Hello!!!

Welcome to my blog! Why the name p50plus? Simple... my name is Paige (hence the "p") and I am 55 years old... (hence the 50+). I am using this blog to document my journey to fitness and health that started in April of this year (2011).

In this blog, I will share the parts of my journey that I feel are applicable to others who are where I was - overweight, tired and hurtling towards illness. If I had stayed on the road I was on, I would have been flirting with adult onset diabetes, heart problems and who knows what else. I was eating poorly, fast foods were a daily part of my life and exercise? Nonexistent. I had not exercised in over 30 years.

To give you a quick glance at where I was and where I am now, three months after I started drinking Shakeology and exercising (doing the ChaLEAN Xtreme workout program) I have posted some pictures below. I am not proud of where I was when I started, and the "Before" picture still causes me to wince. I hope I never forget the embarrassment of seeing myself in this picture taken by a student. I can't believe that is how I looked every day. The "after" picture  I am much more comfortable with, as I had lost 20 lbs and my fitness level had skyrocketed during my first run-through of the ChaLEAN Xtreme program.

 This picture really does tell a story - this was taken in January of 2011. I was wearing my long sleeved shirt unbuttoned because even though it was a XXL, I was too big to button it down the front. All my shirts were like that, so I took to wearing Tshirts with funny pictures or pictures of guitars on the front and leaving my long sleeve shirt unbuttoned, calling it a "fashion statement". It was really me hiding the fact that I could not button the shirt because I was too big. How did I get to this (260-ish lbs) from the days when I was 180 lbs or less and could run 3 miles in 18 minutes, and trained bodybuilders in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980's? Easy. Lots of McDonalds and Wendy's. In fact this last five years, I would stop at McDonald's every morning for breakfast on the way to work. Do you see those pants? 42 inch waist. Remember them - I have another picture to

show you later.

Ok - to the right is where I am right now.  My weight is 236, roughly 20 lbs lighter. My pants size has dropped from a 42" waist to a 36" waist between the last half of April and the end of July. I have gone from not being able to do a single pushup to doing 72 pushups in four minutes recently. I ran up the stairs at my house recently with a 20 lb sack of dog food in my arms, and when I got to the top of the stairs I wasn't even breathing hard.  I was stunned. All this was accomplished using Shakeology (a Beachbody product... a meal replacement drink) and doing the ChaLEAN Xtreme workout, a 90 day program.
So that is where I am at as of this moment. I am doing the 90 day ChaLEAN program one more time, then I will graduate to P90X in December. I will post more pictures as I progress.



Remember those pants I told you about in the picture above? Here they are again.... Did I actually WEAR these things?