Pandora Williams

I have a lot of photos of myself from days long past. Photos of myself at an extremely unhealthy weight. Photos of myself at a time that I was eating as a way of dealing with my emotions. ​ These pictures represent a time in my life where I was constantly sad, constantly depressed. They represent a time when I felt completely unworthy. They are pictures of a woman who put on a fake smile to hide all the pain inside. They capture a woman who felt like she was drowning in the co-morbid conditions that the disease of obesity had brought her too. I was full-blown diabetic, I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, severe edema and severe depression. There were days that I was simply non-functional. I knew that my weight was causing these medical issues and truthfully, I didn’t care. I had given up on life, love and the pursuit of happiness. I very consciously made the decision to not care about what my lifestyle behavior choices were doing to my health and to my body. I had a lot of days that I really wished I wasn’t even there. I was very aware that I was digging a grave with a fork and a spoon. In fact, if I am being completely honest, that was very much my intention. These photos portray a woman who truthfully didn’t love herself. A woman who didn’t believe that she was worthy of being loved. They portray a woman who was still very much caught in the survivor mentality of life. A woman who had grown up a survivor of physical, sexual and verbal abuse. A woman who was psychologically using her weight as a way to build walls and keep people out. Sometimes I post photos of my transformation, a before-and-after photo of myself and I look at it and I think “Oh my god, who is that girl?” or “I don’t recognize that woman anymore.” Almost instantly someone will see my photo and tell me that I was just as beautiful then as I am now or that I have always been the same person. I very rarely respond to these comments because I really don’t know how to explain. Really, that’s your interpretation, not mine. I don’t need you to qualify my beauty and I don’t need you to diminish the celebration of my transformation. Let me pause here and clarify something – if you have ever been one of those people who came on to my post and made a comment like this, I am not spanking you. I realize that you’re trying to be a positive voice in a negative world. I realized that you are trying to be supportive and kind and I appreciate that. I try to do the same and there are far too many people out there that are willing to tear each other down rather than to build each other up. What I am trying to do is maybe get you to see the situation through a different perspective. I’m trying bring light to the fact that sometimes what we think is positive and supportive, if contrary to how someone feels about themselves, really isn’t. Sometimes I think we are so busy trying to make sure that those that are dealing with obesity do not feel shamed or stigmatized that we forget that obesity is a very complex disease and that it can be caused by many different things. If I was a recovering drug addict and I posted a before and after photo of myself with a tourniquet around my arm and a needle in my vein would you tell me that I was just as beautiful then as I am now? I am one of the first people to stand up against weight bias, weight stigma and weight discrimination. Nobody should ever have to experience those things and I spend a lot of my free time trying to help educate and raise awareness to fight these societal intolerances. I am also the first person to stand up and say that obesity is not healthy. Obesity isn’t a pretty disease. It is as unkind and ugly as any other deadly disease. Just like you can’t look at a photo of someone and decide that the reason they struggle with their weight is because they make poor lifestyle choices and over consume food; you also can’t look at a photo and assume that it’s not. As a recovering food addict, someone who used food to feed my feelings and someone who was purposely and systematically killing herself with food, when I look at a photo of myself and say “I don’t recognize that girl anymore.” — I don’t need someone to tell me that they do. I’d much rather see my transformation acknowledged in a way that doesn’t focus on looks but rather on the accomplishment. “Way to go! What an amazing transformation.” “That’s awesome, congratulations on your health accomplishments!” “What a great job. Look how far you have come.” There are a ton of ways we can acknowledge before and after transformations without using beauty as our quantifier. As someone who has very openly discussed body images issues after weight loss, I can honestly tell you that when someone tells me I am just as beautiful then as I am now I have to remind myself that they are talking about on the inside. Because just a couple of years ago a comment like that would have me standing in front of my mirror wondering what I needed to “fix” about my body to make it noticeably different. When I look at those before photos and all they represent, I don’t think I was beautiful then. I think I was suffering. I think I was in a very dark place and I think my obesity was a very physical symptom of that ugliness. I’m relieved everyday that I was able to bounce back from it. I look back at those photos and I am thankful that I have managed to find a way to maintain my recovery from obesity and food addictions in a world that is food-centric. I look back at those photos and I am grateful that I wasn’t successful at trying to end my life via obesity. Some people look at those photos and think that I hated myself because I suffered from obesity. The truth is I suffered from obesity because I hated myself. The moment I learned to start loving myself and finding myself worthy, I started making healthier lifestyle decisions. I am not the same person in those photos. Not on the outside. Not on the inside. I have successfully navigated a lifestyle transformation. If I was the girl you see in my before pictures, you likely wouldn’t have the pleasure of knowing me today, my friends would have been shopping for a casket by now.

These pictures represent a time in my life where I was constantly sad, constantly depressed. They represent a time when I felt completely unworthy. They are pictures of a woman who put on a fake smile to hide all the pain inside. They capture a woman who felt like she was drowning in the co-morbid conditions that the disease of obesity had brought her too. I was full-blown diabetic, I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, severe edema and severe depression. There were days that I was simply non-functional. I knew that my weight was causing these medical issues and truthfully, I didn’t care. I had given up on life, love and the pursuit of happiness. I very consciously made the decision to not care about what my lifestyle behavior choices were doing to my health and to my body. I had a lot of days that I really wished I wasn’t even there. I was very aware that I was digging a grave with a fork and a spoon. In fact, if I am being completely honest, that was very much my intention. These photos portray a woman who truthfully didn’t love herself. A woman who didn’t believe that she was worthy of being loved. They portray a woman who was still very much caught in the survivor mentality of life. A woman who had grown up a survivor of physical, sexual and verbal abuse. A woman who was psychologically using her weight as a way to build walls and keep people out. Sometimes I post photos of my transformation, a before-and-after photo of myself and I look at it and I think “Oh my god, who is that girl?” or “I don’t recognize that woman anymore.” Almost instantly someone will see my photo and tell me that I was just as beautiful then as I am now or that I have always been the same person. I very rarely respond to these comments because I really don’t know how to explain. Really, that’s your interpretation, not mine. I don’t need you to qualify my beauty and I don’t need you to diminish the celebration of my transformation. Let me pause here and clarify something – if you have ever been one of those people who came on to my post and made a comment like this, I am not spanking you. I realize that you’re trying to be a positive voice in a negative world. I realized that you are trying to be supportive and kind and I appreciate that. I try to do the same and there are far too many people out there that are willing to tear each other down rather than to build each other up. What I am trying to do is maybe get you to see the situation through a different perspective. I’m trying bring light to the fact that sometimes what we think is positive and supportive, if contrary to how someone feels about themselves, really isn’t. Sometimes I think we are so busy trying to make sure that those that are dealing with obesity do not feel shamed or stigmatized that we forget that obesity is a very complex disease and that it can be caused by many different things. If I was a recovering drug addict and I posted a before and after photo of myself with a tourniquet around my arm and a needle in my vein would you tell me that I was just as beautiful then as I am now? I am one of the first people to stand up against weight bias, weight stigma and weight discrimination. Nobody should ever have to experience those things and I spend a lot of my free time trying to help educate and raise awareness to fight these societal intolerances. I am also the first person to stand up and say that obesity is not healthy. Obesity isn’t a pretty disease. It is as unkind and ugly as any other deadly disease. Just like you can’t look at a photo of someone and decide that the reason they struggle with their weight is because they make poor lifestyle choices and over consume food; you also can’t look at a photo and assume that it’s not. As a recovering food addict, someone who used food to feed my feelings and someone who was purposely and systematically killing herself with food, when I look at a photo of myself and say “I don’t recognize that girl anymore.” — I don’t need someone to tell me that they do. I’d much rather see my transformation acknowledged in a way that doesn’t focus on looks but rather on the accomplishment. “Way to go! What an amazing transformation.” “That’s awesome, congratulations on your health accomplishments!” “What a great job. Look how far you have come.” There are a ton of ways we can acknowledge before and after transformations without using beauty as our quantifier. As someone who has very openly discussed body images issues after weight loss, I can honestly tell you that when someone tells me I am just as beautiful then as I am now I have to remind myself that they are talking about on the inside. Because just a couple of years ago a comment like that would have me standing in front of my mirror wondering what I needed to “fix” about my body to make it noticeably different. When I look at those before photos and all they represent, I don’t think I was beautiful then. I think I was suffering. I think I was in a very dark place and I think my obesity was a very physical symptom of that ugliness. I’m relieved everyday that I was able to bounce back from it. I look back at those photos and I am thankful that I have managed to find a way to maintain my recovery from obesity and food addictions in a world that is food-centric. I look back at those photos and I am grateful that I wasn’t successful at trying to end my life via obesity. Some people look at those photos and think that I hated myself because I suffered from obesity. The truth is I suffered from obesity because I hated myself. The moment I learned to start loving myself and finding myself worthy, I started making healthier lifestyle decisions. I am not the same person in those photos. Not on the outside. Not on the inside. I have successfully navigated a lifestyle transformation. If I was the girl you see in my before pictures, you likely wouldn’t have the pleasure of knowing me today, my friends would have been shopping for a casket by now.

The concept of being your “perfectly imperfect” self was first introduced to me by one of my heroes Heidi Powell. [ You can read her original article: I am (still) Perfect here] One of the biggest things I have struggled with post-weight loss is body image issues. The picture below is one of my favorite photos of myself. I feel like I look fierce, strong, happy and proud of what I have accomplished. But there are days I don’t feel like any of those things. At my darkest moment, I was having a nervous breakdown after reconstructive plastic surgery #4 in Dallas, Texas when things still were not looking perfect and the numbers on the scale were reflecting my swollen body weight and not the numbers I was used to seeing in weight maintenance. It took Chris Powell telling me to get off the scale for me to stop obsessing and start trying to get back to me again. [ See related Facebook post here: July 22, 2013 ] The truth is the hardest thing you will ever tell someone. The truth is really scary. It makes you vulnerable because once you put it out there, no mater what anyone has to say, it is your truth. But the truth is what I have promised you from the very beginning. So the truth is, there are still things that I don’t love about my body. There are still flaws that I pick out and can beat myself up emotionally over. The excess skin on my hips and lower buttocks area still causes me skin and rash irritations. The skin that hangs right above my bra line and pooches out over my tank top dives me insane. It makes me super self-conscious about wearing tank tops in public. But I force myself to do it because it’s a fear of something that I know is really only noticeable to people who are looking for it. Though I just told you all where to find it. So that ends that. My arms still bother me. Two brachioplasty surgeries and two touch up surgeries later, I still dislike my arms. They just don’t look right and that little indentation that they keep telling me is a genetic traits that is unrelated to obesity or weight loss, absolutely drives me nuts. Every time I look at my arm I see a little fat roll. This makes me really self-conscious about wearing tank tops. But I force myself to do it as part of my acceptance of my imperfect body. Shorts are an entirely different manner. The skin I see hanging off my thighs if I do a plank in front of one of my group training sessions in the gym is so embarrassing to me that I refuse to wear anything but capri pants unless it’s cool enough outside to wear pantyhose underneath to help shape them and hold the skin in place. My hair is never quite the way I want it. Coloring it myself rarely comes out the way I intended. But who the heck can afford paying a stylist constantly these days? If I can’t do it myself it’s not achievable. My eyebrows, no matter how well-groomed I keep them do this wonky thing when I’ve rubbed my face nervously. My boobs look great in a bra. Outside of one and naked in front of the mirror I obsess over how slightly differently my nipples were placed and how I can see the ripple in one of the implants. These I am told were normal things to expect after getting implants. I’m still not 100% convinced I made the right decision on that. Lord knows after being told at a weight loss surgery convention that one of the main reasons a group of women disliked me was because I was too skinny and my boobs were too big, I really second guessed that decision. [ Read related article here: The Teeter Totter of Weight Bias ] My stomach still has more skin than I think it should have after three different abdominal surgeries to fix it. I’m sure I have defined abdominal muscles under there, somewhere. There are areas of my body right under my arms and along the sides of my breasts where the skin is so damaged from obesity that I get these little pockets in the skin that if I’m not watching carefully can get infected. I truly believe that we need to work on getting doctors and insurance companies to realize that the disease of obesity damages the skin and that removing that damaged skin is a part of treating the disease. My feet are funky. I think I have a hammertoe or something. My little baby toe is pretty much deformed. Even the people at the nail salon snicker at its appearance when I get a pedicure. When I lay on my back on a bench doing a chest press I have weird excess skin on my back right around my shoulder blades where my muscles move. Dislike. On any given day, I can look at all of these things in the mirror and I can fixate on and pick myself apart over how something should have looked had I never weighed 420 lbs. I try hard not to do that. I try to accept that weighing 420 lbs. was part of my story. It is part of what makes me a good weight loss coach, it is part of what makes me good at helping other people fight obesity. It’s all part of who I am, part of the imperfect life that led me to being the perfectly imperfect version of myself that I am today. Who knows where I would be if my story had been different? Each one of us has a past; we can either allow that past to haunt us or we can decide to define our future. My story has brought me to where I am today. To a career that feeds my passion to help other’s fight obesity and find the fun and potential emotional outlet in fitness as a Weight Loss and Wellness Coach and Fitness Instructor. During one of my major moments of body image issues, at time where I was upset that my body wasn’t perfect, a woman who I admire greatly asked me if I wanted to be an example of what most of my clients could never achieve, or if I wanted to be an example of what is attainable. This message hit home for me. Each time that I catch myself standing in front of the mirror picking myself a part I remind myself that I am an example to my clients and my community of what can be achievable after 260 lbs. of weight loss. I am not perfect. Nobody is. But I am myself perfectly. I stay true to who I am and I am an example of my own story. That, my friends, makes me perfect at being my imperfect self. That make me perfectly imperfect. Learning to accept your flaws and loving yourself in spite of them, and muting those internal negative voices that put your emotional well-being in jeopardy is an integral part of your weight loss journey. If you don’t learn to do that and love yourself success will exponentially be more difficult. So what is my biggest tip for battling the barriers of body image issue that can sometimes present themselves in my life after weight loss? In some of my worst moments, when my body image issues are getting the best of me and my internal voices are being unkind when I look in the mirror, I pull out some old pictures. I look back at the photos of when I actually weighed 420 lbs and would have given anything to lose the weight. I look back and the photos of all the skin that hung on my body afterward and remind myself how miserable I was and how good of a job my surgeons did with what they had to work with. I stop and remind myself that while what I wanted was to have the body of a porn star, that wasn’t a realistic expectation. Given my story, where I have been and what I have done, the body I have today, though imperfect for all the reasons I mentioned above, is still my body. I eat healthy, I work out on a regular basis and I do the best I can at making my body a reflection of who I am today. Never let anyone including yourself fool you. Losing all that extra weight won’t make life perfect and it won’t make you perfect. Losing the weight is the big physical part of the journey but the emotional part just begins there. From there you’ll face issues like regain, battling with the numbers you see on the scale, how you handle life without food as form of comfort and maybe the biggest of all, the body image issues that surface when you realize what your body should have or would have looked like had you never been affected by obesity. From there, it is time to appreciate the journey. Be proud of what you have accomplished and understand that you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in your journey right now. Don’t focus on should, could or would, focus on being your imperfect self and understand that you are perfectly imperfect and that my friends, is exactly what we should be.

At my darkest moment, I was having a nervous breakdown after reconstructive plastic surgery #4 in Dallas, Texas when things still were not looking perfect and the numbers on the scale were reflecting my swollen body weight and not the numbers I was used to seeing in weight maintenance. It took Chris Powell telling me to get off the scale for me to stop obsessing and start trying to get back to me again. [ See related Facebook post here: July 22, 2013 ] The truth is the hardest thing you will ever tell someone. The truth is really scary. It makes you vulnerable because once you put it out there, no mater what anyone has to say, it is your truth. But the truth is what I have promised you from the very beginning. So the truth is, there are still things that I don’t love about my body. There are still flaws that I pick out and can beat myself up emotionally over. The excess skin on my hips and lower buttocks area still causes me skin and rash irritations. The skin that hangs right above my bra line and pooches out over my tank top dives me insane. It makes me super self-conscious about wearing tank tops in public. But I force myself to do it because it’s a fear of something that I know is really only noticeable to people who are looking for it. Though I just told you all where to find it. So that ends that. My arms still bother me. Two brachioplasty surgeries and two touch up surgeries later, I still dislike my arms. They just don’t look right and that little indentation that they keep telling me is a genetic traits that is unrelated to obesity or weight loss, absolutely drives me nuts. Every time I look at my arm I see a little fat roll. This makes me really self-conscious about wearing tank tops. But I force myself to do it as part of my acceptance of my imperfect body. Shorts are an entirely different manner. The skin I see hanging off my thighs if I do a plank in front of one of my group training sessions in the gym is so embarrassing to me that I refuse to wear anything but capri pants unless it’s cool enough outside to wear pantyhose underneath to help shape them and hold the skin in place. My hair is never quite the way I want it. Coloring it myself rarely comes out the way I intended. But who the heck can afford paying a stylist constantly these days? If I can’t do it myself it’s not achievable. My eyebrows, no matter how well-groomed I keep them do this wonky thing when I’ve rubbed my face nervously. My boobs look great in a bra. Outside of one and naked in front of the mirror I obsess over how slightly differently my nipples were placed and how I can see the ripple in one of the implants. These I am told were normal things to expect after getting implants. I’m still not 100% convinced I made the right decision on that. Lord knows after being told at a weight loss surgery convention that one of the main reasons a group of women disliked me was because I was too skinny and my boobs were too big, I really second guessed that decision. [ Read related article here: The Teeter Totter of Weight Bias ] My stomach still has more skin than I think it should have after three different abdominal surgeries to fix it. I’m sure I have defined abdominal muscles under there, somewhere. There are areas of my body right under my arms and along the sides of my breasts where the skin is so damaged from obesity that I get these little pockets in the skin that if I’m not watching carefully can get infected. I truly believe that we need to work on getting doctors and insurance companies to realize that the disease of obesity damages the skin and that removing that damaged skin is a part of treating the disease. My feet are funky. I think I have a hammertoe or something. My little baby toe is pretty much deformed. Even the people at the nail salon snicker at its appearance when I get a pedicure. When I lay on my back on a bench doing a chest press I have weird excess skin on my back right around my shoulder blades where my muscles move. Dislike. On any given day, I can look at all of these things in the mirror and I can fixate on and pick myself apart over how something should have looked had I never weighed 420 lbs. I try hard not to do that. I try to accept that weighing 420 lbs. was part of my story. It is part of what makes me a good weight loss coach, it is part of what makes me good at helping other people fight obesity. It’s all part of who I am, part of the imperfect life that led me to being the perfectly imperfect version of myself that I am today. Who knows where I would be if my story had been different? Each one of us has a past; we can either allow that past to haunt us or we can decide to define our future. My story has brought me to where I am today. To a career that feeds my passion to help other’s fight obesity and find the fun and potential emotional outlet in fitness as a Weight Loss and Wellness Coach and Fitness Instructor. During one of my major moments of body image issues, at time where I was upset that my body wasn’t perfect, a woman who I admire greatly asked me if I wanted to be an example of what most of my clients could never achieve, or if I wanted to be an example of what is attainable. This message hit home for me. Each time that I catch myself standing in front of the mirror picking myself a part I remind myself that I am an example to my clients and my community of what can be achievable after 260 lbs. of weight loss. I am not perfect. Nobody is. But I am myself perfectly. I stay true to who I am and I am an example of my own story. That, my friends, makes me perfect at being my imperfect self. That make me perfectly imperfect. Learning to accept your flaws and loving yourself in spite of them, and muting those internal negative voices that put your emotional well-being in jeopardy is an integral part of your weight loss journey. If you don’t learn to do that and love yourself success will exponentially be more difficult. So what is my biggest tip for battling the barriers of body image issue that can sometimes present themselves in my life after weight loss? In some of my worst moments, when my body image issues are getting the best of me and my internal voices are being unkind when I look in the mirror, I pull out some old pictures. I look back at the photos of when I actually weighed 420 lbs and would have given anything to lose the weight. I look back and the photos of all the skin that hung on my body afterward and remind myself how miserable I was and how good of a job my surgeons did with what they had to work with. I stop and remind myself that while what I wanted was to have the body of a porn star, that wasn’t a realistic expectation. Given my story, where I have been and what I have done, the body I have today, though imperfect for all the reasons I mentioned above, is still my body. I eat healthy, I work out on a regular basis and I do the best I can at making my body a reflection of who I am today. Never let anyone including yourself fool you. Losing all that extra weight won’t make life perfect and it won’t make you perfect. Losing the weight is the big physical part of the journey but the emotional part just begins there. From there you’ll face issues like regain, battling with the numbers you see on the scale, how you handle life without food as form of comfort and maybe the biggest of all, the body image issues that surface when you realize what your body should have or would have looked like had you never been affected by obesity. From there, it is time to appreciate the journey. Be proud of what you have accomplished and understand that you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in your journey right now. Don’t focus on should, could or would, focus on being your imperfect self and understand that you are perfectly imperfect and that my friends, is exactly what we should be.

As someone who used to weight 420lbs and has won the battle against obesity I can tell you that a large part of that battle has been numerical for me. At the beginning of my journey, I counted everything. Every calorie I ate, ever calorie I burned. I paid attention to my heart rate, the distance that I covered, the duration of time that I exercised and since the beginning, one of the biggest discrepancies I saw in numbers was in the amount of total calories burned that cardio machines reported. Today I spent 65 minutes on an elliptical doing a cross country program that varied the resistance from anywhere from level 3 to level 18 during my workout. When I was done, the elliptical reported a total calorie burn of 907 calories. The machine is taking into consideration my age, weight, time, and pace when determining my calorie burn. The Fitbit Surge on my wrist calculated that same workout at 66 Minutes, 5596 steps, and with an average heart rate of 130BMP during my workout calculated the same workout at 595 calories. My target heart rate zone as a 38-year-old female is between 93 and 157 beats per minute. So I’m pretty okay with working out at that intensity for 60 minutes. My heart rate is typically in the 140s during harder parts of my workout and drops as low as 125 during the recovery stages after my intervals. So the same workout according to the cardio machine burned 312 calories more than my fitness tracker. That is an outstanding 41% difference. We’re not talking about 20 calories here, we’re talking about the same amount of calories as the 6 inch turkey and provolone on wheat with some of the bread scooped out that I’m eating for lunch today. As a weight loss and wellness coach, I am constantly encouraging my clients to keep food and exercise journals. Studies have proven that those that keep food diaries are 50% more successful in weight loss than those that don’t. I usually recommend my clients keep a separate exercise journal so that they are tracking numbers that are more relevant to their exercise routine. Mainly we want to insure that we are seeing the progression and that the routine is indeed getting your heart rate into your target heart rate zone. This also helps insure that there is no confusion when using applications such as MyFitnessPal – where the application will add the calories burned in a day as I am often asked by clients if they should eat those extra calories. Understanding how we create caloric deficits and what sort of deficits you need to produce at the end of the day is an important part of the weight loss journey. Currently in the fitness industry we recommend that the average person trying to achieve weight loss attempt to create caloric deficits of 500-1000 calories a day through proper nutrition, activity, and exercise. Basic cardio recommendation for someone trying to lose weight is 60 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity 5 days a week for a grand total of 300 minutes a week. I teach my clients that something as simple as adding one glass of wine (an average of 123 calories per 5oz serving) per evening without adding exercise and activity that counters it can add up to 3,690 calories a month, a total of 44,280 calories or – 12.6 pounds a year. If I was tracking calories and activity and depending on a cardio machine to get my caloric burn information and it was off by 300 calories a day on average – that’s an error of 9,000 calories or – 2.5 pounds a month. This could make an awfully big difference in my calculations and expectations if I’m not careful. This can have a big impact on weight maintenance as well. If I think I am burning 300 extra calories a day than I might eat more thus hindering my weight maintenance by causing unexpected gain. Everyone is different; each person’s body has a unique base metabolic rate and their metabolism burns differently. Each of us has our own fitness level as well as our own level of cardiovascular endurance. The fitter you become the lower your resting heart rate goes and the harder you have to work to get your heart rate up. As an example, last Monday in my weight loss boot camp class one of my clients and I wore a fitness tracker that tracked our heart rates and calorie burn during the workout. My calorie burn during the class was close to 250 while hers was nearly 600. Why is she getting so much more out of the workout than I am? Because the workout is a lot harder for her at her fitness level than it is for me at mine and thus, since her body is working harder, she is burning more calories than I am. So should you trust the calorie burn indicated on your cardio machine as part of your calorie deficit for the day? In my professional opinion, survey says EHH. Even though the makers of cardio equipment will tell you that they are constantly improving the technology behind the calculations you see on the machines you are likely seeing a 20-40% calculation discrepancy. While the most accurate way to measure the amount of calories burned during a workout would be to measure oxygen consumption during exercise using a machine that measures ventilation and the carbon dioxide concentration of inhaled and exhaled air to calculate V02 max. These tests can be time-consuming, require appointments and can be costly. Fitness professionals are trained to be able to estimate V02 Max in a field setting using a 1.5 mile run, 12 minute run or 1 mile walk test. If you don’t have access to these tests or a personal trainer and calculating your calories burned against your calories in is important to you I’d recommend investing in a reliable heart rate monitor or activity monitor that has a heart rate monitor built into it to get a more accurate number and insure that your time and calorie expenditure journaling effort is as helpful to your overall goals as it can be.

At the beginning of my journey, I counted everything. Every calorie I ate, ever calorie I burned. I paid attention to my heart rate, the distance that I covered, the duration of time that I exercised and since the beginning, one of the biggest discrepancies I saw in numbers was in the amount of total calories burned that cardio machines reported. Today I spent 65 minutes on an elliptical doing a cross country program that varied the resistance from anywhere from level 3 to level 18 during my workout. When I was done, the elliptical reported a total calorie burn of 907 calories. The machine is taking into consideration my age, weight, time, and pace when determining my calorie burn. The Fitbit Surge on my wrist calculated that same workout at 66 Minutes, 5596 steps, and with an average heart rate of 130BMP during my workout calculated the same workout at 595 calories. My target heart rate zone as a 38-year-old female is between 93 and 157 beats per minute. So I’m pretty okay with working out at that intensity for 60 minutes. My heart rate is typically in the 140s during harder parts of my workout and drops as low as 125 during the recovery stages after my intervals. So the same workout according to the cardio machine burned 312 calories more than my fitness tracker. That is an outstanding 41% difference. We’re not talking about 20 calories here, we’re talking about the same amount of calories as the 6 inch turkey and provolone on wheat with some of the bread scooped out that I’m eating for lunch today. As a weight loss and wellness coach, I am constantly encouraging my clients to keep food and exercise journals. Studies have proven that those that keep food diaries are 50% more successful in weight loss than those that don’t. I usually recommend my clients keep a separate exercise journal so that they are tracking numbers that are more relevant to their exercise routine. Mainly we want to insure that we are seeing the progression and that the routine is indeed getting your heart rate into your target heart rate zone. This also helps insure that there is no confusion when using applications such as MyFitnessPal – where the application will add the calories burned in a day as I am often asked by clients if they should eat those extra calories. Understanding how we create caloric deficits and what sort of deficits you need to produce at the end of the day is an important part of the weight loss journey. Currently in the fitness industry we recommend that the average person trying to achieve weight loss attempt to create caloric deficits of 500-1000 calories a day through proper nutrition, activity, and exercise. Basic cardio recommendation for someone trying to lose weight is 60 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity 5 days a week for a grand total of 300 minutes a week. I teach my clients that something as simple as adding one glass of wine (an average of 123 calories per 5oz serving) per evening without adding exercise and activity that counters it can add up to 3,690 calories a month, a total of 44,280 calories or – 12.6 pounds a year. If I was tracking calories and activity and depending on a cardio machine to get my caloric burn information and it was off by 300 calories a day on average – that’s an error of 9,000 calories or – 2.5 pounds a month. This could make an awfully big difference in my calculations and expectations if I’m not careful. This can have a big impact on weight maintenance as well. If I think I am burning 300 extra calories a day than I might eat more thus hindering my weight maintenance by causing unexpected gain. Everyone is different; each person’s body has a unique base metabolic rate and their metabolism burns differently. Each of us has our own fitness level as well as our own level of cardiovascular endurance. The fitter you become the lower your resting heart rate goes and the harder you have to work to get your heart rate up. As an example, last Monday in my weight loss boot camp class one of my clients and I wore a fitness tracker that tracked our heart rates and calorie burn during the workout. My calorie burn during the class was close to 250 while hers was nearly 600. Why is she getting so much more out of the workout than I am? Because the workout is a lot harder for her at her fitness level than it is for me at mine and thus, since her body is working harder, she is burning more calories than I am. So should you trust the calorie burn indicated on your cardio machine as part of your calorie deficit for the day? In my professional opinion, survey says EHH. Even though the makers of cardio equipment will tell you that they are constantly improving the technology behind the calculations you see on the machines you are likely seeing a 20-40% calculation discrepancy. While the most accurate way to measure the amount of calories burned during a workout would be to measure oxygen consumption during exercise using a machine that measures ventilation and the carbon dioxide concentration of inhaled and exhaled air to calculate V02 max. These tests can be time-consuming, require appointments and can be costly. Fitness professionals are trained to be able to estimate V02 Max in a field setting using a 1.5 mile run, 12 minute run or 1 mile walk test. If you don’t have access to these tests or a personal trainer and calculating your calories burned against your calories in is important to you I’d recommend investing in a reliable heart rate monitor or activity monitor that has a heart rate monitor built into it to get a more accurate number and insure that your time and calorie expenditure journaling effort is as helpful to your overall goals as it can be.

How many times have you seen a Facebook post asking you to participate in some sort of physical challenge? Perhaps it was a plank a day, or a squat a day, or the thirty days of lunges challenge. How many times did you think about it and then decide that you couldn't do the unimaginably large number of repetitions required each day in order to complete the challenge? You probably made a good decision and let me tell you why… Challenges are great. When they are designed correctly. We have a weight loss and fitness challenge at Wilmington Lady Fitness and I am very proud of the positive long term behavior changes we see as a result. Challenges are fun. They increase awareness and open the doors to education by teaching people important exercises and making them more health conscious. But not all challenges are created equal and some challenges can be counterproductive to your health goals. I’m not a fan of exercise specific physical challenges. I believe they pose some risks that just aren't worth the benefit for the average individual. Challenges encourage numbers and not technique. As a professional fitness leader I can tell you that when we coach and cue an exercise we are looking for muscle fatigue and only pushing the muscle to the point of fatigue and perhaps just a smidgen beyond it. Fatigue is an important thing to understand and recognize when you are doing weight and resistance based exercise. Once your musculoskeletal system fatigues out, your nervous system follows and when fatigue takes over your form suffers as a result. You can’t hold your original position any longer so you have to move and compromised some where in your body to allow you to keep going. You’re able to continue what you are doing, but you are doing it with improper form now. Basically, whatever bio-mechanical change you just made to allow you to keep preforming that exercise is being encouraged and strengthened by continuing to preform this misaligned movement. We've hit a point of demolishing return. Preforming more of the exercise is no longer beneficial because it decreases form and technique hence, proper body bio-mechanics. Let’s talk about why we exercise for a moment… We exercise in order to increase our physical endurance, to allow us to preform daily tasks without experience fatigue and discomfort. We exercise so that when we have time off, we’re able to do the things that we want to do. We exercise so that if an emergency happens, we’re physically capable of dealing with it. We exercise to increase our general health. So what you have to ask yourself is, does my lifestyle require this type of long duration long repetitions of this particular exercise? If you have a situation where it does, then the challenge your are considering might be a great additive to your fitness routine. If not, then you would likely benefit more from an exercise routine that did accentuate your lifestyle and goals and not propose the risk of damaging your form, technique and proper body bio-mechanics. Let’s use the recent 30 day squat challenge as an example for a moment. Squats are a great exercise. They are very important to functionality and fitness. They strengthen your quads and glutes. Whether you decide to do a squat challenge or not, you should be doing squats on a regular basis when you exercise.But there are very few situations in which I would throw someone who is just starting out with squats into the 30 day squat challenge that has recently surfaced on the internet.Here’s something to consider. The most common errors you see during resistance training are, improper form in order to lift more weight, using momentum to complete and exercise, doing the exercise too quickly, and not maintaining a neutral spine. How many of these errors do you think you would make after let’s say 100 continuous squats. Let’s try something. Stand up for a minute and let’s try and do a squat. Place your feet just a over shoulder width apart. Make sure your toes are facing out just slightly. Now stand up straight, pull your shoulders back, push your chest forward. This is easily achieved by putting your hands on the back of your head and pulling your elbows back. Tilt your hips so that the top of your booty rolls upwards towards your back. Keep your back in a neutral position and keep your knees over the center of your feet. Take a deep breath and then exhale as you slowly bend your knees, hips and ankles lowering your body as much as you can and trying to achieve a 90 degree angle. Keeping your weight balanced on your heels and pushing from the heel in an upward thrust, lift your body at the same pace that you lowered it and return to your start position. Alright you just did one squat. Are you SURE you did it correctly? If you are, are you sure you could do it correctly twelve times? Twenty five times? Fifty? One Hundred? Are you positive that you do the squat so well there is absolutely no need at all for any modifications? Your body mechanics in doing a squat largely determines how a coach modifies an exercise for you. With someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with squats I might start using a stability ball, bench or chair. This will help build some minimal leg strength. For others I might using a squat assist machine to help them learn the proper form. For more advanced squatters I might put weights in their hands or add a compound movement with their squats like bicep curls or front raises. I would never throw a client into the number of repetitions that a challenge like the 30 day squat challenges suggests. I usually start with one to two sets of eight to twelve repetitions and then, based on each clients performance and how quickly their body adapts to the exercise and how quickly their form and technique improves, begin to progress the exercise to their needs. Go back and follow the directions for the correctly preformed squat again. Now consider all the modifications that I just described might be needed with different clients and different fitness levels and ask yourself is your squat is so perfect that it needs no modification and if your form and endurance is so good that you can confidently do fifty squats on your first day. Because if you can’t do fifty squats perfectly on day one why would you even considering progressing to more the next day? I had a couple of clients a few months ago that performed two hundred and fifty stability ball assisted wall squats with correct form over the course of our workout. They were done in sets of twenty-four squats at a time and spaced out throughout our forty give minute workout. That’s not a feat I would throw at someone that hadn't been training with me for quite sometime or someone that only had a couple of weeks experience at doing the exercise. One of them had been working with me for seven months and the other for about five. Let me tell you one of the general and most fundamental rules of strength training exercise… Never work the same muscle group two days in a row. When we build muscle we stress muscle. So when we exercise to the point of muscle fatigue we created little microfiber tears in our muscles. When they heal, they heal bigger and stronger. But they need rest to heal. You can’t just tear them day in and day out. Avid exercisers and those that have experience with strength training will tell you that if you workout five to seven days a week you do it on an exercise program that targets different muscle groups each day. If you are working out three to four times a week you’re usually performing a total body workout each day or following a pattern of upper body, lower body, total body, core. You’ll get much better physical and weight loss oriented success if you do four sets of twelve repetitions of the version of the squat that you can physically maintain proper form and technique on and then move on to increasing your skill in a different exercise that uses the same muscle group differently like a lunge. If you are working out at home and want to add a little cardio, throw some modified jumping jacks or some jump rope in between the sets to get your heart rate up and burn extra calories during your workout. The big questions you should be asking yourself before you take on a new fitness routines are… Does it help me achieve a personal goal I am working on? Will it help improve some aspect of my lifestyle? Does it follow the basic rules of strength and resistance ( or cardiovascular ) training? Is it something that I can maintain? Is it realistic to my fitness level? Is it safe and do the benefits outweigh the risks involved? Is it going to be fun? If any of your answers are no, you might want to reconsider the change you are about to make and consult with a fitness professional to get assistance developing an exercise routine that will better suit your needs. When clients ask me if I think they should do a 30 day squat challenge or a plank a day challenge I tell them that unless their goal is to finish a physical challenge that proposes higher risk of injury than necessary to achieve results, encourages improper form and technique, and is over in thirty days leaving them to figure out what part of their body they are going to over-train next, a total body work out plan would probably be a much better option. I did a 30 day burpee challenge once at the request of a family member that was asking for moral support and participation. The only thing it did was make me grown at the mention of burpees for years to come.

You probably made a good decision and let me tell you why… Challenges are great. When they are designed correctly. We have a weight loss and fitness challenge at Wilmington Lady Fitness and I am very proud of the positive long term behavior changes we see as a result. Challenges are fun. They increase awareness and open the doors to education by teaching people important exercises and making them more health conscious. But not all challenges are created equal and some challenges can be counterproductive to your health goals. I’m not a fan of exercise specific physical challenges. I believe they pose some risks that just aren't worth the benefit for the average individual. Challenges encourage numbers and not technique. As a professional fitness leader I can tell you that when we coach and cue an exercise we are looking for muscle fatigue and only pushing the muscle to the point of fatigue and perhaps just a smidgen beyond it. Fatigue is an important thing to understand and recognize when you are doing weight and resistance based exercise. Once your musculoskeletal system fatigues out, your nervous system follows and when fatigue takes over your form suffers as a result. You can’t hold your original position any longer so you have to move and compromised some where in your body to allow you to keep going. You’re able to continue what you are doing, but you are doing it with improper form now. Basically, whatever bio-mechanical change you just made to allow you to keep preforming that exercise is being encouraged and strengthened by continuing to preform this misaligned movement. We've hit a point of demolishing return. Preforming more of the exercise is no longer beneficial because it decreases form and technique hence, proper body bio-mechanics. Let’s talk about why we exercise for a moment… We exercise in order to increase our physical endurance, to allow us to preform daily tasks without experience fatigue and discomfort. We exercise so that when we have time off, we’re able to do the things that we want to do. We exercise so that if an emergency happens, we’re physically capable of dealing with it. We exercise to increase our general health. So what you have to ask yourself is, does my lifestyle require this type of long duration long repetitions of this particular exercise? If you have a situation where it does, then the challenge your are considering might be a great additive to your fitness routine. If not, then you would likely benefit more from an exercise routine that did accentuate your lifestyle and goals and not propose the risk of damaging your form, technique and proper body bio-mechanics. Let’s use the recent 30 day squat challenge as an example for a moment. Squats are a great exercise. They are very important to functionality and fitness. They strengthen your quads and glutes. Whether you decide to do a squat challenge or not, you should be doing squats on a regular basis when you exercise.But there are very few situations in which I would throw someone who is just starting out with squats into the 30 day squat challenge that has recently surfaced on the internet.Here’s something to consider. The most common errors you see during resistance training are, improper form in order to lift more weight, using momentum to complete and exercise, doing the exercise too quickly, and not maintaining a neutral spine. How many of these errors do you think you would make after let’s say 100 continuous squats. Let’s try something. Stand up for a minute and let’s try and do a squat. Place your feet just a over shoulder width apart. Make sure your toes are facing out just slightly. Now stand up straight, pull your shoulders back, push your chest forward. This is easily achieved by putting your hands on the back of your head and pulling your elbows back. Tilt your hips so that the top of your booty rolls upwards towards your back. Keep your back in a neutral position and keep your knees over the center of your feet. Take a deep breath and then exhale as you slowly bend your knees, hips and ankles lowering your body as much as you can and trying to achieve a 90 degree angle. Keeping your weight balanced on your heels and pushing from the heel in an upward thrust, lift your body at the same pace that you lowered it and return to your start position. Alright you just did one squat. Are you SURE you did it correctly? If you are, are you sure you could do it correctly twelve times? Twenty five times? Fifty? One Hundred? Are you positive that you do the squat so well there is absolutely no need at all for any modifications? Your body mechanics in doing a squat largely determines how a coach modifies an exercise for you. With someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with squats I might start using a stability ball, bench or chair. This will help build some minimal leg strength. For others I might using a squat assist machine to help them learn the proper form. For more advanced squatters I might put weights in their hands or add a compound movement with their squats like bicep curls or front raises. I would never throw a client into the number of repetitions that a challenge like the 30 day squat challenges suggests. I usually start with one to two sets of eight to twelve repetitions and then, based on each clients performance and how quickly their body adapts to the exercise and how quickly their form and technique improves, begin to progress the exercise to their needs. Go back and follow the directions for the correctly preformed squat again. Now consider all the modifications that I just described might be needed with different clients and different fitness levels and ask yourself is your squat is so perfect that it needs no modification and if your form and endurance is so good that you can confidently do fifty squats on your first day. Because if you can’t do fifty squats perfectly on day one why would you even considering progressing to more the next day? I had a couple of clients a few months ago that performed two hundred and fifty stability ball assisted wall squats with correct form over the course of our workout. They were done in sets of twenty-four squats at a time and spaced out throughout our forty give minute workout. That’s not a feat I would throw at someone that hadn't been training with me for quite sometime or someone that only had a couple of weeks experience at doing the exercise. One of them had been working with me for seven months and the other for about five. Let me tell you one of the general and most fundamental rules of strength training exercise… Never work the same muscle group two days in a row. When we build muscle we stress muscle. So when we exercise to the point of muscle fatigue we created little microfiber tears in our muscles. When they heal, they heal bigger and stronger. But they need rest to heal. You can’t just tear them day in and day out. Avid exercisers and those that have experience with strength training will tell you that if you workout five to seven days a week you do it on an exercise program that targets different muscle groups each day. If you are working out three to four times a week you’re usually performing a total body workout each day or following a pattern of upper body, lower body, total body, core. You’ll get much better physical and weight loss oriented success if you do four sets of twelve repetitions of the version of the squat that you can physically maintain proper form and technique on and then move on to increasing your skill in a different exercise that uses the same muscle group differently like a lunge. If you are working out at home and want to add a little cardio, throw some modified jumping jacks or some jump rope in between the sets to get your heart rate up and burn extra calories during your workout. The big questions you should be asking yourself before you take on a new fitness routines are… Does it help me achieve a personal goal I am working on? Will it help improve some aspect of my lifestyle? Does it follow the basic rules of strength and resistance ( or cardiovascular ) training? Is it something that I can maintain? Is it realistic to my fitness level? Is it safe and do the benefits outweigh the risks involved? Is it going to be fun? If any of your answers are no, you might want to reconsider the change you are about to make and consult with a fitness professional to get assistance developing an exercise routine that will better suit your needs. When clients ask me if I think they should do a 30 day squat challenge or a plank a day challenge I tell them that unless their goal is to finish a physical challenge that proposes higher risk of injury than necessary to achieve results, encourages improper form and technique, and is over in thirty days leaving them to figure out what part of their body they are going to over-train next, a total body work out plan would probably be a much better option. I did a 30 day burpee challenge once at the request of a family member that was asking for moral support and participation. The only thing it did was make me grown at the mention of burpees for years to come.