exercise

After a very long hiatus (January, some time I think) I made it back to the gym today.  I tried to make it last week, but had some appointments on my calendar that I forgot about.  I really need to get some sort of planner instead of the scraps of paper that litter my purse. (Blackberry Curve -available in red, I hear you calling me…but you must wait until August 1 so I can get the most of my upgrade option, tho I think if someone in my house who isn’t me has his way, I’ll be getting a PalmPre)

Back to my gym renaissance…after teaching summer school today, I had a killer headache and hadn’t eaten lunch, so I knew I wouldn’t be in any shape to work out.  Instead, I called Jose and asked if he wanted to go to the gym tonight.  After moments of shocked silence and a lot of me saying “hello…are you there??” he said, “SURE!!!”  ok, not with that much enthusiasm, but you get the picture.

I did my usual…stationary bike for 30 minutes. I did a moderate pace, variable setting and I didn’t have to stop once!  woohoo!  It was hot in there and my left earbud kept falling out (damn you small ears!!!) but I manged to stay focused, courtesy of last week’s Star magazine.  Why is it OK to read trash when working out?  Do the benefits of a workout negate the brain-turning-to-mush powers of tabloid publications?

Surprisingly, I felt great after the workout and I’m actually looking forward to my next workout on Wednesday.  Which again will be an evening workout because I have to do some work at school in my library on Weds/Thursday after summer school, but that’s ok.  I won’t be going back in this summer and want to get a few jobs done for the fall.  So Wednesday I will bike again and Thursday I will be swimming.  The pool looked so inviting today after my workout, but I didn’t have time to swim and bike today.

I should change the channel on the TV.  I am watching Unwrapped on the Food Network and seeing pink Hostess snoballs whizzing past. Instead of reaching for the bag of gummy bears my sister gave me, I am going to make a strawberry smoothie with fresh strawberries, yogurt and 2% milk.  I need to start cutting back to lowfat millk, and I can drink 1%, but I get milk from a local dairy and they don’t make 1%.  I really like their milk.  I used to voluntarily drink skim milk, but now the thought of it is not appealing in any way.  I do like ice in my milk, but I drink it quickly so it doesn’t get all watery.

alright, i can tell from my above paragraph that it’s time to stop blogging for the night.  I’m not doing a good job of focusing so I will go make my smoothie and then go tackle my gigantic reading list.  Ahhhh. I love summer vacation!!

San Francisco updates in my next post!

I’m not one for making resolutions.  I’m terrible at being accountable to myself, so if I were to make a resolution it would fly quickly out the window.  I like to think that a “goal” is more attainable than a resolution so that’s the terminology I’m sticking with for the time being.

I have two major goals for 2009.  One of them is to go on another amazing vacation with my husband. If you’re not in the know, we went to Italy this past March…check the archives or the Travel button at the top of this page for the postings (more on that in a coming post).  The other one is the obligatory get healthy/lose weight/be happier.  I lump all of those together because in my mind, they are all linked.  If you actually know me, you’re probably familiar with my 10 year health struggle ending in a dual diagnosis of  Crohn’s Disease and a thyroid condition called Hashimoto’s Disorder, so that’s no surprise . If you’ve been a friend of mine since I was in high school, the weight gain is no surprise either.  It certainly didn’t happen over night and other than blaming bad eating habits and very long in coming diagnoses (over 6 years of doctor bouncing) of several auto-immune diseases, I have no real excuse.

My PLAN (sounds even better than GOAL doesn’t it?) is to use this blog as my accountability tool.  I will post an entry each month updating my overall health status, hopefully including PHOTOS!!  Don’t worry, there will be no pictures of me in biker shorts and tank tops, but I will be as honest as I can handle.

The most recent full picture I can find and yes, a photo with Death should warrant a wake up call

Here’s my motivation…these are some photos from high school and college.  While I’d be thrilled to get back to my high school weight, it’s probably an unrealistic goal. I’m not sure my ancient body is that resilient. I’d be more than happy to get down to my college weight (last photo). For Now. It’s my first BIG milestone, with lots of small ones in between.

I’ve been using a really good resource for while called SparkPeople.  It’s free and they have great tools to help you track food intake and exercise as well as providing support when needed.  I also joined a group with some ladies at school which will encourage and motivate our healthy living. It should help when we are surrounded by delicious looking treats, plus the weekly weigh-ins don’t hurt! I’m not going to do a lot of posting about my food intake or my exercise log here, since I’m tracking that on my sparkpeople page, but feel free to view that page too.  I’m terrible about writing down what I’m eating, not because I’m in denial, but because it’s time I don’t have.  I can’t promise that I’ll be updating that daily, but I’ll do my best to keep the exercise log updated, especially since I’m using it to track my triathlon training.

Good tasting, satisfying food is a priority for me, after all, I am a foodie, so while I’m not looking to cut out all the bad foods from my life, I’m trying to moderate their fit into my new plan as well as incorporate regular exercise and mental health strategies. I did remove 99% of packaged foods from our diet, meaning that if I make something like macaroni and cheese, I’ll make it completely from scratch.  It’s not hard and it doesn’t take that much longer to do, and it’s so much better for you than envelopes of powdery cheese substitute, or whatever they call it.  Including more fresh vegetables is also crucial.  I’m the salad queen, I love them and can make a lot of different variations and most of the time, I also make my own vinaigrette based salad dressings (the jars are full of so much junk!)

Check in often for my progress and while I don’t need heat from the Food Police, encouragement will be welcome.  If you know of any good tasting, healthy recipes (especially snacks and breakfast…both are huge stumbling blocks for me), please share!

To be continued…
Chris

Yes, you read that correctly. I am training for a triathlon.  Me, the person who has never run in her life.  (Ok, there was that one time I was trying to catch a train in Germany with 3 other people and two children, but the details are really fuzzy and I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness so it doesn’t count.)  Notice I didn’t say WHEN I’d be doing the triathlon, but I am going to start training.  I”ve already recruited one victim friend, yay Kim!!! and I’m hoping that I can entice some others…any takers?  If you want to sign on to just do the training, that’s ok too.

There is a sprint distance (an all woman event) in the summer, which might be doable, but realistically, I am looking at next fall or possibly the following summer.  I need to get in serious shape before, and of course for me that means visiting at least 45 doctors for clearance.  I found a good resource online, but I’m still looking for other training plans and information.  Please share if you know of any.

There are many levels of triathlons — in case you don’t know much about them (I didn’t) here’s the dirt:

So the sprint distance will be my first foray into the world of triathlons.  At. Some. Point.  The first thing I need to do is set a training plan (and stick to it as much as possible). I’m working on setting that schedule soon.  What is it they say about habits?  They take 21 days to set?  That seems like a long time to me.  I was kind of hoping that it would just happen over a week, but I don’t think I’m that lucky.

The next thing I need to do is buy a good bike. I have some time to think about this, since I won’t be biking outside in the winter (me + shoes + ice = bad, I can’t imagine me + bike + ice).  The fitness center I go to has a good selection of treadmills, bikes and the devil incarnate aka the elliptical.  (HOW?? WHY??) so I will be able to use the bikes there as well as the pool.  We have a treadmill at home that’s actually being used as something other than a cat bed, so as long as I can keep that up, I’ll be ok.  The problem is that I prefer to exercise in the morning, at least the treadmill part, but it’s been so cold in the morning (and I’ve been up way too late (reading, watching tv, blogging, chatting, working on secret photo projects) that I haven’t been walking in the mornings.

Ok, I’m going to get some spaghetti sauce going in the CrockPot and then we’re heading out with Jason to see the new Bond movie!

Ciao!

Tonight we went to dinner at Morton’s The Steakhouse to celebrate our 8th anniversary (which technically is Tuesday the 28th).  Dinner was, as usual, delicious.  It’s always such a treat to have a nice, leisurely dinner.  At a dining table.  That takes longer than 15 minutes to eat.  Usually we eat downstairs on the couch, quickly so I can get wrapped in my couch cocoon (aka my down comforter) for nightly tv watching.  Normally, we’re big on photographing our food so we can remember it later or share the experience, but I’ve always felt weird about taking photos in nice restaurants.  The fact that Jose works for the Morton’s corporate office makes me think twice too. So I don’t have any photos of the food to share tonight, but you can find pics here.

The General Manager took our photo and framed it for us…another nice touch.

Here’s a picture from our wedding in October 2000

and this one, which was taken in December 1997

Sorry about the dusty photos, but my scanner has some problems.

I also started working on the recipe index, and I’m hoping to get my recipes and how-to photos up shortly.  I am going to start small, so be patient.  The first one I’m posting is for tostones, which are twice-fried plantains.  YUM!  Jose’s done a lot of work on the back end of this page for me, so we have him to thank for it looking great. 

Oh, and since I said I would be talking about exercise in this blog and I haven’t yet…I did walk on the treadmill this afternoon for 30 minutes…I did about 1.5 miles.  I hated every minute of it, but it wasn’t as terrible as I remembered.  My PLAN is to walk every morning at 5am (and still go to the gym 4 evenings a week for more cardio — bike or swimming).  We’ll see, tho I did manage to do it regularly for the 6 weeks before we left for Italy.

lots to do still tonight.

ciao,
Chris