Day 12: Run Around

Today has been a full and busy day!

I started off with Curves. It was interesting because I didn't feel very energetic today... and I realized I really couldn't give my top effort to both the machines AND the cardio. But because with Curves Smart, I'm trying to improve my performance on the machines, that is where I put my top effort. My heart rate was up SO high from the machines and how hard I worked, I barely needed to do anything on the cardio spots after the first few machines. In the end I felt like I worked even harder than the last time... but I was like how much higher calorie burn can I GET? LOL. Well.... 629 calories today it said. I went over my target (which was raised from the last time) on all machines except one, which worked a muscle group that is pretty sore from AquaZumba. I killed it!

I also want to try the Zumba class at Curves this coming Tuesday. It's a mixture of Zumba with the strength training. You can't use Curves Smart with it though so guessing the calories will be interesting.

Anyway... after Curves today I went home to change and eat breakfast, then drove to the airport (35 mins) and picked up my friend who was returning from a business trip. I then drove her home (an hour and a half) and back to my home (an hour). I was pretty pooped by then. On the plus side, we did have lunch together at Panera Bread:

I had gone there with the intention of getting a bow of chicken and wild rice soup.... but forgot that they have only certain soups each day. I didn't like any of the others that much so I got a half tuna sandwich with some vegetable pesto soup. I ate the half sandwich and only about 1/3 of the soup for a total of 273 calories.

Anyhoo... I had planned to go for a walk with my new walking buddy. But I got home at 2pm and my 6:30 evening plans got moved to 4:30, so I only had enough time to eat, shower and leave by 4pm.

My "meeting" was with a friend who gave me some work I can do from home! I am not making an income from my business yet (gotta pay things off and save some up over the summer)... so I am VERY grateful for this!!!

I saved up my calories today so I could splurge on a frappuccino during my meeting with her at Starbucks. Can't BELIEVE I didn't take a picture of it. It's been 2 weeks since i had one and AGES since I had one with whipped cream. That was GOOD.

When I got home 3 hours later I had dinner and then got started on my new "job"... muddled through it since I'm just learning so it took me a while. Now it's midnight and I'm EXHAUSTED. I just might sleep in tomorrow I HOPE!! Still having trouble sleeping as good as I used to.

Thank you everybody for the suggestions and ideas about the headaches. I did have my blood pressure checked last time I went to the doctor and it was normal, but it has been a while, maybe 8 months. I also never considered low blood sugar so I will try that suggestion next time. I have to wait a while to go to the doctor until Ian starts his new job and we have health insurance again... next month!!

So today's ending stats... 1,656 calories eaten... 783 calories burned through exercise (a few extras from FitBit adjustment).... NET 873 calories. Still 327 calories from my goal of 1200. Still not sure if it's good for me to be under, or bad and it will slow me down... need more time to determine!

Day 11: AquaZumba & Wild Animals

This morning I joined my friend April at our gym for an AquaZumba class!! I was nervous to try it for a couple of reasons. One being I took a water aerobics class at our gym before that ended up REALLY hurting my feet because the guy was a drill-instructor type who said run run run!! And it made my plantar fasciitis flare up. Another reason is that I know Zumba in general has a lot of hip movement which I have to be careful of with all my hip problems. (OK I'm sounding AWESOME right about now huh?)

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised!! It was a great workout - tough, a little bit beyond what I'd do working out on my own, but not so much that I couldn't keep up. I didn't hurt anything either. She was a great teacher. My feet did great. There WERE a couple of hip moves that I modified just to be sure I wouldn't upset my hips... but, I think being in the water adds a lot of safety because you can't really do your movements so fast that you might pull something. I had a really good time and I'd like to keep going maybe once a week or every other week.

I couldn't find any calculators online that have calorie burn for AquaZumba. I put it in as water aerobics and got 384 calories burned... but I really think that's low based on how I FELT compared to other workouts, especially given that it is one hour long. But I don't have anything else to go on right now, so that's what I went with.

Here's the site for AquaZumba if you're interested :)

After a nice breakfast in the LifeCafe with April (I had a protein shake), I came home and ended up going with my dad and my husband to the Wild Animal Sanctuary. It's a really cool place that rescues wild animals from bad situations.... where they have been kept as pets when they shouldn't have... when they are surplus from zoos... when they've been abused, etc.
We have never been so thought it would be a fun trip... see some animals... walk around... take some photos. I'm still trying to get familiar with my new camera. Well, it didn't turn out to be great for learning stuff on my camera because all of the animals were pretty far away (couldn't work much with depth of field, etc)... but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon and better than sitting on my butt right? :)

Here are a few photos...

I may not be done eating today so can't give you my stats. I did want to mention a couple things.... and maybe get some opinions??? For one, I had mentioned being really tired since I started eating better and exercising so much. That is starting to get better... but what isn't getting better yet is I've been getting a headache every day! Some are minor but a couple of them have been really bad, like the one I got today. Has anyone else gotten really bad headaches when they "jumped back on the bandwagon" with food & exercise? I'm wondering if it's just the change and I need more time, or if I need to worry that I'm doing something wrong... like a certain deficiency, not enough calories (hard to believe but who knows). I will wait and see how it goes for another week maybe but it's NOT been fun. I feel like I'm doing such good things for my body and I should be feeling GOOD, not crappy! Sheesh!

Curves tomorrow and hopefully another walk with my buddy too. I am hoping to save up some good exercise calories because I'm meeting a friend at Starbucks in the evening AND I have a free drink coupon... so I want a frappuccino WITH whipped cream baby! Haven't had one in ages. :)

Day 10:Curves Smart & More

So today I had a little more time at the computer at Curves so I got some photos of the cool info I get to see using Curves Smart. The cool thing is I improved at everything since the last time and I get to see that. It really does make me push myself harder.

This is the first screen. It shows a supposed representation of my body (I wish! lol) ... the cool thing is it shows dots for each muscle group and it will be green if you worked it at or above your previous level, yellow if it was under or red if it was way below. At my first workout with Curves Smart I had a couple that were yellow and red, but today I got all green! Whoo! And that meter on the left shows how much of the workout you were 'in the green' on the machines... so it was very good and all in the green this time. My weight at the bottom shows 216 because that's what I weigh on their scale. 4 lbs higher, nice right? But I guess 2 of that is probably the clothes.

This screen tells you how you are performing on each machine. This one told me I improved on all of them. I'm sure I won't be able to keep that up every time though lol.

This screen shows you (at the bottom) a graphical representation of each machine. The green dot is your target for each machine. The target is based on your previous performance. This shows my workout today and that I surpassed my target on most of them. There's no reason why the one is purple other than that's where the mouse was at the time. Up above is a graph of the same thing - the target versus my performance. The blue one is my previous workout, the purple one was today. The target was a little higher for this one than the last one and luckily I stil went above it this time.

This screen shows a pie graph of the strength of each of my muscle groups. On the top left it shows the calorie burn of each workout. Today's was 540 calories! Yeah! I don't think I really know what the bottom left part is. I'll have to ask next time.

All in all I think I'm really going to like using Curves Smart. By the way in case you are wondering, it's just a little chip you carry around and put into each machine when you use it:

 

A couple of hours after Curves I ended up meeting up with my friend to go walking again. I wasn't sure how much energy I would have... BUT... I surprised myself by walking for an hour and a half! 4.3 miles! AND burned another 532 calories after the 540 I burned at Curves. Needless to say, I had quite  few more calories to eat today.

The funny thing is I actually sat there thinking, I could eat something I don't always get to eat. Panda Express maybe... pizza.... I can't even remember now all the other things I thought of. But nothing really sounded good. I ended up basically just eating more but of the same healthy things I have been eating. Well except for a handful of fritos and a piece of chocolate :) But I just found it interesting that I actually FELT like I could eat something "bad" and not FEEL BAD about it.... and I just didn't really crave anything. I went out for a bit and thought about what I might pick up on my way home.... and realized I was craving CEREAL from home?!?! What is THAT? And some strawberries?! I tell ya, that was weird.

All in all a very good day. My net cals is only 721... but I really can't eat anymore for the day so I'll take it. Tomorrow morning I'm trying AquaZumba... will let you know how it goes!

Day 9

Hello friends! I am feeling good today. Even though I actually slept really poorly last night, I do feel that my body is adjusting to the new eating & workout habits and I'm starting to get my energy back again.

This morning I went to the gym for my arc trainer workout. I snapped this photo of the vending machine at the gym. Wouldn't it be great if you could find a vending machine like this amongst all areas with vending machines?!

Protein bars and snacks... and below these were all protein drinks and sports drinks.


I did the arc trainer for 40 minutes again on hill intervals level 3. Must've worked just slightly harder this time because I came out with 450 cals burned although I went down on my weight on the machine. You can only put in your weight in 5 lb intervals so last time I was closest to 215 and now closer to 210 so I put in 210. I know machines can be inaccurate but I try to at least get on the same machine when I go so I can compare to previous results on the same machine.

When I got home I made my 2nd  breakfast (1st breakfast had been the coffee protein drink). I was proud because I kind of invented something. I wanted eggs, but wanted meat, but not ham... what to do what to do. Cheesy eggs sounded good. I ended up creating kind of a "mexican scramble".... egg beaters, leftover turkey taco meat/refried bean mixture, a little corn and black beans we had in the fridge, topped with a dollop of salsa. It was DELICIOUS!

I used 1/2 cup egg beaters (actually the equivalent of the Lucerne brand), 1/4 cup of the turkey taco meat/bean mixture, and just sprinkling of the veggies. It was VERY satisfying. If anyone is wondering, my salsa is Safeway Brand Garlic Lover's Salsa. I HATE salsa... but I LOVE this salsa! I have been using it with a lot of things.

Today was Ian's dad's birthday and I knew we would be having dinner at their house tonight. A friend of theirs made the dinner since his dad is sick and his mom is busy taking care of him. We had a penne pasta casserole with beef & cheese, a salad, garlic bread, and dessert. This could have been a land mine but I kept my portions very reasonable and got my two workouts today, so I enjoyed my meal and have nothing to worry about!

I know it's hard to tell size in a photo, but the pasta is about 1/2 cup. I didn't finish all my salad, had the smallest piece of garlic bread I could get my hands on, and kept my dessert quite reasonable also. It was chocolate cake mixed with chocolate pudding and a whip type topping. I had about 1/2 cup of it I believe, about an hour after dinner. Sorry no photo of that one. It was delicious though. If it were anything else I would have skipped dessert but for his dad's birthday I just didn't want to make a big deal of anything... it may very well be his last birthday. He was able to eat tiny bit of the pasta and cake... hardly anything though :(

Ian's mom got him this Darth Vader pinata.... which she is saving until his birthday in September and is totally going to make him bust it lol.... we thought it was pretty cool:

That's my cute hubby. No you can't have him :) Although you may really want to after you hear this. When we got home he said he had a present for me! Guess what he got me.... for NO REASON at all?!?!?

BEAUTIFUL earrings!!! I couldn't get a better photo at night but the hooks have little crystals in them too... SO pretty! These were hand made by my sister-in-law's best friends and he bought them for me just cuz :) How sweet is that?!!? I just love him.

We also went for a walk tonight to get a little more exercise in!

Alrighty so stats for today....

I ate more calories than I have any other day of this so far (thanks to the bday dinner)... 1775 cals. But I burned 742 cals with exercise so my net is 1033. Hoping for a little lower calorie day tomorrow. But I'm really not going to sweat it, I feel good about  my day - and week!
It's only the 2nd day of the week and I've exceeded my exercise goal for the week (150 mins or 5 days of 30 min workouts). Already at 152 mins after just 2 days. And I have several more workouts already planned for the week.

Feelin' good :) But am icing my sacrum/lower back tonight. It's sore and that's why I'm having so much trouble sleeping the past couple of nights. Hopefully tonight will be better. I need me some Zzzzzzzzzz.......

Day 8, Weigh-In

Today's Food Diary

Today's Exercise Diary


First of all, today was my weigh in day. My weight today was 211.8 :) That's a loss of 1.6 lbs since I weighed in Friday morning and also gives me a total of 4.2 lost for the full week. Yeah! The best part is I'm less than 2 lbs from hitting my -100 again. Come on, let's get it. :)

I enjoyed my yogurt this morning SO much! It's a strawberry chobani yogurt. I put just a little bit of protein granola and some diced strawberries, layered it in my cup. It was pretty, delicious and satisfying!

 

Another one of my meals today was a gala apple with this protein granola bar. Can I just say these bars are freaking DELICIOUS?! omg I think it was my favorite thing I ate all day.

 

Other meals today include a Starbucks vivanno smoothie for breakfast, chili & fritos, and a chicken, artichoke & spinach  lean pocket with salad. 

Workouts today.... there were 2. I went to Curves this morning. It was my first day using Curves Smart. I plan to blog about it more soon once I can get some photos. But basically it's a chip I put into all the machines that tracks my progress and how hard I'm working. I get to look in the computer afterward and find out my calorie burn, how hard I worked each muscle group, etc. It's really cool!!! So today I know my 30 mins at Curves burned 440 calories.

Later in the day I went for a walk with my friend Jessica who lives in the next neighborhood over. If I went alone I wouldn't have gone as far because I was tired after my Curves workout. But walkin' and talkin' I was able to go for 52 mins, 2.55 mies, burning 303 calories.

I'm not gonna lie I was TIRED after all this working out!!! But in such a good way. I felt GOOD. I did take a nap though this evening :) And I'm still looking forward to going to bed a little early.

I was THRILLED with my FitBit stats today!!!! Check this out!!!!!!!

 All I can say is Woot woot!!!!! I feel just awesome about this! And I'm finding FitBit to be really fun. Yesterday I didn't come anywhere near this, it was kinda my lazy day. Today I was go go go. Besides workouts there was some errand running and I also did some chores at home that kept me moving around. Now that I think about it, no wonder I needed a nap :)

My favorite tidbit of today is probably the little stats I got at the end of completely my journal. MyFitnessPal told me "if every day were like today, you'd weigh 197 lbs in 5 weeks".... and FitBit told me "At this pace you will reach your goal of 180 lbs by June 30,2012"..... I find these things SO motivating!

A good start to the week. Bring it on.

Day 7 & FitBit Intro

Hey everybody. So today makes a full week of tracking my food and exercise. And so far I have to say, it doesn't suck :) I am adjusting and I feel good about myself knowing I'm doing the right things.

I'm a little concerned that I had a bout of dizziness this morning that lasted a couple of hours, even when laying down and sitting. I am worried it may be calorie intake related. I've had dizziness before, but only when first getting up... not lasting like that. It did go away but something i will have to keep an eye on.

We had a really lazy day today. Slept in, hung around the house this morning mostly because of the dizziness. I wrote a blog post catching up on some events of the last 6 months which I posted on Ian & Christie (the blog I share with my husband).

Ian's cousin ended up coming through town today with his new girlfriend we hadn't met and they were visiting Ian's dad on their way to Montana. So we went over there this afternoon to visit everybody and met the girlfriend (she was very nice).

We went grocery shopping and got things for a couple of dinners... decided to make turkey tacos tonight! We got some ground turkey and Ian made his own taco seasoning out of spices at home... did you know that the Ortega taco seasoning (and probably other brands) have a ton of calories? 120 cals per packet and we were making 2 lbs of beef so we would have used 2 packets... adding 240 cals total to the entire recipe. Because it's not just spices but contains corn starch and other things too. I had NO idea. SO.. we did without that. We did mix some fat free refried beans into our turkey mixture.

My two turkey tacos with 1/4 cup each of the turkey/bean mixture... lettuce, a little bit of 2% shredded mexican cheese and some garlic lover's salsa.... 280 calories.

After dinner I just felt antsy so I had to go for a walk even though today was supposed to be my day off from exercise. I just did a short walk... 27 mins and I forget the mileage offhand but it was less than 2 miles. We finished up watching a movie and then I wanted to get out of the house so Ian took me to Barnes & Noble and we browsed a bunch of magazines. By this time it had been about 3 hours since our tacos and we were hungry so we went to Chili's. I got a *cup* of chicken enchilada soup for just 190 calories :)

I ended up slightly over my calorie net today by just 60 cals but SO not worried about it because my cals are kinda low to begin with and I've had a defecit every other day all week long. Tomorrow is weigh in day!

So before I wrap it up.... for those who have never used a FitBit and are wondering what it's like... I wanted to share screenshots of all the cool stats I am able to see.

The top of my dashboard has the activity panel. Here is my completed one from yesterday:

 

When you are in the middle of a day and it isn't complete, you see progress bars for each category, like this:

 I didn't do nearly as much today as it was kind of a lazy day for me!

At the bottom of those two screenshots you'll see "You Have # Activity Records". If you click that link you can see detail for your activity records which are your exercise sessions.

The first activity record is from yesterday's geocaching/walking session. It shows the duration, the calories burned, how many steps I took (almost half my whole day in the workout.... shows how important they are).... distance, pace, etc. The bottom shows the time frame and calories burned across that. If you did things like intervals, you'd see the spikes of when you burned more cals.

 

This second activity record is for a fast walk I took last night.

The next thing on the dashboard is a graph section showing your activity throughout the day in two forms:

 

I find this so interesting!! I do hope to stride to have less sedentary time in my day when I can.

Next is your food gauge:

 

 

If you were only using FitBit, this is what you'd pay attention to for your calories... but because I use MyFitnessPal, it is more accurate there as FitBit makes adjustments to it for me so that is where I have to look. FitBit allows me to eat more than MFP does. Still figuring that out.

Lastly, FitBit can be worn in a wrist band at night if you would like it to track your sleep. I find this interesting, plus then it excludes the sleep session from your activity graph, which helps.

This one is also from yesterday. The top one is my night's sleep night before last. The 0 mins to fall asleep is not accurate (that's the night everything was coming up 0's)... but then yesterday's nap seemed to catch it pretty acurately. The pink bars show activity during the sleep period such as waking up, tossing and turning, getting up to go to the bathroom. You get a total of how long you were in bed (including what time you went to sleep) and how much actual sleep time you got. It's not 100% accurate as all it is detecting is movement... so if you are awake but not moving, it records it as sleep time, etc...but still very interesting data.

So that's a little overview on FitBit. So far I am really liking it and I've only had it for 2 full days! I love that Ian got into it too. he liked FitBit so much he got one AND started logging on MyFitnessPal now (he wanted nothing to do with it before).... so I am REALLY happy to have him back on this journey with me :)

Day 6...What Blister? Pshhh

No that doesn't mean the blister is gone, or even smaller... Lol. But basically I just didn't let it stop me from having an active day. Since I know this may be the beginning of a long road for me (the bump will keep growing and I may need surgery on it again).... I went ahead and bought some Crocs so I can have my heel exposed and nothing rubbing it.

So with my crocs on my feet... Hubby and I set out to do some geocaching. Seems we always start doing this again in March every year :) Today's weather was GORGEOUS! We found a trail around a lake not too far from home that had a whopping four geocaches right along the way. We found all of them in the beginning part of the walk and the just finished the trail as a nice brisk walk after that.





Ian along the trail to the first geocache.





Pretty spot!





The third cache was cleverly hidden in a log!





The lake and mountains :)

So that was our geocaching walk. Since the actual geocaching part slows you down because you're looking for the cache, writing in the log, putting it back, looking up where the next one is, etc... Our walk time is long compared to if we were just walking.

We were out there for 1 hour, 4 minutes. Total distance 1.8 miles. My calories burned, 340-something.

We were really craving pizza today, so after our walk we went to the nearby shopping area and finally tried Marco's Pizza which they offer by-the-slice. MyFitnessPal said 1 slice of pepperoni there was 290 calories. So Ian and I each ordered 1 slice of pepperoni. Problem was.... The slice size seems to be somewhat... Uh.... Haphazard? Unplanned? Undefined?





One slice was almost twice as big as the other!! Well I took the smaller one because I knew it would fill me up anyway and Ian ate the bigger one. Everyone has said the slices there are HUGE and mine was more average, what you would pull out of a pizza normally. But I still went with the 290 calorie count because who knows. By the way.... It was delicious!! I think it's my new favorite pizza. As long as I only eat 1 slice (which I always do) it will fit into my day. I think going out for a slice is so much better than ordering a pizza at home because.... No leftovers!! That's the key. When we have leftovers I end up having a slice for breakfast the next day... Then lunch.... Then snack.... Lol. This is much more reasonable.

After this we walked across the shopping center so I could go to Lane Bryant. Unfortunately, I had to buy a new pair of size 16 jeans even though I'm a mere 5-7 lbs away from fitting back into my size 14's... Why? Because it's my ONLY pair and today it finally wore all the way through on my inner thigh where my thighs rub together. Grrr! And even when I was in my 14's, I would wear the 16's on period week and stuff.... So yeah I definitely needed to just suck it up and by them. I also found a few v-neck t shirts there with sleeves at the elbow!!! That is SO hard for me to find, I bought it in 4 colors. Definitely want my arm surgery someday but for now, I have to hide the upper arms.

After all that we came home, hung around a while and decided on a nap. We had a few obstacles though...





3 cats on the bed!!! Sheesh!! But we kicked them all out and took our nap :) I am finally starting to sleep better than I was earlier this week. The nap felt so good!

And FINALLY.... An update on the FitBit. It worked today! Something must have fixed it when it reset itself at midnight, because this morning it was working AND filled in the stuff from yesterday that had been all 0's. Same for Ian's, his was working too. So today has been really fun and interesting seeing everything the FitBit says. However I think this post has been long enough already so I'll save more FitBit details for tomorrow!

But here are the basic stats from my day today...

11, 881 steps taken today
(I went for an extra walk tonight just to be sure I went over my 10,000 steps!)

5 floors climbed

5.41 miles traveled today

2702 calories burned


FitBit calculates calories a little bit more accurately. According to them, I sit ll have 570 cals I could eat today (but I'm done eating). It says "at your current pace you should reach your goal weight of 180 lbs by July 3. 2012"!! That would be awesome, but it's hard to believe right now!

Food today 1505 cals, burned 507 thru exercise, net 998 cals (well under 1200 goal).

TODAY'S FOOD DIARY     TODAY'S EXERCISE DIARY