Tag: biking

Fat Fridays: Which Direction are You Looking?

Losing weight is kind of a funny thing. You drop some pounds and you look at yourself and you’re so excited. I look great! I look so much better! Isn’t this wonderful! But then, after a while you start looking at yourself and thinking, man, I need to lose so much more weight. Look at all this fat. This is so depressing. 

It really has to do with your perspective. Which direction are you looking? If you’re looking backwards then losing weight feels great. I used to be THIS much and now I’m a lot less!! Yay me!! But when you’re looking forwards, it can get depressing. I want to weigh THIS much and I still have so far to go. Uggh. 

This week I found myself kind of in the UGGH category. I’ve lost a lot of weight (44 pounds as of this morning!), but in order to hit my goal weight, I still have 62 pounds to go. Argh. I’ve been having to encourage myself. I’ve been keeping a log of my weight loss and I went back and looked at the numbers. Ok, a month ago you weighed this much, you’ve made a lot of progress! 

It also makes me think about the WHY of weight loss. Why am I doing this? I know when I was in my teens and twenties, weight loss was about achieving a certain look. I want to wear THIS size clothing. I want my measurements to be THIS much. If I can look like that model in the magazine, then I will be happy. And I think I thought I would be happy because then I would be attractive enough. Which is what our culture teaches us. You have to look a certain way or you are not really worthy of being loved. 

Well, I have been happily married for almost twenty-two years now and my husband has proved to me that he is capable of loving me through thick or thin. And while I would love to look my best for him, I don’t feel like I have to look a certain way to be lovable. (I say that breezily, but it was a long, hard-fought journey to get to this place.) 

I now find myself being motivated a lot more by health concerns. I am prediabetic. I know that my weight is a major contributing factor. I have spent long periods of my life completely inactive and I feel like I’m missing out on things I want to do because my body simply isnt’ strong enough to do it. I want to climb mountains, go on long bike rides, go running. I want to have energy to do active things with my kids instead of just watching from a chair. 

These past six months as I have been exercising daily, losing weight, getting stronger, I have started to appreciate and love my body more. Look at you! Look at what you just did! I am excited to think of all the things I will be able to do as I shed more and more weight. 

But, all of this brings me to the final point I want to make. This week I was at the park taking a long walk, almost four miles. It was so nice to be outside in nature. The sunlight was at that perfect evening slant, the trees were shimmering in the breeze, the grass was extra green. It was just a perfect time. And I was thinking about my goals, ONE DAY, I’ll be at the weight I want. ONE DAY I’ll have arrived. And I was thinking about my WHY for weight loss. And it occurred to me that I was already doing my WHY. I was taking time for myself to get out in nature and walk. I was being active and doing something I liked. I don’t have to wait for some nebulous time in the future when my scale finally says the magic number. I’m already living the life that I want. Right here, in the present. And instead of swiveling my head back and forth: future, past; focusing on the here and now seems better. 

Fat Fridays: Vacations and Diets

I went on a vacation last week. We were gone for five days. I talked to my trainer ahead of time and we talked about things I could do to stay on track with my diet and exercise, but in the end I told her that my main goal was to simply not gain weight while I was gone. And I am happy to say that I accomplished that goal. But it was hard. 

One of the problems was that all the grownups on the trip were tired and weary and cooking was not a top priority. We did a lot of pizza, hotdogs and sandwiches. Cereal. It was a vacation after all. Cooking healthy meals is not exactly what you feel like doing when you are relaxing. I think the other problem is that our family, and the other family we were vacationing with, had all just finished a very long, hard school year. So we were especially tired. 

In order to make up for not eating super healthy I decided I would get more movement in. I made sure I was getting my 10,000 steps a day. I went on walks, bike rides, went swimming…In fact, on the day we went to the beach I got over 20,000 steps! Three miles of that was walking barefoot in a wet swimsuit down the beach. Not something I recommend for overweight people. I’m still recovering from rub burns. I think I was a little obsessive about getting exercise. I got up early (not on purpose, my inner clock was still set to “gettting-kids-to-school” time) and then I would find a private place and do the workout my trainer had set for me. Then I would take a walk in the neighborhood where we were staying. If I didn’t have all my steps at the end of the day, I took another walk. But it worked. Five days of eating pizza and hotdogs and sandwiches and one trip to an icecream place where I indulged in chocolate icecream with all kinds of chocolatey toppings, and I managed to not gain any weight. 

Of course, I didn’t lose any weight either. But the good news is, since I’ve come home, I’ve doubled down on the healthy eating and exercise and have already dropped two pounds in three days. And, after all the indulgence, the healthy food tastes really good. 

I keep having to remind myself that my diet and exercise are not a short-term thing that I’ll just do until I reach my goal. This has to be a complete lifestyle change. Which means that it has to fit with all areas of my life, including vacations. So, I am feeling a bit more confident about the future as I have now tackled staying-healthy-while-on-vacation and have passed the test. 

Fat Fridays: Fitbit Charge 4

Fitbits. Anyone got one? 

Just before Mother’s Day my husband told me he wanted to buy me one, so go and do some research and tell me which one to get. Wow! Ok. I had never really thought about getting one so I knew absolutely nothing about them. I started to do some research and I found this article on google that gave top reasons for buying a Fitbit, and reasons you shouldn’t buy a Fitbit. It was helpful. The one thing that stood out was when they said You should NOT buy a Fitibit if you are relying on this device to motivate you to exercise. They said, if you are already motivated then it’s a good tool, but by itself, it doesn’t have the power to change you into someone who has the discipline to get up and exercise. 

Good point. I remember the days of thinking, Well, if I only had THIS product, or THIS exercise program, or THIS membership then I would get myself in shape. And it’s just not true. If you have the desire to start exercising and eat healthier, you don’t need any fancy gadgets to make it happen. You just make it happen with whatever you have. 

BUT, sometimes those gadgets are pretty fun and they DO make things easier!

So, just over a week ago I got a Fitbit Charge 4 and I am having a lot of fun with it. It tracks how many steps you take, your heart rate, how many stairs you climb, how many calories you burn (though I read an article that says it has about a .3 error rate, so you have to take off about a third of those calories to get a more accurate number).  It keeps track of how well you are sleeping, how much movement you are getting throughout the day, how many workouts you’ve done in a week. It also has exercise programs you can start so that it tracks your walk or your run, or your bike ride or other exercises and tells you how far, how fast, etc. It has a place to track weight loss and how much you drink and eat (though I haven’t bothered using those features since I’m already tracking what I eat on my personal trainer app). 

This past week I lost three pounds. And I think a lot of that might have been because I was moving more. The Fitbit has a goal that you get up and move nine times a day and it buzzes to give you a reminder. So, I’ve been getting up more to just walk around. It is also tracking your steps and as I’ve seen how close I am to getting 10,000 steps in a day, I’ve been motivated to just take a short walk around the neighborhood or walk around my yard in order to reach my 10,000 steps goal. And then, of course, losing three pounds is very motivating so that makes me want to move more too! 

So, my conclusion… If you are counting on a Fitbit to make you suddenly want to be a fit and active healthy person, I wouldn’t spend the money. But, if you are already on a journey in that direction, then a Fitbit is a great tool. 

I’m going to get off here now, it’s time to get moving! 

Fat Fridays: Quick Update

So, last week I had some big slip-ups involving cake. And pasta. And maybe something else I can’t remember? I figured out why I was in binge-mode, but I was still bummed at my set-back. On Saturday I decided to weigh myself, kind of as a punishment. Here, weigh yourself so you can see how badly you did from messing up. I weighed myself, and low and behold, I had lost three pounds. 

????????

Life doesn’t make sense. 

This means I hit my thirty pound weight loss milestone! Yay!!! 

This was very inspiring and I jumped right back on the wagon, and have done very well food-wise this week. 

In other news, I ran two miles yesterday, two minutes faster than before. Still ridiculously slow. I realized that right now, my running time for two miles is the same time I used to have in college for running three miles. And I wasn’t fast in college. But, progress is progress. We take what we can get. The other big progress is that, after running, I was not crazy sore. And today I don’t seem to have much lingering after effects either. 

This week I have been making a slow shift to gluten-free. I’m not being legalistic about it, I have told myself I can have bread if I want to, it’s an option, but I’m trying to have some gluten free options readily available. This week I’ve been eating VANS gluten free ancient grains waffles that I found at KROGER. They’re pretty good. I like them because they have a bunch of different grains and aren’t just rice, potato and corn flours. 

I also had a first this week. I went biking one day for my exercise. I was supposed to bike eight miles. I was happily biking along when my phone in my pocket beeped, reminding me of an upcoming appointment in ten minutes. I was at least fifteen minutes away from my house. It was a zoom meeting where I was supposed to be actively talking, not just silently observing. Yikes. I rode as fast as I could toward my house but was still a mile away when it was time for the meeting to start. So, I got off the bike, logged into the zoom meeting and kept my camera off. The person running the meeting asked if we could turn our cameras on, and another person chimed in to say that they were driving and would turn their camera on soon. I jumped on this excuse and said, Yes, I am heading home, not quite there, I’ll turn on my camera in a couple minutes. Then, I put the phone in my pocket, where I could still hear the meeting and started riding like crazy towards my house. I almost made it, I was maybe two minutes from my house, but then they asked everyone to go around and introduce themselves. I had to get off the bike so I could hit the right buttons and turn on my speaker to introduce myself, but then I was out of breath and breathing hard cause I had been pushing so hard to get home. I ended up apologizing and saying, sorry, I’m on my bike, out of breath, almost home. 

Sigh. 

Technology creates weird situations. 

Well, that’s my update for now. I’ll see you all next week!