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…...