Blogiversary Giveaway! (and I’m on Twitter!)

As promised here it is! My blogiversary giveaway. Last year I gave away my favourite baking cookbook – One Smart Cookie. Which if you love baking, but are trying to keep your food healthy or your fat consumption down you much check it out! No recipe has more than 1/4 cup of butter, but the flavours are wonderful! My favourite is the chocolava cookies and I use her sugar cookie recipe as my stand by.  If you’re interested in her book check it out here: Canada: Chapters/Indigo or USA: Amazon.com.

Well this year my celebratory giveaway is another book (because I like my reading!):

Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? by Alex Hutchinson, Ph.D. is a fantastic book! I was reading it on my subway commutes in NYC and it was super engaging. If you’re like to know the science behind exercise then this is the book for you. Written in such a way that it super easy to understand for the normal person I thought it had some great information about the science of working out. In general I dislike “health” magazines as they usually just promote trends without talking about the science behind it – why it works, how to do it properly, how often to do it. In this book no only does he do away with some pretty prevalent myths, but also provides some great examples of exercises and how to do them properly. This is a great, easy, and informative read that I highly recommend to anyone interested in knowing whats going on in your body when you work out.

Also – I’ve decided to try my hand at tweeting and now you can find me on Twitter right here: https://twitter.com/pound_per_pound. Follow me and let me know about your account so I can follow you right back!

RULES:

This giveaway is open to residents of Canada or the US only (I can’t afford overseas shipping! Sorry!) and will be sent to you either through Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.

Open until Friday, August 10th 11:59pm. Saturday morning I’ll announce the winner!

How to enter: Just leave me a comment below with your favourite exercise/workout/or how you get activity into your everyday life.

Second way to enter: Follow me on twitter and leave me a tweet! Leave me a comment here that you’re following me.

How I choose the winner: I’ll use random.org to choose a number corresponding to your comment – which is why you must leave me a second comment here if you enter through twitter also.

*Disclaimer* – All opinions are my own. No one has paid me to say or promote any books or products, I just really like them so I choose to promote them. Giveaways have not been provided to me, I have personally paid for the giveaway

Weigh-in Week 118: Two Year Blogiversary!

Happy Blogiversary to me! Exactly two years ago on July 31st, 2010, I started this blog. You can read my very first post right HERE!  My how far I’ve come. I started my blog when I was struggling and I had lost 6.8lbs in 13 weeks. (Gee, I guess struggling with weight loss is my normal).  My first post talks about my very real fear that I could easily reach 300 or 400 pounds before I knew it. I knew it had been time to take control and so I did.

(I have no source for this as I googled it and it came up in a number of blogs, so I guess the source will be Google.com)

So where am I today? Well I was down 1.8lbs for a new weight of 158.2lbs with a total loss of 93.4lbs. I’m back in the 150s! (third time’s the charm right?) and I’m hoping to stay here. I was not expecting a loss AT ALL. In fact, I was hoping for a stay-the-same. Truly. This week was not great. One day I snacked all day on Honey Nut Cheerios (a friend brought them in and I couldn’t resist!) Another day I splurged on ice cream – something about NYC makes me crave delicious, delicious ice cream – had a scone at a tea shop, more ice cream – this time vegan ice cream with a long lost friend, and then to top it all off, a creamy coconut cupcake from Magnolia Bakery.

Look! I couldn’t even take a picture before I took a bit! Clearly I have a coconut addiction 😉 But I already knew that.  I think what this week tells me is that my guesstimating of points in general is probably right. I did eat all this, but still ate healthfully other times and stayed within my points so all is well (so far, let’s hope it doesn’t show up next week). I don’t plan on doing this every week, but once in a while is okay I think.

Delicious! I’m normally a chocolate kinda girl, but coconut makes it all better. I will almost always choose coconut.

Now, I did say it was my 2nd blogiversary – last year I did a giveaway with my favourite cookie cookbook. Well this year will be no different – check back later this week for my next giveaway announcement to celebrate! 🙂 Yay me! I’m proud of my persistence and endurance. I’m happy to still be here, chugging away at this. I’m hoping this means it’ll all stick.

Here’s to another 2 years!

Weigh-in Week 66 & Giveaway Winner Announced!

Oh sigh. So I was up this weigh-in: up 1.5lbs for a new weight of 172.8lbs and a total loss of 78.8lbs. This always seems to happen when I reach a big weight loss.

I’m not going to kid myself or you – I know EXACTLY why I gained and I completely deserved it. This week’s weight gain has been brought to you by a whole stack of graham crackers eaten late one night, a whole box of crackers devoured, and a weekend of not one proper meal (other than a French toast breakfast) but rather filled with snacking, snacking, and more snacking.

Knowing why I gained doesn’t seem to be helping me I must say. Every week I gained I’ve known exactly why. The why is usually due to a couple mini-binges somewhere along the way. Usually when suddenly I just NEED breads – hence the graham cracker and cracker fiasco of this weekend. At least they were on 2 separate occassions (well technically 3, the box of crackers took two different sittings), although that doesn’t seem to console me right now. I need to find better ways of dealing with the cravings when they overcome me as I clearly cannot yet handle my trigger foods (which happens to be bread and bread products of any sort apparently!)

However, I did reach my exercise goals! I got in 38 activity points. This past week I: ran 5K three times (twice on a treadmill, once outside), did weight training twice, and walked 7K.

But now onto some better news! The winner of my one-year blogiversary giveaway of the One Smart Cookie cookbook!  Thank you everyone!! I think I succeeded a bit in getting the lurkers out – I definitely know my site views spiked over the last few days 🙂

So there were a total of 11 comments and I used a random number generator to get this number:

Which makes Lauriebee our winner with her comment:

CONGRATULATIONS!!!! I know Lauriebee from the WW forums. How exciting! Here’s hoping this book will help you bake cookies once again that are low in points! It has tons of great ideas for potlucks! 🙂

Please get in touch with me at poundperpound at gmail dot com and I’ll get the book sent to you asap!

Hope everyone has a good week coming up 🙂

One Year Blogiversary! A Giveaway!

Woohoo! I have officially been blogging for one full year. My first post was July 31st, 2010 and was called …and the Journey Begins! At that time I’d been on WW since May 4th and had only lost 6.8lbs. That mean’s I’ve lost 73.5lbs with YOU! 

Thank you so much to everyone who reads my blog! I never thought I’d get any regular readers at all and really just started blogging to keep myself accountable, but you are all wonderful and I look forward each post to reading your comments 🙂

And so to thank you all, and also in hopes of bringing the lurkers out (I am guilty of this too on many a blog!) to comment I am going to do my very first GIVEAWAY!!!  I have decided to merge my two main interests: weight loss and baking (as you can tell by my blog rolls) into one and my giveaway will be a brand new copy of my favourite cookbook: One Smart Cookie byJulie Van Rosendaal! (Canadian shout-out in process: she’s a baker from Calgary)

This book is awesome! It has tons of recipies from cookies to brownies to bars to sweet breads to squares to truffles all low-fat but still DELICIOUS!  I use this book all the time and it has one of my favourite quick and easy to make cookies that I love to make for parties or bring to pot-lucks: the CHOCOLAVA cookies. They are like wonderful brownie cookies but only have 1/4 cup of butter in them!  Because I am in a sharing mood here is the recipe. The glorious thing is that they are only 2 pts per cookie (yes, even on points plus!) – isn’t it great that she includes the NI for each cookie as well?! I love it.

I’d like to point out on this scan of the recipe that it includes the requisite chocolate/baking stains, but also the ubiquitous coffee mug stain.

Now, back to the cookbook giveaway. I should point out that I did not get a free copy or anything like that – either from the publisher, author, or Amazon or Chapters Indigo. I am buying this book myself to give to one reader – THAT’S how much I love this book. I’m going to say that the giveaway is only open to citizens (or addresses) in the USA or Canada as I’m going to buy it either through Amazon.com or Chapters.indigo.ca  (click on the links if you’d like more info about the cookbook)

Here’s how you enter: Leave me a comment on this post and tell me what is your favourite cookie (or baked dessert if you’re not a cookie fan)! The giveaway is open from now until Tuesday August 2nd at 6pm Eastern Time and I’ll post the winner that night with my weigh-in results!

Happy Day! Have a great Sunday all, and a great long weekend to everyone in Canada celebrating the August long weekend  🙂