My exercise yesterday was shopping. I know. That doesn’t count. Actually, it does. I walked around the store for over 90 minutes. For 90 minutes I was walking, not sitting, While it wasn’t strenuous exercise for me, it would have counted had I been at the part; so, it counts when I was in Target.
Now, my walk in the park with the pups on Monday was considerably more strenuous. We walked 2 miles at 3.7 mph. Now, you know that math is not my best subject; so, how do I know that’s how fast we walked? I have an app on my phone called Cardio Trainer. The free version tracks how far and how fast I go using my phone’s GPS. It gives me updates along the walk or run to let me know how far I’ve gone. Using the weight I’ve input, it also tells me how many calories I burned and it equates those calories to something I can relate to. The walk on Monday burned two pears’ worth of calories!
It allows me to input all my workouts manually to track everything I do. It will also keep track of all my walks over time; so, in a month or so, it will tell me how far I’ve walked in total and how that relates to my region. By the end of summer, I will have walked to Chattanooga and back, two or more miles at a time, without ever leaving home!
Cardio Trainer has an associated food diary app called Noom. I downloaded that free version last night and will let you know how that goes.
As I told you earlier, I used LoseIt to lose weight before and I’ve been using MyFitnessPal this time. The more I use MyFitnessPal, the less impressed I am, actually. The food diary seems really random and disorganized. That’s such a shame! I had such high hopes for it.
I know there are tons of these programs out there. What are you all using and what do you think of it?
When I first started losing weight, I can’t tell you how many people lamented that they, too, would lose weight if only they could exercise. My thought was that unless you are a quadriplegic, you can. Then, I injured my knee.
I couldn’t exercise in the ways I had been and in the ways I wanted; so, I pretty much just stopped. I pouted, threw a little pity party complete with cake and ice cream….and elastic waistbands until I forgot how I started.
I walked the dogs.
So, you can’t run a marathon. Walk. So, you can’t walk far. Walk a little and build up. You can’t walk fast. Walk slowly. Walk the dogs. Park further from the grocery store door. Eventually, take the stairs instead of the elevator. You don’t have to be able to climb Everest today. It will wait while you work up to it!
I have a friend whose knees are in such hideous shape that even thinking about how they grind and pop makes me shiver. She can swim. She can do leg lifts. She can lift weights with her arms. She can still move.
Remember how when we were children we ran everywhere just because we could? We experienced the joy of movement! Find something that lets you feel that joy again. I felt it yesterday just walking from my office to the nearby grocery store. I felt my muscles waking, stretching, and contracting as they corrected my balance and allowed me to move. Our bodies are truly wondrous machines!
Heather blossoms
After work, the pups and I went to the park and had a nice, long walk like we used to. We felt the warm sun and the cool breeze. We smelled the perfume of the flowering trees. They spotted a deer and tried to go befriend it (I’m sure that’s what they had in mind). They loved it. I loved it.
It’s a beautiful time of year to start – to remember the joy of moving and the wonder of Spring. It may be a little cliché to say that we should let the season remind us of our own potential, new beginnings and growth; but, why waste a good cliché? Let’s use it! Let’s start again.
So, I weighed in this morning expecting at least a pound lost and….no. Nada. Nothing. C’mon! As long as I’ve been doing this and as many real causes as my mind can give, this still frustrates me, particularly at 5 AM.
I’ve run into this several times during this last couple of years. Here are some possible culprits:
The fact that I’m a woman in child-bearing years. Girls, you know what I’m talking about. Did you know that we can retain as much as nearly five pounds of water? I feel like a camel.
Too much wheat. My first week at my new job saw me eating about 10 meals of Cheerios and a couple of meals that involved mini bagels. While my calorie counts were okay, too many of those calories were supplied by wheat. I don’t know if all the studies are valid; so, I don’t know that wheat causes weight gain. I just know that, for me, too much wheat makes me feel bloated.
Too much fruit. When I first switched my food choices and when I’ve had to pull myself back onto the wagon, I found that eating a lot of fruit during those first weeks was really helpful with cravings. I had quite a bit of refined sugar in my diet, which just wreaks havoc with my blood sugar. To help me stay with healthful food choices, I replaced the refined sugars with fruit, then decreased the amount of fruit to cut overall sugar consumption. It’s time for me to cut my fruit consumption down to two servings a day. I’ve seen diet plans that recommend that you not eat apples. Apples are actually VERY helpful for me. They are sweet, colorful, crunchy, and full of both fiber and flavor; so, they satisfy my appetite in several ways. You just have to try it for yourself and see how your body does with them.
No enough exercise. I have pretty much been wiped out when I get home at night and have not been getting any movement in. That simply won’t do. For my weight, for my heart, for my muscles, for my bones – I must exercise.
So, what are my solutions and goals for this week?
Nothing much I can do about that whole girl thing but wait it out and drink a lot of water to keep my system flushing.
I have to reduce my wheat intake. This week, I will have no more than two servings of wheat. I will satisfy my grain requirements with oats, brown rice and quinoa.
I will have no more than two fruit servings per day.
I will get in at least four hours of exercise this week that will include at least five days.
If we are connected on MyFitnessPal, you can hold me accountable for my exercise – and I EXPECT YOU TO! If you don’t see me moving during the week, send me a little nudge. If we are not connected on MyFitnessPal, why aren’t we? Connect with me and let me know your goals and how you’re doing. Let’s help each other.
The keys to breaking through this stall are:
modify my behavior. To get different results, I must do different things.
(and this is most important) DO NOT ALLOW OLD, NEGATIVE THINKING PATTERNS TO DEFEAT ME.
I have been my own worst enemy. It is long past time I became my own best friend and defender.
I’ve had a weight problem almost all of my life; however, when I saw photos from a family Memorial Day event in 2011, I was surprised to see how big I had gotten. In my mind, I was around a size 14. In the real world, I was a size 20 and still going up. Surprised as I was, I was not motivated to make any kind of real change.
Oh, sure. I told myself I was dieting and cut out my daily Snickers bar, but that was really it. You see, that was kind of my life-long pattern. The Big Diet Lie, as it were. Don’t look at me like that. You know you’ve done it, too. “Oh, no more lasagne for me. I’m on a diet.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, you scarf an entire box of low-fat cookies. Hey, but they’re low fat. Stop it. You know you don’t even believe that.
I had lost significant amounts of weight using both The Diet Center program and Nutrisystem when I was in my twenties. With the Diet Center program, I cooked my own food. Nutrisystem was just like it is now – super, super easy. I just wasn’t commited enough to myself to keep the weight off with either program.
When I made the decision this time to actually lose weight, I remembered the food list from the Diet Center program. Unfortunately, their store fronts have long gone out of business and the books are no longer in print. So, I went to abebooks.com (my most favoritest book site) to get a copy of the cookbook and of the program guide. The books are written by Sybil Ferguson who devised the program for her own health. I also bought a book called Your Body Knows Best about eating for your blood type, metabolism and heritage. I combined those two programs and came up with a group of foods that work for me.
The short description of the list is this: lots of fresh fruits & vegetables, no canned foods or premade sauces (they hide all kinds of sugar, sodium and preservatives in canned and jarred food – read the labels, they”ll scare you to death), meat-free Mondays (or just some day of the week), fish one day a week, no more than one diet soft drink a day (down from 6 or 7 cans a day!), and absurd amounts of water. A daily multi-vitamin ensured that my vitamins and minerals weren’t all flushed out by the copious amounts of water I drank. I also took flax seed and fish oil supplements to help curb cravings. My body craves red meat; so, I eat it. My dad had a calf slaughtered before it got into the meat processing system. The cuts are leaner from this grass-fed calf (which also hadn’t been treated with all those antibiotics necessary for cattle in stockyards); however, even with fattier cuts, I just counted the calories. A good piece of roast beef from time to time isn’t going to kill me and if it keeps me from craving worse things, then, in the balance, it’s the best move for me.
I ate three meals and three snacks a day, keeping my mealtimes as routine as possible. For me, this regular intake of calories kept my blood sugar steady which kept me alert and hunger pang free. I’ve read that the body often signals the need for fluid by making you feel hungry; so, if I found myself feeling peckish outside of routine meal times, I drank a large glass of water or a cup of hot herbal tea. If the water trick didn’t work, I brushed my teeth. That minty feeling often cut off hunger at the pass.
I do not buy sugar free cookies or candies since they actually contain sugar alcohol which, I have discovered, makes me hungry. For 110 calories, I can have two pieces of sugar free candy and be hungry enough to gnaw off my own fist in 30 minutes, or I can have a large banana and be satisfied for two hours. For the same reason, I rarely ate pasta or white breads. Any bread that I ate came from the store bakery, from the farmers’ market or from my own oven. Since the stuff sold on the shelves takes so long to mold, it scares me. I’d rather buy from a local baker, pay a little more, put some in the freezer to keep it fresh and know that I’m reducing the preservatives in my diet.
I would estimate that the first 40 to 50 pounds were lost basically to changing food choices and habits. It was phenomenal! But, did you notice how an awful lot of those habit descriptions involved the past tense? Tomorrow, I’ll tell you why.
Thoughts about everything and nothing in an effort to be a better person than I was yesterday.
It allows me to input all my workouts manually to track everything I do. It will also keep track of all my walks over time; so, in a month or so, it will tell me how far I’ve walked in total and how that relates to my region. By the end of summer, I will have walked to Chattanooga and back, two or more miles at a time, without ever leaving home!
The Daily Doty 