lright folks, let's talk new year's resolutions! I know this is a time when gym memberships skyrocket, diet plans abound, and everyone is feeling super confident about their fitness goals for the new year. This week I'm focusing on my fitness and health plan for the next year, my goals, and my strategies for making my lifestyle as healthy as possible!

Over the past couple years I've really enjoyed pursuing my own fitness and feeling healthy and strong more so than I ever have before. I did probably three-ish rounds of Insanity, off and on, for about a year and a half to two years and really enjoyed the results and routine of doing the Insanity workout. But I'm ready for something new. I love intense workouts, and I was looking for something that added in a bit of weight on top of cardio. I do love how Insanity doesn't require any equipment, and that made it really easy to even do on the road (I did it in my grandma's living room and multiple hotel rooms), but I wanted to add more tone and muscle than I was getting by just using my own body weight. I took to instagram and did a google search of inspiring fitness IG accounts and found Kayla Itsines' account and started following. The snippits she posted of her workouts looked intense, and she used some weights in her workouts as well, both of which I was looking for. I also really enjoyed seeing the transformations of real girls who had done her program, which really inspired me. A lot of workout programs feature extreme transformations and vast weight loss, but that's not my story. I'm a small person just looking to tone up, get strong, and feel healthy, and that's what most of her transformations show. I was sold.

I bought and downloaded her Bikini Body Guide and I'm super excited to start it in January. She has both a workout guide that takes you through 12 weeks of workouts (and if you finish and want to step it up even more, she has BBG 2.0 which goes from week 13-24), and if you're a workout newbie and aren't sure you can cut it at the beginning, she also includes 4 weeks of easier workouts to start you off and get you ready for week 1. These photos are taken back in late November right after finishing month 2 of Insanity, before we went to Hawai'i. I'll be taking new "before" pictures when I start Kayla's guide in January since by then it'll be nearly two months of laying around, eating holiday treats, and not doing any workouts whatsoever. I feel fine in terms of how my body looks, but I want to feel stronger. We haven't climbed at all in the last 5 months (okay, well, we just climbed one route in Joshua Tree last week, but that's been the first time in 5 months), which is sad, but our lives changed a bit and something had to give and it turned out that rock climbing got the short end of the stick. I really enjoyed how strong I felt because of rock climbing and maybe we'll get back to it, but for now I just want to feel strong and I'm looking forward to Kayla's guide pushing me physically.

She recommends getting both the workout guide and her nutrition plan as well, but I opted for just the workout guide as I'm planning on doing the Whole30 program to get back on track with my nutrition after the indulgences of the holidays. She just revamped her nutrition guide, though, and now offers vegetarian and vegan options, which I think is pretty awesome! I'm neither vegan or vegetarian, but I know that a lot of fitness nutrition guides tend to overlook those areas.

I'll be talking more about my plans for Whole30 and kickstarting my health when it comes to eating tomorrow, but I'm planning on starting both Whole30 and my BBG workouts when I'm finally done traveling for the holidays, which will be on January 12th. I'd love it if you guys wanted to get on board with me and support one another. I'm super goal motivated, and one thing I've wanted to do in order to have a tangible goal is enter a body building competition, but unfortunately the one that I was looking into is on the same day as our next Adventures in Oz burlesque show this April, so I might have to put off that goal for a bit. I'm so motivated by competition, and it's such a physical goal (though certainly daunting and a whole new world!) so I'd love to at least try it once! Have any of you guys done body building competitions before? For now I'm going to start with Kayla's guide and I also got a gym membership through Groupon, but maybe later in 2015 I'll be able to see if it's in the cards!

images via kaylaitsines.com and kayla's instagram
leggings in top photo via bombsheller