 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 it is Friday, so it's weigh in day. We're gonna chat about my week and we're gonna talk about this week's Weight Watchers Workshop topic. So if you're excited, give this video a big thumbs up, subscribe, turn your bell on because we do a weigh in every Friday and I actually upload five videos every single week. Check out the description box down below where you will find nutrition coaching. Highly, highly, highly recommend those personalized macros and calories. That is how I have lost and maintained my 140 pound weight loss as well as one-on-one coaching for questions, accountability, or to talk with me directly. Links to discounts to my favorite things and come join my free, amazing supported Facebook group. We would love to have you. So let's chat about my week. It's definitely been an interesting one. My weigh in and the Weight Watchers Workshop topic. Happy Friday friends. I hope you had an amazing, amazing week. Happy belated St. Patrick's Day and happy Easter. I can't believe Easter is in March this year. Like I said, this has been quite the week for me. It's been really good in some aspects and it's been really bad in some aspects. I really wanna talk to you a little bit about the good and the bad this week. Let's start with the good. Let's start with the good that happened this week. On this last Sunday, I ran a 5K in Tucson. It was the Desert Leprechaun 5K. It was with my boot camp groups, specifically with my friend Mel. There wasn't a lot of my boot camp group that was able to attend this 5K. So I mainly spent it with my friend Mel. And let me tell you, this 5K was so much fun. It was St. Patrick's Day themed. It was actually on St. Patrick's Day. So everybody was dressed up, wearing green. I rocked my green St. Patrick's Day t-shirt, some green lipstick, a green eye look. It was truly so much fun. And what was so amazing about this 5K is I beat my best 5K time by six months. 5K time by six minutes. That is pretty incredible. I ran this 5K in about 40 minutes. About a 12 minute mile, which was really good for me. I do a lot of jogging slash running and some walking. I try to do more intervals. To be honest with you, I'm not a big runner. I don't love running, but running is really great for building up my endurance. So I do like to do a walk run when I do 5Ks, similar to what I did in my first 10K about a week ago in San Diego. So that was really exciting. Another thing to check off my bucket list was completing another 5K and of course, beating my best time. Another great thing that happened this week is Trainist, the app that I've been loving. I've been sharing it a lot here on my channel and a lot of you have been loving it as well. Trainist is a free calorie counting app. My fitness pal, Luzit, those other apps out there you have to pay for the premium version in order to really do anything in the app. The free version is very, very limited. Well, Trainist is a completely free app. There's no ads. You can build recipes, scan foods, track your food. It's a newer app to the market, but what's really exciting is as of March 21st, they've added some really exciting features to the app that are literally game changing in a weight loss journey. You're now able to check in in the app every single week, track your weight. That is very exciting because you're not having to track your weight in separate apps. You can actually do it directly in the Trainist app where you're tracking your calories and your macros. And even more exciting, you can now upload progress photos into the app so you can see your progress based on photos. Now I highly recommend this because as you know, the scale isn't always our friend and I talk all about how to track your progress and your success in ways not relating to the scale. And one of those ways is measurements and the other way is pictures and you can put all of this information now into the Trainist app for free. They're constantly upgrading that app. They're constantly adding new features and it's free. Who doesn't love a free way to track calories, your progress and your weight? They are going to be making some other changes to the app as we move through 2024. I'll definitely share those with you but I have been loving this app. I find it to be very user friendly, very accurate when I'm looking up foods, when I'm scanning foods, it's extremely accurate and it's very easy to build recipes and track those recipes in the app. So I will link the Trainist app down below for you. If you haven't downloaded it already, definitely do especially with all of these amazing upgrades and features that they've added. So I've been loving that. I input my weight into the app, I input my photos into the app and now I'm tracking my progress weekly in the app as well. Absolutely love, I'll link it down below for you but that was an exciting thing that happened this week as well. Like I said, this week had some challenges. This week was a little bit sad for our family. If you saw Wednesday's What I Eat in a Day, you know that Lola officially has relapsed into her lymphoma cancer. We got confirmation on Monday. Actually the day I was filming Wednesdays, What I Eat in a Day is the day I took Lola to Beyond Colleges, anticipating that her swollen lymph nodes were relating to her high calcium and we were given the news that she unfortunately had fully relapsed into lymphoma. So it was very heartbreaking. You can see that in Wednesday's video. It was very sad for me. It's still sad for me. I'm trying to hold it together for this video but we did make the decision also on Wednesday that we were going to embark on another chemotherapy journey with Lola. You know that we put her through what's called this CHOP chemo protocol. Almost a year ago, she actually was in remission over a year. The average is a year. So Lola exceeded the average. She went into remission within the first four weeks of the chemo protocol last time. So we decided that based on her not displaying any signs of sickness, she's actually completely her normal self even when she was diagnosed originally with lymphoma she acted completely normal and because she is healthy and in a healthy state we decided to go ahead and go through that chemo protocol again. She navigated that really well last time and we're hoping to have those same really good results. With going through this protocol a second time the average remission is about half of the first remission. So Lola being in remission a little over a year the expectation for the second round of this chemo protocol is about half of that. So six to seven months on average but we're hoping for more. And then after this next protocol she's unable to have this chemo treatment again but there are other rescue protocols available to her. We're hoping we don't have to use those. Lola is an older dog. She's about 11 and a half. We're not a hundred percent sure because she's a rescue but based on Diesel's age versus Lola's age I brought her into our family. I'm guessing that's about her age and she's definitely a senior dog. She has a white face and her little fur her brindle fur is starting to get some gray but she's healthy enough to go through whatever we can put her through to help her make it through this second round of lymphoma. This protocol is extremely expensive. It's well over $10,000 which is what we spent the last time we put her through that. We're spending that again to put her through it this time because if we didn't do this then her lifespan is weeks to months. And that's just not an option for us. I can't think of a better way to spend my money than to take care of my baby and hopefully allow her to live out the rest of her natural life cancer free and healthy. So it was a big blow to us this week. It was something that I've been expecting I guess over the last year. I mentioned in a previous video that I've had anticipatory grief for the last year because it wasn't a matter of if she was going to relapse it was a matter of when. So every day I worried about her. Every month I worried about her. Every checkup I worried about her. And this is truly just the day that we've been dreading and I feel really lucky that she was in remission over a year. I feel really lucky that she's happy and healthy at this point, even though she has cancer. Okay, so let's move into my week. Let's move into the rest of my week and let's talk about the Weight Watchers workshop topic before I share with you my weigh in. So with the ups and downs this week overall I had a good week. I was, my food was really good this week. I really focused on getting in my water, moving my body. I got in all my exercise this week. Before I share my weigh in though let's talk about this week's Weight Watchers workshop topic. And that is a surprising way on how to make healthy choices easier. Are you having trouble staying active? Are you having trouble with snacking? Are you scrolling on social media when you should be sleeping? All totally normal. Us as human beings love the path of least resistance. We don't wanna do hard things. We wanna do things that are easier and that includes the items I just mentioned. And that's where science fact friction so to speak comes into play. One part of our body says do the path of least resistance and the other part says do what's going to work. So there's a way to kind of have a healthy balance of these two things. So try this, think about things you want to stop doing. Maybe it's snacking on sweets after dinner. Maybe it's scrolling social media before bed, sleeping instead of taking a walk. Number two, how does your space make it easier to keep doing these things that aren't helping out your weight loss journey? Maybe cookies are kept front and center in your pantry or your phone is always next to you in the bedroom or you can snooze your alarm and quickly fall back to sleep. Number three, brainstorm ways to make one of these behaviors harder on you. Make them harder to do than make a plan. I'll move the cookies to the back of a rarely used cabinet and I'll keep a bowl of fresh fruit on the counter for snacking. Again, we do not wanna take the path of least resistance. So if those unhealthy behaviors are made to be hard for us, it's a lot less likely that we'll do them. And if those healthy behaviors are easier, it's likely that we'll do those as well. It's all about changing those unhealthy behaviors into those healthy behaviors and making those healthy behaviors the path of least resistance. Truly the easier it is to do something, the more likely you are to do it. And that's just human nature. It doesn't make you a bad person. We're all humans. So we all want to take again that path of least resistance. But this is also hackable. Again, by making the habits that you want to break harder on you, you're less likely to do those unhealthy habits. Now, this doesn't mean you can't hit up your local drive-thru that you can't have a sweet treat after dinner and that you can't scroll social media before bed. Just like anything else, it's all about balance and moderation. We just wanna kind of interrupt those automatic unhealthy habits, make them a little bit harder and make those healthy habits a little bit easier. This is something each and every one of us struggles with. There's some unhealthy habit that we all struggle with and by making that harder, I promise you it's going to make the healthier ones a lot easier. And with that, you're going to be able to reach your goals and you're going to be able to maintain those goals as well, especially weight loss, your health journey overall, fitness, whatever it is that you need to work on, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to reach your goals. So I really like this topic. It's all about, again, using the path of least resistance for healthy habits instead of unhealthy habits. Let me know down below, what are some of the unhealthy habits you used to have that you now, and what are the healthy habits that you're now focusing on and give us your tips and tricks on how you navigated that and how you made those healthy habits a priority for you. I definitely want to hear from you down in the comments. Now let's jump into my weigh-in for the week. Last week's weigh-in, I maintained my weight loss. This week, my weight was really weird. I actually had this conversation with one of my coaching clients who was struggling with navigating the scale and learning that the scale isn't the most important piece. So we talked a little bit about my personal weight journey this week. I will tell you that for the majority of this week, my weight was up not one, not two, but three pounds. Randomly, a spike in my weight of about three pounds. And that stayed three pounds up on the scale through Tuesday. Finally, Wednesday morning, my weight dropped down a couple of pounds, a couple of pounds, but I was still up a pound on the scale. I've been a little bit more active between the 10K, the 5K, and then my normal exercise. I'm always sore. I really push it at boot camp. I push it in the gym, and I've been pushing it with this new app that I've been using for my gym workout. So my soreness has increased a little bit. I've been really focused on taking my one-up pure rebuild, which is a creatine supplement and my one-up BCAAs. Those have been game-changing for me. Speaking of game-changing, my friend Amy, who I had cosmetic surgery with that was just here visiting, she tried the one-up creatine pre-rebuild when she was here. She texted me the other day and said that it has literally changed her recovery game. She's a fitness instructor. So her and I are both sore constantly. We swear by pure rebuild. It is a game-changer. I'll link it down below for you if you're interested in checking it out. I actually have a 20% off discount for one-up. I use the discount. Amy uses the discount. Amazing product. So I feel like that's helped with my recovery, and I think that's an ending. I think that that is why my weight kind of trended down after it drastically spiked up the beginning of the week. I did a lot of maintaining this week after that. I did a lot of up and down this week after that. But when I stepped on the scale this morning, I'm actually down 0.4. So I lost 0.4 pounds this week, even after the scale spiked up three pounds. I want you to take away from this that that spike up on the scale is not weight gain. It is simply a fluctuation. Now, can that fluctuation stick around? Absolutely. Can it stick around for days? Absolutely. But I promise you, and I swear to you that the scale will eventually catch up and that weight fluctuation will go away. I am constant living proof of that because as I got closer to maintenance and as I'm in maintenance mode, essentially my weight is all over the place and that is absolutely normal. That's why we focus on other things like doing our first 10K, beating our best 5K time, drinking our water, eating our protein. That's why we focus on those things, those NSVs like our clothes fitting better, our measurements going down, noticing changes in our pictures. That's what we want to focus on because the scale doesn't always give us the best indicator of our success and the scale will spike up and will spike down. Weight loss is not like this. It's not going to always trend downward. So you have to anticipate those weight fluctuations. But this was a big eye-opener for me this week and just a reminder that the scale isn't the only indicator of overall success because at the end of the week, I'm down 0.4 pounds. I'm feeling really good. I'm really proud of myself through the stress of this week to actually be able to go down and weight is amazing to me. So I'm super grateful. And again, I'm super grateful for all of you. Again, thank you for your love and support with Lola. It really, really means a lot to me. I will keep you guys updated on her. She is officially going through the five-month chemotherapy process. She actually received her first treatment on Monday and we are going every Tuesday for the next about five months. Her lymph node shrunk pretty dramatically in the first about 24 hours after her chemotherapy. So fingers crossed, that's an indication that it's going to work again for my sweet girl. So again, thank you for everything. I want to hear from you guys on your healthy habits. I want to hear from you how your weight loss was this week. Kind of what you've learned this week from the scale and what healthy habits you're forming. Let me know everything down in the comments. And if you enjoyed another weigh-in, give this video a big thumbs up. Again, subscribe, turn your bell on so you don't miss any future videos. And don't forget to check out the description box for one-up nutrition. The free Trainist app, it will be linked down below for you. Check it out. It's pretty darn incredible, as well as discounts to my other favorite things and come join our Facebook group. We'd love to have you. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in tomorrow's grocery haul. Bye.