favorite quotes

"If you cannot pray sincerely, offer your dry, hypocritical, agnostic prayer, for God in His mercy accepts bad coin." ~Rumi ...

It's time to start posting!!

I started this blog on January 1, 2010 with my commitment to eat a vegan diet. Part of that commitment is also to lower my cholesterol and get my weight into the healthy range.
Over the past weeks I have learned that it is easy, satisfying and delicious to eat vegan! It is easy to meet my protein and calcium requirements without eating animals! But I have also learned, IT IS EASY TO OVEREAT AND STILL HARD TO LOSE WEIGHT!!!
There are many reasons I should stop trying to lose weight.
First of all, this is my body composition:
Height - 5 feet 7.5 inches
Age - 43
Weight - 200 lbs
% fat: - 24.2%
% water - 52%
Pounds muscle - 142.8 lbs
Pounds bone - 7.4 lbs
Not too shabby. Through practicing Bikram yoga, I've gone from 41% body fat to 24.2% body fat. I've gone from 113 pounds muscle to 142.8 pounds muscle in about 2 years. In other words, in the past 2 years I have lost over 17% of my body fat and gained over 29 pounds of muscle.
*If I played on the women's rugby team, that would be great. But I don't.*
I want and need to be lighter and smaller. I wear a size 14 and I know I'd feel best in a 10. I know that if I weighed about 150, I would feel amazing, maybe 160.
Having said all of this, I'm proud of what I've accomplished, I do feel good and I am extremely grateful for my health. I just can't accept that 200 pounds is my ideal weight.
So, I need to:
*get comfortable with daily calorie deficits and more cardio
*lose some lean muscle mass {{Decreasing protein and increasing cardio is the way to do it.}}
It will be like turning a bear into a deer!