 Hi friends, welcome to my channel and welcome. If you're new here, my name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and I'm on the WW or the Weight Watchers blue plan. It's Friday, it's the first Friday of a May. It's the first Friday of me working on the May challenge that I set out for myself and over 50 other participants in my Facebook group are doing the May challenge right along with me, which seriously warms my heart. So if that's you, leave it down in the comments. If you're interested in taking part in the May challenge, it's definitely not too late. Head on over to my Facebook group. All of the information is pinned at the top. Join my Facebook group while you're there. We'd love to have you. So it's been quite a good week for me. It's been very interesting. I can't wait to share with you how this week has went. So if you're excited for another weigh in video, WW workshop topic will set some goals for the next week and I'll fill you in on the challenge. Give this one a big, huge thumbs up and don't forget if you're new or you haven't yet subscribed, I'd love to have you here. Hit the subscribe button and don't forget to ring the bell next to it so you don't miss a single video. Down in the description box, you are going to find nutrition coaching. I do offer personalized to you macros and calories. Highly recommend taking advantage of that whether you're on WW or not. And I do offer one-on-one individual coaching sessions as well, if that's something that you're looking for. Links discounts to all my favorite things and of course my Facebook group is linked down in that description box. We'd love to have you join that community as well. So let's jump into this week's weigh in, WW workshop topic, and of course, setting some goals for the next week. Let's take note of how cute the big dog is here in the background. I love when they're in the background of the video. It's so cute, it just warms my heart. So let's talk about my week. So if you didn't know, I started my own version of 75 Hard. Actually, it's not even anything like 75 Hard. My challenge that I wanted to set for myself to really push myself in the month of May, I posted it in my Facebook group and like I mentioned, over 50 of you are taking part in the challenge right along with me, which makes it so much more exciting for me. I'm going to put here on the screen what I'm doing in May and exactly what challenge I've set for myself. And then I'll fill you guys in on how that's going so far the first week of May. So so far, I'm killing it. I have done so well. I have stayed within my calories, which as you guys know, I track calories first and points second. And so my goal for May is to stay within my calories, which I have done to a T the first part of May. I've gotten in the 30 minutes of exercise. So yay me, that is something that I knew or thought I would struggle with, but so far, so good. It's been hard, you guys, on days that I'm really busy and I have a lot going on. I have had to get my form of exercise in a different way, like for example, Monday, I cleaned my house and that was my 30 minutes of exercise. It ended up being way more than 30 minutes, but I still was able to get in 30 minutes of moving my body every single day. One day I walked laps in my backyard with the dogs because I was so busy. I didn't have time to take an actual walk, but I still walked in my backyard for 30 minutes and got in my 30 minutes of movement. Whatever you have to do to move your body every day, it's so important to do that. Not for weight loss, but just to keep your heart healthy, your body moving, building up and maintaining your endurance and making yourself strong and healthy. I've had no problem drinking my gallon of water. I've been writing a little note to myself every morning. It's been going really well. I'm enjoying it. Now I will say the one part that I've kind of failed on is weighing myself every day. Now part of the challenge was to weigh yourself once a week, but I said I was going to weigh myself every day. You guys, I forget. It's just not that important to me that I've been forgetting. So I'm just going to focus on this weekly weigh-in here for you guys and so that I can film my weigh-in video for you, rather than stressing out about weighing in every single day. But overall, it's been going really well. I've been enjoying it. It's definitely been pushing myself, which is really, really great, which is exactly why I wanted to set these little mini goals for myself. So my week went really, really well. And I'm excited to move into this next week. I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing, working on the steps of my challenge. And I'm also going to focus more this next week on some additional self-care. Even fun things like little face masks or hair masks or painting my toenails or whatever. I just want to focus on doing a little bit more self-care because we can't take care and love other people until we take care and love ourselves. So that's kind of my week in a nutshell. I do want to talk to you guys a little bit about this week's workshop topic because it kind of goes hand in hand with my challenge. And then I'll share, of course, this week's weigh-in with you. So this week's topic is how literally changing your brain helps you reach your goals. So we're going to talk about neuroplasticity and I'll put that here on the screen for you guys. And how that affects our healthy lifestyle and our weight loss is we have to change our brain so that we can reach our goals, whether they're short-term goals or long-term goals. So how we're going to do this is start by answering a few questions. What paths think of these as repetitive actions? Do you automatically take in your day-to-day life things that you do without consciously thinking about them? Are these things that you're doing leading you closer to your goals or further away from your goals? If the answer is further away, what new paths can you form to get you closer to your goals rather than moving in the wrong direction? Jot down these new paths, new ideas, new things that you could do to help you reach your goals. And when you encounter that fork in the road on whether what you're doing is leading you towards your goals or away from your goals, you can reference this list that you've made of all of these new paths you can take that get you closer to your goal. Make sure you're constantly reminding yourself of your intention and the reason why you're doing this or your why as WW likes to call it. Reflect on the paths that you're taking on a regular basis to make sure that those paths are giving you success, that they're leading you in the right direction, not down the wrong road. And keep an eye on where and how you can make tweaks to get you closer to those goals. So let's dive just a little bit deeper. No matter how old you are, you can still make changes to your brain which lead to changes to your goals. You can still develop new habits, build new pathways to make it easier to do those habits. Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. And I guess that's lucky for some of us. So for an example, let's say that you rely on a lot of pre-made meals. You're busy, life's busy, you work, you have a family, you have maybe several jobs and pre-made meals are what you generally gravitate towards because they're easy and they're convenient. But you have some big dreams of really learning to cook or maybe trying all these new recipes that you see on YouTube and Instagram. And grabbing these pre-made meals may not be leading you down the path of learning new cooking skills and trying new recipes. So a new path that you could take is come up with a handful of quick, easy meals that you can make on the go and quickly or meals that you could meal prep one day a week and have totally ready for the whole week so that it is kind of like a pre-made meal but you've made it yourself. Therefore, you're controlling the ingredients, you're learning new cooking skills and you know exactly what's going into those meals. So I really like this topic. I think it's really important to remember how our brain leads us to developing both positive and negative habits. And when we find ourselves veering down that wrong path, that's when we need to course correct and put ourselves down the right path. The more you practice that right path or taking that new approach, the more it'll become second nature to you. That's because both physical and mental strength are built through repetition. Our brains thrive on repetition. The more we do something, the more common and natural it becomes to both our bodies and our brains. Now let's jump in to this week's weigh-in. I am back, of course, to tracking all of my food and staying within my calories. I didn't tell you guys, but I wanna make sure that I'm completely honest and transparent with you. I give myself a calorie range. I eat between 1700 and 1900 calories a day. So in order for me to stay in my calorie range, I just have to fall somewhere between 1700 and 1900. I don't have a set number of calories every day. I prefer to have a range because some days I'm more hungry than others. So with staying on track, with moving my body at least 30 minutes every day, drinking my gallon of water and reminding myself of the good things, I am down this week 1.4 pounds. This is the most that I have lost in several weeks. I really, truly think that staying on track and getting in that little extra bit of mindful movement and I didn't work out every day. I worked out three days, physically worked out three days and just moved my body a little bit more the other four. It led to 1.4 down on the scale. So I'm officially 61.4 pounds down, which is incredibly exciting. Like I mentioned, my goal is to kill the month of May. I wanna see at least five pounds lost this month. So that is my goal, that's what I'm shooting for. And that just helps give me a little bit of extra motivation to stay on the path that I'm on rather than veering towards that wrong path. So now I wanna hear from you guys. Let me know if you're doing the challenge right along with me, how things are going. And if not, let me know what's going on. Let me know if you are feeling like you're making good decisions, if you're seeing the scale move in the right direction and what new habits or new paths are you looking to create. So thank you so much for all of your love and support you guys for hitting 60 pounds down. It means so much to me. All the nice comments on my weigh-in video seriously mean the world to me. I plan on sharing more before and after pictures. I'm just terrible at taking pictures. I've always been that way. I've never been a picture taker of myself. I have to get better on that so I can share my progress with you guys. But again, thank you so much for all the love and support. Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up if you enjoy these Friday weigh-ins. And of course, if you're new or you haven't, click that subscribe button. What are you waiting for? Hit the subscribe button and ring the bell next to it so you never miss a Friday weigh-in or any other video. Don't forget to check out the description box again for nutrition coaching, links, discounts to my favorite things and my Facebook group. If you're interested in the challenge or not, we'd still love to have you join that community. Happy Friday, friends. I hope you have a beautiful day. I can't wait to hear from you in the comments and I'll see you next time. Bye.