Week One: Throw out the shit in my fridge. (Goodbye Cherry Coke, Goodbye cookies, goodbye sweet, sweet banana chips.) Fridge is loaded with the following for snacks:
Grapes, raw veggies, (Cucumber, broccoli.) Water.
One treat: (My crack: Grape Soda.)
I don’t focus on working out- I focus on establishing killer eating patterns.
Done!
….
Week Two: Start Establishing better Eating Out Patterns. Salads with lemon as dressing – (which is actually decent, when paired with a light vinagrette.. or Ranch.) No Dessert. Small snacks instead of meals. (I utterly failed at this.) I call that method a fail in general. I was always freaking hungry, plus? I’m on the go so damn much that stuffing my mouth in drive-through was all I could manage. Alright.. alright.. I can do this.
Friday Night? Salad and 1/4 of a blt. Water, baby!
I managed to go to a carnival/fair-food extravaganza and eat only a pickle on a stick- thankyouverymuch. (Then we went out to eat, and I manged to eat 1/4 french fries- and 1/2 a french dip sandwich, (minus the bun.) Cherry Coke was spectacular- thankyouverymuch.
Done!
….
Week Three: (This, awful, evil, week.)
Fitness Test. (Depressing.) I have to state before I took the fitness test? I ate a spoonful of frosting. I told myself it was alright and that I’d work it off. I think I worked off breakfast also.
How many push-ups in 60 seconds? (20) A very low number….
How many crunches in 60 seconds? (There was no way to determine whether I should do the full ons, or the girly ones.) I did a mixture. 63- suckas! (See, mom-tummy? You’s gonna be gone.)
How many pull-ups. (Wtf is a pull-up?)
What is my heartrate now? (Slightly escalated, perhaps out of the simple fact that I managed to do 63 crunches and tear open the sunburn on my back with my amazing carpet at the same time.) Pain is gain- (I keep telling myself this.)
Week Three? Get the damn jogging stroller, (thanks, Derek!) and start what I call: Two Weeks of Personal Hell.
Workouts every morning after Ava is dropped off. (30 minutes warm up, 30 minutes jogging, biking- elevating something else than my hand to my mouth.) I’m one point over normal weight in the BMI range. I expect to see a drop next to normal weight by the end of the two weeks. I may not be toned- but I’ll have developed a month of healthier eating and steady exercise- to prove to myself that an actual gym membership might be worth it. (GoGo Chaska Rec Center!)
Do I sound high? I think it’s a mixture of tonight’s frosting and 63 sit ups. I call that -good.-
Alright.. I admit it. I’ve joined the bandwagon of “I’m almost 30 and I wanna be all like 16 again.” I use eye cream. /deargodwhat’shappenedtome.
Can you point me to which the direction I may find the beach?
URRRGHHH! That Way!
Way to get healthier. You’re already beautiful inside and out.
I could almost be convinced to let you borrow my Burley trailer so you could haul the kid around. I should show you that damn hill up to Summit…
How about we strap it on the back of the Victoria and watch it beg you to take a sharp turn. Good stories, my man. Good Stories.
Part of me wonders why you were taking a fitness test (particularly one that involved pullups for a woman). The other part of me is confused. Certainly your selected eating options are healthy in a way, but where’s the rest of it?
To wit, aerobic exercise is extremely catabolic (it burns muscle) since the body deems that muscle is less useful than fat if you’re not lifting weights. Ergo, runners get “skinny-fat”, where they certainly drop weight, but body fat percentage is relatively unchanged after a while. Running intervals (jog, sprint, repeat between street lights or something) alleviates this somewhat.
Secondly, ahh… protein. You need some. Fiber is extraordinarily filling, yes (making vegetables/fruit a plus). Nothing wrong with non-refined complex carbohydrates (quinoa, keff, and non-instant oatmeal) either, which will make the really sweet stuff (ahem, frosting) taste almost sickeningly sweet after a while.
Drink milk. It’s not as cheap as it used to be, but the sugar/protein ratio in skim milk is just about the ideal for stopping catabolysis after exercise (and you really should be eating something within 90 minutes of exercise, but you don’t elaborate on that, so it’s hard to say).
Cottage cheese is extremely cheap, low in calories, and has an assload of protein. Natural peanut butter (ignore the fat content) is highly recommended. Some sort of meat is practically required (chicken breasts/ground turkey are healthy and economical, but it’s hard to beat pork shoulder for the price, and you can trim it before you cook it anyway). Lentils are ludicrously cheap, versatile (you can even make halfway decent cookies with them), and almost 100% comprised of fiber and protein.
And, ah, something with iron. Seriously. Your diet is going to make you anemic. Lentils are good for this, too, but red/black beans, chickpeas, and any number of other things (including multivitamins) will do here.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s losing weight! I guess I’d need a picture to prove that, though.
Ry-
Again with the rockstardom.
alright… Iron… Milk… Protein. (Where do the peanut butter M&Ms come in though.. that’s what I need to find out.)
And I now really want to hear about these lentil cookies of which you speak.
Thanks, Guy!
The lentil cookies are thanks to Alton Brown.
For the protein, you could just go the lazy-ass way and buy a 2lb container of protein powder (~$15 at Target/Wal-mart in the sports fitness area of the pharmacy section). The general rule is that if you’re working out, you should be eating 1 gram of protein per lkg of ideal body weight in order to maintain muscle mass (more than that if you want to gain muscle mass, which is really difficult for women and you probably don’t want to anyway). The upshot is that protein has comparatively few calories per gram. IIRC, one serving of cottage cheese is something like 70 calories with 13g of protein (~25% of the RDA, and even getting 100% of the RDA should be enough, just that your diet didn’t have any).
Peanut butter M&Ms are unfortunately not anywhere to be found on the list. That being said, it’s not the end of the world to eat junky food. You can’t violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. As long as you’re eating less calories than you’re expending, you should lose weight. If you avoid the artificially sweetened stuff, at least, it won’t be appealing after a while (way too sweet).
Most candy (and refined grains) has an extremely high glycemic index, though. It’ll spike blood insulin, which makes you feel hungry again when it drops (part of the reason low glycemic index foods are recommended is to avoid this — nobody wants to be hungry).
Somewhat bizarrely (given that fructose is, like sucrose, a simple sugar), fruit doesn’t cause the same effect. Juice does. The fiber in the skin/flesh drastically mitigates it. This means that fruit smoothies are largely ok (Jamba Juice probably not), as is fruit yogurt (I find it disconcerting that a single-serving portion of yogurt has more sugar than a can of soda — get the big containers and add fruit yourself; berries/cherries are really cheap right now [frozen blueberries are always cheap], and winter has its own cheap additions [pomegranate, bananas {as ever}, etc]).
In all seriousness, adding protein powder to smoothies makes them much more filling at an extremely low cost (it’s probably 20 cents/scoop), and they’ll digest slower. For similar reasons, a lot of people add peanut butter to oatmeal.
I’m going to be lazy and say that, frankly, John Stone Fitness (the Recipes section of the forums in particular) has a wide variety of cheap, healthy, sometimes delicious (it varies, but I’m not a picky eater, and a glance at the ingredients should be clear enough) food. The forums aren’t as active as CrossFit or StrongLifts these days (CrossFit is dominated by military/police/fire/EMT people — they’re probably not the kind of workouts you want to do, though they cost nothing other than a pullup bar and freeweights/bands; StrongLifts is a segment aimed towards guys who seem to want to get “big”, which isn’t my thing at all), but neither CrossFit nor StrongLifts has a recipes section. They’re scattered around a zillion threads about proper macronutrient ratios/etc.
Bear in mind, a large part of the reason I’m elaborating on this is that personal trainers at most places make a fair amount of their money hocking expensive supplements you don’t need (meal replacement bars, amino acid shakes, etc). So, ah… if you join a gym, ignore that.