Category Archives: Health & Fitness

The month of May has always been my time of the year to start new things. I don’t know if it’s because it’s my birth month, the fact that it’s spring and everything is coming to life again, or just some weird fluke.

Four years ago this month, I began taking steps toward becoming healthy so I could lose weight and while I began to thrive on that new journey, I began to suffocate and wilt in my graphic design business. After doing something that I loved for years, I felt nothing but dread and hatred toward doing it, so I closed up my business, shut down my auctions and took down my website. As soon as I did that, I felt instant relief. I focused on my fitness and my part-time job as a cake decorator. I was happy and loving my new journey in health & fitness, as well as learning and experimenting with cake decorating.

Fast forward four years, drop 100 pounds and subtract my cake decorating job and here I am. Only now, I have an itch to design again. I felt it coming on a few months ago when I was asked by a friend to help them with a logo. I felt it here and there during the years I took off, but I would design a tattoo or two, do an invite for a friend, design my own Christmas card or something small, that I could easily walk away from if I didn’t feel like continuing. However now I feel a void in my life and I’m ready to fill it with design again.

This past week I’ve been designing …and it feels good to be doing it …so I decided to dive back in!

Every morning I wake up, get the kids off to school and then focus on my workouts. I made a promise to myself that I won’t blog or design until my planned workout for the day is complete. I even start scheduling my day like I would if I was still working, and it’s helped. (Although today I was really excited about the stuff I was working on and may have fed the family frozen pizza after 8pm because I lost track of time…. ooops!)

Speaking of workouts, I’ve had a really good week. I felt good on my all trail runs, started lifting again and my friend Jac started a May Challenge with me, which I posted on the Facebook Page in case you would like to join in!

Nutrition has been so/so, but I’ve been drinking my protein shakes again. (Being sick really knocked me off my routine, it’s bad) Yesterday I stopped into GNC to pick up more the Designer Whey Protein 2GO but they didn’t have any. I of course had to look around and picked up a new Lean Shake 25 flavor, which is super yummy!

I’m a sucker for orange cream flavors…takes me back to childhood!

The rest of the week was spent focusing on making new designs. I have an external hard-drive with most of my old designs on it, but I felt I needed to get some of the rust off and do things from scratch. Things came back pretty quickly, although there was a lot of cursing at first as I tried to remember the shortcuts to making scrapbook style paper, like I use to. I’m a huge fan of typography, so lots of time was spent on making sure I had plenty of fonts I liked, since this is a new laptop and I’ve never really designed using it before.

So, here’s to another May rebirth of me! If you’d like to see some of the stuff I’ve been working on, you can check it out at Nicole Hynes Designs!

Can you believe it’s May already? How have your workouts been going?