I have had in mind coming back to healthy eating AND exercising but frankly the healthy eating thing has been a pretty big change from how I’ve been eating for weeks, or even months…  And so I felt pretty justified in putting off the exercise thing a bit.  But a series of work-from-home days this week had me walking up multiple flights of stairs several times a day, and feeling winded after that minor effort, so the realization that I need to get on the stick was coming.

In addition, I know that diet is 95% of weight loss.  It’s so easy to eat an extra 500 calories.  It’s so hard to burn off 500 extra calories.  But somehow the two are synergistic together, I think because I tend to do MUCH better on my diet when I am also making the effort to exercise.

The day started out promising - instead of showering and getting dressed this morning, I jumped directly into workout wear.  That’s where the good intentions remained for many hours.  Breakfast.  Making cornbread.  Making chili.  Doing a few things around the house.  Playing on the internet.  You get the picture.  Doing everything EXCEPT getting my butt out the door to go to the gym.  Finally late afternoon I was reading someone’s blog who said how much better she had felt after going to the gym, and that was it, it pushed me to step away from the computer and head out the door.

I did 50 minutes on the elliptical and 20 walking on the treadmill.  Plus its 5 min each way to the gym (which I consider my warm up and cool down).  My thighs hurt, but I feel really good.

I ate more than my fair share of corn bread, which is only modestly offset by the fact that it’s a low-cal recipe.  I’d wanted to find out if the cornmeal I can find in France for polenta can be used for cornbread (it can) and one of the Thanksgiving stuffing recipes I’m considering will need cornbread, so I needed a trial run.  Plus, I’ve always liked cornbread.

Reporting on yesterday’s dinner is easy.  I had potato-leek soup and made a bunch of veggies (roasted parsnips, roasted beets, roasted apple-pear compote, and green beans).  I ate a bit of each of those, and took just one bite of the meat fondue.  Yuck.  I seem to have gone kind of off meat these past few days, everything I’ve had just has made me turn my head away.  So there was no struggle to control myself at dinner - I ate some of each of the veggies.