New find! It's always good to find something new to keep things moving along. I found yesterday that eating a banana mashed up with cottage cheese was very, very much more filling than eating the two separately on the same plate. Amazing but true.
Another busy day. I started by cutting (sawing) back some ivy which has grown between next door and us. (I'm very behind in the garden, as some of you will know.) There was a bad leak in the kitchen a few nights ago and a builder and a roofer are coming to check the roof and wall today. I hope that removing the ivy will make access easier. They worked on this area a few years ago but we all knew what they did was a temporary thing. Old houses always keep you on your toes.
Pedometer on. It worked nicely yesterday. I find wearing one encourages me to walk a longer path between A and B. Glad I bought another one.
Good luck today. We really do have to lose this 'a lot' that we're lugging around.
Weights are going well! I splurged on a set of adjustable weights yesterday and am pretty happy with them so far.
Routine:
bent over row, 15 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps (increased weight)
upright row, 15 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps(increased weight)
chest press on stability ball, 8 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps
overhead press on stability ball, 8 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps
lunges, 15 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps (increased weight)
squats, 15 pounds per hand, 3 sets of 12 reps (increased weight)
crunches on stability ball count to 50
Added:
two different arm exercises that DD showed be to help with rotator cuff problems that I've experienced in the past. 2 sets of 12 each with a 3 pound weight. I don't know what these are called.
The increase in weights caused a lot of huffing and puffing and sweating and then a bit of shakiness afterward. I think that's all good stuff!
Hi Birchie! I'm here, I promise! Reading, not talking.
I'm feeling reasonably okay about myself this week. Two weeks out from a four night mini vacation. I am so ready to be away from work and various and sundry personal drama. Things have turned crazy with XW - for those of you who remember, the relationship there has always been complicated. It has gone from complicated to straight up ugly in the past week. Working hard to not let that derail me. Exercise is good, food is pretty good, vacay coming. I'm in a mostly happy place and want to stay there.
Well, I got my "slap" on Monday. I've had high cholesterol my entire life, like everyone on my mom's side of the family (none of us have had heart attacks or strokes for 6 generations, and live well into late 90's). My doctor has been a very reasonable guy and he stays on the cutting edge of cardiac news - he hears me out about my general dislike of statins and always has some options for alternative means. Back in October I agreed to a down-and-dirty, very detailed VAP profile of what exactly makes up my cholesterol. We went over it in gory detail on Monday. The news wasn't bad in the short term: "fluffy" LDL, rock bottom Lpa, good triglycerides, good blood pressure - but there are some moving-towards-the-limit inflammation characteristics that, as he said, are going to be trouble if they stay where they are for 20 years, and I should address them now.
So here's my new directives, based on the specifics of the particles that are in the trouble ranges: Almost absolute avoidance of processed meats. It's summer, he said I could eat a grilled sausage maybe once a month, but not once a week. Almost absolute avoidance of sugar. Never eat sugar in isolation. Mindfulness and avoidance of the simple carbs (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes). No restrictions on meat, eggs or dairy/saturated fats, but I am to be well aware of the origins and should favor grass-fed, free range at all times. Beer/wine, no problem in the quantities I drink - stick to dark and dry (no problem!) And exercise. Quite a bit of it, and make it cardio. He said, and I had to stifle a snicker, "You don't have a ... LOT ... (pause) of weight to lose ..." And I need to start taking berberine, magnesium, and bump up the fish oil and D3/K1/K2 that I already do.
Y'know what? None of those recommendations, after I pressed him a bit, are any different than what he tells his perfectly healthy patients. This is just the lifestyle that needs to be adopted in order to optimize all known and unknown risk factors.
I have 4 months to work on it before we redo that bloodwork. I am at the tail end of the grieving process - I figured this day was coming - and am working on how to incorporate these changes. The food's not too bad and I am confident I can adapt. It's the exercise. You all know I struggle on that one. However, it's now been explained in detail what the benefit will be on certain markers, and how much I need to do to achieve results, and I just need to put on the big girl panties and go do it.
The food's not too bad and I am confident I can adapt. It's the exercise. You all know I struggle on that one.
I've been thinking about this and I don't think I had realised you struggled.
Is because of lack of time in your schedule? (Could this change with your new job?)
Or too much else in your schedule? (I'm OK if I can exercise in the morning but also get enough sleep the night before. This can be tricky.)
Or nothing convenient? (Have you read about neurodoc's fab new gymn which is so close to the office?)
Or no goal to aim for? (You did so amazingly in that swimming thing in Atlanta a while ago.)
Quote:
Almost absolute avoidance of processed meats. ... Almost absolute avoidance of sugar. Never eat sugar in isolation.
Loved these!
Off to make tea. I'll start by making a carrot salad (also includes a few cashew nuts and perhaps currants) and I think I'll have cold chicken with it. The others can have chicken in white sauce and fusilli or soup leftovers. At the present time I simply don't care. I am very tired and am going to the other end of the country tomorrow (funeral and executrix-related). I'm going by train so I'll just curl up with a book or simply sleep.
Two full weeks of workouts complete. I can actually see a slight difference, so it's working. But I haven't managed to lose any weight and I know that if I did lose I'd really see a difference.
My eating has been pretty good, too. Last night was a huge Greek salad (spring greens, cucumber, red onion, red pepper, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives and feta with Greek dressing) and a spiced lamb burger (no bun). Lunch was maybe calorific (seafood crepe with salad) and breakfast was normal (homemade egg McMuffin).
I've got a ton of baby carrots to munch on at work this week so hopefully that will help. I had been buying cheese sticks and I'd eat two or three a day and that can't be good at all.
I almost talked myself out of getting up and working out this morning, but I didn't! And I had a great workout, too!
I'm going to start my meal planning here. I feel that if I post it I will follow it.
Breakfast--egg whites and tomatoes
Snack--baby carrots
Lunch--salad (pre-made Bistro) small yogurt
Dinner--grilled tomato, avocado, bacon and cheese sandwiches with either fresh tomatoes or soup
The ugliness has turned into stiff silence and messages from DSS with 'my mom says...' because she refuses to contact DH directly for anything. Putting a 10 year old in the middle of everything is awesome, huh?
I'm just tired. I've been exercising pretty solidly for the last few months, food has been mostly okay. Did some yard work on Saturday, so no official exercise. Took yesterday off for the mentioned tired. Have to get some in today, and already feel drained. Can't take a break yet, mini vacation coming up in under two weeks, so need to power through til that. We have DSS all week this week, one of our summer visit weeks, so this will be busier than normal. Must get the exercise in while working from home today.
It's not even noon and already I've messed up my eating a bit.
I'm finding that lifting weights makes me more hungry. The egg whites this morning were not enough to keep me going. I ended up having a protein bar and a cheese stick. Hopefully the rest of the day goes better.
Allison, some days I find that I'm hungry, hungry, hungry all morning. By 1 pm I might eat 1400 calories and be freaking out that I'll be at 3000 by the end of the day. But then something happens mid-afternoon and my appetite adjusts. If I'm busy I won't even think about food until I get home, and my daily total ends up around 2000. So my advice is to eat according to your hunger and see if your appetite calms down by evening. Glad you got that weight set
Shannon, extended family hassles just suck. My DH had three from his first marriage and we went through a lot with those kids and their mom. Now they are grown, all doing well, and life is good. So hang in there.
Yesterday's food that wasn't originally planned was a protein bar, two cheese sticks and a handful of pistachios.
Today's workout was all 10 and 15 pound weights, 3 sets of 12 except crunches which was 3 sets of 20.
Food planned for today:
Breakfast--egg whites and tomatoes
Snack--protein bar and carrots
Lunch--Bistro salad, Activia light yogurt
Snack--pistachios
Dinner--huevos rancheros
Hi all, I'm in the midst of some crazy weeks but at least my conference trip is over. I got to Indiana late the night before I was scheduled to speak, and found out that the presentation format wouldn't allow me to see my notes pages or preview my slides. So I stayed up all night memorizing my notes for 2 hours of talks. By the time I GAVE the talks the next afternoon I was a zombie, but that may have worked in my benefit since I was too tired to get very nervous.
It was pretty demoralizing though, the guy before me gave a really popular talk so throughout my talks, the packed room steadily emptied. Also, the free-booze reception started at 6 and my talks ran until 6:30, so of course that REALLY emptied the room. It's hard not to think "months of work on those presentations, and for what?" But of course I'm required to do this #$^& on a regular basis because getting tenure requires time on the conference circuit.
So a whirlwind trip with no sleep plus stress and jet lag (Indiana is 3 hours off from California - I didn't realize the state has 2 time zones; that seems awfully ambitious for a smallish state) added up to a whole bunch of crap eating on Saturday. I did get a long trail run in with DH Sunday so that was nice. Unfortunately DH's dad is doing very poorly (I think I mentioned a while back that his dad has severe dementia despite being fairly young) and now has pneumonia. It's been so hard on DH and his mom for so long, and it just gets harder.
This morning's unplanned food for me is a cream cheese danish, and I'm loving it. Unashamedly. This has been a crappy several weeks for me. I've been reading but not posting much, and since I have to bring my stress down I once again need to get in touch with my outlets. So here I am.
I mentioned a few days ago that there has been a lot of ugliness with XW, well, that hasn't gotten any better. We are still at arms with each other, and she isn't speaking to DH. We are supposed to go on a mini vacation next week, flight leaves Thursday morning at 8:40. We are supposed to have DSS Wed night and turns out that DH hadn't worked out the taking him back to XW early (like 5:30 am early) before the poop hit the fan, so now I'm anticipating trouble with that. She is going to cause trouble, I can just feel it. If I miss my plane over her I'm going to pop a blood vessel in my head.
XW is taking DSS on a vacation out of state over Father's Day weekend, that is why we are taking a little trip. DH is pretty upset about it, so it seemed to be a good weekend for a break. My dad said he was perfectly okay if we did a different weekend, unless I wanted to send a strippergram at which point Father's Day itself would be fine. LOL
Work is beating the crap out of me. We are this close to done with the health insurance renewal and none of our insurance companies have done anything right in this process. No cards yet, wrong enrollments, new people not in the system, wrong personal info, people who were covered and renewed were dropped, people moved to the wrong locations. I'm so tired of the whole thing.
I'm leaving work early this afternoon to take my MIL to the doctor - she is having trouble breathing, some weaknesses and minor chest pain. She has some chronic bronchitis, but this isn't a part of that apparently. She's seen a pulmanologist and a cardiologist now, and both think it is likely an embolism or clot. We have a nuclear lung test today to see if it is there, if not we go back in a couple of days for a nuclear cardiac test. You can't do them at the same time, or even back to back on two days apparently. Because I'm feeling paranoid, I suspect that we may end up changing the trip next week no matter what happens with XW and the drop off. And I feel terribly selfish for that being the first thing that my head jumped to when we started talking about all of this earlier in the week.
I had my physical last week - my cortisol is high, but everything else is great so the cortisol is likely due to stress. If I can't relax some and get it down on my own in a few months she wants to discuss a short course of targeted anti anxiety meds. I didn't fully realize they could test cortisol levels - she apparently looked at it in companion with thyroid function, and thyroid looks fine. Doc says I look great, both test and appearance wise, said to keep up the exercise and unwind a little. I told her I was 10-15 pounds over where I wanted to be and she said "aren't we all? You look great, loosen up a little." Interesting perspective. LOL
I am down to 145.5, which is 12 pounds down from my high point of a few months ago. That isn't reflected on my ticker, because I actually gained weight after I started it. Maybe I should update the starting weight, that might be more motivating.
My weight has been going up rather than down. While I'm not at my all-time high (non-pregnant high, that is), I am dreadfully close.
Exercise is going great! After 2 1/2 weeks I finally wake up and am glad to hit the weights. And today I'm not feeling super hungry, which is a good turn for the better.
Meanwhile I enrolled with Blue Apron. My first delivery is today. I had a zoodle recipe I planned to have tonight but that might have to wait until next week as I want to try the Blue Apron stuff. DD gave me a coupon so the first delivery is free (normally just under $60 for three dinners for two).
I need to schedule my yearly exam. I went to refill my prescription for BC pills and it has expired. The pharmacy was to contact my doctor for the refill but neither the doctor nor pharmacy has contacted me for anything. Last year my doctor wanted to d/c my BC pills--something that I wanted to do the previous year. He wanted to wait until this year, do a blood test, and then do another blood test a few months later. I have half a mind to just d/c them and see what happens.
Jessica - call in whenever you can! Remember, only one treat a week! 
However, it's now been explained in detail what the benefit will be on certain markers, and how much I need to do to achieve results, and I just need to put on the big girl panties and go do it.
Not what you need. At all.
