Friday gain

I guess I knew it would happen but I'm still pretty annoyed.  I have worked out every single day since last Friday.  Probably longer, but I know this past week I have worked out every day.  We went to the ballgame on Sat and Sun and that screwed me up.  I did good Saturday, but on Sunday I had too many drinks (no alcohol at all Sat).   It just sucks that I can blow up in one day and it can take me many many days to get it off.  I hate it.  I'm cranky cause I want my regular Friday Imo's salad special (after my run) and I don't feel like I deserve it.   So I can't decide. . . 

Here it is.  A big whopping 1.4 gain.  Damn it. 

My fat % stayed the same.   But the BMI went up, I assume cause my weight went up.  I don't pay attention to the BMI. . . I want the fat % down!  So I guess I'm glad it didn't go up. . . but still. . . I'm just annoyed by this.    

My lunch time runs aren't long, but I got a 3 miler in this week.  I also worked out twice after work (even when I ran at lunch).  I did Chalean Extreme one day.  Last night I tried my new Piyo workout.  It's also by Chalene Johnson.  It's a pilates/yoga combo I suppose.  I did 2 of the workouts actually.  Wow.   Umm. . . screw you downward dog!  Ha ha.  I hate body weight exercises cause I'm too damn heavy.  Really I didn't do too shabby.  Sometimes I just had to watch, cause I didn't know the routine yet.  And it's hard to be in down dog and look *up* at the TV and figure out what the hell to do. But once I figure it out, I'll be golden.  Maybe I should take the time to watch the 40 min instructional video also.  lol.  

5 pounds!

I lost 5 pounds.  I'm so excited about this because I did it in a rather stress free (for me) way.  On Monday June 2nd I was pissed off at the scale.  It read 208.2.   I decided I'd not get on the scale again till Friday.  Then I could get on again Monday (the weekends are hard for me so I like to monitor the damage) and then again on Friday.  So twice a week.   

On Friday June 6th I weighed in at 205.0.  That's 3.2 lbs!  I wasn't to "sure" of that weight but I know I also put on lb or more the weekend before so it might have fallen off fast. 

On Friday June 13th I weighed in at 204.8.  To say that I was bummed is an understatement.  It was my time of the month that week so it's possible I gained and loss 2 lbs that week, but still . . . . 

So I then gave up the twice a week scale thing unfortunately.  However I was only monitoring this past week and didn't put much stock in the number.  I knew it didn't "count" till Friday.   

And now it's Friday. . . 

Ignore the date.  I'm way *way* too lazy to correct the date on my scale.  :)   

So 5 lbs in 3 weeks.  Not too shabby.  Not as fast as I'd hoped, but I'll take it.  It's motivating me and I need that.  I want to get under 200 lbs as the first goal.  Then we'll talk about the next goal.   

What have I been doing differently?  I've been really strict about what I eat at work.  I eat the same breakfast - a shakeology smoothie.  I have the same lunch - chicken on salad with salsa as the dressing.  I have fruit throughout the day.  I have one serving of Planter's nutrition energy mix with my salad.  I've been trying really hard to not snack in the evenings as much.  I allow myself a snack. .  or 2. But not 5 or 6!   I almost always have a Fiber One oats and chocolate granola bar.   Last Friday at work I ran at lunch and then had a salad from Imo's immediately after.  I allowed myself a few pieces of the cheesy bread that come with the lunch special.  I'm doing that again today because it allows me to break up the monotony of eating the same thing every day.  It's still a salad but it's a treat.  It comes with a small soda and I allow myself to have that.  I've been looking forward to it all week.  I'm trying to find that balance between a really healthy lifestyle and allowing myself to enjoy food/life.  Weekends are a bit more tough as we usually eat out once, but I also run farther on the weekends and am generally more active.  So I guess it's working.  

The biggest thing for me is that I have a "plan" so to speak and my stress level over the scale has decreased.  For me this is huge!

It's getting really really hot and humid here.  We have had a heat index of 100 or really close since Tuesday.  It's tough as hell to get in 2 miles at lunch, but for now I'm sticking with it hoping to acclimate.  I'm also hoping the heat breaks as it was supposed to only be Tuesday that was hot. . . it's Friday now and it's still hot. :(   It's definitely affecting my motivation to run during the day.  But for now I'm hanging tough and I'm just going to "do it!"   

Have a great weekend! 

Just Do It

The other day I got a FB message from a friend of mine.  We use to be roommates and so I'd say she knows how lazy I really am :)   She asked me how I run every day.   She can't find the motivation.   We did the half marathon together, but I know I trained more than her.  Of course she was sick.   But I followed my training plan to the letter. Now I'm not training for anything but I'm am trying to workout almost every day.  However, I should note that I don't do long workouts.  I love my lunch time runs, but they are only 2-3 miles.   Now it's getting really hot and humid with heat indexes into the 100's. Not sure how long those runs will last.    My response?   I don't workout every day!  Lol.  No really - it was more of a "I just do it".   I mean that's all it boils down to.  I just freaking do it.  Do I love it?  Nope.  Do I dread it?  Often times.   Especially with this heat.   Do I try to make excuses?   Oh yeah.   If I don't run I do a Chalean Extreme weight workout.   I will have a scale update soon I hope, but the scale is slooooowly but surely moving in the right direction.   My friend is naturally thin.  However, that doesn't mean she's in shape.  But I suspect if I was naturally thin I'd have much (way way way) less motivation to workout as much as I do.   I have that extra motivation of hating the number on the scale. I told her  "I'm fat, you're not.  Therefore I workout".  Ha!   Now that being said, I support getting more fit regardless of your current size.  Skinny/thin does not mean you are fit in any sense of the word.  It does not mean you have cardio fitness or muscle tone.   So I know that is what she wants.  She rides horses, as do I.  And she did a competition recently and noticed her fitness wasn't where she wanted it to me.   Digging deep and finding the motivation is a hard thing to do.  I struggle with it.  I want to be lazy.  I want to stay inside in the AC and lay under a blanket reading my kindle.   But there's also a small dose of fear that encourages my motivation.   Fear that the scale is going to go up quickly.  It did several years ago when my thyroid went crazy.   50 lbs in one year and it didn't matter how much I worked out, how lazy I was, how much I did or did not eat. . . it was steady climb. While I don't have total control of my thyroid and any associated weight gain, I know what 250 looks like on the scale.  I know that I look like a blown up balloon.  I know what size pants that is.  So I don't want to get there again. I'm afraid of that.  No lie.   Then there is also the fear of losing my running condition.  I know that I lose it pretty quickly as I took time off after the half marathon.   I want to do a fall half and while I haven't picked one yet, I'd like to start the training with a solid base of fitness.  So I "just do it".  I change clothes at lunch, and I attempt to run without dying of heat stroke.  Some days (ok, only once recently) I get up early to do Chalean Extreme before work.  Sometimes I do it after I get home, after riding my horse and before dinner. . . . I do it then.  Bottom line: Just Do It!  See what happens!  What have you got to lose?   (besides weight?)

Elevation

I've been running more and trying to increase my distance.  I want to stay fairly low over the summer and maybe pick up training for a fall half marathon.  I just can't decide which half I want to do.  In the meantime over the summer I'm alternating running with Chalean Extreme weight workouts.  So I'm not doing her whole program, just the weight level workouts. 

I've been doing short runs, usually 2 miles, at work over lunch.  It helps break up my day and keeps me more "awake" in the afternoon at work.  The town I work in is much more hilly than the town I live in.  So it's also good hill work for me.  I swear, I feel my calves expanding.  I do *not* need larger calves.  No no no!

Earlier this week a coworker brought doughnuts and I ate one.  So I made myself do an extra mile at lunch.  Up till this point I never took the time to run 3 miles at lunch.  Mostly due to taking too much time on my lunch break. 

As I was catching up with my online Garmin data I thought I'd share with you an elevation comparison.  

Here is the 3 miles from earlier this week at work: 

Here is 3 miles from a run I did in my town a couple weeks ago.  

As you can see my town is quite flat!   When I run a 3 miles out and back from my house for some reason the elevation chart looks hilly.  I'm not sure what's going on, but I don't feel it is a true reflection of what the run feels like, so I'm not sharing it. It feels like a very flat run.   Maybe it's because the back roads are lumpy.  Ha!   So while I'm not doing any major hill work, it's enough to tire out my legs and work on those muscles.   

Scale Control

As you may know, I'm a daily weigh person.  I get on the scale every *single* morning.  I may also get on at night before I shower.  I can usually predict what my weight will be in the morning by looking at my night time weight.   I'm not going to lie that this act of daily weighing causes stress.  I will admit that what number I see in the morning can dictate my stress level regarding food for that day.  This is not healthy.   So why do I get on the scale so often?  I'd say the fear of the unknown.  I'd rather know than not know. I'd rather stop a 5 lb gain when I gain 1 lb than catch it at 5.  And ultimately because I cannot, absolutely cannot, judge my weight by how my clothing fits.   I'm 5'10".  It takes me about 20lbs to drop a jean size.  At least.   Likewise I can easily gain weight and no go up a size.  And judging the level of "tightness" of said jeans doesn't really work for me.   It's really discouraging to have to lose so much to go down a size.  Likewise it takes quite a bit of weight loss before someone will look at me and ponder "are you losing weight?".  When they say that they think I lost maybe 10 lbs when in reality it's usually 25+ by that point.  So. . . . the scale is my tool.  

Not this week!

I got on the scale Monday morning and I weighed in at a whopping 208.2.  The 208.X is the highest I've weighed since 2011 I believe.   It's depressing.  It sucks.  And I realized that no matter what I do I can't seem to get it down.  I have no idea what's going on.  So rather than stress every day I'm trying like hell to eat right this week.  I promised myself I can get on the scale on Friday morning.  That's tomorrow!  TGIF!   And so I might do a M & F scale thing for a few weeks.  I usually mess up on weekends.  Maybe if I don't let myself get back on till Monday morning I will do better?   We will see!  I can't wait till tomorrow.  No lie this has been both stressful and less stressful if you know what I mean.  My eating has been pretty good.  I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day.  I'm trying hard to reduce snacks in the evenings.  My boss bought us single servings (well single is relative) of Ted Drewes ice cream (custard?) on Tuesday.  My old boss use to do this for us quite often. It's been years since we've had this at work. I couldn't say no.  But what I did do is commit the ultimate sin.  I threw away ice cream.  Yes I did!  I ate half of the *little* container and threw away the rest.   I'm pretty proud of that!   I call that compromise.   

It's been a really rough week for me.   A lot of stuff going on at work that I don't agree with.  A friend's one year old son got diagnosed with kidney cancer.  There were issues at my barn resulting in a friend moving her horse suddenly yesterday.  Unfortunately I had a part in that situation as I reported the barn worker handling her a horse in a way that I didn't think was appropriate.   I also over heard my barn owner talking smack about me.  So now I'm in a situation where I feel I might need to move my horse.   So there's a lot of stress.  I'm thankful (I think?) that I didn't have scale stress on top of it.  So here's to tomorrow and a better weigh in!  I need to get back in the 100's to be happy mentally.   I don't know what's going on with my body.  Most people wouldn't think I weigh this much and I actually had a friend guess my size at a size 10 (I'm a 16 again).    So I guess I should be happy I carry my weight well.  But after shopping for shorts on Sunday I'm thoroughly disgusted with myself and my fatness.  

Have a great day!

Cakeway to the West

On Saturday, my husband and I went cake hunting.  That's what I call it!   There are 250 fiberglass cakes all over the St Louis metro area celebrating the 250th birthday of St Louis.   Well I think as of the last update 234 of them have been placed.   They are at places that are landmarks or some significance to St Louis.   A certain number of the locations were voted on by the public.  Of course I had no clue about that vote until well after it was over and cakes were being placed.  All the cakes have different themes, usually relating to the location they are placed.

We took photos at each cake. Here's one that was the Soldier's Memorial in downtown St Louis that was behind a locked gate.  I guess we got there after it closed.

I took Norman, the World Equestrian Games mascot with us for some photos.   Alltech is kind of asking people to take photos of Norman traveling the world.  Here's one of Norman on the St Louis Art Museum cake.

And here's one of me with a cake so you can get a feel for the size of the cake.  This one was in Forest Park and was at the location of Shakespeare in the Park.  Every spring they do a Shakespeare play for a few weeks in Forest Park.   This was probably one of my favorite cakes.

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So this leads me to talk about wearing my fitbit this weekend.  We walked all over Forest Park to get all the cakes in the park.  It was easier to walk than to hope to find parking near each cake.   I was good with walking cause I was too lazy to run before we left to go cake hunting.   Here are the stats from Saturday. 

Over 7 miles!  Woo hoo.  I'd say that was pretty accurate as we did a lot of walking all day.  It was fun to see these stats and I'm having fun with the fitbit.  

However, the anal part of me wonders how the fitbit comes up with distance related to steps.  Based on the goals, 10,000 steps = 5 miles.  Ok.  When I go on a run and I look at my stats it's pretty dang close on mileage, so I'm good with that.  I do *not* expect this thing to be accurate.  I expect it to be relative. 

So that brings me to Sunday.  Yesterday I ran 3 miles, rode Eli and then did various other things.  Here are the stats for Sunday. 

Relatively speaking I walked less steps and more miles.  This was a little more skewed in the middle of the day yesterday.  There has to be some algorithm that takes in frequency of steps or something.  My guess is that riding might throw this off some, but that just a guess.  I'm not being anal enough about it to look at the stats after every single thing I do, or try to figure it out by doing certain things on certain days.  But when I do the math, Sat come out to 2193.8 steps/mile and Sun is 1952.5 steps/mile.  A difference of 241-ish steps per mile.  *shrug*  Big enough to care?  Probably not.  Definitely not for me.  I'm still having fun with the fitbit and I'm using it in a relative way.   I like wearing it and seeing how active or lazy I'm being.  It's fun on days like Saturday when we were walking so much to have an idea of how much we actually did.  For those reasons I'm keeping it. :)   However, the anal aspect of me is still somewhat bugged by the numbers that I see.  But again I think the thing is close enough and in no way to I think it's accurate to the step, to the mile or to the calorie.  I do not take those calories burned into account in my life.  Well hell, let's be honest, I don't count calories well at all or I wouldn't be this fat right now!

Happy Monday everyone!  Hope this is a great week.  I'm looking forward to a three day weekend after this week is over.  We will probably do more cake hunting and we have tickets to the Cardinals game on Memorial Day.  Yay!

Buzz buzz buzz!

I find that I like the buzz (vibrating) from my fitbit when I reach my step goal. It happened yesterday while I was running on the treadmill. 

It's *very* hard for me to get many steps at work.  I try to get up as often as I can, but I work in a very small office.  I'd have to literally walk laps to accumulate steps.  The last time (and only other time so far) I reached my step goal was last Sunday when I ran and rode my horse.  I did the same thing yesterday.  After work I went for a short and totally unproductive ride.  Then I ran 3 miles on the treadmill at the gym.  That's when the buzz happened!  I wanted to do a happy dance, but I wasn't done running yet.  This was my first 3 mile run (treadmill or on land) that I've done without stopping since my half marathon.  I finally feel like I'm getting my running mojo back and it feels good.  Wed night I ran 2 miles and I felt so fabulous.  I wanted to run another mile but I had to get home and changed as we had tickets to the ballgame.  Unfortunately they postponed the game as we were on our way.  Damn them!  I could have ran another mile.  Geesh. 

I'm thinking of doing a 5 and dime challenge in June.  I would run a 10K in the am and a 5K at 5 PM.  Did I post about this already?  I don't remember!  I need another goal so that I keep running.  I have not yet run a race of the 10K distance so this could be fun.  It conflicts with something that I was invited to that day though, so I need to decide what I'm going to do. 

I have decided to keep the fitbit.   I like it enough and while it's not totally accurate I knew that going in.  For example, I think it gave me more distance (that's different than steps) for my run yesterday, but that's ok.   I'm thinking of doing a fitbit challenge.  Where I reach the step goal every day for a certain length of time.  I just don't know - could I do a month?  Whew.  Seeing how little steps I get during a day at work I'm not sure.   I do find the little thing on my wrist to be very motivating though.  I just wonder how long I will be motivated by it?  That's the thing.  Oh - I should say I thought I was having battery issues when it was half uncharged after the first 24 hours of use.  Maybe I didn't charge it enough the first time?  I charged it last Friday night and didn't charge it again till last night.  I don't think I would have had to last night.  When I plugged it in it started the charge with 2 lights (out of 5).  But they say it lasts 5 days and last night was day 6.  I didn't want it to die on me in the middle of the day.  Nor did I want it to die at night cause the sleep stuff is my favorite data to see. :)   But 6 days is really good!  I didn't get any notifications from the app that it needed to be charged.  I read that you will get those when the battery is low.  Of course that's if you have bluetooth on your phone turned on so it can sync. If you don't. . . and say you don't manually sync it for 12 hours - there's no way it can tell you the battery is low.  So while there are these little quirks I do like the little thing!  And boy is the fitbit little.  Kind of impresses me with how small it is. 

Have a great weekend everyone!  Next week I'm going to try to write a post about time anxiety if I can formulate my words in a respectable fashion.