Moving On

The last ten days have been a wasteland of inactivity, on the one hand, and excessive eating, on the other. No need to dwell on it. No need to make excuses (though a head cold lingers and could sap my energy if I let it). Just time to move on.

Plans are what I need. Plans, and a new raft of diet books, and healthy food in the house, and the motivational nudge to get out there and start doing things. Clean out the freezer, and fill it with grab and go lunches and breakfasts. I see a big pot of cabbage soup in my near future!  Exercise, adequate sleep, being outdoors... all things I've been ignoring for the past little bit.

Time to get moving. Retrospective hard cold look at the facts to come, but right now, I've got to look forward.

Seasonal Foods

I'm not making my weight goal this month. Such a modest goal it was, too.  In fact, with nine days to go in the month, I probably could still make it. I'd have to start by jumping off this couch, strap on the running shoes, and hit the street... But even then, I can't control what the scale says each day. I can only control my actions to manage calories out versus calories in, which over the long term will result in weight loss.

But I'm not going to hunker down and try to get to goal this month. It's Christmas, for crying out loud.  And some of the joy of Christmas comes from making, getting, exchanging, and eating the special foods of Christmas.  I am going to allow the joy into my life.  I'm going to do it in such a way as to not go crazy, so as to not have huge regrets on January third when normal life resumes, but I'm going to consciously embrace the foods of the season.

For starters, (I mean "for example" because I actually started a few days ago) I've just made a half cup of Trader Joe's Sipping Chocolate.  Yummy, though mellower than the Dominican Republic dark drinking chocolate I had the other day. My mother is a christmas cooking making dynamo.  To us, there are two special kinds:  one is a butter cookie made with almond paste, piped into circles and dusted with powdered sugar, and the other is a brown sugar cookie with a pecan half stuck on top. There were others in the past, some made faithfully for years even after the family made it clear we didn't really like them. I remember green christmas tree-shaped butter cookies, from a special cookie press. Ordinary rolled cookies cut into shapes and decorated with icing and stuff. But now these two types are what she is up to making.

My big contribution will be Julekage, a sweet yeast bread flavored with cardamon and with embedded fruit pieces.  My mother used to make it with currents and the horrible gummy fruit-derived things that go in fruit cakes, but then my sister a few years ago made an innovation (!) and substituted excellent dried cherries and cranberries for the fruit cake stuff.  (There was some controversy in the family about whether it was permissible to introduce change into our traditions, even with universal agreement that it tasted better.)  This year, I found candied whole lemons and oranges at Whole Foods, and we tried the lemon - tasty though chewy. I'm going to make one or two loaves with cut up small pieces of those for the fruit. I'm probably going to do this tonight, and I imagine one loaf will need to be eaten fresh from the oven. At least two loaves will need to hidden at my house until Christmas morning, since we actually need to eat some of it on Christmas day.

I've got the big college kid to feed for a while, and kids hanging around the house for a week, so a quick trip to Trader Joe's filled the freezer with their easy-to-prepare staples.  The big family dinners will be designed around meat, but I've got lots of vegetables for me to focus on besides.  We've recently gotten into soups - I'm mostly not making them, but the bought ones from Whole Foods and Trader Joes are quite tasty and filling. (Interestingly, I bought lobster bisque at CostCo and my little girl told me it tasted like it was full of sugar and she didn't like it. She's getting more refined and healthy preferences. Yay!)

I'm not cancelling any gym sessions, and I expect to be fairly active (though my "fitness tip" of the day in email from my gym says it takes eleven hours of wrapping presents to equal one cup of eggnog!)  I'll be going to work most days after christmas so it reduces the snacking opportunites.  So I'm aiming for holding my own on the scale and the way my clothes fit.  We'll see, but I'm hopeful.  But not obsessing.

I'll be joining the legions of people in January with renewed vows of healthy living and high hopes for achieving challenging goals in the year to come. But this year, I'll have some success to build on, and the confidence that comes with that.

No Hot Water

No hot water at my house means... take your shower at the gym at work! And as long as you are there wearing your jammies and carrying your work clothes to change into, you might just as well spend some time on the treadmill.

Sadly, I was half-way in, really grooving on the "there's no traffic this early in a holiday week", when I realized I had no towel. So it was turn around and drive all the way home, back again downtown.  My workout time was cut in half, but still it was more work than if I hadn't done it. In fact, I had my longest stretch of non-stop jogging, figuring I had better up the intensity to compensate for the lack of time.

The good feeling lasted about three quarters of the way through the day. Not bad.  I may get more gym workouts in over the next two weeks, if I continue to make it a priority.

Me, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties:  "running?  not for me. on a treadmill? is there anything more pathetically boring in the world?"  (time seems to have tempered some of my judgmental side, luckily).

What has changed is the iPod. I couldn't imagine doing it without the music, which pretty much means the iPod.  During the Big Loss, when I was on the NerdicTrak in the basement every morning, it was hugely blasting very loud music. Now, I'm in my ear-bud bliss in the midst of others.  Whatever it takes is fine with me. Just as long as I keep moving.

Satiate Your Imagination

Today's NYT had a piece on how imagining eating something wonderful makes you eat less. It separates liking a food from wanting to eat the food. Imagining eating it doesn't make you like it less; instead, you want to eat less. That is, if you truly in detail visualize eating it first. Not just contemplate the food, but each bite of a healthy portion is thought through, imagined bite by bite.

I'm a real believer in the power of visualization. Certainly, years ago when I was training for my pilot's license, I found sitting alone and thinking through each manuever and procedure repeatedly made me more able to execute them.

So I definitely have a problem with eating sweets in the evening. I'm adding maybe up to 300 calories almost every night in chocolate, (ok, some nights it's even more!) after dinner as I wind down. I've been struggling with what to do about it. We're talking Dove Darks, the absolute best chocolate ever sold in a supermarket.

An obvious choice would be to just don't have it around. This is my chocolate, its not like I have to have it around for the family. But I'm not ready for that. The thought of no chocolate in the house sends me into a panic. That might be reason enough to make myself go without for a while. But not right now.

I'm thinking about putting my stash somewhere inconvenient. I've been keeping it in the kitchen, and only allowing myself one piece at a time- each one is off the couch and a new trip to the kitchen. But my house is small enough that is no real barrier.

So now I'm thinking about keeping it in the basement, a sufficiently unpleasant place that it will be a more significant obstacle, besides just more steps and further away.

But I'm also thinking about this visualization technique. I heard more about it on a Science Friday podcast. The key is to not just be stimulated by seeing or thinking of the food, but actually to "habituate" to the food the way phobia sufferers habituate to their stimulus. And artificial stimulus can be as effective as the real thing.

Can't hurt, right? All I invest is some time and thought. I'll let you know.


- iPhone uPdate

Made it!

Just a half hour walk - about a mile and three quarters between my two office buildings - was enough to put me over on all three measures today!

Now its time for bed because I just read in the New York Times that getting enough sleep may ward off Alzheimer's. Good night!

So Very Close...

I really am motivated to make my goals - make my numbers - cross the finish line on the parameters I've set for myself.  And all it takes is some very small changes to get there. I actually have several tiers of targets. The set I'm talking about here are minimums. They are not very ambitious, but they are a starting place. If I make them, I am "moderately active" instead of "entirely sedentary" which is another way of saying "slug".

Yesterday I went over my "calories burned" by ONE!  I was seven minutes short on activity, and 900 steps short of my walking goals. So close! Sunday, I had a nice calorie total, I was short one minute of activity, but my steps were 40% below target. Today, I was pretty sure I was going to meet all three targets since I started at the gym. But, when I plugged in just now, I've got a little way to go. I'll make the calorie target (it takes around 40 calories an hour for me to be alive and there are two hours to go till midnight) and I'm over on the activity target, but I've got about 400 steps to go. I think I'll go start up the Wii and do something mildly interesting like run the obstacle course. I bet ten minutes of activity will get my 300 steps in.

Like I said, its a floor. But if it's a target, I should work towards it, and check in while I can do something about meeting it.

Holiday: Brakes Off?

The day started out badly- my girl was having Julekage for breakfast (Norwegian sweet Christmas bread) and it didn't take a second for me to join her. Then it was the holiday potluck at work. I was saved by more meetings keeping me away, but I did manage to snag a piece of the award winning desert from the contest- Chocolate Eclair Cake. One forkful was heaven and I could have happily stopped there, but no-- the full second was only six bites, but still too much. I was on a roll, so cookies made by my mother just fit in nicely, thankyouverymuch.

But tomorrow is another day, and it starts at the gym at six.


- iPhone uPdate