Down to 175.8 pounds and reducing: Weight training, "clean" eating and lots of Jesus...

Trying to look thinner...

There I am, taking a weight-loss progress selfie in the hallway mirror to find my skinniest looking pose.

The last time I wrote about my weight on this blog I confessed that I had hit 180 pounds, even though the gym's scale said 183 pounds back then. I thought 180 was a nice round number -- and it was lower than the gym's scale because it was my so-called flush weight, what I weighed first thing in the morning -- my thinnest poop-everything-out weight.

Anyway, today I'm grateful to God that the scale is going down in a good way and my weight read 175.8 pounds this Friday, on my weigh-in day, which is nearly 5 pounds less than that 180-pound point that I knew had to be my turn around.

What changed? 

Well, the last time I wrote about my love of Robek's green smoothies and I have still been doing plenty of those kale and spinach combined with fruit and protein smoothies that I absolutely love. (My kids like them, too.) And I'm blessed to get those every morning, and sometimes drink them twice per day. They are very convenient and they help to fill me up. I've also noticed that they really curbed my appetites for sweets so I don't crave ice cream and things like that.

My Weight Training Epiphany

Another huge blessing was the fact that a friend of mine brought me to some group personal training classes at a place called BBL Fitness here in Akron. I did a sample class and then I just felt like God was telling me to go ahead and join, so I did and it has changed my life for the better. I've learned so many great tips from the trainers there, who eschewed some of the fallacies I had about weight training. "Lift like a man, you won't look like a man. You'll look good," said one of the trainers and it blew my mind.

Growing up, at first I had been taught that women shouldn't really lift heavy weights. And for me to have a weight bench in my room as a teenager growing up brought concerned comments from my mother and my best friend at the time, who didn't really understand a woman wanting to lift weights.

There are certain women who still feel like if they lifted weights they were going to bulk up too much, and so therefore sometimes don't do anything. Or, they fall into the thought process that I had heard in the past, which said if you wanted to get ripped and toned, you needed to do lots of repititions with low weights.

Well, I'm understanding how those kinds of philosophies weren't totally changing my body for a while. I wasn't challenging myself enough, and I was surprised to find out when taking the Boot Camp classes that I could hardly do a push-up. But now that is getting better and my upper body strength is strengthening as each class goes by, and I'm learning more and more about how to change my shape and health for the better. It's no wonder that when I'd go to the health club and I wouldn't ramp-up the weight that things kind of stayed the same.

Sure, thank God I've been able to lose weight throughout the years based upon keeping to an approximately 1,600-calorie per day diet, however it is getting better now by combining calorie restrictions with weight training and continued cardio workouts by getting my beloved 5K runs in on the treadmill, too.

Yes, when I burn a good 400 or so calories on the treadmill or in workout classes, I can add those back as additional calories I can eat for the day but it's funny and great that some days I don't even feel like eating all of them back, so I don't force myself to eat when I'm not hungry.

So I love the fact that even though I'm gaining muscle, I am also losing fat and losing it at enough of a rate that the scale is still going down, which is what I want to see, in a good way at a good pace.

I know there are times when people gain muscle, which weighs more than fat, and even though they're losing fat the muscle may outweigh the fat for a time. So they don't necessarily see pounds going down -- they might only see inches going down. I want to see both, positive person that I am.

We don't have to worry about building the muscle, because as I've learned, the muscle helps us continue burning fat throughout the day where as if we were only just strictly doing all this cardio, we wouldn't necessarily have the same benefits. So even when I'm away from Boot Camp class and I go to the health club, I know I can challenge myself by amping up those weights in order to see more continued progress. So I continue to hope I'll go along at least with this pound a week weight-loss or more until I hit my goal weight, which might be around 150 or 145 pounds, depending on how healthy that is for my height of 5 feet 10 and a half or 11 inches tall.

Therefore, keep checking back or follow me on Instagram to check out my continued weight loss -- and I'm sure the Kindle books that will follow will show the tracks of the whole journey. Also I will continue to unjump the shark and give more Kindle bookselling tips and other fun moneymaking writing stuff I've learned for 2014. Take care all!