Category Archives: Health and Fitness

Fitness Progress

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On March First I started a Tumblr to keep track of my progress. I mostly just update with my starting weight of the day and how I’m feeling. I’ve been using an app for food tracking, but it’s waned in it’s helpfulness, so I’ll probably go back to just remembering what I eat again in the future. A few things have happened since January.

Most importantly, I found out that my weight trigger is almost completely hormonal. By getting my hormones under control through herbal supplements, my weight has varied and actually gone down. When I started keeping track I weighed 122. Today, I started out at 117.6 which isn’t half bad. Obviously, it fluctuates a lot, so I’m not totally ready to call it “lost” yet, but it’s nice to see the scale moving down instead of just up. Ironically, the scale numbers don’t actually reflect how I feel. So I’m still working on that. My legs however, are really starting to tone up and look really nice, and so is my stomach when I’m not focusing on that one little ledgey thing near my abdomen (which might just be where my stomach lives). I haven’t measured myself but I should start doing that, because that’s what actually counts.

Secondly, I’ve been staying fairly consistent with exercising. I don’t push myself too far because my body will regret it and I don’t have a trainer or anyone besides my muscles and bones to tell me what’s safe and what’s not. I still walk at least once a day if it’s not pouring ice cold rain, and I do general yoga stretches and core (I think?) exercises in the morning or at night as needed. My muscles have been finicky lately (and today my tailbone decided to hate me) so I pay attention to those and if I think I’m going to bother them more, I don’t do the stretches. It’s better to avoid injury, I think…

That said, my body is starting to have a little bit more definition than it had before which is nice. Weird, but nice.

We’ve been cooking. Less this month than last, but cooking and controlling your ingredients does seem to help – at least as a placebo if nothing overtly noticeable. This week we made Ribs with Macaroni& Cheese (who knew they went so well together?), Chick-Fil-A-eqsue sandwiches (because they don’t exist here, and I miss them :P ), and we’re going to be making chili, chicken pasta primavera, curry chicken shepard’s pie, and if I’m lucky, I’ll make a scrambled egg & left over veggie thingy. ;)

So that’s where I am now. Still flying by the seat of my pants – the biggest thing, I think, is just figuring out what your trigger is and focusing on that, and then adding things (cutting soda, cooking more, exercising regularly).

Nom-age

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We’ve been cooking most of our meals over the last week. That’s not saying much, I guess, but I feel like we’ve been cooking better meals and that’s what counts (even though we ended up having cheap fast food more times than we would have liked). It should because I spent a heck of a lot of time working on it last week too. So here’s basically what we made:

Lemon Rosemary Salmon with Carrots that we baked with it (lemony-rosemary carrots are *so* good)

Butter Bean Soup <mine is very similar minus the dill, bayleaf, and olive oil. I use Marjoram and 4 cups of water with some dry chicken broth in addition to the crushed tomatoes – my recipe is actually from my Mother-in-law. I also threw this in the crockpot and let it cook all day so I didn’t have to think about it.

Three Bean Pasta E Fagoli from Rachel Ray’s Look + Cook cookbook. We froze what was left of both soups after we had them for lunch the next day. I still have some of this in the freezer. I had to substitute the noodles though and got just small shells, and we didn’t get the fancy cheese because we couldn’t find it. :P

Corn, Rice, and Bean Burritos from one of our Taste of Home magazines. They were almost as good as this one local hole-in-the-wall burrito place and would have been really good with some kind of sweet potato salsa thing. But I don’t know how to make that, I just like how Bruce’s Burritos does it. I think we had salad with cucumbers with this one. We’ve beent trying to use up our lettuce, so we’ve had a few green salads interspersed all week.

Alex made Spaghetti with an amazing salad (and bread! but he didn’t make the bread) for dinner on Monday. Alex had taco’s and I had breakfast for dinner on Sunday (our cooking-ness takes a break on the weekends).

I’m going to attempt to make a kind of “fauxtisserie” chicken breast with…something for dinner for Valentines.

And then I get to start this all over again. Joy (not).

I think I’m going to go through the Slow Cooker Revolution cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen for ideas this week.

Because I love Pinterest

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I finished going over the last two fitness books from the library and came to the conclusion that I actually like using pinterest for finding exercises. Some of the exercises in The Perfect Body Diet I actually have pinned on my fitness tips board.

The Mayo Clinic book was very nice though, and I’m glad I skimmed it. I like their approach and if I hadn’t figured out more of what I was doing last week I think I would have gotten more from it. They were very gentle which I liked and took a lot of care in talking about things like self-image in and how your self-esteem/mood/body image relates to getting healthy. They suggest things besides just exercising – like writing notes to yourself and confidence boosting activities, which I do occasionally (write notes to myself) when I’m feeling particularly happy with humanity for those moments that I know I’m going to need it (like today).

Pinterest Motivation

from pinterest

me + food = meh

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I realized earlier today, that I think the reason I enjoy food significantly less than everyone else is because I have no real emotional connection to it. I eat food because I have to as my body dislikes starvation. While I appreciate good food, and I have a handful of foods that I will be very happy if you serve me (dark chocolate, pizza, and mac & cheese) I don’t enjoy it like everyone else I know seems to. I wonder if it’s because food and I are less emotionally connected and if that’s part of the reason I only eat when I’m hungry and (generally) don’t eat more than I need to. I don’t eat for non-hunger reasons (like boredom or sadness or happiness) with the exception of being held captive by hormones that send me into a depressed and munchie ravage.

So today, I did something that I really don’t enjoy.

recipe quest

Finding recipes. I dread it and try to avoid it as much as possible usually, but something else hit me today.

I’m doing this because I think I’m worth it, and no one else can do this for me.

I want to eat healthier and cook healthier not because I’m a good wife, or I enjoy the process of making a good meal for my husband, because honestly, I don’t. I hate loathe the process and I have no satisfaction in cooking at all (thankfully my good-wifey-ness isn’t subject to my kitchen performances); but I finally think that I’m worth the effort, as much as I might hate the process.

So jumping into the annoying finding-recipes-and-making-lists quest I was able to write down some interesting bits of information I found from the encyclopedia, and hit with a little bit of genius, I came up with something to potentially solve the ever frustrating problem of not knowing what to do with leftover produce (you know, before it turns into goo).

Produce & Uses Chart

I’m coming to the scary realization that taking this healthy eating thing on for myself means I need to actually put effort into finding food and using it and maybe even doing more cooking (sad). So if I can streamline some of that process to limit the amount of “I don’t know what to do with it” coma’s that I inevitably fall into, that might help me feel better about getting foods that expire in a week.

In the meantime, I’ll keep reminding myself that me and my health are worth the uh, torture of potential meal planning…and I’ll keep switching between Spongebob and MSNBC while I’m at it, because that seems to help.

Workouts on the Second Floor

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I’ve said this before – I live in a second floor apartment and someone lives under me. We don’t have carpet, so there’s nothing to soak up the sound. We try to be as quiet and considerate as possible which makes exercises like jumping or jogging in place kind of hard to do. I even tip toed through some of the kinect fitness stuff because I didn’t want to land too hard.

Amazingly, when looking for exercises it’s hard to find ones that are really good for people who have to equipment (not even a yoga mat) and live above someone in an apartment complex. The easy go-to’s are kind of off limits to overly considerate apartment dwellers.

But I found one website on pinterest, that lets you select a region you’d like to work out and lists a variety of exercises to choose from.

It’s Divine.ca and at night, before I go to bed I’ve been doing the Inner Thigh Sculptor and the Leg Raise. They all take place on the floor and use your bodyweight, so it works well and I can feel my muscles working. The other exercise I’ve been experimenting with I also found on pinterest from Tracy Anderson called the Thigh Trimmer.

I usually just sit on floor and watch whatever’s on while I do them. The hardest part is that my cat thinks it’s time to rub against me while I’m stretching. I love doing these at night because my muscles feel much more relaxed and comfortable before bed.

Later today, or this week I’ll go through the exercises from the library book and see about incorporating some of them too.