to make them right for her and keeping up the resistance training she added when she joined a gym in November.

Interestingly, Cindy was using an app that she felt was giving her too low a daily calorie target for all the activity she was doing, and when I reviewed her records I agreed.  So we actually had to adjust her consumption upwards to give her the proper amount of fuel to support all her activity.  And the pounds are coming off steadily again.  Yes, sometimes when you’re trying to lose weight, you actually have to increase your calories to strike a proper balance.

Contest Runner-Up Cheryl Behrens finished her 3 months of coaching with me earlier this month, and dropped a major surprise announcement on me during her final session. As you recall, while Cheryl had come to enter the contest for weight loss reasons, when we got to talking, she really wanted to focus on getting more energy, organization and a regular, healthy eating pattern into her life, reducing stress, get more work-life balance and maintaining her ability to do all the activities that she wants to in life as she gets older.  So we put the weight loss aside…or so I thought.

By the end of our time together, Cheryl did achieve all that and more.  She’s been feeling way less stressed, more positive as life’s challenges come her way, achieved greater work-life balance all on increased energy.  Cheryl has learned to not try to take on too much at one time and scatter her focus, as well as to be creative in organization of her time and space so she feels more in control of her world-something we can all aspire to do.

She’s taken new measures based on ideas we’ve brainstormed together to ensure she eats regularly and healthfully even if she doesn’t want to cook for herself.  And when it’s not snowing too badly and doesn’t feel like Siberia out (or CHIberia as my husband has been calling it), she gets to the gym.

So the BIG surprise from Cheryl, was that without even trying, by addressing all the other aspects of her health and wellness she wanted to work on together, she sneakily LOST 10 POUNDS during our 3 months together!  She had told me that she wanted to surprise me with this happy, unexpected change, and she sure did!

It goes to show you that like I always believe, weight loss and weight management are intertwined with all other areas of wellness-nutrition, fitness, stress reduction, work-life balance and life satisfaction.  Needing to lose weight is usually a sign that something else in your life is off, and until you get to what’s really getting in the way of being the happiest and healthiest you, it’s going to be a struggle to get to where you want to go.  But once you do, it’s not as hard as you think to lose weight and keep it off for good.

I learned this lesson myself through my own weight loss journey that led to a 48-pound weight loss I’ve kept off for 4 years now, and I’m privileged that as a Certified Health and Wellness Coach, I get to spend my days helping people like Cheryl and Cindy make their healthy lives easy and break down these barriers every single day ?

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