I guess I run now

Like ya do. Like everyone do.

So I waited & waited for my doctor’s “girls” (that’s what the receptionist called them) to call me back to talk about my thyroid test results. No luck. I’m really starting to hate my doctor now.

So I figured I’d follow the thyroid diet, take my supplements, and make an appointment for late June when I’ll have to head back home to fly out to see my mom anyway. But the last few days my joints have been crazy, painful, stiff. Argh. Okay, I can deal. Whatever. What I can’t deal with is waking up this morning to see my eyes almost shut from swelling. Funny. When I first started thinking I might have a hypothyroid condition, I checked out my eyes to see if I could see any puffiness at all. Looked closely. Trying to detect any slight changes. Turns out, when it happens, you don’t really have to look very closely at all to see the swelling. It’s what you call as plain as the lids swollen almost shut on your face.

So…given that one of my mom’s symptoms was losing every blessed hair on her head, I figured I’d stop playing around, stop puttin’ off, and book an appointment before I woke to an even bigger shock. They got me in at nine on Monday, which means I’ll leave here Sunday morning to drive down, spend the day there Monday, and drive back on Tuesday. Not fun & I really hate losing those 3 days writing, but I’d also hate losing all my hair, so there you go…or there I go. Ugh.

Anyway, the perfect pedometer week is on temporary back order. I got my food star yesterday & walked an hour on the beach with hubby & dog, but I’m not pushing much beyond that until I get back next week. It’s tough to get those 10,000 steps in even without adding two full days of driving in there.

Oh, I’m all excuses & aches & pains. Boring, I know. But with luck by this time next week I’ll be getting back to my old self again & getting out there again.

Until then…here’s today’s plan:

Breakfast: small bowl of cheerios

Lunch: will be salad with egg (added: & 1/4 cup bean salad)

Dinner: green curry (with lite coconut milk) veggie dish over whole wheat rotinis rather than the more traditional white rice or rice noodles. I love a good curry, so any way to serve it without the added rice calories is  awesome! (worked out okay. I’ve been buying a whole wheat blend pasta that hubby actually likes, a sort of transition pasta on our way to all whole wheat)

Snack: good slice of cheese (about 2 oz?) & a glass of red wine.

Exercise: Did a 1/2 hour walk to the grocery store in the morning. Now thinking another 1/2 hour at least on the portage. Update: did 1 hour & 15 mins on the portage. I could’ve gone longer, but worried the dog was over-heating. Going to overheat myself in the sauna in a few…see if I can’t get my heart rate up a bit.

Water: been good about those 4 pints a day, so no changing that!

Hubby’s gone to Wausau, WI for the day. He and a friend will be attending a John Deere auction, apparently. So I’m going to drive…that’s right, drive…across the bridge for a nice grilled salmon & salad, write for a while, take my walk along the portage, get groceries, and come home around 5 for a nap. The dog will want walking after that, so with luck I’ll earn 1.5 stars today!

Breakfast: HB egg & coffee

Lunch: Grilled Salmon salad (dressing on side)

Dinner: depends on what looks fresh at the store

Exercise: will be walking as usual

Water: must have at least 2 pints with lunch for starters.

Have a happy day chicks!

May be a boring one today (which, no, doesn’t distinguish this post from my others at all). Decided against the ice cream last night…seemed like the right thing to do.

Food:

Breakfast: coffee, 1/2 banana, HB egg

Lunch: salad with HB egg small bowl of rice

Dinner: will probably be cheese burgers (at home, but with bun & all!), 3-4 bean salad, & a green salad maybe some beets. I passed half of my burger off on hubby before I even took the first bite…figured if I didn’t do it then, I’d never get that half off my plate. After dinner update: had a cup of lite ice cream…240 calories, but so very good.

Exercise: walking 50 minutes so far…need another 3200 steps, though. Update: another 25 minute walk after dinner did the trick.

Water (why not?): 2 3 pints towards goal.

Okay, so this is Monday’s post with all kinds of confessions about Sunday.

First of all, let’s just say that I’m starting the perfect pedometer week over. Giving myself a mulligan, a free pass, a do over. Yesterday I took a 30-minute walk in the afternoon figuring hubby & I would take a long drive with plenty of beach walks to break it up & get the rest of my steps in.

Not so much. Our friends called around 5:30 to ask if we wanted to go with them to take their boat on its maiden voyage. They are our best friends out here & we love boating with them (especially since we don’t have a boat). So they got a new, bigger boat this year cause they also have 5 children under the age of 7 & needed the room for the kids. Two of those kids are twin one-year-olds, btw. Now…if it were me with 5 kids, I’d have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning, much less packing everyone up to go boating. But this is only reason 536 why I don’t have kids. Love them, but one of the things I love most about them is their whole not mine-ness.

Anyway, they like having us along both for company & for help corralling the little ones.

So we say yes. & I’m secretly thinking we’ll be back on solid ground before sunset (up here that’s close to 10:00 these days) & hubby & I can just walk along the portage. But we got back at 10:30 & we ended up driving a carload of kids back to their place, unpacking the car, etc, so it was 11:30 before we got home…exhausted. So to bed with only 6029 steps. Damn!

Oh, did I mention the wine? No, I didn’t mention the wine? There was wine. We were christening the boat, so of course there was wine. 1/2 a bottle for the boat & 1 1/2 bottles for us. Okay, mostly me. Argh. Does it help I had only a small salad for dinner? No? I didn’t think so.

Okay, fine. Back at it. This time I’ll get my perfect pedometer week & I’m adding in a perfect week of yellow food stars on top of that. Eh gads! Why do my failures inevitably lead to me taking on bigger challenges?

Anyway, quiet day at home today, no cook outs, no big food temptations. We had porkchops with rice & veggies & salad for dinner, breakfast was a hardboiled egg & lunch was a no go for some reason. Anywho,  I bought some lite ice cream for a snack later. Tough part will be measuring it out, but that’s the price you pay for mint chocolate ice cream at 120 calories a 1/2 cup, right?!

I hope everyone (in the states) had a nice long weekend!

Update: got an hour & 10-minute walk in, earned my food star thanks, in part, to a 30-minute sauna that made drinking my 4 pints of water super easy to do! Weather calls for rain tomorrow, so I’ll need to be ready to drop everything to get my walk in whenever the weather permits. No gym membership up here, but I might buy a few day passes for the rec center just to make certain I get my hour of exercise in every day. Just 199 steps to go before I reach 10,000 today…that’s a walk to the basement & back.

Slept until 8:30 & have done nothing all day but write. One super short walk with the dog, but I’m up to only 1263 steps so far & not feeling the love right now for walking.

Hubby wants to take a drive later (one of the things we like to do in the summer is explore the Keewenaw on tire & foot), so I’m going to push for some place where we can walk. Maybe he’d go for a short drive to Hungarian falls, a hike up the falls, & then a nice long drive along the coast. I think I’ll push for that or, at least for a walk along a beach somewhere. Don’t want to lose my chance at another 10,000 steps today & I also don’t want to have to get there by circling every room in the house for hours on end.

Have a nice Sunday everyone!

Huge stress blowout yesterday…family, work, hubby’s diss, stupid doctor. The upside is I ate not so much because I had no appetite (me, no appetite, somebody record the date). The downside is last night was my second in a row with a migrane.

Argh.

Now I need to get moving & head for the portage for my walk or else I’m not going to get those numbers added to my pedometer & that would suck. Big time.

A little blog reading should get me in the mood to move. Let’s see who’s posted today.

Update: Okay, yeah, I was a little nervous I wouldn’t get my steps in today. No motivation, tired, sore, stressed. But after I checked in with some folks here, I managed 1 hour 10 minutes this morning. Then hubby & I took a 25 minute walk after dinner, so I’m in safe territory with 11256 & plenty of daylight left to burn.

Tomorrow’s goals inlcude another 1.5 hours of walking, hitting my food goals, and finishing up this stupid essay I’ve been struggling with.

Same dealio as before. I woke up & decided I could get more work done at home today (didn’t want to have to carry 4-5 books with me over the bridge to the coffeeshop to work), so hubby, dog, & I took a long walk by the canal (portage) instead. This time we did an hour & 35 minutes. It’s weird, but by the time I get back to the car, my joints are tighter & more painful than before. I assumed they’d loosen up along the way, but that just isn’t happening!

Anyway, this is the third day in a row that the W8 challenge has pushed me to exercise for at least an hour, so my pedometer’s been getting a workout too. Which brings me to my title: I think I’ll aim for a full week of no less than 10,000 steps. This used to be easy-peasy when I was running, but these days it’s like a huge accomplishment if I break 5,000. I’m at 10675 so far for today, 12459 for yesterday, and 11080 for Wednesday. My Omron pedometer (which I don’t get paid to endorse cause they’d never let someone in my shape endorse their product anyway, but which I do recommend cause it doesn’t need a belt clip, fits nicely in your pocket, & never gets accidentally erased back to 0 steps) is perfect for this cause it stores a week’s worth of steps.

So…not even back to blogging a week & I have a fresh new blogroll of really great bloggers, the W8 challenge to keep me moving & honest & motivated, and a goal of 10,000 steps a day for a full week. I’m also really so very happy to be back in touch with folks from before who inspired & challenged me so much last year.

Other updates: put a call into the doctor who wasn’t in the office today. Apparently the best I can hope for right now is that they’ll have “his girls” call me back to discuss my test results late this afternoon. His office is back at home, now 9 hours away, so if he’s not going to treat me (and his failure to call me to discuss my results suggests he thinks the results & my symptoms aren’t a big deal), I’d like to learn that in a phone call rather than an office visit. Also, because of my insurance, I have to wait 30 days from my last appointment before I can switch doctors & I’d prefer not to do the long drive to have an appointment with this doctor if I’m just going to get disappointed and then have to wait 30 full days before I can dump him & get one who will treat me.

Okay, the health complaints are old & boring, so it’s time to cut that out.

Our dinner party went well last night. Hubby didn’t try the whole wheat flour for the pizza crusts: I suspect we’ll try that out on our own before we risk it with company. And I wasn’t very good, but I wasn’t all that bad. Breakfast was 2 eggs with a handfull of veggies, lunch was a salad, dinner was 3 small pieces of pizza (yes, 3!), a salad, and 1/2 cup apple crisp with 2 tbs vanilla ice cream, a beer, and a small snifter of Grand Marnier while we played cards. Argh! Still worlds away from what I would’ve eaten were it not for blogging, but worlds away from where I need to be in terms of willpower.

& we were up so late last night that all I thought of this morning was WALK. So I totally forgot to eat breakfast, which means no gold star for food today. Although I hit the salad goal for today already & am 2 pints into my 4 pints of water.

Okay, that’s about all the boring stuff I have to report today.

Cheers Chicks!

Sunnygee posted about saying “no” to some pretty big temptations & I was thinking about what I said “no” to & felt good about lately.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, but maybe I want to make this a separate page & add to it daily/weekly:

• I said no to wimping out on the walk home & calling hubby to pick me up.
• I said no when a friend asked me if I wanted a drink last night & drank 3 pints of water instead.
• I said no when that same friend asked me if I wanted a bowl of ice cream.

Of course, this blog should be about saying “yes” to good things like healthy food, water, exercise, & emotional support from other bloggers, but I had a good time with my NOs yesterday: they made me feel in control.

Plan today: breakfast of scrambled eggs with tomatoes, salad for lunch, walk into & out of town, write, clean house for our dinner party tonight, try to convince hubby to try making one pizza with a whole wheat crust for the party, eat mostly salad & enjoy (rather than gorge on) one slice of pizza, drink water.

Update & THANKS for all the encouragement ya’ll! Well, since we’re having company for dinner, I’m in the same boat as getupnow, thinking about cleaning. So rather than walk to the coffeeshop (get all sweaty & tired & end up rushing through cleaning & dinner prep), I dragged hubby away from the computer & dog out of his nap & we went for a walk along the canal. My plan was to get us at least 30 minutes away from the car for a full hour long walk (and one gold star), but we managed 45 minutes up & 40 back (quicker cause the rain inspired us to move a bit faster & take the shorter routes).

Got home & read some. Then hubby brought in the mail, including my test results. My TSH is at 3.32, which, according to the newest standards, makes me hypothyroid…not by a huge amount, but enough when combined with my symptoms to suggest I probably need the T3 & T4 tests and some meds. Of course, no news from my doctor who is probably using the outdated norms & assumes I’m just making all this misery up. I’ll call his office tomorrow to see about a follow-up, but I may end up saying “NO!” to this doctor if he doesn’t help! In other news, my cholesterol is up 5 points to 225, HDL is excellent at 64, LDL is “borderline” at 131, and Triglycerides are just a wee bit better than normal at 149. I’d like to get my cholesterol down to about 200, but that would require one of those incredible getupnow acts of super-human will & I’m more inclined to nap at the moment.

I’ve been going back & forth about walking into town. Hubby assures me we’ll walk & sauna tonight, but if something comes up…I’ll be in trouble. We just rolled into town last Friday, so something–some trip to visit a friend or, like last night, some last-minute dinner plans–is bound to come up.

Not to mention the fact that all morning I’ve just been sitting around reading blogs & FB & dreading turning my focus to these gawdawful revisions I need to make…soon! I’ll focus better if I’m away from the house (laundry, cleaning, dinner prep, the phone) & I’ll get my exercise to boot, so why am I going back & forth on this…one word…HILLS!

It’s nothin’ but hills between me & the next town over. I used to do this walk every day last summer, but then when I was done working at the coffee shop, I’d walk another mile or so to hubby’s office at the university & he’d drive us home. So…no huge hills at the end of the walk. Well, hubby’s not a grad student at that university any more, so no office to walk to. That means I’m facing a pleasant walk to town that’s mostly downhill to the bridge & then a deadly walk home, uphill, at this grade you just wouldn’t believe.

I guess what I’m saying is that the real problem here is really four words…I am a WIMP!

Oh, what the hell. I’m off.

Update: I remembered something important about this weight-loss thing…small victories mean a lot. So I laced up my shoes, threw my laptop into a backpack, and headed out. Only a 35-minute walk there, but a 45-minute walk home. It’s around 4 miles roundtrip & not an unpleasant trip at that. I also got in 3 good hours writing, came home, cooled off, & put in another hour on this essay that is finally starting to come together, I think (hope!).

The hills were a bear. I brought my cell thinking that if I wimped out when I got to the coffeeshop, I could always call & have hubby pick me up. But then I figured if I didn’t tackle the damn hills today, that would give me a reason not to tackle them tomorrow too–I had the excuse all ready, “I’ll do the return trip when I’m stronger & in better shape.”–Well, I’m in miserable shape, but I took the hill slow & steady & lived to tell the tale. So there’s no excuses for me tomorrow either!

Now hubby’s downstairs making a veggie & pasta dish, so I gotta run or he will use the bleached pasta rather than the whole wheat stuff. & since my rule with pasta is that it must be at least equal parts veggies & pasta, I’ve got some supervising (read: nagging) and chopping to do if I want it to be just this side of healthy.

I was planning a “day 2″ or “day 3″ title, but it’s taking too much brain power to figure out which day of my new better thyroid diet I’m on, so there you go.

We’ve eliminated most, if not all, of the bad foods & have started walking every night (okay, only 2 nights so far, but that’s a start). Last night only 2 miles, but we had a long sauna in the afternoon that wore us both out. Yeah…I’m dragging hubby along for the ride here. A little over 3 miles the night before last. Again, it’s a start. I’m hoping to do 4 tonight. And tomorrow I plan to walk into town to do some work at the coffee shop, which will add to my mileage for the day.

I didn’t bring the scale with me since there aren’t any perfectly level floors in this house anyway & the summer I did try to weigh here, it was just frustrating as all hell trying to get any consistent numbers. So I’m going to have to go by the fit of my clothes to see how things are progressing. First sign will be the loosening of my new watch band…the clerk made it a little tight by taking out too many links, but I decided to leave it that way. A skoch uncomfortable, but a good & constant reminder that I don’t need any cookies or other junk!

Yeah, that’s pretty much it for these parts. We’re trying to eliminate the bad foods & highly processed foods (so anything with more than 8 ingredients is out without a second look), walking, and taking long saunas. I have to admit that I haven’t felt this relaxed in months. In fact, I took some time this week to settle in with a book my MIL gave me for Christmas, a new PD James mystery & it’s been lovely just reading for fun. Unfortunately the book is done & I have some serious revisions to make to a couple of articles within the next week, but that’s okay…that’s all I have to do with my days right now.

Being at the UP house has been great so far. It’s practically empty except for the stuff that we left here for the tenant to use during the winter & the stuff we brought from the other house…next to no clutter, no TV, no office to go to every day, and while we’ve got some light repairs planned for this place (and I need to hire someone to paint the exterior), there are no reminders here of the work we have to do pulling wallpaper & painting the new house. It is, as I had hoped, a nice little summer retreat! With luck hubby will find it easy to get his diss finished up here. If it looks like that ain’t happening, though, we’ll have to head home.

Okay, I’m boring me now. Time to check in with your exciting lives!

Cheers!

Update: I updated my blogroll…didn’t want to remove those links (1 fit chick, Josephine, soclose), but I’ve added some new ones from some wonderfully inspiring chicks. I’m also joining the W8Challenge that Delitaagain apparently won last month. I don’t think I’m in the running for a win, especially this late in the month, but I think it might provide some motivation to get me moving. Keeping very simple goals: food goals are to eat breakfast every day, eat at least one salad a day, and drink 4 pints of water (ugh, better get on that one); exercise for me is going to be one hour a day & I’ll be happy with my two dinky stars a day. Very happy.