Not that I'm old by any means but when I was younger I never had to worry about my weight. I was always looking good and wore what I wanted to wear while stuffing myself with chips, chocolate bars, and soda like they were going out of style.

I pretty much worked all day and partied all night. I was always on the go and always had real high self esteem.

Then my nights of going out and dancing slowed down to one night a year from seven nights a week. I ended up moving from a very physically demanding job to a less physical - sitting behind a desk - job that I still enjoyed my junk food at.

Time went on and before I knew what was happening I couldn't fit in to my favorite pair of jeans and I could no longer button up my knee length sweater. In fact, I couldn't even get it around my circumference, it was just too small.

So I headed to the gym. The first year I melted off the gained weight quickly and built up some muscle. I looked and felt better than I had before I even gained the weight in the first place. So once I was happy with my body and my gym membership expired I took working out off the to do list and grabbed my bag of chips.

Soon I had gone past the not being able to button up the pants era and entered the - I can't get the pants past my thigh - era. So I started going to a different gym.

I remember the first time I went to that gym and stepped on the scale and honestly thought to myself that the scale must be broken. I worked out harder than I had ever worked out before. I lost the weight and stopped going to the gym again.

Soon I was in the - I'm not even going to begin to try to put those jeans on - era. And back to a different gym I went. But this time I wasn't excited about it because I knew that even though I may lose the weight I will ultimately get bored with the gym, stop going, gain even more weight back and continue this process till the day I die!

So I quit the gym completely and bought a treadmill and some free weights. I had been on the treadmill off and on for a few years when I admitted I had gained another twenty pounds that I needed to get off. Truthfully walking on the treadmill was pretty much the most I pushed myself. My heartbeat never had a chance to get up there because I never pushed it that hard.

So I went out and bought an elliptical. This would for sure get my heart rate going I told myself. But it's quite easy to get lost in music land and just kind of robotically go up and down on an elliptical without much effort.

Well let's just say I eventually was forty pounds heavier than the days of partying and eating whatever I wanted. True, I probably could have added on even more if I had not done my yo-yo gym routines but to be honest it was getting harder if not impossible to get the weight off and I was at a loss of what I was doing wrong. It used to be so simple for me.

After talking about it with my husband I realized that I used to do a lot of weights in my early years. Even at my job I was lifting, pushing, and pulling. In fact, cardio had been boring to me in the gym and I could only make it through the recommended ten minutes of warm-up most of the time. I would then focus my attention on the weights and completely exhaust myself with them. And that's when the light bulb turned on.

I hadn't been doing a weight routine because we have free weights and I didn't know how to utilize them properly. I had seen the commercials for the resistance band, and the exercise ball, and even the use your own body weight for building muscle but I was brain washed into thinking that the gym was the only way I could have a good weight workout. I also thought that cardio was the key factor in losing weight. Somewhere along the line I had learned this about cardio and embedded it into my thought process.

Now I know it's not true. Not only is cardio not the only part to losing weight but building muscle is essential to losing weight and being healthy.

And you don't have to head out to the gym to achieve it. You can get the same muscle building and fat burning workout at home by using the proper techniques and schedule.

Today I actually have a productive workout at home routine and I don't have to head to the gym anymore.