Last week was Week Eight of Best Body Bootcamp and I was all set to do a big recap of my progress. It’s not that I don’t think I made any progress, but I realized that I didn’t really put a lot of effort into my first Fitness Test at the beginning of January. I’m not really sure my results would be very reflective of my progress. So instead I’ll talk about a few things that I’ve noticed over the past few weeks.

Running: My biggest goal right now is to get better at running. When I went running at the beginning of January, after a whole month off from running, my pace was 16:21 and I ran 1.9 miles. Yesterday, I went on my last run (technically I went for a run last Friday but was sidelined by a low blood sugar) and I ran 3.11 miles at 13:34 min/mile pace. Not exactly stellar but I’m definitely getting faster and my endurance is also improving because I’m able to run longer without having to walk. My first 5K is coming up at the end of the month and I’m hoping to do use that as a benchmark for the Best Body Fitness, both before and after to see how I improve.

Strength Training: One thing that I continue to have difficulty in is push-ups, so I really want to focus more on my arms. I know they are the hardest for people but I can’t even do them properly on my knees! It’s very frustrating. However, I did increase the amount of weight that I use when strength training, which was very exciting. I felt buff!

Weight Loss: Over the eight week program, I “only” lost 5 lbs, which is good but not as much as I would have liked. I am disappointed that it wasn’t a bigger difference, but I also think that I could have made my workouts a little intensive by combining the strength training with more cardio. I plan on doing that for the next round and hopefully I will see a difference!

Body Changes: Of course, just because your weight doesn’t change doesn’t mean your body doesn’t. I have lost 3 inches around my hips and 1 inch around my stomach and my thighs, so I know things are firming and tightening up, which is really the name of the game. Summer is right around the corner and I want to make sure that I look good in my summer dresses!

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do over the next few weeks until the next Best Body Bootcamp starts on April 1st. I saw this cool idea on Healthy Tipping Point called the Ironman March. You basically do an Ironman but spread out over the entire month of March. Pretty cool, huh? I haven’t really done much so far, although I did run 3.11 miles yesterday so that’s good! I’ll probably include some strength training in there somewhere, but I think this will be my new challenge for the month!

I’ve also decided that I want to try tracking my calories again. The reason I say this isn’t so much because I’m a die-hard calorie counter but I’ve noticed that my blood sugars do better when I do precise carb and protein counting. Well, not exactly precise, but certainly better than my guesstimations. Sometimes I literally stare at my plate and just go, “I feel like this is 30.” Even though I have no freaking clue. So using MyFitnessPal has been really helpful in figuring out carbs and proteins for my food for my diabetes, and since I already have to go in there to look stuff up, it’s really not much extra effort to actually log the darn food.

And as I said to a friend the other day, effort is one of the most important things when it comes to your health. Results can vary because they are usually dependent on external factors you can’t control. The only thing you can control is the amount of effort you put into something. Hopefully your effort will reflect in your results, and when they don’t, that’s when you need to look outside yourself to see what might be going on. Only then will you really have all the information you need to make the right choices.