Making time to workout can be difficult when you have a busy life with a husband and children–but not impossible. Angelica Amador Benitez has two children and gained 100 pounds from each pregnancy. She was not happy with the way she looked or felt, so she decided to do something about it.
“My first pregnancy I went through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and you are injecting yourself with hormones to get pregnant–even though I don’t think it was the hormones, I was just eating more than I was supposed to,” explains Angelica Amador Benitez. During both her pregnancies she gained 100 pounds, prior to that she was 140 pounds.
“I’ve always been a gym rat because I love the rush of walking into a gym, but when you are 250 pounds, you don’t want to be jumping up and down at a gym,” she says. As a new mom, she didn’t have the flexibility in her schedule to go to a gym because she had a newborn to take care of, so she needed a program she could do in the comfort of her own home. Angelica was up one night and purchased Turbo Jam at 2 a.m. and decided to give it a shot.
The program came with a schedule to follow each day as well as a nutrition book. “Thinking that you have to lose 100 pounds is too stressful, so I broke it down in small increments because losing 2 to 3 pounds a week was more realistic,” she explains. She started the program on a Monday and weighed herself the following Sunday. Angelica didn’t care about how long it took, even though she gave herself a whole year to lose the weight and lost the weight from the first pregnancy in 6 months and the second pregnancy in 8 months.
This was a life changing experience for Angelica, which caused her to change her mentality towards food and working out. It wasn’t about dieting, but about adapting a healthier lifestyle that would continue years after losing the weight. “A diet doesn’t work because a diet signifies that there’s a beginning and an end, so once you are done, you go back to your old ways and gain the weight back,” she says.
One of the things she did was relearn what foods are good for you and what foods are holding you back from losing weight. “Nothing in my closet fit and I wasn’t going to go buy a whole new wardrobe because I was a bigger size. I was determined to get into those clothes no matter what because I paid a lot of money for them and I was going to fit again,” she says. Her weight was affecting her health, for example, she would get tired just going up the stairs and would snore loudly because of all the weight on her chest.
Tips that worked for Angelica
- Hang out with people that have the same goals as you
- Don’t announce that you are not eating certain foods because people will convince you to eat them regardless.
- Set yourself for success, give yourself small goals.
- 80% of losing weight is what you eat, do your research.
- Find a fun workout that you enjoy and mix it up.
- It only takes an intense 30-minute workout to lose 2-3 pounds a week.
Angelica is now an online health and fitness coach and has kept the weight off for 5 years. She works with BeachBody and she helps people lose weight online by working out with them, giving them workout tips and even nutrition tips. She enjoys working as an online fitness coach because it gives her the flexibility that fits her schedule while caring for her children.
