Glad to hear from you bargoo. I'm glad you are able to get good support from the Cancer Society.

Dagmar :hug:

Bargoo, a lot of women can rock a shaved head. I imagine that you are one of them. :hug:

Bargoo, hugs to you. I think about you often, glad the ACS and your beautician are taking care of you. You will rock this look. :hug:

Glad to hear from you Bargoo. Sounds like your attitude is positive.

Had my post-training evaluation. After a summer of more exercise than usual, my weight stayed essentially the same, body fat was .4% lower, dropped my resting heart rate by 20bpm, blood pressure down 7%, went from the 50th percentile to the 90th in flexibility (reach test), and doubled my "unipedal stance" (a balance test) times, for eyes both open and closed, into the ideal range. I conclude that exercise must be a good thing. :)

Good job !

Interesting! Especially good results on your heart rate, flexibility and balance!!:carrot::carrot:

You know when I ask my mother what she thought of something, and she says, "That was ... different," then I always go off & try to fill in "different" with what she really means. But heck, that's what I do on the job every day, so it's probably reflexive.

You know I've been thinking of you, so I'm grateful for any news you can offer, whenever you get a minute & feel up to it. I suspect there's just too much to say, it's overwhelming, and you may be too tired to try to get it all written down here. But just exactly that: Know that we are thinking of you.

Bargoo, good to hear about the wig and the scarves. Wigs are so good nowadays. My aunt's had be fooled, it was so like her own hair. And scarves look so wonderful. They seem to suit each person so well.

Amazingly, I seem to have reset my taste and smell functions. This is great news.

I've reminded myself that much coffee is horrible, fruit juice is questionable (both too acid), most jams and marmalades are too sweet for me, and low sugar hot chocolate is quite vile.

I'm not sure how this has happened. It started before I went to Mum's for a week and has built and built, despite eating cake. I haven't had low sugar hot chocolate for about 10 days so that must be a contributing factor. I have this niggling feeling that it undermines my efforts.

This visit to Mum's was the least physically challenging probably ever. I think I'm generally better aligned; I had a massage the day I arrived; I monitored exactly how much I walked as part of running errands which helped to explain my tiredness; I slept in what I think is the best bed in the house; the DB is older and more self-sufficient; my dad has been dead a few years now so it's not quite so raw and there isn't so much to do. Yes, it must be a combination of all these.

So, overall, progress. I'll weigh myself tomorrow.

Hugs to you bargoo!

So. I really need to step it up. DD invited me to do a 30 day yoga "challenge." It doesn't look like much of a challenge, though. Each day is just 20 minutes and I watched several minutes of day one today and the instructor sure talks a lot. It seems to me that I'll be listening for 10 minutes and exercising for only 10. We'll see. I still have that yoga video I bought a few months back as well as some Jillian Michaels videos (which I've done and even at 20 minutes they are killer!). I also decided to buy a Jawbone Up. I've been thinking of this or the Fitbit Flex for some time and after reading multiple reviews I decided on this one. I'll arrive tomorrow. I like how you can track food on it--take a photo of the food or scan the bar code. A few steps less than other apps and with the wrist band it'll keep track of my activity (or lack thereof).

DD is coming home for the weekend. While glad to see her, it is difficult to eat with her. She eats like a horse (but she exercises for hours a day, so it's okay for her). She's happy with what she is doing (although I'm sure that when school starts on Tuesday she'll have less opportunity to go to the gym and will have to adjust her eating). We're going to try a new restaurant tomorrow night and she wants me to fix chicken enchiladas, so obviously it won't be a diet friendly weekend.

I start fresh on Tuesday. Daily exercise of at least 20 minutes and a bit higher protein and less carbs.

I am going to eat a lot of leafy salad this weekend. I finally have some time to cook and I'm taking advantage of it. Those two statements sound a bit silly together but most evenings the salad is the thing I can't seem to get together.

It's a long weekend but I'm not drinking any beer. For me the Labour Day weekend is the start of the "new year" and I want to go into work Tuesday (with 3 new dogs!) fresh, rested, and ready!

Good weekend all!

Dagmar :strong:

Dagmar, did you happen to snag a picture of Maximus? I'm jonesing for some puppy pics, LOL!

allison, at least you'll have somebody with whom to talk about healthy eating and exercise IRL for a bit! Your DD has literally worked her fanny off - I think when I joined the maintainers here, she was just getting started. High five her from me!

silver, hooray for tastebuds that are properly calibrated. When the less-nutritional foods just don't appeal, everything is so much easier. Good luck on the scale today!

I have made contact with my pretty-close-to-local Masters swim team. The workout times look like something I can live with, the costs are (gulp) what I expected for a coached team, and I'm raring to get started. Looks like I can get my first 3 workouts free - yay! Looks like next weekend will be my kickoff. :D

Becky :cheer2: re the Masters swimming. I used to swim with a team and have fantasized about Masters. Maybe in my 70's, when I've quite dogwalking. :p

I'll be taking puppy pics next week while playing with Max in his yard.

Dagmar :yoga:

Becky, wow! When you decide to do something, like make exercise part of your life, you don't mess around, do you? No, woman, you go ALL THE &^%$#cking WAY! Once you get the momentum & get off the runway, you fly like the Concorde!

I think I've convinced myself that I need to keep running at least one day a week. Today was my second day of the week & it was laborious as ever, because I am coaching myself so much about my form. I felt less jouncy, though. I've got to learn to live with incremental improvements.

Scale up about a half-pound from last Friday, but it looks like I'm staying below 150, even if only by a fraction.

Becky, congratulations on your progress over the summer. Good to have data proving that, yes, exercise works in your case too! I was going to ask you how you're going to keep things going as the weather turns nasty but it looks as though serious swimming will do that for you. Please keep us posted.

Exercise in bad weather will be a challenge for me and I haven't worked out what to do yet. What I do know is that I'm going to have a fairly rigid exercise timetable (and this will include my Italian lessons). Any flexibility I have will be going on other things.

Saef, I'm reading "Running with the Kenyans" by Adharanand Finn at the moment. It's a good read and quite amusing (possibly in a rather British way) about changing the way your foot strikes. Might be worth a look.

(Appalling weigh-in today.)