Damage Control

Remember Jeff Foxworthy and his jokes that start with “You might be a redneck if….”?  Well I have a new one.  “You might have the metabolism of a dead, decomposing slug if……”

• Eating potatoes in any form (even roasted and not fried or slathered in butter) makes you magically gain five pounds.
• Even thinking about eating a potato makes your waistline expand, just in principle.
• One week of indiscriminate and ill-advised potato eating can undo half of the miserly weight loss garnered during nine weeks of deprivation and exercise.
• The above phrases apply to all forms of non-sprouted wheat breads as well…….
• Daily exercise as recommended by your ever so smug doctor, does not, in fact, cause you to lose weight.
• Daily exercise makes you feel better about everything but your weight.
• Eating less than 1200 calories a day does not result in weight loss.
• Conversely, eating 1200 calories a day or more, also, sadly enough, does not result in weight loss.
• Avoiding sugar like it is a flesh easting disease does not result in weight loss.
• Cutting out red meat does not result in weight loss, but instead makes one into a cranky, whiny troll who still can’t lose weight.

Yes, dear friends, I fell off the diet wagon and I fell off hard!  Although I got out and walked every day (except for the day we were under a tornado warning – I felt it was a wise decision),  I did partake of some particularly delicious homemade treats.  Michelle’s wonderful pasta salad and macaroni salad.  Yikes!  Carbs!  Laura’s beloved Morning Glory muffins.  Gasp!  More carbs! Wendy’s yummy roasted potatoes paired with Jim’s exquisitely cooked steak.  And yes, an Olive Burger, with French fries.  And we won’t even speak of the breakfast potatoes that I indulged in a couple of days in a row.  Carbs and more carbs!  I succumbed to the dreaded plague of vacation eating and I have paid the price.  I gained a whopping five pounds during my glorious, nine day extravaganza of not logging every calorie I ate. 

Since returning home, I have managed to lose three of those nasty five pounds by totally cutting out my beloved carbs and continuing my daily exercise ritual of either walking or pounding away on the elliptical trainer while watching reruns of Grey's Anatomy (don't judge!). .  But like an addict, I know that I will be sorely tempted again when I arrive in Missouri, land of the best barbeque on earth.  However, I can eat barbeque without too many carbs, except of course, the beans that are mandatory with any barbeque. Although the steak fries at Gates may be more temptation can I can handle without an intervention.

Breaking Through The Dreaded Plateau

I know I haven’t blogged in awhile, but rest assured, I have been faithfully following my diet and exercise regime.  Sadly, I had nothing earth shattering to report.  After seven weeks of regular workouts and miserly calorie counting I had lost a solid seven pounds and then got stuck in the dreaded wasteland of diet plateau.  For two whole weeks, my scales did not budge by so much as an ounce!  Well, except for the one pound I gained temporarily after a day of ill-advised carb consumption.  I had even declared a moratorium on red meat, prompted bythe agonizing guilt that I felt from consuming an enormous hamburger at Red Robin over two weeks ago.  I succumbed to the questionable wisdom of most diet promoters (with the obvious exception of the Atkins Diet) and followed their advice to reduce my intake of red meat.   Some diet promoters even say to cut it out completely, and oh what a difference you will see!   Well, my answer to that is horse pucky!!!  After over two weeks of abstinence and attempting to quell my red meat cravings with soy substitutes, I had not shed any weight!  None. Nada.

And while we are on the subject of soy substitutes, let me just say that it is better to just give up red-meat-esque foods or allow yourself the occasional treat of real moo cow, because soy substitutes just don’t cut it!  That’s not to say that I don’t like the Morningstar Spicy Black Bean Burgers.  Those, I like because they don’t even remotely pretend to be a hamburger.  And the Morningstar maple flavored breakfast sausages aren’t too bad, I suspect because the maple flavoring helps to disguise the faux sausage flavor.  But the Grillers?  Puh-leeeeze!!!   This is the most miserable substitute for cow meat ever, with the possible exception of Boca Crumbles.  I tried the Boca Crumbles in spaghetti sauce, foolishly thinking that the spices and tomatoes would disguise the tiny, flavorless pieces of cardboard.  I choked down one serving and had to throw out the rest.   So, I am going to allow myself the occasional splurge of real, mooing cow meat.  In fact I have a date with a Draft House Olive Burger next week and plans for a steak cookout with friends and I am going to enjoy it!  Every juicy, sinful bite!  All the while, working hard to stay within my daily calorie limits, or as close as possible anyway.

But I digress.  Yesterday I was bemoaning my weight loss plateau in my mind as I wiled away my lunch break on my elliptical trainer.  I was angry that all of my faithful exercising and diet deprivation was getting me nowhere and trying to talk myself out of giving up outright.  Although I was sweating and my heart rate was in the appropriate cardio and fat-burning zone, I realized that I wasn’t working all that hard.  My body has gotten accustomed to this workout, like a favorite worn out tee shirt that you like to wear to bed every night.  I realized that I needed to shake things up and work harder.  And what do you know, staring me right there in the face was the up arrow button for increasing my resistance on the elliptical trainer.  Quelle surprise!  There was my answer!  It had been mutely staring me in the face for weeks now and I had ignored it, probably on purpose, for fear of inducing a stroke or at the very least wobbly legs.  But here I was, seven weeks into my workouts and my legs are strong, people!  Strong, I tell you, and pretty muscular to boot.  What the heck was I afraid of?  So, I tentatively increased my resistance to a two.  OK, not bad.  After about five minutes, when I realized that I was not going to topple over dead, I increased it to three and then eventually four.  Ah, now there was that burn in my thighs that I had been missing!  So, I labored on and increased my workout to a full 60 minutes since I was having a slow day at work anyway.  And this morning I was rewarded with a two pound weight loss.  I hope it’s permanent, but just in case, I am going to be jabbing that button up to the highest setting I can stand from now on and going for a full 60 minutes whenever possible.  The plateau has been busted and I remain hopeful that my endeavors will continue to be rewarded.  Of course, that Olive Burger is a reward in and of itself and I am going to work extra hard this week to earn it!

Hot Sand

I had big plans for a beach walk today, I really did.  I had some errands to run this morning and a sick friend to visit in the hospital, but I really had planned on a beach walk – at least three miles.  So what happened?  It got hot, that’s what happened!  I didn’t get to the beach until almost 2:00 PM.  As I was  trudging across the sand, loaded down like an old, decrepit, lumpy pack mule, I found myself  puzzled to discover that the usual refreshing sea breeze was noticeably absent and the sun left like it was about 200 feet from the surface of the earth.  As soon as I set up my chair and kicked off my flip flops, I found myself doing the hot sand dance. You know this dance - it’s kind of a cross between the Funky Chicken and the quickstep.  And if any of you youngsters ask “What on earth is the the Funky Chicken?” I will personally come to your house and do the Funky Chicken on your head!  Google it.  Nuff said.  Anyway, I knew right away that a three mile walk was going to be particularly miserable today, so I resigned myself (with a certain amount of glee) to simply bobbing in the refreshing Gulf waters to stay cool and drinking about a gallon of iced tea when I was out of the water for short periods of time.  

I knew that if I was to meet my fitness goal, this left me only one option - my trusty elliptical trainer.  I came home, hot and salt encrusted and without benefit of a shower, or any other refreshment, I did my due diligence of 45 minutes on my squeaky elliptical trainer, while watching a DVD to save me from complete and utter boredom.  But seriously- I have to get some WD40 on that thing – STAT!  Afterwards, my shower was nothing short of heaven on earth and I felt no guilt whatsoever when I ate a couple of tacos for dinner.  None. Nada.

My goal tomorrow is to get to the beach before the temperature reaches blast furnace conditions and get in a beach walk.   But if my normally reliable sea breeze is missing, I will consign myself to the Gulf waters without a morsel of guilt or regret, maybe even burning a few measly calories by snorkeling.  But when I come home, my elliptical trainer will be waiting for me, like a dog waiting patiently for its master to come home and take it for a walk.  And I will perform my cardio ritual without complaint, because guess what – I lost a pound and that, my friends, is motivation enough for me.

Small Victories

Ah gentle readers, you may have wondered if I had given up on my fitness quest.  Fear not, good friends, I am still fighting the good fight, I just haven’t had the energy to blog, so I must regain some discipline.

When last we spoke, I was vacationing in North Carolina with my daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law.  I had hoped to get  a couple of good walks in, but the combination of my daughter’s first trimester fatigue and the miserable North Carolina heat and humidity put the kibosh on my grand plans.  Still, watching my three year old granddaughter run, jump, bounce, climb, slide and then run jump and bounce some more during a visit to Monkey Joe’s made me tired just watching her, so I figured that counts, right?  Well maybe not, but it sure was fun!  To have that kind of incandescent energy would be mind blowing at my age.  We did some walking at the aquarium and played in the sand and surf at Myrtle Beach on another day.  I did not count calories or try very hard to eat the perfect, healthy diet that I have been striving for.  I did not really exercise.  Instead I enjoyed the stress free pleasure of being with my family, of letting my vivacious granddaughter entertain me for hours on end and shopping with my daughter, watching Tangled and Toy Story 3 (while trying not to sob uncontrollably at the end) and just generally being lazy.  And I did not gain once single, solitary, jiggly ounce.

 

This, my friends, is a small victory.  In the past, a week of vacation eating would add five to seven pounds to my fishy white underbelly and I would have to starve myself miserably for weeks to lose that vacation weight, or worse yet, it would stay with me forever as a constant reminder of what a fun vacation I had.  Not exactly the type of souvenir that I like to bring home. I would much prefer a cheesy snow globe or a refrigerator magnet than a permanently attached addition to my wobbly bits.   So, it seems that I may have actually put on some muscle, boys and girls - the kind of muscle that helps to boost the metabolism ever so slightly and helped me maintain my weight, in spite of my lack of exercise and less than stellar eating habits for six days.

I have only been home for five days now and have gotten right back into my diet and exercise regime. The scales have yet to move in the downward fashion that I dream about, so they are still the enemy, mostly.   But - I actually maintained my weight on vacation without gaining and I was able to get right back in the saddle and start exercising after my short respite.  I walked three miles on Monday, did 45 minutes on the elliptical on Tuesday and again today.  Wednesday was housecleaning day and I still maintain that anything that makes me sweat and makes my back ache constitutes exercise, so I’m counting it.  It’s going to be a glorious weekend for long beach walks, so that’s the plan.  Even if my scales refuse to budge, I can see real, actual muscle definition in my thighs, more than I have seen in a while, so I know that I am doing something right.  Small victories are better than no victories….

On vacations, grandchildren and other calorie burning activities......

This week it might be tough to get in my regular five times a week workouts.  I managed a long beach walk on Saturday and a good session on the ellpitcal trainer on Monday, but Tuesday I worked a seven hour day and then traveled to North Carolina to visit my daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law. 

Yesterday was a day spent tethered to my laptop, as I had to work. The rest of the week is mine - I am officially on vacation!  And although I don't want to use that as an excuse not to work out, I know that I may just have to get my exercise in other forms.  I may be taking my granddaighter for walks in the park, for example.  Those will not be my normal, calorie-burning, fast-paced walks, but they will be walks.  And they will be wonderful because they are spent with my precious, intelligent and always amusing granddaughter.  I will still count them as exercise, even if they aren't the biggest fat burning exercises, but because they are emotional exercise, which is equally important in life. 

Reconnecting with a grandchild that I haven't seen in six long months has given me the emotional equivalent of the biggest endorphin rush known to man.  Hugging my beautiful daughter and having long talks and slow walks will be equally as beneficial to my health as running a marathon.  Wait - scratch that.  Running a marathon would probably kill me.  So maybe the experience would more be akin to one of my epic beach walks.  But it will do my heart as much good as a cardio workout.  Because I have missed my family terribly and I already feel lighter.  Lighter of heart, lighter of spirit and maybe a little lighter in weight.  Because my daughter's scales weigh lighter than my new scales.  I knew there was a reason I like to come here......

Progress, or lack thereof....

Well friends, I have been at this new exercise and fitness quest for four weeks now.  Every week, I have gotten in a minimum of 45 minutes of good cardio-type exercise, five to six times a week.  Sometimes, especially on the weekends, my walks can go on for an hour and half to two hours.  I have been alternating between the elliptical trainer, walking and swimming, but the bulk of my workouts have been spent on the elliptical trainer and walking.  This week was no exception.  I had a beach walk on Saturday.  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I spent a minimum of 50 minutes on the elliptical trainer each day and Friday I tool a three mile beach walk over the course of 90 minutes and yesterday I took a four mile beach walk in just under two hours.  I have counted calories religiously every day.  So why won’t the freaking scales budge?????  Well, actually, they do budge – up and down, the same 2-3 pounds every couple of days, but no lower than the initial 5 pounds that I lost in the first 10 days.  What gives here????    Just two short years ago I undertook a mission to lose weight and I walked five days a week and watched my calories, and presto!  I lost weight!  Now, two years later, the same diet and exercise regime isn’t cutting it.  And the funny thing is, the day after I took my one day break from exercise and ate a little bit more than my daily allotted calories, I showed a loss on the scale.  I just don’t get it, folks!!  Where is the justice in that?

So, it was time for me to study up on this a bit and the results were surprising. I’ve done my research and it looks like I am not eating enough, thereby slowing my basal metabolic rate even further than it’s already abysmally slow rate.  When you take in too few calories, your body goes into starvation mode and slows down the metabolic rate in order to conserve calories for basic functions.  According to my research, between my calorie restriction and the amount of exercise I am getting in each day, I am not meeting my daily necessary calories to maintain my current basal metabolic rate.  Seriously????  It seems to me that should equate to weight loss, but apparently not.  I don’t get it, though.  How come all of those contestants on Survivor, who really are starving, end up looking anorexically thin?  Gah!!!

So, dear friends, I am going to try a little experiment this week.  I am going to eat just a few more calories than I have been allowing myself to consume of late.   I will still avoid sugar and starchy carbs, but I will allow myself more actual food. I will faithfully continue my exercise, because the one area of progress that I am seeing is my increase in stamina and energy levels.  Big time increases!  After yesterday’s marathon beach walk I didn’t even stagger and collapse into my beach chair!  Instead, I sat down ever so gracefully, glugged down an entire bottle of water in about a millisecond and then jumped into the Gulf for some well-deserved bobbing.   A month ago, I would have fallen on my face in the sand without budging for the next hour and my legs would have been crying out in pain, begging to be put out of their misery.  But not now, so all in all, I guess we can call that progress.

Getting Back On Track

Let’s get one thing straight here - I have not gotten off track with my exercise.  My diet, yes, but my exercise goals – no,  a resounding no!  I have exercised 5-6 times a week since I began this quest towards fitness. Yesterday, I vowed to put last weekend’s eating indiscretions behind me and move forward.  I stuck to my diet all day and walked three and half miles in one hour.  Today, I am still on track with my diet and did fifty minutes on the elliptical on my lunch break.  I am eating fresh fruits, raw veggies, fat free cottage cheese and drinking plenty of water.   Sadly, I fear that it is going to take all week to undo the damage of one day of bad eating.  I really did eat healthy foods on Saturday.  Only on Sunday did I fall of the diet wagon and I didn’t even fall all that far off, maybe just dangled off the wagon by a short rope.  It is maddening that one day can undo half of three week’s worth of hard work. 

I fear that I may never get my waist back or lose that ridiculously thick neck, but most of all I want my face back.  I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror – it is a stranger’s face that gazes back at me.  I feel like a victim of The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.  Only in this movie, the Pod People aren’t exact replicas of the people that they replaced, but older, squishier versions.  One of the first places I put on weight is in my face and neck and yet it seems to be the very last place that I lose weight.  It’s just not fair!!  OK, I need a little cheese with that whine, don’t I?    

But, I will soldier on.  Why, you may ask?  Because I can feel an actual increase in my stamina and strength and I know that I have been doing my heart a service, getting in all of that aerobic exercise.  Getting healthier is my main goal and if it means that I will be healthy, but not thin, so be it.  I guess I can live with that.  But I sure would like to get some semblance of my waistline and my face back.  Just a tiny bit, pretty please?     

A Mini Vacation

Well friends and readers, I know you are wondering what happened to me.  Either that or you’re thinking thank God she took a few days off!!!  I don’t know which category you fall into, but I’m baaaa-aaaack!

On Thursday, I came to the realization that I have been able to work out on my elliptical trainer for 45 minutes straight and manage a semi-graceful dismount, as opposed to collapsing like a wounded jellyfish, so perhaps it was time to add on some time.    I tacked on an extra five minutes and still managed to actually step off the elliptical instead of falling off.   This emboldened me to the extent that I upped my game to 55 minutes on Friday.  It’s a darn good thing, too, because on Saturday, I embarked on a little mini-vacation, replete with the dreaded vacation eating.

My good friend Julie, whom I have known and loved for more years than either of us care to admit, was coming to Florida with her step-daughter and her friend.    She had rented a beach house on Anna Maria Island and I was going to spend the weekend with her and the girls.  I knew that there would be food involved.  And wine.  I mean, come on!  A beach house! This constitutes a vacation in my book! Thankfully, I had met my goal of five workouts in the week, but having had my niece and her boyfriend here all week, I had already fallen off the diet wagon in a most disgraceful way – mainly because I cooked so much while they were here.  Oy vey!!

Still, I am not going to provide a big mea culpa here.  I ate seafood on Saturday – nature’s low fat, high quality protein – I had ceviche, shrimp, lobster and crab.  And I got in a good, brisk beach walk with Julie.  Granted, we were walking with wine glasses in hand, but still at a good, brisk pace that sloshed some of the wine out of the glasses, to my great dismay.  But then again, that means that I ingested fewer calories from that poor, decimated glass of wine, so I guess it was a fair trade off.  I really didn’t feel too guilty about Saturday, overall.  Yesterday, well I am pretty sure I burned some calories, maybe thousands of them, fighting the crashing waves in Gulf and later strolling along St. Armand’s Circle, but I did eat pizza last night.  So today I did my penance with an hour long walk.  And I got back on my diet.  So no whining and no apologies.  I was on vacation!!!  

My New Friend

Well, boys and girls, my elliptical trainer really is turning into my new BFF.     My dreaded morning trip to the scale revealed another pound of weight loss.   Perhaps my plateau-busting loss was not a fluke or a tease, but a truly heartfelt offering from my friend, the elliptical trainer.  So today’s lunch time workout was approached with a new vigor, and, dare I say it, eagerness?  I am hoping to see another tiny, incremental negative number in the morning.  Somehow, this small weight loss has spurred me on to new heights with my calorie counting.  I am actually hitting negative numbers on my calorie intake thanks to my elliptical workouts.  My beautiful niece Amanda, who is visiting me this week, told me how she lost fourteen pound in two months just by working out on the elliptical.  And I remember how my drop-dead gorgeous daughter Caitlin totally transformed her body with her elliptical workouts last year.  Dare I hope for such results?  Yes!  Whole-heartedly!  So it’s another dinner of fish and veggies, another day of negative calorie intake and a dream of getting a waistline again.  My new friend and I have another date tomorrow on my lunch break.  I’m buying!!

Making Friends

Perhaps I have been quick to judge.  I have been calling my elliptical trainer an evil entity and accused it of variously smirking or sneering at me.  Could I have been wrong?  Maybe I mistook an inviting smile for a smirk and come hither look for a sneer.  I think that maybe, just maybe, my elliptical trainer wants to be friends with me.  I think that it may just be trying to tell that it is my best option for a fat burning workout.  Maybe it’s lonely.  I’m not sure which, but two workouts in a row on the elliptical have rewarded me with a small weight loss when I had hit a little plateau.  Perhaps that was a peace offering to entice me be friends and visit my new friend every day.  So I got in a forty-five minute workout on my lunch break again today and I was actually smiling as I wiped the sweat out of my eyes.  My thighs were quivering ever so slightly less than the day before at the end of the workout.  I hope the peace offering wasn’t just a tease, because I think that maybe I might extend an olive branch and become friends with my elliptical trainer.  My daughter and my niece tell that I should become friends and embrace my elliptical trainer as my new BFF.   We shall see, but I’m still not loaning it my favorite earrings or anything like that……

Mother's Day and other food holidays.....

I know what you’re thinking.  You haven’t heard from in three days and you are sighing and shaking your head sadly.  You are certain that I succumbed to the siren song of a of a certain bag of Fritos which keeps calling my name and that the aforementioned bag of Fritos swallowed me whole, or vice versa.  I fell off the face of the earth for three days, so I probably fell off the wagon, too, right?  Well, yes and no.  

I behaved badly over the weekend and ate what I wanted and didn’t even get my beach walk in this weekend.  My beach time was spent lazing in a chair, talking with an old friend I hadn't seen in years and floating with my foam noodle is the warm Gulf waters. Saturday night I imbibed in that glorious southern delicacy known as shrimp and grits (cheese and jalapeno grits, to be exact - as only Doc Ford's can do it), accompanied by a couple of Rum Runners. And last night I had a marvelous steak dinner with my friends.  I managed to leave and head home before the pan of brownies came out of the oven, so you gotta give me some credit for that......But, I did work out on Friday and if I work out every day this week, I will still meet my goal.  At least I managed not to gain any weight over this glorious weekend of eating whatever I wanted.  Hey, it was Mother’s Day after, all.  I was entitled!  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Friday I had big plans to walk on my lunch break.  Big plans!!!  But as the morning wore on, the clouds thickened and I knew that rain was threatening.  Still, I was sure that I could have taken my walk and gotten back before the deluge, were it not for a last minute call from a client begging for my help in navigating the maze of the somewhat antiquated software system that I support.  And after forty-five minutes of virtual hand holding and extreme patience on my part, she was able to do what she needed to do, but the dratted woman made me miss my window of opportunity for walking outside.  By the time I got off the phone, Sarasota was being inundated with rainfall of biblical proportions.  Of course, she probably saved me from being struck by lightning, or at the very least being carried away on a river of rainwater, drowned love bugs and dead palm tree fronds.  If I had gone out when I originally intended to take my lunch break, I surely would have been caught in that epic rainstorm. 

So, given no other choice, I stared down my sneering elliptical trainer, gave it my best tough guy glare and said “let’s dance.”   Forty-five minutes later, as I nearly fell off the detestable thing, thighs quivering like a scared little Chihuahua, I shook my fist at it and declared that this wasn’t over yet.  Oh no.  Not by a long shot!  I will beat you, O evil elliptical!

So here, I go today – round two with the elliptical.  I will conquer!!!!!

A Day Off

Tonight's post will be short and sweet, boys and girls.  I have acheived my goal of five workouts in a week's time and today is my blessed day off.  This does not mean that I will hang up my spurs for the rest of the week - I plan on a lunch time workout tomorrow and a nice, long beach walk this weekend.  I did housework today, though.  Anything that makes my back ache constitutes a workout in my book, so I don't feel like I was a total slug today.  That being said, I still feel a small sliver of guilty remorse for not hitting the pool or the pavement today.  I must be missing those pesky endorphins......

OK, so I cheated.....

I have to admit it, dear readers – I cheated on my diet last night just a wee, tiny bit.  I went over my net calorie allowance by a couple of hundred calories yesterday due to an inexplicable craving for Greek food.  I was feeling too lazy to cook, thanks to my experience with Miss Perky Witch on the TV fitness channel.  I decided to check out a new restaurant called The Greek Taverna, a very small Mom and Pop type of establishment, with a limited, but very authentic menu.  Besides, the Mediterranean diet is supposed to be healthy, right? I splurged on the moussaka and a small Greek salad and came home feeling comfortably satiated.  And for the record, moussaka, is probably not the healthiest thing on the menu….

Today was supposed to be my exercise-free day.  My goal was to work out five times a week and I had already hit workout number four with the aerobics instructor who shall remain nameless (Evil Witch) on the fitness channel yesterday.  Today was going to be my day off!  Still, just knowing that I had cheated on my diet yesterday, I found myself arguing with my old friend Agnes, the nagging voice in my head who can lay on a guilt trip that would make any Jewish mother proud.  I just can’t ignore her when she starts yammering at me, so I went straight to the pool when I finished working for the day.  Thirty minutes of lap swimming later, I feel justified in eating that moussaka .  I can also barely lift my arms to type this blog, so I’m thinking that swimming might be another tool to keep me from overeating.  If my arms are too tired to lift a fork to my mouth………..

Don't be a hater.....

Today is another scorcher and the love bugs are still out in force.  The elliptical trainer is still smirking at me and the pool is looking better and better.  Unfortunately, I have errands after work and must accomplish my daily fitness goal on my lunch break, so I have 45 minutes, tops.  What to do, what to do?  I still want to mix up my exercise routine as much for the benefits of muscle confusion as for the benefit of not getting bored with whole cotton pickin’ idea of exercise and diving head first into a bag of Fritos.  I could go to the pool, but at this time of day the likelihood of being able swim laps without bowling over small children is slim to none.  Then I remember something I have seen on my cable TV guide but have never actually explored (mostly out of fear, I assure you).  Thanks to Comcast, I have free access to on demand exercise and fitness programs.   Working from home means that I no longer have an excuse not to partake of this cornucopia of free workouts.  So, dear readers, with great trepidation, I turned on the TV and started perusing the options available to me.

 

A plethora of virtual aerobics instructors, not unlike the me of twenty years ago, were all beckoning me to go ahead and get fit with them!  Gawd!  Was I ever that perky and annoying?  Why didn’t someone take me out back then - someone with a high powered rifle equipped with a laser scope, perched high above the YMCA, taking a bead on me as I walked out the door?  Because I am pretty sure that some of my students must been just as annoyed with me back then as I was with one of today's TV aerobics instructors, folks.   I did one and a half classes on my lunch break and wanted to kill the second aerobics instructor with my bare hands before I was done. 

The first half hour class was fine.  It was a fast paced, low impact class.  For those of you that don’t know me that well, I am only allowed to perform low impact workouts due to not one, but two back surgeries that left my spine fused in three places and enough metal in my back build a small rocket missile (which I would gladly have used on instructor number two today).  High impact exercise is strictly forbidden my my orthopedic surgeon.  Also by my knees, which have very little cartilage left in them after ten years of teaching step aerobics.  Ironic, isn’t it?  But I digress. 

Instructor number one took me though a good workout that got my heart pumping and the sweat flowing.  I could have repeated half of that class, but didn’t know if I could fast forward though the warm up part, since I was already plenty warmed up.   So I picked a cardio sculpting class for selection number two.  I was only going to be able to do fifteen minutes before my lunch break was up, so I figured I could handle fifteen minutes of almost anything.  Boy was I mistaken!  Within five minutes my thighs were burning, my knees were wailing in pain and this little chica was doing plyometrics, for cryin’ out loud!  Plyometrics = high impact.  Oh, she demonstrated the low impact moves, with a very condescending tone and a smirk on her face that was reminiscent of the smirk my elliptical trainer gives me.  I really didn't like her attitude, or her ripped abs.  She could bounce all day long without her knees grinding in bone-on-bone agony or feeling her jiggly parts going airborne.  She didn’t have any jiggly parts, the perky little witch.   Just as I was telling her in no uncertain terms just exactly where she could stick those dumbbells, it struck me.  That really was me twenty years ago!  Too fit and too perky.  It’s truly a wonder that I am still alive and had not been mowed down in the YMCA parking lot.  To all of my former students, I offer my most profound apologies.

Love Bug Season

Ah Monday - the reality check that puts my ample rear end into a chair all day long, solving the problems of four hospitals’ software systems.  Sitting.  In a chair.  All day.  I would have taken a walk on my lunch break or even after work, but this is love bug season.  For those of you fortunate souls who are unacquainted with love bugs, let me give you the Cliff Notes version.   They don’t bite and they don’t sting, but they are an unbearable nuisance during their swarming season in the spring and late summer.  They have a slightly acidic body chemistry that will literally eat the paint right off your car, which will become plastered with love bugs anytime you have the nerve to venture out on the road during love bug season.  They are evil, disgusting and annoying to the extreme.  And they love to get in your face.  They are swarming everywhere and if I were to go out for a walk, I would look like a crazy woman who is just begging to be hauled off in the paddy wagon in a stylish (but slimming!) restraining jacket.  Because the only way to walk through the swarms of love bugs is to wave one’s arms wildly about the head and face the entire time.  And even utilizing said love bug – warding tactics, I still would have returned home be-speckled and disgusting.  No thank you.  I contemplated the evil elliptical which sat there smirking at me all day long.  Yes, it was smirking – I swear it was! 

However, when I walked out to grab my mail, I noticed that the love bugs were avoiding the pool area, strangely enough.  Maybe they were avoiding the mud daubers that like to hang out there. Right there, I had an epiphany.  For today’s exercise goal I would swim laps.  It sounded like a reasonable plan to me.  I am a strong swimmer, or at least I used to be. When I obtained my scuba certification at the ripe old age of 20 (during my former athlete years) I swam laps in the pool 4-5 times a week, for an hour at a time.  Being more than double that age now, I felt justified in swimming for half of that length of time.  Piece of cake, right?  I can hear your snickers now.  Go ahead and gloat, you meanies -  you were right.  I set off at a moderate pace, alternating freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke and sidestroke.  I threw in some alternating periods of wind sprints with the freestyle, my fastest stroke.  Thirty minutes later, I crawled gasping out of the pool, feeling distinctly faint, and resembling a giant strand of overcooked fettuccine.   Seriously overcooked fettuccine.   Not in the least bit al dente.   Still, I felt great once I was able to move and breathe again.  I felt well enough to fix up a wonderful seafood dinner before collapsing in my recliner for a well earned evening of Dancing With The Stars.  Does watching other people burn calories count?

Seafood Diet

Well, today was a stellar day in my quest for fitness.  It was another postcard perfect day at the beach today.  A funny thing happened within minutes of my arrival, though.  I sat down in my chair, gazed out at the turquoise waters,  contemplating how long I could hold off before grabbing my foam noodle  and  make like a jellyfish, floating along in the gentle current, when this strange little voice  in my head (we’ll call her Agnes) started to lay on the guilt trip.   “You have to walk!” said Agnes.  “And you have to walk first, before you have earned the right to float in the water!”   “But it’s hot out and I want to cool off!”  I whined.  “No buts!” was Agnes’s commandment.  When I thought about the current state of my butt,  I just couldn’t come up with an effective argument.  Well, darn.  And there was a wonderful sea breeze.  So I set off with my phone app logging my miles for me.  I felt really nice and I kept pushing myself further along.  Just to that next high rise condo unit, I would tell myself, then just to the next beach house.  Before I knew it I had walked two and half miles.  Which meant two and half more miles of hoofing it to get back to my chair, my water and my tuna fish sandwich that was waiting in my cooler.   Yikes!  As I turned around and started back, I started thinking about fish, possibly because there were plenty of people fishing from the beach today, flipping the occasional fish to their designated great blue heron stalker.  Every fisherman gets one.  I think it might be a state law or something. 

Anyway, when I arrived back at my chair after my five mile walk –yay me! –I drank enough water for a camel preparing for a desert crossing and ate my tuna sandwich.  And, I thought back my trips to Hawaii where I gorged on fish every single day and didn’t gain an ounce, in spite of all of the fruity tropical drinks I imbibed on vacation.  I decided that I need to eat more fish, more seafood!  Why, for heaven’s sake wasn’t I doing this already, anyhow?  I live in Florida, for Pete’s sake!  I can buy fresh fish all year around!  So, after my well deserved soak in the Gulf, I stopped off at Walt’s Fish Market and picked up a fresh caught grouper filet to take home for dinner.   My seafood diet will not be the legendary “see-food diet”, but an actual diet rich in fish, shellfish and the ever-so-healthy omega -3 fatty acids.  I’ll let you know if I start to grow gills…...

How To Burn Calories Without Even Trying

I have found that I am in love with my fitness app on my phone.  Really, truly in love.  Who knew that thirty minutes of snorkeling would burn 272 calories?  Not moi.   It doesn’t feel like exercise to me.  To me, it is utter bliss.  Gliding though the water hearing nothing the heightened sound of your own breathing, eyes scanning the ocean floor in hopes of spotting a sand dollar, seeing the occasional fish dart past – this, I could do all day long.  But as I was snorkeleling along, I realized that this is a leg workout, at least to some degree, with the water and fins providing resistance.  So when I finally pulled my pruney self out of the water, I thought to myself “What the heck.  Can’t hurt to look it up, right?”  I pulled out my trusty phone, opened up the app and typed in snorkeling.  Ah-ha!  There it was.  All I had to do was punch in the number of minutes I had been pretending to be a fish (a fish mind you,  something sleek and fast like a barracuda, not a manatee, even if I resemble one!)  I was ever so pleasantly surprised to learn that thirty minutes of snorkeling equaled 272 calories burned.  Oh joy!  Oh rapture!  I have found another way to cross train and it’s fun!  Something I love to do!

As I parked my keester in my beach chair and commenced to pat myself copiously on the back for my discovery, a niggling doubt crept into my waterlogged brain.  Was this just a little bit too easy?  And isn’t letting myself get away with a measly 272 calorie burn almost like, well, cheating???  As I gazed at the crystal, turquoise water that was calling for me to come and float and be lazy, bobbing in the warm Gulf waters with my foam noodle, I knew what I had to do.   I had to earn that bobbing time.  With a reluctant sigh, I hauled my carcass out of the beach chair and started walking down the beach, GPS –enabled phone app in tow to tell me how far I trekked.

A funny thing happened about fifteen minutes into my walk.  I started to feel pretty darned good.  I think it might have been those sneaky endorphins again.   I didn’t walk at quite the sidewalk-burning pace I do when I walk in the neighborhood, but I walked over three miles and for an hour and twenty minutes.  Mission accomplished.  I had met my daily fitness goal and rewarded myself with a long, relaxing bob in the Gulf waters with my beloved foam noodle.  And a margarita at the Old Salty dog on my way home……….

Habit Forming

Let me begin by saying, yesterday was not day one of my new diet and exercise regimen.  It actually started a week ago today when my friend Renae came to town and announced that we would be walking while she was here.  She had started a walking program and was determined to stick with it.  I was glad to walk with her, because I like to walk and have used this method to melt off pounds before, with a modicum of success.  Time to form a new habit.  I've done it before and I can do it again.   

We walked three miles on Friday and three miles on Saturday.  I felt reasonably good about our persistence in the face of what I like to call “Vacation Syndrome”.  You know about that one, right?  It is the insidious disease that infects us when we are on vacation.  The constellation of symptoms include a tendency to eat out for almost every meal, because hey!  We’re on vacation!   Other symptoms are a frightening sloth that creeps over the body once it is planted in a beach chair with a book and a fruity drink with an umbrella sticking out of the top.  We are entitled to this because we are on vacation.  Vacation Syndrome inertia can make it nearly impossible to lift that oversized rear end out the beach chair and go for a walk.  But we did it.  And as a side note, just let me say that three miles of walking barefoot in the sand is one heckuva workout!  It leaves the calves quivering and crying out piteously “Why oh why are you abusing us so???”  Which leads to yet another, even more vile symptom.:  because we actually exercised while on vacation, we have now earned the right for yet another fruity, umbrella-clad drink and another dinner out on the town.  Do you see where I’m going with this? This syndrome causes  a chain reaction of symptoms that often results in food comas, sunburns, large, Hawaiian print muu-muus and double chins.  Not a pretty sight.

As I said, I was reasonably encouraged that we walked in the face of Vacation Syndrome for two days in a row.  Alas, for the second half of the vacation we succumbed to full on Vacation Syndrome.  No walks for two days.  More magnificent dinners out on the town and the consumption of more adult beverages than should have been allowed. The horror!  Then, on Tuesday when Renae left I had to return to the inevitable backlog of work that piled up when I was on vacation.  No walk for me that day – I needed to recover from my vacation and the appallingly busy day at work, so I just watched Dancing With The Stars, butt firmly planted in the recliner and attempted to assuage my guilty conscience by eating a Lean Cuisine for dinner.    Yeah, like that really helped…..

When I woke up Wednesday morning, I was hit over the head with the ugly truth:  I had not walked or exercised for three days in row!  How was I supposed to get in a healthy exercise habit if I skipped three whole days?  I remember reading somewhere that it take two weeks of repetition to form a habit.  I want my exercise to become a habit and skipping three days in row was no way to accomplish this goal.  So immediately after work on Wednesday, I laced up my trusty New Balance walking shoes, plugged my iPod earbuds firmly into each ear and cranked up the tunes.  I set off on a fast paced journey down memory lane, thanks to the musical stylings of KC and the Sunshine Band, Sister Sledge and the Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever anyone?).    And it felt good!!  Yesterday I spent my lunch break sweating it out on the elliptical trainer with a movie in front of my face and it felt good!!  And today I spent my lunch hour walking again, motivated by Kool and the Gang, The Ohio Players and Thelma Houston, among others.  And it felt really good!!  (And yes Randy, I will download some Earth Wind and Fire to my iPod.)   I even think I just might have felt the tiniest endorphin rush.  Just a tiny one, but it's a start. Maybe this is why I feel so good!  I remember well my days as an athlete and I know my endorphins,.  They are glorious! And the best thing about endorphins is that they make one crave more endorphins, thereby motivating an endorphin-crazed person to actually work out more frequently in order to satisfy that craving.  This is a good thing.

So dear readers, can you guess what this means?  I actually accomplished my goal of exercising five times in the space of a week and I survived.  And I feel really good.  I think I am going to like this new habit….

P.S. - I don't want to jinx myself, so I'll just whisper it quietly.... I have lost three pounds.  Shhhh....

Getting started

OK.  It’s time I admitted something.  My body has failed me in epic proportions.  Of course, I am equally to blame, as I have failed my body, too.  I went from being a spectacularly fit aerobics instructor, weight lifter, cyclist and martial artist in my thirties to being a fifty-something, non-athletic  blob.  Well, not a total blob.   Maybe more of a midsection blob….  I still have some amazing muscle tone, probably thanks to the aforementioned exercise of years past.  Although there is definitely some fat marbled into those muscles, my legs are very toned and a simple flex reveals that I still have biceps and triceps, in spite of the incipient bat wings that are desperately trying to attach themselves to my upper arms.  I have fought them ferociously and am so far winning that war.  Even my larger than yesteryear butt is still toned.  Fat-marbled, but toned. Go figure.  But my back, lats, obliques and abs (what abs?) are nothing but flesh-toned Jello.  Pasty, white, flesh toned Jello, I might add, as my midsection does not reveal itself to the sun or innocent passers-by at the beach.

In my thirties, I taught aerobics.  Step aerobics and karate aerobics.  I wisely knew that if I wasn’t the teacher and thereby obligated to show up for class, that I would in fact not show up for class.  So, for completely selfish reasons,  I taught aerobics.  At one time I was teaching at three different places all at once:  Gold’s Gym, the YMCA and the karate school where I started studying martial arts at age 34.  I was busy!  And very fit.  But somewhere along the line, life intervened.  My kids got involved in their own (multiple) sports and Boy Scouts and piano lessons.  My schedule was beginning to overload and I had to let some of my aerobics classes go, as well time at the dojo, time on my bicycle, time lifting weights.  Still, I was teaching enough to maintain an adequate fitness level and keep gravity at bay.  Then, at age forty, I changed jobs and found myself having to take call.  Being on call for my job was the death knell to my part time career as an aerobics instructor.   It was also the death knell for my figure.   It was a gradual demise until my divorce-induced stress eating pushed me to my highest weight five years ago and I was ready to have a funeral for my poor, long lost normal-sized body.   But, I managed to pull myself out of my funk, start walking and dieting and I dropped 30 pounds.    However, like a bad penny, some of that weight has turned back up over the past three years.  I have gotten lazy.

I have decided that I no longer have any excuse not to do something about this sorry state of affairs.  I work from home now and no longer waste three hours of my day attempting to make myself presentable and then making a ninety mile round trip exodus to work every day.  That is three whole hours that have been added back into my daily life, Monday through Friday.  That’s fifteen hours, folks!  Fifteen hours that I could be exercising!  Well, not quite.  I think my body would go on strike if I actually attempted to exercise for fifteen hours in a week’s time.  And said strike would most likely be severely painful, possibly resulting in my untimely demise.  But I can surely add in one hour of exercise a day, right? Well RIGHT????  Sigh……  So, it is time to start a blog to help hold myself accountable.  This is tool, just like the food logging and pedometer apps on my Android phone.  I need motivation!

I say all of this as I get ready to jump on the elliptical trainer and attempt to melt off a few ounces of fat.   Even as we speak, I am contemplating mopping my floors as a way to procrastinate and put off the  mind-numbing  trek on the elliptical.  Pathetic, I know.  But it is hot and humid out there today, so I have already talked myself out of walking outdoors.   Besides, all of the experts say that you need to mix up your exercise routine.  So I am alternating between walking, the elliptical trainer and other sweat inducing activities such as trying to a erect sun shelter on the beach with a sea breeze that is trying to take the shelter airborne in kite-like fashion.   Just ask my friend Renae about that one!  But I digress.  The elliptical trainer is staring me in the face with mute disdain.  Its attitude is one of “Go ahead punk, make my day.”

Fast forward forty-five minutes and gallons of sweat later.  I have just spent my lunch break trying to exercise away the calories that I will eat for dinner – carefully measured calories, but calories none the less.  I beat the elliptical trainer into submission.  I burned actual calories and got an aerobic workout at the same time.  I have set a goal – I will exercise at least five days a week.  So, little blog of mine, are you going to hold me to it?  Stay tuned…..