Long time, no blog(ging)

So... I'm back from my 3+ year hiatus.  In that time I had a baby, changed jobs and went on a bunch of awesome vacations with my fantastic family.  I'm sure I'll end up with little to nothing to blog about at some point in the future, so eventually you'll hear about it all.  My life isn't that interesting, ha, ha!

After I had the baby I was really, REALLY off the fitness bandwagon because I was not allowed to exercise during my pregnancy.  In fact, I was advised to gain weight before conceiving, just to up my BMI from underweight to low-normal.  I had/have a fairly muscular build, so I didn't look extremely thin or sickly, just slender. 

I dabbled a bit after my daughter was born and I was given the all clear, mostly long walks and light jogging on our treadmill while she was napping, but I nursed her and it was generally uncomfortable for me.  In the interest of full disclosure, my boobs were huge, constantly felt squashed and I was paranoid I would lose the bounciness of my twenty year-old self if I exercised as I had previously.  I even went so far as to invest in a Moving Comfort Fiona sports bra, but I just couldn't bring myself to really get back in the swing of things until we were done nursing.

Cue March 2012.

She was well past her first birthday and was drinking cow's milk at school, but we were still nursing mornings and evenings.  I'm not sure what possessed me, but I became convinced I needed to be healthier, so I started having smoothies for dinner.  My milk supply tanked, my boobs shriveled up and (surprise, surprise), my daughter was no longer interested in nursing.  I continued the smoothie kick for a week or so until this happened, at which time I FREAKED OUT that I was irreparably damaging my daughter (first time Mom guilt) and I quit my smoothies.  It didn't help, I/we were done.

At that point I thought to myself, "something has to change."  That "something" was exercise.  Mind you, I was only 2-5 pounds heavier than I was when I became pregnant, so it was really more about toning up and building a muscle base.  As fate would have it, a few days later a Groupon caught my eye for a bootcamp-style personal training group that met at 5:30am at a gymnastics center just minutes from my house.  For $30 it promised me a meal plan and three weeks of unlimited training sessions.  "Sure!" I thought, "I went through real bootcamp, so could this really be so bad?"

Cue May 2012.

"Oh no, my Groupon expires at the end of this month and we're going on vacation soon!  How could I have waited so long...?!"

I managed to get in just under the deadline, and thus began my fitness journey with Reshape.