Birchie - I'm sorry about your clothing trip, I hate shopping for clothes in the best of situations. I've been chatting with Steve Troutman lately, a personal trainer I know, about writing me a training plan. I felt like I wasn't going in a positive direction, and was interested in having him write me an exercise routine or something. After several back and forth about my goals, my diet, my knowledge base, my comfort level with programs here is what he said:
"Everything I would recommend to you in a program would be summed up into the following:
Get your nutrition under wraps since everything else matters very very little if this part isn't aligned. And the distant second would be the exercise, which, at your current height and weight, is going to require a much larger emphasis toward strength training rather than conditioning... so essentially the opposite of what you're currently doing.
You seem to be focusing primarily on the exercise part which honestly becomes an exercise in hairsplitting once the primary fundamentals are accounted for. There are endless ways of packaging the fundamentals and everyone wants you to believe that they've found the best way, which is total bs. But again, none of this matters a whole heck of a lot if the nutrition isn't consistent and appropriate. If you cleaned that up, did some basic strength training 3 days per week or so, and did some basic conditioning work as needed, I think you would head in the desired direction."
It was interesting to hear him say out loud that I needed more strength training and diet control and less cardio. In our discussions and reading some of his articles on his site he said that resistance training was especially important to 'women over a certain age' (he tactfully didn't say what that age was, but as I'm 41 I'll say that over 40 is what he meant...
) I thought about this when you talked about not being able to do much weight lifting after your injury. Are you able to do any yet? Or are there any mods you could make?
I'm trying to eat more intuitively, while still tracking calories. Trying to let go of the several mini meals and snacks a day plan I was using back when I was more heavy in the weight lifting forum. Pushing protein, limiting carbs. You mentioned adjusting your mini meal plan, has it helped any?