Omg y’all. I have just completed Tone It Up’s Love Your Body challenge and let me tell you, it has opened my eyes to lots of things. First things first, some of you might wonder, what’s Tone It Up? Tone It Up (TIU) is a fitness community for women who want to…improve their bodies. However, not only do you improve your body, but you improve your mindset as well. Tone It Up started from two women who were both new to an area who found each other through fitness. Karena was a fitness model and Katrina was a fitness instructor. They hung out together and decided to record themselves on YouTube working out on the beach and TIU was born! The thing that’s special about Tone It Up was the fact that they’re very body positive. They don’t focus too much on trying to get skinny. Instead, they chose to focus on loving your body as it is now and speaking positively about it. You can show love to your body by showing yourself self-love and feeding it foods that will make you feel nurished with actual whole foods (they call these foods lean, clean, and green), working out, preparing your meals, meditating, and connecting with like minded women all over the world who will cheer for you as you share your high and lows through fitness.
They make fitness available to any woman all over the world through their YouTube page, website, and their new phone app. For the phone app (available on Apple and Android), you can go to classes that you schedule throughout the day and what’s cool about it is that before class starts, they’ll send you a notification saying “hey beautiful your {class} is about to start” and you can chat with women before and after class. They have HIIT training classes, Barre (my fave), Yoga, Boxing, Dance Cardio, etc. You never really get bored with all of the options they have available! In the class itself, the instructors constantly encourage you and its like they can see through the screen (at least for me) because when I stop or get “tired” they say things like keep going babe, you’re a rockstar, its okay if you stop for a moment but get back to trying, and my favorite quote if it doesn’t challenge you it doesn’t change you. Those little bits of encouragement really does help!
Over the years, they have expanded their brand to not only videos, but protein powders, fitness assesories and tools, protein bars (so far my favorite is the salted caramel bar), protein shakes, books, etc (many of which can be found at Target). They really want to make fitness accessible to many women no matter your budget. Their app is free but if you want access to their classes and on demand classes, you can either pay about $87 for a yearly subscription (which is what I do) or you can pay a small monthly fee. Don’t want to pay for the classes? No problem! You can still access the daily moves for free (just so you know, the daily moves are no joke) and you can go to their YouTube channel and website for free content as well. So really there’s no excuse to improving your health. There’s also a nutrition plan that you can purchase from them. Its about $175 for a flat fee and every time there’s a new challenge, you’ll automatically get the accompanying meal plan with it. Is that out of your price range? No worries! They’ve just recently having sells of just the meal plans themselves if you don’t want to pay that fee (for example for the 31 day fall challenge the meal plan was only $31). I personally advent invested in that flat rate but I have purchased a meal plan for one challenge.
Last year, I discovered Tone It Up on a girl’s trip in January. We went into Target (my fave store in the whole world) and I saw this end cap that was pink and blue and oh so pretty and I decided to buy some weights, some booty bands, and a resistance band just because I wanted to start working out again. I looked up their site and was hooked. I loved what they stood for and their message. I downloaded the app, paid the fee and started working out. I found them while they were in week 5 (it lasts for a total of 8 weeks) of the Love Your Body challenge and I went from there. At first, I’d work out for 7 days a week…insane, right? Eventually I adjusted my workout regime but my mindset was wrong in the beginning. My focus was on becoming skinny. I didn’t eat right at all. So with that combo, I didn’t see much results so I knew I had to change.
Fast forward to mid January when the Love Your Body challenge began. I was so excited because this would be my first time doing this challenge for the entire 8 weeks. I knew what to expect with the nutrition portion of it and I was motivated to lose some weight. The problem was, I didn’t have healthy food in my kitchen. I had so much soda and chips that I just didn’t care. Also, I don’t own a scale (I have a very unhealthy relationship with the scale) so I had to rely on pictures that I took of myself. I planned on writing my meals down in a journal to keep track of my progress…that lasted 1 day! I did workout for 5-6 days throughout the week. I was also excited to do the mindful meditations each week because it gave me something to ponder on for the week. One thing did changed a few weeks into the challenge: the way I talked about my body. I don’t know what happened but all of a sudden, I started being more kind with the things I were saying about myself and the progress I was making.
By week 4, I had noticed changes in my clothes and in my body. I was so excited when I looked at my photos of my progress! I made some slight changes in my diet. I started to drink more water and I ate 2 soft boiled eggs almost every morning. It also doesn’t help that I wasn’t eating much (your girl has a pretty small appetite) but I feel that that factor played a part in my weight loss as well. By that time, my goal wasn’t to get skinny anymore; it was to get toned. I know I’m not overweight (my BMI is quite normal) I just wanted to look less pudgy or soft. Anywho, towards the end of the challenge, I laxed with my diet again. I’m not beating myself up for it but it did make me look very closely at my diet. I have the cookbook True Roots by Kristin Cavallari and I picked out a few recipes that I don’t mind making thats delicious and healthy (her avocado chicken salad is to die for) meals. Now that the challenge is over, I’m going to continue trying different things that I think taste really good and thats good for me. For example, making shakes is a challenge to me but I had to find what ingredients work for me as far as taste goes (if its not a little bit tasty, I’m not going to eat it).
I know this was a lengthy post but I had to tell you all about it! I love Tone It Up and the community and I love what a change it made in my life!
Nessa D 