Starting Point

Monday, August 29, 2011

Day 66-Some Thoughts on this whole TTWLC

Mandatory recap: From the last post until now, I went to Yoga (62) and walked a whole bunch on the weekend. I apparently hate exercising on the weekend. I don't know why. I have more free time so one would think that I would take advantage of it..but no...I am super lazy. Food wise, I did really well until yesterday when I went to the Canadian National Exhibition. I ate half of a deep fried mars bar (seriously), 2 delicious (award winning) ribs, and some Tiny Tom's Donuts. It happened...deal with it. So much for my boot-camp/detox business. But supper last night was amazing! Slow cooked whole chicken, carrots, broccoli and sweet potato wedges. Om nom nom. speaking of noms..check out this liscense plate I was driving behind...
Full of Win

So tonight I am getting ready to go to Zumba for the first time in a while! Super excited.

Ok here is what I really want to blog about. Last week someone asked me what I do on my free time. I told them that I go to the gym eat healthy and I then I blog about it. (It made sense in context) And it got brought up that I have lost about 10 pounds in the past 50 days. Ntb. Anyway this chicky asked me "How did you do it??"

Ok once again, not an expert, but this is just my opinion and what worked for me.

My answer...in different words...Cut the crap.

This goes a bunch of ways...a) stop eating crap, and b) stop lying to your self and making excuses...c) stop giving yourself crap.

I will elaborate.
Firstly, I try to eat as naturally as possible. My fridge is full of veggies and fruits and my cupboards are bare. No frozen meals, no frozen pizzas, not very many boxes. This means that I plan my meals meticulously, and I plan my grocery list accordingly. To simplify things, when you do groceries, just don't go in the middle aisles. My typical grocery cart has the following processed items...1 loaf of whole wheat bread, 1 box of crackers...and 1 pkg of mini rice cake chip things. Look at the ingredient list, if it looks like a organic chem class gone wrong...don't eat it!!! Yes those mini thins are low fat and low calorie, but they aren't real food...that is what makes them bad (and delicious). Same goes for packaged salad dressing.  I eat my salads raw or with a little bit of olive oil and vinegar. Some times extra fat and calories in moderation (natural almonds) vs process low fat stuff (100 cal chips) can actually help you loose weight!
I figure by eating this way 90% of the time, I can allow myself half of a deep fried Mars Bar once ever.

Part b) I was (still am sometimes) the queen of excuses...I'm tired, I worked too hard today, I don't want to go to the gym wah wah wah. I will fully admit that it is very hard to drag yourself to the gym (hence my lack of real exercise on the weekends). Somethings that have worked for me is to consider the gym a mandatory thing (like a meeting) that you have to go to NO MATTER WHAT. The other thing is to put it in my schedule. I know that every Monday I do Zumba, Tuesday is Body Pump..etc. The main thing that has worked for me has been a work out buddy. This time around with this challenge it has been my boyfriend Mike.  My BF and I have become each other's motivation to go the gym because we go together. He does his thing while I do a fitness class and we meet after. We get to talk about what we did at the gym, and compare our muscles (haha). But seriously he has lost 10 pounds as well, so we are doing pretty well.

And part c) If you do bad one day and eat something naughty, don't skip the gym. If you gained weight one week instead of losing, don't go eat a bag of chips. If you ate a delicious deep fried mars bar to get the full experience of the CNE, don't eat ice cream later out of depression that you ruined your diet.
It's not about being perfect and "good" all the time...it is about eating healthy, exercising, and still living your life. Don't give yourself crap over one bad week or day, or minute. Just accept that sometimes a bag of chips is ok, and move on. This is a lesson I am still learning. I remind myself that even if I still can't run a 5k, and I haven't lost much weight in the past 2 weeks, it is ok, because any bit of exercise is good, and every healthy food choice can't be a bad thing.

If you want to see success with a healthy life (in my humble, non-expert opinion) is to balance it. Start with simple switches that you can stick with (coke to diet coke to water for example). Once you have the balance, then you can fully enjoy your healthy life without worrying about every minute of it. That is truly when you can have your cake and eat it too (low fat-gluten free-organic-chocolate cake with local beets in it please :P)

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Day 60-Life Happens When you are Busy Makin Plans

As much as I try to be a good gym go-er/ healthy eater, sometimes life happens. Par example, this was my 3rd time to the gym in 2 weeks...ooopsy. I'll splain the situation.

Lets review....

Monday (Day 52), I was still really sore from city chase so I went for a rollerblade instead of Zumba. The BF and I got caught in the rain and ended up rollerblading in the rain/dark. Good times. I probably could of gone to Zumba, but rollerblading was super fun! Tuesday (Day 53) I wasn`t feeling very well, not just kinda blah which can be cured by the gym, but full blown ill. So I came home from work and slept and didn`t go to bodypump. Wednesday (54) I woke up feeling fine and went to Yoga, but the instructor didn`t show up so the body pump instructor from the previous class did abs with us...for 45 minutes. Then a yoga instructor came and we did yoganess for 20 minutes. Good times. Thursday-Sun (55-58) my family was in town, but we probably walked a total of 8 hours throughout the weekend.

On Monday (59) I couldn`t go to the gym because I drove up to Sudbury for work, but on Tuesday (60) even though I was out of town, I was getting all stressy about the lack of exercise in my life, so after the work business I went for a walk/run around a neighbourhood in Sudbury, then went back to the hotel gym and did some more intervals on the treadmill and then did abs. This just proved to me how much I have made the gym and exercise a normal and wanted part of my life.

Tonight I went to Body Pump, and the rest of the week I am back to normal with the gym. Hooray for getting back on track.

Food wise, I ate out a lot in the past 10 days (famjam visiting and trip to Sudbury) but I tried to eat healthy at the restaurants (salad instead of fries etc.) Yesterday I had a gluten free pizza, and it was delicious. I did eat some fries at lunch yesterday, and my stomach was so sore for the rest of the day. Tonight I came home from my trip and had a simple chicken and spinach salad and it was so satisfying. I was craving spinach. It is amazing what happens when your body gets used to not eating junk, then you just don't crave junk food. Even though I did pretty good on my diet considering the situation, I still feel really full so I want to try to eat really healthy and light this week/weekend to give my body a fresh start.

I have nothing major planned for this weekend, no reason ,to cheat or miss the gym, so for the next 7 days I am doing a semi bootcamp/detox just because I can!

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Day 51-Gotta get the METs

It is day 51!! I have lost 10 pounds since I started this challenge (again) which is awesome!!!! I have 10 to go to reach my goal, so I am right on track :).

Disclaimer...I am obviously not a professional, and I find all my info on the interwebs, this is just some interesting stuff I found about diet and exercise recently.


I have started recording how many METs I am burning after reading this interesting article from Chatelaine.com. Basically 1 MET is how many calories you burn at rest for one hour. (Decent Calculator here, just divide your result by 24hrs!) So if you jog at a brisk pace you burn 5-6 METs or 5 times your resting rate. There are a ton of different tables that list the MET level for each activity this one from the YCMA is pretty good!

This website lists some goals to go for each week shown below:

30 or more MET-hours/week of at least moderate intensity activities (3.5 METs per hour or more) - excellent
20 to 29 MET-hours/week - very good
12 to 19 MET-hours/week - satisfactory (but, you should still try for 20 MET-hours/week or more of at least moderate intensity activities.

Normally I get I am around 24-29 MET hours a week of moderate to vigorous activity, so that makes sense that I am seeing some results on the scale!!

On Thursday I went to Bodyflow as per usual. There was a BBQ at work, so I cheated and had a sausage instead of going with the low fat grilled chicken option. Sometimes you got to live a little right :).

Friday I didn't go to the gym to give myself a rest for Saturday, because on Saturday I did CITY CHASE!!! The details of the race are going to be on my other blog shortly, but basically from a fitness perspective, it involved racing around the city for 6 hours doing crazy challenges. So going back to my MET business, on Saturday alone I got 26.6 METs! Because of this I had some pasta on Friday night to Carb up, had a PB+J sandwich on the track, and some delicious Vector "protein bars" (lets be serious, it was an amped up chocolate bar). And I didn't feel too guilty about all that carb love because I knew I was burning it off doing city chase.

However, I had mad salad cravings!! Who knew that by not eating my standard salad at lunch I would be missing my spinach! There is a severe grocery shortage in my house at the moment, so tonight we had pasta again with chicken and tomatoes and onions, but still a lack of the leafy greeness. So I am going to back on track tomorrow, with a big-ol-plate of vegs. Nom nom.

The other thing city chase made me realize is my running needs some serious work for me to run a 5km. I was  totally able to power walk the whole course and felt pretty good, but when we actually had to run, I quickly lost my breath and got really tired. I partially blame it on the humidity, but I really do need to get running to get ready for the 5 k in 50 days!

50 days down, 50 more to go! If I do as well for the next 50 days as I have for the first ones, I will hopefully get to call this totally typical weight loss challenge a success :).

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Day 47-Gym Karma and some Healthy Noms

Here is a little (ok I lied..it is a large) recap of my past week doing my totally typical get in shape bid-ness.

Weekend-
Exercise: Didn't make it to the gym Friday or Sunday as planned...booo. Meaning last week I only went to the gym 2 times, and walked 2 times. Even though I know this is not up to par, instead of dwelling on it, I just got right back into things on Monday.
Diet: Not too bad, the bf made some steak salad (nom), and may have eaten way too much blue cheese with it, but over all still better for me than McDonalds. We went out Friday evening, and I got booster juice.  I ordered a regular forgetting how HUGE they are. One thing I read somewhere is choose the size you want to be..do I want to be large or medium after all this?...No I want to be small!!! (Or tall at Starbucks haha).  Lesson re-learned!

Monday- Exercise- INTENSE ZUMBA!!! I attended my normal Monday zumba class, and really tried to push myself. It was great. I love standing at the front at zumba, because then I don’t get distracted comparing myself to other people. I may look like an idiot, but I really don’t care because I am having a BLAST!! Self consciousness at the gym is rapidly disappearing, especially since I don’t know anyone there!
Food: DELICIOUS SUPER of portabello mushrooms, and homemade pesto with a small slice of deli ham (cooked in a frying pan to make it “facon”), with some havarti cheese all roasted in the oven until cheese melted. We had that with a homemade salsa, toasted small pita, and some snow peas. Yep that is right, I worked, did groceries, and made that meal and went to the gym on Monday, and even watched some tv in there!! (The meal took all of 20 minutes to make, I highly recommend it)

Tuesday: Cheat day! I know it isn’t my typical cheat day, but my Dad was in town and we went out for supper. I still had a super healthy lunch that involved some salad with leftover garlicy homemade pesto.  I had to skip my normal body pump class that I go to on Tuesdays, but....gym karma happened

Today: I went to Body Pump at a different gym today to make up for it, and the Tuesday evening instructor (who is awesome) just happened to be filling in at that gym!!  Whoa!! So now it totally feels like Tuesday for me! I added weight tonight so I am sure I will be sore tomorrow!
Food-The bf made some grilled tilapia with spices, and wild rice and veggies for super. For lunch I had an egg, lettuce, small amount of low fat cheese and more of that homemade pesto with naturally sweetened plain yogurt (Stevia Sweetner) and raspberries. I also had some hummus and about 7 low fat triscut crackers. And yes I was starving by 5:30, but I survived.  

Also, as much as I am not as focused on the weight loss as I was in round one of this whole dealio, I have been checking the scale, and at this point I am exactly on track to get down to my goal weight by October 2nd. Just got to keep movin!! And eating the veggies J. The next 50 days are really going to be about training for the run, as I haven’t really done a lot of running yet.  I am going to try to blog more, because now that I actually am doing stuff (aka exercising and eating healthy) I would love to share more details with you all (recipes, class reviews etc), instead of shoving it all into one GIANT post like this!




Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Day 40- I is scared in a good way

No I am not afraid of the gym, or of vegetables, or anything like that...

I am terrified of getting off track.

For the past 3+ weeks I have been super keen about this whole challenge, and I am thoroughly enjoying it, and seeing the results (I am completely on track for weight lost compared to days of challenge), however, I am so afraid that what happened last time will happen again. I was semi good the first 50 days and then did absolutely nothing the last 50 days.

This fear of losing the rhythm I have got going is motivation in a weird way. Par example, yesterday I was not feeling the gym, at all. I have been dealing with this little allergy thing and just felt tired and a little sick. So I decided around lunch that after work, I was going to skip the gym and come home. I probably then would have had junk food for supper, or snacks because if I am skipping the gym I might as well skip the diet.

"I'm too tired", "People shouldn't go to the gym when they are 'sick'" "you can do it tomorrow" were just some of the arguments I had to skip.

BUT....

I was so afraid that this one active skipping of the gym would put me so off course that I had to go.

And guess what?

I felt 10 times better afterward. I had way more energy, my allergies weren't that bad. And I felt super intense after adding lifting weight at Body Pump!!! Oh yah! Got to love gym endorphins.  I came home and made easy peasy spicy soup for supper, with corn on the cob and chicken sausages. And tonight even though I was tired, and lazy and didn't want to cook super, I made a egg frittata with wild rice that was healthy quick and cheap!

As I approach the 50 day mark I won't be celebrating with a birthday (as I did last time)...but instead, with City Chase a amazing race-esque adventure race within Toronto! I am super excited!