love letter

Dear late night taco bell & 6 pack of highlight midnight adventure:

You are not the way to start a healthy time. Please discontinue any attempts to tempt me away from my highly sought after, yet fully attainable goal of complete health and wellness with hot body attachment.

Thank you.

My goals

So, can a 35 y/o who is really really out of shape lose 30 lbs before April? God I hope so, because that is my plan! To date, I've lost 4 lbs in 8 days. I think that is awesome, considering I have been busting my ass to exercise and eat better over the last 7 of the 8 days. The hard one is to not eat late at night. The reason this is hard is because Drew doesn't get home until 8pm or so, then if you add in time to get somewhere to eat or preparing food, it is almost 9pm before we eat dinner. I try to just eat salads when this happens, but MAN it is hard to avoid the cravings of a full entree of rich, savory, fatty, meaty foods. Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, I join boot camp. It is an hour, few women, exercising class ($200 for 6 weeks, every Tues and Thurs if you are interested), that I started to attend Tuesday of this week. Last night's was a killer on my body! Plus I will run at the IMA once a week for an hour or until I'm so sweaty I can't stand it anymore. Three hours total a week. I also have cut all "white" foods from my diet, i.e. breads, pastas, white rice, anything like this type of carb foods. For the most part I am eating salads (sometimes with chicken in them), steamed veggies, a little tofu, a little meat, very high-fiber grains, and SlimQuick. I still eat butter and fats, but I just take it easy on them. Screw non-fat shit, it tastes horrible to me and it is full of sugar. I still have coffee on occassion, but for the most part I just drink water. Lots of water. I lost 4lbs. I'm happy. Even 3lbs times 12 weeks is 36lbs. I CAN DO THIS. I love you SJMJ.

Sad folky shit

When I asked, "What do you jog to?" I could only confess that I had not a single workout worthy soundtrack. I hinted that this might contribute to my slow moving geriatric shuffle of a jog. As such, may I present:

"Playlist for a 35 minute mile"

J. Tillman - No Occasion
Tiny Vipers - Swastika
Cave Singers - Cold Eye
Bon Iver - Blood Bank
Damien Jurado - Sheets
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Love Comes To Me
Fleet Foxes - Ragged Wood
Iron + Wine - Sodom, South Georgia

Yes, this is what I [try to] run to. Relatedly, I'm currently accepting any/all donations of mixtapes that will make me move a bit more quickly. Katy Perry encouraged.

A's first post

Okay - so this is me trying to be realistic about getting healthy. The goal is 20-25 lbs by summer. That gives me a wide margin, but I'd like to see a loss of 1-2 lbs a week. The means are a hodge-podge combination of many of the methods I've tried over the past four years to shrink, arranged in a fashion that I think is realistic, and with lots of forgiveness room.

Exercise: The current goal is this: 30 minutes daily. Right now the hubs and I are doing a dvd called Power 1/2 hour that has five different 1/2 hour segments focused on different body parts: abs, buns, thighs, arms, stretch. Well, stretch isn't a body part but you get it. You can arrange the five segments in different ways - to focus on lower body, or to focus on core, or two a day to focus on slimming down. I am doing one a day now - hope to add more later. In the past whenever I've tried doing the slim training 2 a day I've burned out a quit. This is my number one priority activity for these 18 weeks. Food can be forgiven - missing a workout cannot.

Food: I want to normalize my daily food intake, keeping fruits and veggies high and lowering bread and sugars. This is based on the raw foods thing to some extent, but not married to it. Over the summer we did raw foods, and loved it, but it's too spendy to keep up full time. Now each morning will start with a green juice for energy and nutrition. Lunches can be either juice again, or a soup or healthy crockpot concoction that is heavy on the veggies or a big fat salad. Dinner is also either salad or healthy crockpot concoction. Healthy means no butter, no white rice or white pasta, and heavy on the veggies. But dinner should also have protein components, meat or tofu. Snacks we'll do on the WW principle - portion control! Last night after a nummy dinner of salad and beet/carrot/cucumber juice we needed a treat. So we had a SmartOnes peanut butter cup sundae each. They come portioned, so after 200 calories, all done! Also, I plan to drink lots of healthy, decaf teas to promote digestion, health, and appetite control between meals.

Key: food is the trickiest part for me. Next Monday is pie day at work, tonight is a big fancy veggie party put on by a doctor I work for. This weekend I'm facilitating a leadership conference where the food is provided and out of my control. So I'm going to go easy on myself in situations that are out of my control, and be strict on stuff that I can control, like what I have for lunch every day, and choosing veggies over other stuff. I tend to be a person who goes full bore one way or the other - I'm either logging everything I eat or I'm not, and eating everything I can get my hands on. I want to be balanced this time, focus on moderation, and try not to miss a workout.

"Lofty"

Fitday.com has dutifully told me that: "Warning. The weekly weight loss for your goal is high." Thanks, fitday. It's a step up, however, from sparkpeople, who wouldn't even let me enter my goal, since it requires a loss of 2.73 lbs/wk. I get it, it's a lot. But I'm an all or nothing kind of lady, and this go 'round I'm not settling for nothing.

I'm 180 now. On June 6th, I hope to be 130. Wow. It's not completely impossible, but given that I've been stuck at 174-179 for almost a year, it definitely isn't easy. I've tried almost every method of "healthy" eating, including a strict raw food diet. The only thing that I now know for sure is that I can't eat pasta without gaining weight, and I can't not work out.

Goodbye, sad size 14 Levi's. I want my teeny little AG's to emerge from the back of my closet. This week, it's two-a-day workouts to get me started [/brainwashed] on a workout kick. Only two days in a row so far, but that's more than I'd done in the previous 6 months! Thus far my lofty goals are serving me well.

Already thwarted.

Lunch meeting at Red Robin. Certain caloric death. WHY.

Testing, it's working!

I am just testing this out, then I will edit it and delete it.

Getting started

Today is Day 1 of 126. There are 6 of us, give or take, taking our own individual diet + workout challenges. In some cases, the goals are general: workout more, lose post baby weight. One of us has until April to lose 20 pounds; another wants to lose 50 by June.

Finding time to work out is hard enough - trying to commit to matching your schedule with someone else's is even harder. Since we can't meet up in person, we blog + email + text about our accomplishments. Some of us make use of sites like fitday.com to track nutrition + calorie data. In every way we can, we're making use of online tools for real life results.

Tuesdays are our check in day, the day to brag or fess up. Between now and our goals, there are at least 18 check points. February 3rd will be our next rendezvous, if not sooner.