Round

Today I did something that made me prouder than pretty much anything I’ve done all year.

I had a stressful day

Despite the miscarriage of 2 weeks ago my morale is holding up pretty well & I’ve not fallen into a depression, but the constant wait-hope-wait-hope cycle wears me down and I know I’m not dealing with everyday pressure as easily.

Today I had stress coming from several directions today - although Work Stress dominated. A big project is in the crunch phase at work, plus discussions around what a next job will be are heating up, and before I’d even had coffee I got the news I didn’t get a job I’d interviewed for recently.

I ended the day with one Big Stress event

The specifics of the stress don’t really matter - what matters is how I reacted.

As I walked out of the meeting, I immediately thought to myself “I need to get to the gym”.

Not “I need ice cream”

Not “I need pasta carbonara”

Not even “I need to call a friend” (although I did, on my way home before hitting the gym)

Nope, I thought “I need to get to the gym”

Last year when I had REAL life stress (dealing with cancer & needing to have a hysterectomy when I wanted to have a baby) I learned to make exercise into a stress-management technique.

But I went off exercise in early April and have only been back in the gym a handful of times in the past few weeks (when I slowly & gently went back to exercise).

So I was pretty surprised (but quite pleased) that my reaction was “‘must work out” instead of “must stuff my face” which is how I dealt with stress for most of my life.

Cool Huh?

What do you do when you are really stressed?

What if you were paid to do what you want to do anyway?

Companies are starting to pay their employees to successfully lose weight, exercise & do other healthy behaviors. This article says that the money involved is between $100-500 a year - which isn’t enough to pay for a family vacation, but it could easily offset some of the cost of a gym membership, diet coach or more fresh organic produce.

Wouldn’t it be great if you paid by the calorie?

I don’t have such a thing on offer - no one is offering to pay me to lose weight - and I’m not somebody who is very motivated by money - but the idea of being paid to do what I SHOULD DO (and want to do anyway) is quite appealing.

I’ve always thought that life would be so much easier if you paid for food by the calorie. Twinkies would cost a fortune, apples would be almost free. Bucket of fried chicken? Set you back $50, but a salad with grilled chicken breast only $3. Wouldn’t that be nice?

It would also be great if every time you lost weight you gained money. Get on the scale, -1 pound, +$10. Or even better as a motivator might be the reverse too - if you gain, you pay - that might keep me from going crazy on the weekend!

Alignment of purpose & weight loss synergies

Aligning various factors to make choices easier is one of the key steps to changing behavior

Aligning various factors to make choices easier is one of the key steps to changing behavior (any behavior). So if you want to lose weight, putting a lot of behaviors that will help you do that together helps. It also helps if you can think of those weight-loss behaviors as doing something MORE than helping you successfully lose weight.

That’s why adding a financial incentive to get you walking more or stepping away from the frosting could be a good motivator for a lot of people. Adding things together in the same direction creates Synergy.

I’ve worked on creating synergies for myself

For myself, one of the Alignments of Purpose I’ve created for myself is how I think about my weight loss journey. I now see taking care of how I eat & move as part of general self-care & self-respect. That means I’m doing it for more than vanity. I see it as integrally linked to my health. I see exercise as a big part of how I relieve stress. All of these help to align similar drivers to the same behaviors - which in turn helps me to actually do those things.

I’ve also reverse-engineered a few things too. Last year I started linking things I enjoyed - the small pleasures in life - to reducing stress. And then to my weight as well (since I’m all about Low Stress weight loss). Some of this is mentioned in my 100+ Things That Make Me Happy series, but it’s really related to aligning the purposes - enjoying my life fully helps me be more content in my life while losing weight, and that aligns the purposes I have.

What about you? What kind of synergistic goals do you have that help you align your life towards weight loss?

I know you’ve probably heard the expression “Springtime in Paris” but unless you’ve been here during that time you may not know how absolutely glorious it can be. It’s hard to imagine a better environment to go for a walk, get some exercise & generally enjoy healthy living!

My seventh year in Paris

I’ve lived in France for over 6 years now. I spent a year going around town in a daze of falling in love with the city, then my second year here I spent a year in a daze of falling in love with my husband. The third year I gave up my expatriate status to go local when we got engaged. The fourth year we got married. The fifth year we were happy newlyweds, but in the infertility saga. Last year I had a really hard year (endometrial cancer, hysterectomy) and this year I’m really enjoying Paris again. (And now walking for exercise in Paris again).

Lots to love

There are lots of things I like about living here - we have great cultural events available all the time, the architecture is stunning & the food is generally really good. It’s an easy city to get around in (great public transportation, and it’s a compact city too). Even if you take a taxi or car, there is always walking involved. It might be 5 or 10 minutes, not real exercise walking, but walking it is. When I’m out and about & see women in heels I don’t know how they do it.

Springtime in Paris

Spring in Paris is particularly magical because of all the blooming trees and other flowering plants. The weather is mild (in between days of rain to keep it all lush & growing). People are out in parks in droves (makes you wonder why they’re not at work or in school, in fact). Don’t get me wrong - the city is beautiful all year, but it’s particularly nice this time of year - the trees are no longer naked, there are still blooms everywhere & the weather is warm enough that just a sweater will do. In the summer it will be very hot, in the fall it will rain more, and winter can be gray & some days very cold. Right now it’s perfect. Especially for walking for exercise, because the weather makes it very comfortable, even if you go at a good clip.

Exploring Paris on foot

Exercise or not, the best way to see the city is walking. It seems like every building has neat architectural details. There are lots of small parks, benches, trees. Historical plaques on buildings explaining someone was born, died or had some kind of a major Historical Event every where you turn. Walking, you see all of this up close. You have time to see a building from different angles as you walk by. You can stop and look up at an interesting detail, or to read the plaque explaining what happened here (of course, if you do this too much you’ll lose some of the exercise benefits…).

Getting back to exercise

Since a lucky confluence of events have transpired (no travel this week, great weather, willingness to exercise) I’ve decided to spend as much time as I can exploring Paris on foot. Walking in a city is a good first step for training for hiking this summer. Sunday & yesterday I walked in a local park for 45 minutes each day. Today I organized myself to run several errands halfway across town on foot - walked there & figured I’d either have the stamina to walk back or I’d decide to get home another way.

It was a Glorious day. Birds singing, blue skies, bubbly clouds, warm enough that walking at a good pace I took off my jacket & carried it with me. Listening to audiobooks on my iPhone. Passing through beautiful parks, watching kids play, old people chatting & even a few old men playing chess! Certainly a good way to be Enjoying the Process of healthy living & exercise! In the end I upped the exercise quotient up even more, and walked home too.

Picture this

I’m going to try to take a picture of something wonderful I appreciate on each of my walks.

Here’s for today :

Cool fountain

Detail of the horses (yes, that’s a turtle spitting water!)

——————————-

Spring Focus Update

My own check-in

1. Eat Healthy : no problem there. Had Korean for dinner which had lots of sodium & meat that I think was marinated in sugar & soy & it puffed me up so…
2. Weigh In : 193 which is up one (see above!)
3. Exercise : went for a 45 min walk

Group Update

Group weekly check in : I decided to give another day to report on last week to the stragglers (although from next week on I will report group results on Tuesdays, and add any latecomers to the following week’s tally).

Interested in a way to help you Focus on being healthy & losing some weight by July 4th? You can still join us here - we’re not very picky about when people join, we want everyone who needs accountability & a little motivation to jump in!

Well, this week’s travel has gone well.

Nowhere very exciting - I’m in a suburb of Munich Germany, where I come every 2 weeks or so.  I just wasn’t traveling for 6 months last year while I dealt with my health.  It’s not my favorite spot on earth, but it’s okay.  The hotel where I usually stay (and did this time as well) is nice, clean, small, good restaurant, easy transport to the office & friendly.  They don’t have a gym, but the rooms are decent size. 

Years ago when I did my big weight loss effort I did yoga for a while.  I was terrible at it - I’ve never been very limber - but I really enjoyed it, remember how strong I felt & how relaxing it was.  I have several yoga DVDs and did use them from time to time after moving to Paris, but never regularly.  Two and a half years ago I was frantically trying to lose weight before my wedding & was really pushing myself on exercise & I seriously injured my back.  Herniated disk, acute sciatica, unable to walk, narcotics, sick leave, and about a week after the wedding - surgery (which worked!).  I was told in no uncertain terms by my orthopedic surgeon that I needed to be extremely careful in the future - regarding stretching and any kind of jarring activities (jumping, skiing, running - all OUT), and stregnth training out too. 

As a result, I’ve only done cardio since then, walking, swimming, elliptical, bike.  I can get a very good workout on these and truth be told it’s not like I’ve really missed doing other stuff, but recently I’ve been wondering if I can start to move back to a moderate level of flexibility.  My poor hamstrings are really tight.  I’m not talking about anything that would risk re-rupturing a disk, mind you (when they repair a disk it never completely heals due to the type of tissue). 

So my first week back on the road I tried a few yoga videos which were a great fit because they are VERY beginner (so am I!).  They’re also very short (10 min or 20 min).  It’s not a ‘calorie-torching-workout’, but hey, that’s okay, because a hotel room is maybe not the best ‘calorie-torching’ environment.

One thing I forgot about yoga is how much you have to support your own body weight.  Maybe not so hard for the skinny fit nymphs of yoga lore, but not so easy when you’re my size with a terribly out of shape upper body.  Still, it’s easier to see progress when you’re starting from this low, and this week, two weeks after my first short foray back into yoga, I can already hold certain positions longer.

Babysteps, babysteps, babysteps. 

• Small sessions of new exercise
• Starting with really easy levels
• Doing some exercise in my hotel room instead of doing nothing

I confess to being one of those people who hold a few conflicting beliefs around exercise.

• I think exercise is really important to health
• But I think weight loss is 90% about what we eat (and how much)
• I don’t believe that weight loss is as simple as ‘calories in, calories out’, i.e. I don’t think you can really completely “burn off that donut”
• I believe exercise increases hunger
• I feel better when I exercise, and exercise is a great stress-buster for me.  Except when it becomes a SOURCE of stress, and that’s happened to me a few times.

Several years ago I sat next to a cardiologist at a dinner party who told me that he always tells his patients to separate thinking about diet & exercise.  That a healthy diet is one thing, to be followed to the best of ability, and that exercise has completely different effects and also needs to be followed to the best of ability, but for different benefits & results.

What he said really resonated for me, and since then I’ve been striving for that.  To think of exercise as something every healthy body needs, for oxygenation, muscle strength, etc.  But not specifically for losing weight or for it’s contribution to weight loss - and that’s a big change for me.  It’s also made me find peace with exercise.  Not a ‘must do it daily’ attitude, not the pushing myself so hard I broke my back my sciatica a few years ago!), not linked to my periods of weight loss off & ons.

I also see how different this attitude is from what is in the media & in common thinking today.  Everything you see mixes ‘diet and exercise’ as a single entity for weight management and sometimes health, but in fact the two are very different.  Over the years I’ve seen a lot of studies saying that the exercise component on it’s own doesn’t lead to weight loss (here’s a recent article by Time).

For myself, I know they actually ARE correlated.  Eating well & losing weight gives me more energy & makes me so much more aware of my body that I want to exercise.  Exercising requires planning & effort, skills that reinforce healthy eating, and the many many minutes it takes to burn off a few hundred calories makes you much more conscious of how many I take in in the first place.

Over the past few months I’ve become a regular exerciser again - more on that in a future post.

For 2 days in a row now I’ve managed to get in morning exercise.

I don’t think it makes much difference to your metabolism whether you exercise in the morning or later in the day - but I think it makes a big difference in how likely you are to do it.

As the day goes on, the things we want to get done, the time left in the day, and various distractions and unplanned events all creep up, knocking down the likelihood to get that planned workout in.  Add that to the fact that most of us are tired and that exercise is not our favorite activity of all time, and the good intentions can easily get run off the road.  I know everything that is between me and a planned workout is a potential reason not to get it done.

If I plan to work out on a weekend day I will often get dressed directly into my workout gear to help nudge me in the right direction.  This was no big deal in the US, where people often wear exercise clothes out in public (and brands like Juicy make a mint marketing this look), but it’s pretty shocking in France (probably more so on a body that doesn’t look like it actually makes it to workout very often!).

I’ve been back exercising regularly for coming on 3 weeks now.  Half that time was in the US on vacation, where it was easy - getting to the gym could be my biggest objective of the day.  Half the time was back home in Paris but mostly when I was still on vacation.  This workweek has begun with me having several work-from-home days, which is flexible for gym time, but not 100% so.

One of my goals is to work out at least 3x a week, and on most days when I’m in Paris (I’ll be traveling quite a bit in my new job).  So these days at home need to include the gym.  Monday I put it off and put it off and then was almost going to not do it.  I did, but also realized I spent more time worrying about it than necessary, and earlier sessions would really help that.  Yesterday was my first foray into the morning workout in a long time.  Today was a repeat, although more successful in that it was a tad bit earlier, and it was unplanned.

It’s been bitter cold in Paris (unusual for us) and yesterday my DH dropped me off at the gym on his way to work.  It’s about an 8 minute walk from my house to the gym, and in 20 degree weather I was happy to avoid one direction of that walk.  Well, this morning my DH asked me if I was going to get up & get ready for the gym (when I’d kind of thought I’d sleep in a bit) but in the end I did get up and was glad I did.  Especially when he called me later to ask if I wanted to go shopping and to a movie at the end of the day.  If I hadn’t already worked out I’d be trying to figure out how to do it earlier or more likely deciding to blow it off…

I don’t know how often morning workouts will really work for me.  When I work from home they should be okay, but I’m expecting to be told I’ll need to spend more of my non-travel days working from the French offices (phooey) which could still technically allow for morning workouts but they’d be mighty early…  In any event, I know they do help my stress levels quite a bit.

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.

I got on the scale this morning and was down one pound from last Monday.  Great, I’ll take it.

Especially because for the first time in a long time I’m feeling like what I’m doing now is decreasing the stress in my life and is enjoyable.  If I can live like this and lose weight, I can’t complain.

I ate generally healthy this week - not much meat as our beloved butcher closed forever, and what I did buy I stuck in the freezer when I realized I’d be solo for dinners most nights of the week.  I cooked a fair amount, and some of my old favorites and new one as well - I made chopska salad (Bulgarian), spring rolls (yum yum - that’s the new fave), last night I even made fish for myself, which is a shocker since I rarely eat fish, let alone make it, let alone by myself, but there was a small piece of my favorite fish (monkfish) at the market yesterday and so I grabbed it.

I had normal food during lunches (working ones) and ended up eating a fair amount of bread, as we had sandwiches 3 days running.  Plus one of the evenings a work dinner where I had pasta w a cream sauce (a mistake on my part, I should have asked more questions of the waiter, it wasn’t even very good for all those calories)…

Of course, quite likely the real reason for the pound of fat feeling free to leave me is the exercise.

Here’s how I did on exercise for the week :

• Monday July 7 : Swimming  45 min plus walking 40 min
• Tuesday July 8 : rest day
• Wednesday July 9 : 15 min light walking plus swimming 40 min
• Thursday July 10: 60 min light walking
• Friday July 11 : 40 min light walking
• Saturday July 12 :60 min serious walking, 120 min light walking
• Sunday July 13 : 40 min Swimming

I am not making a plan for this week because I don’t know what I’ll be able to do.  I am motivated to do a lot, but this week that might not be smart.

I will need to be more careful with diet if I don’t get in as much exercise, that’s for sure…

I am living that song : movin’ movin’ movin’

I have been bit by the exercise bug, and I am really happy about it. I got some unexpected free time last night and the thing that jumped into my head was to go to the pool (I did).

Today I organized getting to several appointments by walking, and chalked up 60 minutes. And I’m bummed I can’t work out tonight. I’m trying to decide between having my eyebrows done or going to the pool tomorrow evening (although doing both might work out in the end).

With today’s walking around I passed my first 500 minutes of exercise, which began on Friday June 27th, which was 2 weeks ago. Not bad at all.

So, I’ve earned my first gold star :

I’m eating reasonably well but possibly not at dieting levels. I haven’t been keeping a food diary but might add that back in the upcoming weeks.

Recently I’ve been trying to simplify my life.  I am throwing out a lot of junk, going through closets, getting rid of old magazines.  I’m also “unsubscribing” from a number of email newsletters that clutter up my inbox.  It was with just such a spirit that I opened an email that contained a link to a quiz on “how motivated are you?”.  What the heck, I clicked.  And the newsletter remains subscribed to, at least for now…

Click this link to take the quiz yourself.

Here are my results :

14 — 20 points:

Strongly Likely To Stick With It

• Based on your score, you may describe yourself as self-motivated, ambitious and achievement-oriented, but also balanced. You are likely to make exercise a priority even when tight for time.
• When exercising, you tend to stick with programs that are challenging and within your comfort zone, which keeps exercise from losing appeal.
• You are likely to seek out ways to maintain your exercise commitment by working out with a friend, hiring a friendly and knowledgeable instructor, varying your exercise activities, rewarding yourself for sticking with it, setting goals and exercising with music.

How To Stay Motivated:

• Although these strategies help you to avoid long periods of inactivity, you may still find yourself totally unmotivated for weeks at a time. There is no need to worry. Instead, enjoy your break. After all, even elite athletes take breaks to invigorate their bodies and souls.

—————————————————————

The interesting thing is that I would have had just about the same score before 2 weeks ago when I started to come back to exercise.

The article mentions taking a few weeks off, but what if weeks become months become a year?

Well, apparently you can get back on track even then.