Setting Goals

I'm about a month away from my big vacation to the remote Arctic. I've often used vacations as a motivating device for me. The idea is I will simply have more fun if I'm in better shape for it. I even trained on the Nordic Trak for my first (and only, so far) visit to Disney World, after realizing how much walking could be involved.

Taking sage advice from my friends and commenters, I'm going to only focus on one aspect at a time. Too challenging right now to try to focus on planning all my food and eating, and also to fit more fitness activity in. So I'm focusing on the fitness until after the vacation.

Taking more advice, I'm not just thinking I should do more, but I actually wrote out a schedule of what I want to do on each day for the month of June. The geekiness in me motivated me to create a new google calendar, which displays in a different color on my family calendar I maintain, which has all the complicated comings and goings of the family as school gets out.  I'm also describing it here, and will report back if I get to it.

I've got the gym three times a week, and yoga class. Neither of those is enough aerobic exercise though to get me to really "fit".  I'm adding walk/jogs in the early morning on non-gym days - it is a mile and a quarter around my block and takes about twenty minutes, plus putting on shoes. I'm alternating walking and jogging, and aspire to jog the whole way.  Right now, it is totally delightful, but more on that another time.  I might work in a work gym visit in the morning, but I'm feeling the outdoor thing is so cool right now. I've tentatively scheduled a downtown bike ride for this evening - all depends on when I get out of work. Weekends are walks and/or kayaking.  Sailing isn't vigorous enough to count, though I will be doing that too.

I want to hit my minimum calories and/or steps every single day during the month of June. So far, I've hit THREE.  On gym / work days, I'll have to do either a lunch or evening walk to go over the top, because I am so very inactive during work times.

Off to work!

The Plateau, Viewed From Afar

I'm stalled. I'm plateaued. I'm going nowhere. It's really really true. By almost any definition, my weight loss "journey" has been taking a break in rest area on the turnpike since February.  Take a look at this:

I've been bouncing around these same few pounds since early February.

But perspective matters.  Look at it in the context of the "journey", which started in January of 2010:

The eye really tries to keep the downward slope going through the last few months, doesn't it?  It almost works as a downward trend, though as if it were approaching a limit.  I could do math on this, to see if there is an actual trend here, but there are limits to how nerdy even I can get about this.

But here is the real revelation I just had. I've been recording my weight in one way or another since 1988 - at least that I can find written records for:

When you look at the time since February this year, it's just a blob. But look at where I've been in during all this time.  Back in 1988, I weighed (at least for one recorded day) five pounds more than the point I'm currently stalled at.  I was thirty-three years old then. For seventeen of the last twenty-three years, I weighed more than I weigh now. In 1992, I was thirty-seven years old, I had my dream job at United Airlines, my first nephew was born, I took up photography as a serious study and a part time business, and I got my pilot's license. I also fought my way down to this same weight I am today in order to have more fun on a major photography excursion to the North Slope of Alaska.

I know I'm stronger now than I was then. I like the shape my body is now, with some shoulders to balance my giant hips. I'm pretty sure pants fit me better now than they did at this weight in 1992. I can do those push-ups. I can celebrate what I have right now, without thinking about what life would be like if I achieved the weight I've had in my mind as my goal weight since my thirties.

Perspective is a wonderful thing. During most of the 1980s and 1990s, I did not keep a journal as I did when I was younger and as I picked up doing again this century. But I have some recorded history in these numbers which I like to arrange into pictures to tell a story about myself back then.  I'm not satisfied with where I am or giving up going even lower, but I'm less frustrated about this plateau when I know there are heights behind me I don't need to scale again.

Starting Out Wrong

Yesterday was a disaster from both an eating and activity point of view...  and I blame it all on the doughnuts!

Instead of starting out with a healthy small spinach omelet at Whole Foods, for reasons not relevant I ended up at our nifty little downtown Silver Spring farmer's and craft market. Not much available in produce yet (lettuce and strawberries and last year's apples) but there are a couple of unique food stalls. One makes tiny little doughnuts right there - squirting the dough into a vat of fat and scooping out little rings onto paper towels to drain. These are tiny - maybe half or less the size of a "doughnut hole" from Dunkin' Ds. With noble intentions, I bought a small bag to take to the kids. I continued strolling and looking at the stalls, and finally the smell got to me. I popped one in my mouth, and it was every bit as good as I thought it would be. But there was a quick slide down that slope.  Really, it is like an addiction. I was thinking about what I was doing, but it was like I was watching a movie, shouting "don't go through that door!" to the clueless actor on the screen.

So then I thought to recover myself. Just sweet carbs in the morning makes me feel bad, shaky and out of sorts. As that feeling came on, I fastened on the crepe stall.  They were doing a brisk business in breakfast crepes- with eggs and meats and cheeses - as well as fruit crepes. "Get some protein to balance the sugar" I thought, and did.  It also tasted wonderful, but the ratio of sweet to protein was not as helpful as I thought. Maybe if I hadn't had doughnuts first, the crepe would have been ok?

So the rest of the day was just --- struggling for the right word here:  punky? draggy? dull? foggy? logy? At any rate, I did some chores, read two books, took a nap, hung out with the kid. I made and ate a meat-and-vegetable dish in the mid afternoon, and capped the evening off with ice cream splashed with rum, instead of an evening walk. Lawn was  not mowed. Plants not planted. Shopping not done.

I feel bad about wasting a beautiful weekend day. Sometimes, we just need a low-energy day, but this was extreme. Would it have been different if it had started out differently?  We are not just a collection of chemicals.  We do have free will. We can choose. But, we can also set ourselves up to make doing the right thing easier or harder. Some days, life will seem entirely like an uphill crawl. But we don't have to tilt the playing field to make it harder.  Maybe I'd better eat breakfast now.

Insourcing

I refer to my personal training indulgence as "outsourcing my willpower".  It is very true that I both show up to work out more often, and also work harder in each session, than I would do by myself.  Time and time again I have proven this to myself.  The training is focused on strength and balance, and I love what it has done for my shape and what it has done for my strength.  Aerobics I still do on my own, and not so successfully. Walking, with very occasional jogs on a treadmill, is pretty much it. With the better weather, I'm doing a lot more walking, but I'd like to get the old heart pounding harder more often. Gym at work is likely the answer.

The personal training is very very expensive, and I don't think I want to budget to do this forever. Eventually I'll have to transition to finding other ways of getting it done. Right now, I'm planning to keep it up through my big trip this summer, but I'm really not sure after that.  I have been doing three times a week, the recommended amount, but the past couple of weeks (and possibly the next couple) my life is much more complicated and so all three trips have been hard to work in. Right now, I'm sitting in a motel room instead of home, and I missed both today's and last Thursday's sessions.

This cheapo motel has no workout room, but it does have barely sufficient room for swinging a cat.  So I pulled the drapes, put on NPR, and spend at least half an hour on traditional equipment-less floor exercises.  Sit-ups and crunches in infinite variety always figure in the PT sessions, and so I got some of them in.  Classic push-ups - not the maximum count, but focused on ten perfect ones, then more easier ones on inclines or my knees.  It felt so good to be moving and twisting I worked in a couple of the yoga postures I've just learned.  I feel much better for having done this, even it feels like it wasn't much.  I ended up with some high side kicks on the back of the room chair.

Part of what I love about the PT is its always different. They have free weights, adjustable machines, big barbells, stretchy cords, medicine balls and giant exercise balls, boxing gloves, and punching/kicking bags. Sometimes I have a giant rubber-band around my ankles and penguin walk while raising a five-pound medicine ball.  The next time, it's just push-ups and sit-ups and leg lifts and supermans.  (Don't they all sound positive and energizing? Not drudgery.) I don't need all the equipment - I have free weights, a mat, and an exercise ball already - but I need to have the creativity to lay out a routine in advance - but not the same old static one every time.  It seems like the kind of thing I need an app for:  "shake a routine".   Shake the phone and get the 30-minute daily workout on the screen. Certainly, I do not have the mental processing power to make it up on the spot in the early morning.  Maybe I should just go low-tech and write the possibilities down on cards and do a "deal a work-out".  (I remember cutting out something like that from an Oprah magazine a few years ago. I did it for a week.)

At least, I know I like doing the workout, and I love having done it.  Often these good intentions do not stay with me - especially in the early morning - and so I'll need to work on other motivational self-talk techniques. But I should at least make it easy and fun to get my own routine.

Of Swans and Doves

I've been to four yoga classes now. It's not at all what I thought it would be. I really don't know what I thought, but not this: really micro detailed focus on exact muscles and poses and specifics. For much of the first class, we were learning how to stand. And then how to lie down. We do lots of other poses, too, but always with a really really detailed focus on how every muscle is lined up. "Use your big toe here. Turn your inner thigh more in.". That sort of thing.

I like it. I like it a lot. It's not burning a lot of calories but it's really making me aware in my daily life of many of these same details. I think it can help my back and knees, but it also has the potential to screw them up, so I'm very careful as I make each move. I told the instructor I was there for balance and flexibility. As it turns out, I already have a fair amount of core strength, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the flex area.

This week, we did the "pigeon pose". I didn't look much like the pictures (hope to edit one in when at a real computer) but after placing my legs on the mat I lifted up my body and flung my arms up and out, spread my fingers, and I felt like a swan, not a pigeon. it was exhilarating.

This morning I was back in the gym for the first time in a week. After the strength workout, I hopped on the treadmill for a few minutes of getting the heart pumping. I planned on just fifteen minutes, three intervals of jogging. I've learned that the key in improving aerobic capacity, in the early stages at least, is to keep coming back to a high pace-- it's the second and third and beyond intervals that are creating the benefit. At fourteen minutes, I was getting ready to wind down when "La Bamba" came on the iPod. I cracked the pace back up to where my feet were pounding out the exact rhythm of the song. I felt like I could do that forever, like I was being carried on the wings of a dove. But of course, after another three and a half minutes, there came a break in the music, and I hit the cool down button and finished it up. Still, it was another exhilarating fitness moment.

Cleaning Out the Pipes

For the first time, my trainer overslept, so I showed up at the gym and she wasn't there. Instead, I jogged for a few minutes on the treadmill. Only 20 minutes, with walking nearly half the time. I haven't been aerobic and vigorous much recently, and it feels really good to have gotten the heart rate up so high, taken so many deep breaths, and probably have some endorphins circulating.

I think of it as like flushing pipes with strong jets of water - the blood rushing through my arteries and veins at a fast rate, opening up and removing clogs.  Probably not what's going on inside, but I like the feeling.

Coasting

I've really not been feeling very introspective lately. And I got tired of thinking about, focusing on, being "on a diet". So I'm spending time doing other things (hello, garden!) and filling my days so I can't eat too much. So far so good - at least no worse than when I was thinking I'm "on a diet".

The gym and yoga are still on, but not much else.

I'll be back.