Sunday, October 30, 2005

Solidarity

As I mentioned before, many of my friends are doing NaNoWriMo in November: write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I also mentioned that I'd have to forgo NaNoWriMo this year in favor of staying in shape.

So, in a show of solidarity, my goal for November is to exercise 50,000 second, which is 833.33 minutes, also known as 13.89 hours. That's 28 minutes a day on average. Okay, so it's not the highest, most challenging goal. But it is doable, as opposed to the 50,000 minute goal I first thought of (there simply aren't 28 hours in a day).

Look a new and improved goal meter, coming soon.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Give it a Tri

This year on my birthday I ran my first competitive race ever (outside of high school), the Revlon Run/Walk 5k. I did alright, finishing in about 31 minutes which is a 6 mph pace. Not too shabby for someone who wasn't trying to run for speed but rather "I have bad knees and would like to be able to walk tomorrow and don't want first-race excitement to get the better of me and make me burn out halfway through the race."

When I move to SF I'm going to buy a bike, so I've been thinking about triathlons lately. I went to Active.com tonight to see what kind of events are going on in the SF area in the spring, and lo and behold the 8th Annual Napa Valley Sprint Triathlon is on my birthday next year. This is prefect because most "beginner triathlete" guides I've seen involve about 5 months of training, which is basically how much time I have before I hit the big 3-0.

Anyone want to race with me? Or, barring that, does anyone want to go to Napa Valley with me for a relaxing birthday weekend and cheer me on?

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Faking it poorly

I've been off the wagon lately, relatively speaking. Not sleeping enough, drinking too much coffee, not working out every day, non-ideal food ratios. I've been socializing, working, packing, working, driving, socializing. I've been distractable at work, so I value a full night's sleep above a workout. But I'm moving away from this city soon, so I value socializing over a full night's sleep. Hm.

Long story short, I'm out of my routine. And that's all bad for work, eating, exercising, and my weight. It's bad for pretty much all aspects of my life. Not to say that a strict daily routine is necessary for me to be happy, but if too many aspects of it are out of whack for too long then I start to fray at the edges. Exercise makes me feel better all day, and sleep makes me function properly: as soon as those two start to suffer everything else does too. So why do they end up at the bottom of the priority stack? Because they are boring. Unsexy. Uninteresting when compared to seeing friends and doing well at my job and packing my apartment. I see them as expendable, but really (this is me doing productive self-talk, by the way) they are the foundation of my life. With a good night's sleep and a little bit of exercise I am better equipped to do well at my job, be a good attentive friend, and pack my apartment efficiently.

I know this intellectually. Clearly. Why is there such a disconnect between knowing and doing?

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Injuries

I have a long and storied injury history, and my body definitely doesn't heal (short and long term) like it used to. This is very sad and annoying, but it's also my life so I am learning how to deal with it.

My biggest problem area is definitely my left knee, followed by my right knee (from favoring the left), then my left hip. Sometimes my ankles hurt, but not often. Right now my left foot is still recovering from the scooter accident so any "pushing off" movement aggravates it. Day to day, though, it's all about keeping the knees happy.

I find that the #1 thing I can do for my knees is to exercise every day. It keeps the supporting muscles and tendons and ligaments strong, keeps the healing nourishing blood pumping through the area, prevents fluid buildup, and the stretching done before and after exercise keeps the entire area more limber.

That said, I have to carefully balance that exercise with respect for what my joints are telling me and not overdo the exercise. My lungs might want a run, but my knee is demanding a walk, so I take a walk. Low impact exercise is good too, like swimming and the elliptical machine, depending on the nature of the discomfort that day.

After the scooter accident aggravated my knee injury I decided to take the long view on it all and stop trying to run for distance. Now I run for speed. If that is a problem too, I'll just cap my speed and live with that. No biggie. When I move to SF I'm going to sell my car and buy a road bicycle and tool around on that to get around town. That should be good for my fitness and good for my joints and good for the environment. Everyone wins!

I just hope that my "crashing two wheeled vehicles" habit doesn't turn into a trend.

This post was adapted from a comment left on a friend's blog.

Goals

She tooks the words right out of my mouth. Goals, rewards, milestones, carrots and sticks. And it's very important that the rewards be things that you want, that are worth working towards, and that don't derail you from further progress. Rewarding my weight loss with a pint of ice cream wouldn't be a very good idea. :)

Here are my carrots. I still need to fill in some of the rewards. I also have to rearrange that road bike reward since I'm not going to reach 140 lbs by the time I move to SF, and the car is going bye bye when I get up there. But buying that heart rate monitor was very gratifying.

Done
155 lbs
fat% checked with calipers
150 lbs
A new bag or outfit
150 is the new trigger weight
148 lbs
Heart rate monitor
To Do
145 lbs
fat% checked with calipers
145 is the new trigger weight
143 lbs
140 lbs
Road bicycle
140 is the new trigger weight
138 lbs
GOAL! (maybe)
135 lbs
130 lbs
25” waist?

Monday, October 17, 2005

Putting yourself out there

Some friends of mine are participating in NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a novel (50,000 words) in a month, specifically the month of November. I thought very seriously about participating (I tried last year, but failed to finish), then realized that between the new job, moving cities, and trying to exercise every day I didn't have time to write a novel, even a crappy one.

I came to that realization when I read this blog entry by a friend of mine about NaNoWriMo. She talks about peer feedback and expectations as a motivating force to finish an important, difficult task (in this case, writing a novel). Upon reading that I realized two things: (1) I prioritize exercise over NaNoWriMo (even though it would be fun) and I don't have time to do both in November, and (2) a little peer feedback and expectation may help me in my goals too!

Poof: Operation Active. Eh, dorky name, I know. I tried to keep it short and not diet/weight loss related, as it's more about staying in shape and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

(Of course, I now eat dessert every day at work, but that's why I exercise every day, right? Right!)

Subsequent posts on my friend's NaNoWriMo blog make me realize that people go about accomplishing large goals in very similar ways, regardless of what the goals are. She talks about planning ahead (plot). About trying to write at least some every day. She talks about tools for charting her progress and providing a useful feedback mechanism. Sounds pretty similar to what I'm doing, and what most people do, to realize weight and/or fitness goals.

So, I'm putting myself out there. By being a critical audience you will help me stay on track. At least, that's the idea. In the end, we write novels and lift heavy weights for ourselves.

Friday, October 14, 2005

Fight the good fight

Thursday's plan: Woke up too late to go to the gym, so brought gym bag with me to work so I'd be sure to workout after work, even if I worked late. I rarely am able to bring myself to leave home to go to the gym at night, but if I stop at the gym BEFORE I get home I'm golden.

Thursday's revised plan: Friend calls me at 7pm and asks if I want to have dinner. Wednesday I had actually asked this same person if they wanted to have dinner Thursday and they had declined, so I had kind of planned my evening around that answer. I accepted the last minute dinner invite, reasoning that since this particular friend likes to get to bed early I could always go to the gym after dinner.

Thursday's reality: Dinner turns into late dinner plus record store, got home at 10:30 pm which is a bit late to hit the gym when bedtime is 11 pm. Stay up until 1 am doing random dumb stuff on the internet and around the apartment. No workout, no good night's sleep.

Lesson learned: I need to accept that as long I don't see working out as an essential oart of every day, keeping company with other mundane tasks like showering and dressing, I'll never reach the kind of effortless fitness and flat stomach I'd like to see. It's pretty much just a fact.

Today's plan: Having dinner with same friend tonight, but we're meeting at 9 pm. I have my gym bag. I will leave work at 6:30 pm, drive to the gym, get a nice solid unrushed workout in, shower, then go eat a tasty Father's Office burger.

Is it stubborn or dumb to expect different results out of the same plan? *sigh*

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Measuring Mania

I weigh myself first thing in the morning every single morning. Alarm, bathroom break, strip, scale. That's the routine. Has been since January 2001, when I had my first "get serious" moment. From my weight log you can see that I've taken breaks here and there (vacations, broken leg, just not writing the number down, etc), but daily weigh-ins and watching the weighted average of those weigh-ins is an essential feedback mechanism in my daily life.

Whenever possible I measure every bite of food I eat. I also log my food intake every single day (nearly) without fail. I have done those two since January 2004 when I had one of my "get serious" moments and took my weight-loss-game up to the next level. Actually, I took a small break from measuring and logging during the holidays of 2004, but I also gained 5 pounds. Negative case proves the positive, right? :)

I don't weigh myself only if I don't have access to my home scale in the morning at my designated weighing time. I don't log my food only on very special occasions, like long vacations out of the country or something. Actually I've been known to log food on paper even during vacations, then go back and fill in the data later in my fitday.com account. I do my very best to guess (or look up) the ingredients of food I've eaten that turns out to not be in the fitday food database.

Measuring food. This is the trickier one. Anytime I'm eating food away from home, like at a restaurant or the cafeteria at work, I'm at the mercy of my estimating abilities. Luckily I've gotten very very good at estimating food volumes. I try to double-check my estimates, for example by going home and measuring all parts of the half of a restaurant meal I've brought home in a doggie bag. When eating at the work cafeteria, where all food is free (what a mixed blessing that is), I try very hard to slightly low-ball my portions of calorie dense foods. Take the smallest muffin in the basket, a scant bowl of cereal, a tiny cookie, etc. I'm wondering, though, if my estimation ability is starting to slip.

Tonight my dinner was some whole wheat pita, hummus, and broccoli. I measured the hummus with a tablespoon onto my plate: 1, 2, 3, 4. I counted the broccoli flowerets. I actually input the meal into fitday before I even started plating it up, to make sure it fit into my nutritional plan for the day. This doesn't seem strange to me anymore, in fact NOT doing it would feel strange. But I also am very aware that other people don't do this. Don't need to do this.

Yes, this all seems a bit extreme and obsessive. I like to think that part of the rigor is my scientific mind: the FitDay reporting mechanism and weight chart averaging aren't worth squat without complete, accurate data. Part of it, though, is a real acknowledgment that if I were to stop all these behaviors and just "live life like a normal person," I'd backslide on my weight and fitness and health. I've worked far too hard to let that happen.

Theoretically, at some nebulous future time, all of these behaviors that I'm forcing on myself will truly be habits and second nature and I won't need these feedback mechanisms to keep me exercising every day and eating well and not gaining fat. I've already truly changed many behaviors, like how big I think a meal should be. Then again, there are lots of reasons for me to believe, or at least accept as a real possibility, that such a future is quite impossible. It's far better for me to just assume that I'll always weigh myself regularly and I'll always think very consciously about what I'm eating, at the very least.

The scale is my most important and vital feedback mechanism, and I don't care what the "don't weigh yourself, it only makes you feel bad" nay-sayers say. I know from experience. When I was gaining weight back over the holidays last year I didn't need the scale to tell me that. I knew it from looking at my body and feeling my clothes. Even 5 pounds is quite noticeable if you are paying attention. But did I change my overeating, non-exercising behavior? No. Nor did I stop weighing myself, however. And when the scale hit the "trigger weight" I had set for myself, then and only then did I snap out of it and get back on that horse and lose those pounds. It's all about understanding your own psychology, then setting traps for all those bad behaviors.

Speaking of bad behaviors, one of mine is staying up too late and being too tired to work out the next morning. Time for bed!

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

By any means necessary

This is a place for me to gripe about the trials and tribulations of trying to live a "healthy lifestyle" while living in this crazy modern world with a demanding job and a social life. I have another journal but if I wrote over there about all the measuring, counting, planning, calculating, and general purpose obsessing I do about my weight and fitness I might seem like a nut. Plus it might seem like I never do anything else, as I don't update that journal on a truly regular basis.

This journal is also a way for me to be held accountable/rewarded for sticking with my healthy living plans. Just the latest in a long line of self-inflicted motivational tactics to keep me on the right track.

Some history for strangers: Same beginning as many of these stories, I was active and slightly pudgy in high school, gained some weight in college, then gained more weight after college when I started a desk job. In January 2001 someone sent me a link to The Hacker's Diet, I bought a scale and saw 191 lbs, and got serious. Lost 20 pounds relatively easily (I say now, of course. At the time it felt hard). Then I moved across the country, got into a motorcycle accident and regained some weight, got serious again and lost another 20 pounds. I really improved my understanding of the weight loss and weight maintenance game that time through. I've maintained that weight loss for about a year, and am now trying to lose another 10 pounds or so.

The Present: Those first few pounds are easy to lose. These last few pounds, the ones that have been with me since high school? They have a death grip on my midsection and aren't letting go without a fight. They want a fight? They want me to bring it? Oh, I'll bring it. But in addition to losing these few pounds I also just need to maintain an active lifestyle and relatively clean eating so that I can maintain my weight now and in the future. It turns out that being skinny and strong and fast takes a lot more effort and upkeep than being fat and soft and slow. Who knew?

The stats, for the stats obsessed: Female, 29, Caucasian, 5'7". Highest weight 191 lbs. Current weight 148 lbs. Current target weight 138 lbs. View the gory details in my weight log.