Thursday, July 20, 2006

If you crave this...

What you crave, what your body is trying to tell you, and what you should eat instead.

General overeatingSiliconNuts, seeds; avoid refined starches
TryptophanCheese, liver, lamb, raisins, sweat potato, spinach
TyrosineVitamin C supplements or orange, green, red fruits and vegetables

Which is particularly interesting because I've been gorging lately on the trail mix in the break rooms. Maybe I should stop beating myself up for that, and just stop eating bread and oatmeal? But then how will I run?

*sigh*

Instead, I think I should just get ENOUGH SLEEP at night.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Google 15

Do you want to track your weight, but hate the idea of going to a specific web page every day to do it? Do you love Google as much as I do? Are you using the Google Personalized Homepage as your browser startup page? Well, you are in luck. There is a new (to me) widget available for the Google homepage called The Google 15 Weight Tracker. There is a longer FAQ about it here. It keeps track of your daily weight for the last two weeks, and creates a little chart of the moving average of your weight. You can easily see if you are gaining, losing, or holding steady.

I'm playing around with it now, and it's pretty neat. I'm too obsessed with going back over my historical weight data to give up using Physics Diet or the Eat Watch, but I've also realized that I have far too many places I write down my weight every day. Keeping them all in synch is a hassle, and even remembering to go to a specific web page every day to log your weight is a real mental barrier to some folks. I love the simplicity of the Google 15 widget, and think it will work really well for people who want a simple and painless view of their weight trend without the extra overhead of yet another website to visit every day.

I <3 Google. :D

Thursday, July 06, 2006

138 lbs or bust

For five months, from early October 2005 to early March 2006, I had a nice steady low weight. In that time I twice nudged my average weight below 148 lbs, a lifetime low. Then, immediately after I met the boyfriend (hmmm...), while I finished triathlon training and then slacked off a bit after the traithlon, I slowly gained weight instead and topped out above 152 lbs in late May. That was six weeks ago, and I've lost a little over a pound since then. Changing the direction of my weight graph from slightly up to slightly down was (mostly mentally) difficult, and now I have to capitalize on it and increase my rate of loss while I still have a positive attitude about the whole thing.

To do that I need to tighten up my eating and stop catching colds and letting little things get in the way of my workouts. Today I was going to skip the 12-1pm spinning class because I had a 1pm meeting, but Samo made me do half of the class instead of skipping it entirely. And by "made me," I mean she came to my desk and started dragging my gym bag towards the door until I followed her. That's the attitude I need every day.

My ultimate goal weight is 138 lbs, and has been for two years. But since I've never been below 147.5 lbs, just getting down to, say, 145 lbs would be a nice thing to try.

As a spur to keep me exercising, I'll be signing up for the Banana Chase 5K road race, taking place on September 15th. It's a local, casual race where I won't embarrass myself by running massively slower than the elite athletes (like Samo). I haven't nailed down a target pace yet, but I'm thinking 8:30 minute miles (26:21 total) would be ambitious but possible.