8:00 a.m. - Had a great day yesterday and I’m stepping up to the plate again today. The plan is to weigh, record food, stay under 1000 calories, complete one long workout and two short ones.
DS and DIL came over yesterday evening with Jake and Scout, cute little grandkiddies. Scout handed me a squashed up and mangled package of Whoppers with a big grin on his face and said, “I saved these for you, Nana! I got a whole lot of Halloween candy and I saved this for you!” I thanked him profusely, waited till he left, and tossed them out. They were all squashed up in the package so he must have been carrying them around all week in his pocket or something. Bless his heart, I don’t think I could have carried a package of Whoppers around all week without succumbing to the temptation at some point. Way to go, Scout! You rock!
I’m weighing in with my old friend 165.5 this morning. Maybe I should just have it tattooed on my forehead.
8:50 - Well, damn! I’ve been sitting here reading and blogging and I finally decided to put my HR monitor on. I keep staring at it and wondering if it’s broken. My HR is at 44% and it says I haven’t burned a single calorie in 5 minutes. That can’t be right? Can it? It’s showing my HR at 44% and that’s floating around between 43% and 44% and it’s showing my BPM at 72 to 73 so it seems to be working. Wait–it shows I just burned a calorie. One calorie in 6 minutes??????? That’s not possible, is it? I’ve had three cups of coffee. I should be doing something…Okay, that’s it. I really want to just sit here and read the paper but I’m going to do a quick 15 minute workout to get my metabolism moving.
9:20 - Did high intensity step aerobics for 15 minutes. HR Monitor (henceforth known as HRM) says I burned 148 calories in the last 18 minutes (8.2 per minute). Now we’re cookin’! I don’t know what to think about all this. The HRM has given me some insight into how my metabolism works but it’s some scary stuff. How long would my heart rate stay at 44% if I didn’t do a workout? Is this normal? I mean, the doctors tell me I have a low metabolism but I’m not sure what that means with regard to a lot of stuff. I know I have to be really careful with my diet but what does “really careful” mean? On the one hand, common knowledge is that you shouldn’t go below 1200 a day but I don’t seem to be losing at 1200 a day. I followed that advice for quite a while and didn’t go anywhere. I think I’m going to go back through my blog and try to figure out what happened when I went to 1200.
10:00 - I wish I’d kept putting all my daily menus in the correct category. That would make it real easy to check. Unfortunately, I quit doing that a long time ago and now they’re all mixed in with the general category. I’m having to go back and move them all to the Daily Menu category. Made it up to the first of October so far. In the meantime, I’ve burned 180 calories in the last 43 minutes (4.1 per minute).
12:00 - Doing great so far. Went out and raked leaves and burned 205 calories in the last 40 minutes. Surprisingly, DH is the one who needed to take a break and then we’re going out to do the backyard in a little while. I was the one raking and all he was doing was standing over the bag and scooping the leaves into it.
Took a look at all the daily menus and realized that I’ve been pretty negligent about keeping track of everything. Lots of times, I recorded breakfast and lunch but didn’t enter dinner. I know I do that sometimes when I know I kept to my calorie count and didn’t bother to enter the last little bit but it makes it difficult to see a correlation with the calories and weight loss. As far as I can tell, I bumped it up to 1200 calories sometime around the middle of August. Of course, that’s when I started back to work and wound up sitting on my behind a lot instead of running around so it’s difficult to tell if it had any effect on the weight loss.
Whoo Hooo! 46 minutes and 229 calories gone! That’s right at 5 calories per minute!
1:30 - Raked leaves for another 40 minutes. I’m going to count leaf raking as my long workout today since my arms are killing me and I burned up a bunch of calories doing it. Only one more short workout to go. Think I’ll save it for this evening when my metabolism is real low again.
4:00 - I’ve been fixing dinner. Slicing and dicing. Dang! I’m down to around 2 calories per minute again. Time for another quickie workout and then I’m calling it a day on the exercise.
4:46 - Okay, burned 170 calories in 20 minutes. Got that heart rate back up there to 8.5 per minute. Hopefully, it’ll stay up for a while because I am done, Done DONE!
5:20 - Burned 150 calories in the last 30 minutes so I’m still doing 5 per minute. I HATE having this low metabolism but I love feeling like I can do something about it! Now, I’m going to chow down on some delicious fresh summer rolls that I stuffed with strips of leftover pork tenderloin from yesterday, edamame beans, rice vermicelli, red pepper, cucumber, carrot strips, romaine, and cilantro. Top it off with a little Spicy Thai Chile Sauce and I’m in dieter’s Nirvana.