 Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and I'm on WW personal points. Happy Friday friends. It is Friday, it is the weekend. Definitely let me know down in the comments what are your weekend plans? Today we're gonna talk all about my week. How was it? Was it great? Was it horrible? How did the week go? We're going to set some goals for next week. Go over this week's WW workshop topic and of course I'll share this week's weigh-in. So if you're excited to give this video a thumbs up, make sure you're subscribed and double check that your bell is turned on because Good Old YouTube has been turning off notifications so that you're notified every time a new video goes live. I do upload videos five days a week. Don't forget to check out the description box down below for nutrition coaching. I highly recommend macros and calories. That is how I have lost the majority of my weight, how I keep losing weight and how I'm keeping it off. So I highly, highly recommend as well as one-on-one coaching if you would like to chat with me directly. You'll also find links and discounts to my favorite things and of course, come on over, join our Facebook group. We'd love to have you. So let's jump in to my week, my weigh-in and the WW workshop topic. I hope you had the best week ever. I had a pretty good week. As always, it's been extremely, extremely busy for me. I am very busy with nutrition coaching. I have upped my working out. I'll be sharing that with you a little bit later in today's video. And we've been doing a lot of car things. I've had to take Troy to Tucson a couple of times for some car repairs. So it's just been overall a busy, busy week. Now I'm not complaining. I prefer to be busy rather than not busy but sometimes busy can be a little overwhelming. And this week was abnormally a little bit more busier. As far as nutrition went, I had a really good week. I actually ate crumble cookies. We picked them up on Saturday, took them over to my in-laws for dinner on Sunday. We bought a six pack of cookies, brought them all over to my in-laws and I had a little piece of all six cookies equaling to about a half of a crumble cookie which if you didn't know, there's four servings per cookie. So that was basically two servings or about 300 calories. I tracked it. It was delicious. I moved on. We left all of the extra cookies with my in-laws. So there was no temptation in my house for additional crumble cookies throughout the week. We also went to my next door neighbors on Saturday for a little, for a party. Her husband went up and ranked in the military and they had a little surprise get together for him. We had an amazing, amazing Mexican dinner. I brought a fruit salad full of different berries and bananas and I really just focused on that but I still enjoyed all of the food and I even had a small piece of cake. So I had cake on Saturday, crumble cookies on Sunday so it was a pretty good week of delicious food. If you didn't know, as part of my Facebook group we have a quarterly paid challenge and our challenge for the month of August in that paid group is water. So I've been heavily focused on getting in a gallon of water every day and out of the last seven days, six of those I was able to get in my entire gallon of water. So I'm really proud of myself for that. I've been slacking a little bit, more like getting in a half a gallon to three quarters of a gallon. So this challenge as part of that paid group has been really good for me in upping my water and really focusing on getting a gallon in every day. That's also going to help with all of my working out as well as flushing all of the cake and crumble cookies that I ate out of my system. Speaking of working out, when I checked in with my fitness coach this last week we made a few modifications. I am lifting weights four days a week now. I am doing structured cardio three days a week and I am walking the remaining four days of the week. Sunday is a rest day for me but I choose to make it an active rest day and I do take about a 30 minute walk every single Sunday. We also modified my macros a little bit. Now of course I did my own macros because I do those for you, I do them for myself but we went ahead and gave me two back-to-back higher calorie, higher carb, lower fat days to see how my body does with that, to see if that helps compensate for all of the extra activity. You can't eat the same calories and macros when you're upping your activity. You have to be able to balance that out and increase calories in certain macros in order to benefit your body from all of that extra activity. We want to make sure that we're fueling our metabolism especially when we're working out more, AKA burning more calories, we need to replenish that. So I've been playing around with the new macros, carbs, fats, calories and it's been really nice to have two pretty high calorie days and I've made those Friday and Saturday. Both of those days are really active days for me pretty intense gym days so those two days made perfect sense to up my calories and carbs and also they're on the weekend and that is generally when I go out for dinner or go to parties or events so it's worked out really, really well and I was anxious to see how it affected my weigh-in this week but before we jump into my weigh-in let's chat about this week's workshop topic and that is how to use your strings to stay on track. Some of our best tools on our weight loss journey are traits that we already possess, things that we are really good at, what we would call our strengths. What do you do when you bring your A game? Whatever those strengths are that you have we need to focus on those, recognize them, celebrate them and draw on them daily to be successful on our journey. So there's some things that you can do to help identify some of your strengths. Now you may be able to rattle a few off the top of your head but if you struggle with coming up with what your personal strengths are this strategy will help determine those. Number one is to identify a strength by filling in the following blanks. I feel like my best self when I'm blank. I never change blank about myself. Blank comes naturally. Name an attribute that most closely relates to your answers so some examples would be thoughtful, focused, clever, open-minded, loving, spiritual, hopeful, grateful, strong, creative, curious, brave, zestful, determined, forgiving, sense of humor. Then go ahead and list out my strength is. Draw from those words really deep dive into who you are and what do you think some of your personal strengths are? The first thing that came to mind for me for me personally is determined. For my entire life ever since I was a little kid you can even ask my mom whatever I set my mind to I am determined to do it. Whether it be family related, relationship, career, weight loss, health, fitness, whatever I set my mind to my determination is strong until I get there. And for me, that is a strength that I possess and one that I need to build on. Step two is to picture times you've used your particular strength to connect to it and realize its impact, visualize what you were doing, how good it felt and the outcome. Now I'm going to go back to my personal trait of determination and let's bring this full circle to weight loss. Once I set my mind to lose this weight and to get it off and to keep it off, I was determined. Now there are a lot of other strengths that I had to possess to get to where I am today, 119 pounds loss, but the determination to keep going was definitely at the forefront. Number three is to write an affirmation to remind you of your strength. It can be simple like I am focused or my zest for life is my greatest asset. Go ahead and write down my affirmation is. And step four is deploy your affirmation and your strength's power. Try saying it every morning to set the tone for the day when faced with a challenge or whenever you need a pep talk. I tell myself probably every day, stay determined, keep going, be consistent, you've got this. Positive affirmation and things that we say to ourselves whether we physically say it or we write it on a sticky note and put it on our mirror. All of that is huge in being successful. It's all about what's up here, honestly. Weight loss is more mind over matter. It's important to be positive to ourselves, be positive to ourselves and build on the strength and qualities we already possess. Most of us know that losing weight or really any endeavor in life isn't just a straight solid line. It is full of ups and downs, bumps, bruises along the way. When moments get tough, when things get tough, we can ask ourselves, what am I doing wrong? I'm not good at this. I can't do this. That is the opposite of what we need to be telling ourselves. We need to be telling ourselves, I am strong. I can do this. I'm determined. I've got this. And when things are going great, that's what we tell ourselves. I've got this. I'm determined. I'm doing great. We need to make sure we're telling ourselves that exact same thing when the road gets a little bit rough. Recognizing our strengths, building upon those, having a positive mindset, like I said, can play a bigger part in our overall weight loss than the actual weight loss itself. It also plays a huge part in maintaining our weight loss. Being in the right frame of mind, having the right mindset about our weight loss, our journey, maintenance, the future can really, really have a huge impact on whether or not we continue to be successful. Focus on what comes naturally and focus on the strengths you already possess. And don't tell me you don't have any strengths because I bet if you followed the four steps, you would come up with tons of strengths that you possess today. And remember, you're strong, you're beautiful, you're perfect and you've got this. So I really like this topic. I think it's really important to have that reminder that we possess positive traits and strengths that can help us in our journey. And remember, what's happening up here can even be more important than what's happening right here. So with that being said, let's hop into this week's weigh-in. If you follow my channel, if you've watched my Friday weigh-ins for the last few weeks, the scale and I have not been friends. We have had a very tumultuous relationship and that tumultuous relationship is continuing. I am finding that my weight is staying literally the same. Sometimes I get a little spike up, sometimes I get a little spike down. Towards the end of this week, I started to see the scale trending down a little bit. Now we're not talking pounds upon pounds, which I'm okay with. I actually saw a few comments in last week's weigh-in video saying, hey, obviously as we get closer to our goal weight, the weight comes off a little bit slower and that is 100% true. Not to mention I have been changing my physical activity almost on a weekly basis for about the last month and that is also going to affect the scale. When I work out four days a week, when I lift weights four days a week, when I do structured cardio three days a week, when I walk every day, my body retains water, it's in flame, my muscles are rebuilding and that cannot show up in a positive light on the scale. And as the weeks have went on, I've been becoming a little bit more okay with that. Now, honest, transparency, of course I'd like to see the scale go down. That is the whole point of being on a weight loss journey. But more importantly than that, I really wanna work on my physical fitness, building lean muscle, actually having muscle definition. And thank you to all of you who have been commenting on my videos saying that you notice my shoulders, my arms, my chest area, how strong my legs are. That really means a lot to me because that, because the scale hasn't been moving, has to be my focus. And that's hard to wrap my head around. To be honest with you, it's really hard to focus more on physical changes that take a little longer to see than that immediate gratification of seeing that number go down on the scale. But luckily, beside the physical transformation that's happening, I am seeing the scale go down little by little. And that was the case this week. When I stepped on the scale, I am down 0.8 pounds. Now that is almost a pound and that is pretty good considering this was the scale most of the week or this was the scale most of the week. So I'm thrilled with 0.8 lost. And on a side note, a little NSV, this shirt right here, I featured in my summer Sheehan clothing haul that I uploaded this last Sunday. Now that video was filmed a couple of weeks ago. It was just in the queue ready to be uploaded. When I put this shirt on today, it is much looser on me. And if you know my way in the last couple of weeks, there hasn't been much of a change, but this shirt is visibly more loose on me. I mean, way more loose than it was in that video. And that is just affirmation that what I'm doing is working, whether the scale says it is or not. So remember that sometimes, a lot of the times, most of the time, the scale doesn't recognize our hard work. Focus on other things that you can see, other changes with your body that you can focus on to keep motivated and to keep going. So now I wanna hear from you guys. Let me know down in the comments. How was your week? Did you gain? Did you lose? And let me know what is your number one strength? What positive trait immediately comes to mind when you think about your strengths? Write it down in the comments because that's going to help you remember that this next week and focus on that along your weight loss journey. And of course, if you enjoyed today's video and you found it helpful, give it a thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed and your bell is turned on because I do upload away in every Friday and again, five videos per week. Check out the description box for nutrition coaching, links and discounts to my favorite things. And don't forget, come and join our Facebook group. We'd love to have you. Happy Friday friends, happy weekend, and I'll see you in tomorrow's grocery haul. Bye.