Things That Are Semi-Awesome…

You know that feeling when a big ole sumo wrestler wearing puppy slippers is sitting on your chest whilst you’re trying to walk up a flight of stairs?  Anyone?  That’s my definition of what it feels like when you’re out of shape (aka haven’t exercised regularly in 2+ months).  It actually doesn’t take very long to get back to that feeling of I might croak walking a city block.  The good news is… it’s reversible… glory hallelujah Gertrude and Beelzebub!  I can’t tell you how good it has felt to exercise regularly these past 3 weeks… dagnabbed good.  Of course, there will be a time when I forget that feeling… it happens… but when I do someone hire that same puppy-slipper-wearing sumo wrestler dude to come and remind me what a dimbat I’ve become… okay!?  The first thing that’s semi awesome… EXERCISE!!

Numero next thing that’s semi-awesome… this literature class I’ve been taking this semester.  I’ve never been a huge reader… PASS.  I’ve always chalked it up to time… but mostly ADD attention span.  I pretend I love to read a book on a nice summer evening out on the deck.  The truth is, I have the book open, but my mind is too busy calculating the amount of Junebugs falling from the tree limbs or the fact that Mr. Neighbor who shall remain nameless is getting into his hot tub nekked again.  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. don’t tell anyone.  This literature class is cool in that the literature is short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays.  So, I guess my attention span doesn’t have to be as long as if it were a 5-billion-page book.  And the stories have been interesting (coughcough… I said STORIES… pass on most of the poetry).  It also includes stuff from all different years from the 1600s to the 21st century.  I’m not going to lie… Shakespeare makes my eyes roll back into my head… but that’s just because I have to do a lot of Internet research after reading one of his poems… just to know what the helium balloons boy be talking about.  Literature class… Fun stuff!

Next thing that’s semi-awesome… The Garden!  I literally cry approximately 8 times per rehearsal… 5 of those times it’s because I’ve totally messed up the notes/words… but the other 3 times it’s legitimately because the material is powerfully beautiful… even if the name of one of my solos is What Good Will I Ever Be?  Those of you who live in the valley and need a good cryfest/feel good program, I’d totally recommend coming to the production, April 8th through 11th at Sky View High Auditorium… Tickets!!   CoughcoughShamelessPlugCoughCough… allergy season… get over it.

Things that are not awesome… my car had to be towed up to the service station tonight.  Boo Hiss… I have plenty of extra money to spend on you… this arm brace I own only cost me $15,000.00… that leaves the other million I have lying around for the car repair!  Beulah the Buick has decided it’s not in her best interest to start some of the time.  Last Thursday I had to walk home from the grocery store.  She started right up soon after though.  Today, the result was not so favorable… thus the reason she was towed.  Stupid Beulah!  She needs to be getting with the above-mentioned semi-awesome things and changing her attitude… STAT!

Question of the Day:  What’s one semi-awesome thing going on in your life right now?  

 

Oh Durrr…

Thank you all for the kind words and congrats… I seriously think y’all are the BEES KNEES!  I don’t know what that phrase means… call up the assisted living center and ask them.  For those who were asking, the production is April 8th through 11th.  I am not sure where yet.

Also, just to clear things up since I don’t think I was very clear in yesterday’s post… I was clear in my mind but I sometimes forget y’all don’t live in my mind.  I somehow made it look like I was joining the production of Les Miserables!!!  This production is a LOCAL production of Michael McLean’s production, so dude is not involved at all… well, except for the fact that he wrote the material.  Just to clear that up.  So, basically it’s like that movie, The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever, but without pageants and Christmas… and camels.

Meanwhile… there was blue sky and sunshine today and after I fainted from gleefullness, I actually went outside on a dagnabbed walk!  It was cold (3os), but I ain’t seen blue sky in the longest of times… it made me happy… and I can take all the happy I can get!  Plus, exercising is a good thing… ask Richard Simmons.  Now, snow… listen here… MELT!

Have a fabulous week, you Bees Knees friends of mine!

Crankies…

This winter is making me have a huge-mongous case of the crankies.  I’ve never liked cold and snow and inversion pollution air… except that one time I dreamt I’d become the Olympic bobsledding Jamaican champion… errrr… okay!  Add a broken wrist, anemic spells requiring expensive iron infusions, and a neverending inversion and you all might as well slap a sticker on my rump roast and call me Depressa…. bahahahaha… that rhymes with Dessa.  Why do I let it affect me?  We’re supposed to choose our attitude/happiness scale… and here I am choosing to be a big blob of depressa.   I gotta admit, depressa does not come with a side of motivation.  If I had my druthers, I’d sleep 24/7… except for the other part of the 24/7 where I’d eat.  I manage to do my required day-to-day activities… shower,  go to work, do my Biology  and Literature homework (begrudgingly), but the desire to do anything to get the happies (aka exercise) is null and void.

I have a ton of excuses too… all great ones… like the time I couldn’t ride the boring recumbent bike in the basement because it was too cold outside… yes, I said the bike was in the basement.  Or the time I decided lifting my 2-pound wrist weight in my right hand constituted a full on cardio session.  I miss the blue sky.  I miss the sunshine.  I miss WARMTH!  I miss being outside, but I’m petrified to walk around outdoors when there’s snow on the ground 2-1/2 feet deep that’s been sitting around since December.  I don’t trust myself.  I hyperventilated the other day when my car required a snow/ice scraping so I could drive it and see out the windows because there was that same patch of ice right next to the driver side door where I fell the first time.  Get back on the horse, Tonto… and RIDE!

This feeling of unsure Whitney is very reminiscent of the years I sat on my tookus and gained hundreds of pounds… and I don’t like it one bit.  It’s a strange phenomenon, this thing we call life… one little thing can roll along and whip you right back down 7 rungs on the ladder of success.  What’s changed?  My confidence level for one.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a success on the scale… a long while… it’s mostly visions of gains… and not the kind of gains you can attribute to sodium intake or water weight.  Gains that require ingestion of wayyyyyy too many calories whilst sitting around reminiscing on your uneven nostril holes.  Who needs paint drying when you gots you some uneven nostril holes!

It’s not like I have no successes to celebrate.  After flunking out of college Biology 10+ years ago, this time around I’m doing well.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy the study of life… I can tell I’m living when I’m breathing… leave all the scientific mumbo jumbo for Bill Nye the Science Guy… but I’ve been able to pay attention to the lectures and the book reading and the myriad of assignments and quizzes that class throws at me… and I have a great grade so far (knock on wood).  There were years where I thought I couldn’t pass a college-level science class, but I’m proving myself wrong right there.  Give yourself credit for that, Whitney… maybe those little credits will spur on the other things in your life you want to get back into.  We all fall off the path of rockstar once in a while… it’s those who work to find their way back who marry David Bowie in the Neverending Story…. errrr… that was in the same dream where I won the Jamaican bobsled team thing… ignore it!

QUESTION OF THE DAY:  Pat yourselves on the back publicly… what are some little things you’ve accomplished recently?  

This was the inversion on a good day.

 

 

Move Over, Arnie…

Arnie as in Arnold “I’ll Be Back” Shwarzendfnsafoafoinfoeinfger… you know… before he turned creeptastic and cheaty and secret love childy… back when he was just a really bad actor with huge-mongous muscles!  This past Thursday in physical therapy (session numero 2), evil lady therapist chic decides it’s not enough that she should twist my arm around like it be torture session at the prison mixer… I told her she may have my hands tied down, but I done got two working legs to kick a hole in her head with; that hasn’t seemed to deter her torturing ways!  EVIL!!!!!!!!  Next time I’m in a really bad mood, I’m going to sign up to become a physical therapist… evil critters anyway!

Anyway… it wasn’t enough that she should do the twisting thing, so she throws in weights to build up the now nonexistent muscles in my forearms/wrist… I’m all like give me the 10-pounder… easy peasy!  She decided it’d be better to start at 2 pounds… which was cool and all, but after 2 minutes of grunting and screeching like a pound puppy stuck in a kitten farm, I hadn’t moved it.  SERIOUSLY!?!?!?  I can’t even lift a 2-pounder with ye yonder wristy thing?  She moved me down to a 1 pounder, which… and I don’t mean to brag or anything… I TOTALLY ACED!!  Yay me!  Nothing like a degrading move from 2 to 1 pound to get that confidence pumping.  I’m aiming to become a miniature weight lifter… if I keep this up, I could probably lift doll furniture for gold medal status!  BRING IT!!

In other news… weighing myself for the first time in 2-1/2 months revealed things that weren’t pretty… ugly number anyway!  At least I know and I did me some exercising today… which really goes well with my anemia… sweat dries (TMI ALERT) and then I end up shivering, bones clacking together until I can get into the hot shower.  Did I mention how much I loved cold weather!?  Where’s my tiny violin?  I actually felt pretty good about today… logged my food… did the exercise… and ate a good amount of vegetation, which has been sorely lacking the last several weeks.  No excuses… get up offa that buttocks and do it!  You have a miniature doll house lifting gig to train for!

QUESTION OF THE DAY:   How has your winter exercising routine been going?  Any fun indoor exercising inventions to share? 

Shoe Friction…

My feet are all kinds of pleasant.  One year they gifted me with plantar fasciitis issues… and when I finally get that under control, having to wear hideous shoes that rock back and forth, they go and take up residence in Blisterville!  Not to mention that they are the size of a Mack truck on steroids.  I wear a size 10 or 11 (depending on the shoe) and I don’t know if anyone’s noticed women’s shoes in size 10 or 11 are limited, style wise.  Like, they only make the most hideous designs for that size.  Here, girl who wants to blend into the wall… wear these styling leopard-print-during-a-mass-slaughtering-pygmy-goats shoes.

Back to my woe is me-ing… gosh… interruptions suck!  I’ve recently decided that I’m going to wean myself off of the rocking horse shoes for exercising purposes and back to normal tenny-runners.  Mostly because the strap on my last pair of rocking horse shoes is approximately 35 seconds away from breaking in two.  Also, because I’ve had a perfectly fine pair of NEW tennis shoes for the past year and I haven’t dared to wear them due to the fasciitis issues.  I started wearing them last week to woggercize.  They felt fine in the beginning, but then the balls of my feet started to burn like hemorrhoids on a cracker.  Whenever I wogged on the pavement, the ball of my foot was grinding against the asphalt… and the friction was about to start a fire.  Totally a Boy Scout steel and flint thing.  I could have set my butt down in the middle of the street, taken my shoes off, started a grass fire, and roasted marshy-mallows… it was that bad.  The whole wog I was cringing… it hurt!  I wanted to get off my feet and move to Bermuda!  Not to be derailed, I put those shoeds back on the next day and went woggercizing, hoping I just had to get used to wogging in rocking horse-less shoes, but it got worse every time I’d do it.

Fast forward to Saturday.  I was at a Christmas Gift shindig, checking out all of the things that cost way too much money and I came across this booth called Happy Feet!  HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!  It was like a eeyore sent a rain cloud to smack me in the receptacle.  I hate being in front of salesmen because I have a hard time saying no, but I purposely walked into that booth and sat my butt down.  The dude put these inserts into my shoes… some gel majig that rolls across your feet from the ball to the heel, constantly massaging as you walk.  I bought ‘em.  Call me Sucker Extraordinaire!  I really do think they will help my shoe friction issue since it’s most felt in the ball of my foot.  Problem solved for $40?  Time will tell… There’s a getting-used-to-period they recommend on the pamphlet I got with it… only wear them so many hours per day and up that as the days go by… so I’m following that… bring on that wogging thing!  I’m leaving my marshy-mallows home next time!

Question of the Day:  Do you have feet issues?  Do you wear inserts in your shoes? 

Operation: No More FatMas…

Challenges are for schmucks… this here thing I’m about to undertake is an OPERATION!  An operation of epic proportions… okay, that was wayyyyyyyy overly-self-importantly dramatic, Whitney… tone it back 17 notches.  This “operation” is first and foremost for me and me alone… I need it… and I need to not gain 5 bajillion pounds over the holiday season this year.  I say that because I am well aware that even though I’m extending this out to anyone else who may want a little bit of a push/accountability factor, I may well be the only one interested in committing to said operation.  And since this shindig is for me first and foremost, I’m fine with that!  So, if this ain’t your cup o’ tea, no big deal.  I won’t be offended!

That said… I did a little bit of brain wracking over the weekend… more than usual… which just so happens to be negative 8 billion on most non-work weekends.  What I came up with is a simple 4-pronged operation… kind of like a fork!!!  Oh my laws… a FORK… and you EAT with a fork.  How exciting is that analogy!  **crickets**  No one?

The 4 prongs are simple:  Cardio, Weight Lifting, Food Logging, and Mental Health.  Let’s break it down by category.

Cardio = 5 Points

The requirement is that you need to do some form of cardio for at LEAST 30 minutes a day 3 days a week.  If you accomplish said goal by the end of the week (weeks in this joint will be Monday to Sunday) you get the full 5 points!  If you only do 1 or 2 days… you get 1 point per day you do it.  Easy.

Weight Lifting = 5 Points

Requirement here?  At least 2 days a week of some form of weight lifting activity… whether it be via a DVD, at the gym, at home… blah, blah, blah…    If you do 2 days’ worth of weight lifting per week, you get the full 5 points!  If you only do 1 day… you get 1 point.

*** If you’re doing it at home and you need some routine ideas, check out this site:  GPP Fitness!  Lindsay highly recommends.  I think the guy who runs aforementioned site posts a new weight lifting routine each day… pretty good ideas up in that joint!

Food Logging = 5 Points

I’m not putting any calorie limits on this thing.  You could eat 500000000000 calories per day (though I’d HIGHLY recommend you rethink that method before you start it) and it wouldn’t matter as long as you logged your food!  Accountability for what you eat is MUY IMPORTANTE!  The requirement here is you need to log everything you eat for at least 5 days per week to get the full 5 points!  Otherwise, it is 1 point per day.  The reason I’m not putting an emphasis on calories is because this is the holiday season after all.  We’re all human and we will all eat things that have a lot of calories at some point throughout the season.  The point of this challenge is to not GAIN weight.  Maintenance is key… losing is awesome… but maintenance is goal.

*** If you need a free and extremely easy way to log food via computer or smart phone (my phone is too dumb to have apps), do not hesitate to go join MyFitnessPal… FREE, easy, FREE, and did I mention FREE?

Mental Health = 5 Points

This one is going to be up to you.  You should pick at least one thing that will help you mentally (because this thing is a full package deal).  Ideas for those struggling to come up with something:

- Prayer/Meditation daily
- Writing in a Journal
- Random Acts of Kindness
- Weekly Community Service
- Get 8 hours of sleep per night
- Reading scriptures/positive books

Just a few of the many possibilities.  Pick one, pick how often you will do it (has to at least be weekly) and then if you accomplish said mental health task you get 5 points!  If you do not accomplish said task, you get ZERO points!

Extra Credit = 1 Point Per Thing

If you’re one of those go-getters who want to get a big ole fat jump on the competition, you get extra credit points for pretty much anything you do extra… 1 point per extra thing.  So, if you exercise/weight lift more than 3 days per week, 1 point extra per day. If you log your food more than 5 days, 1 point extra per day.  If you pick another mental health item to accomplish weekly, 1 point extra.  Get it?  SIMPLE!

Once a week, maybe on Mondays since this started on a Mondee, I will post an accountability blog post wherein you can check in with how many points you mastered that week and/or explain to us how you want to move in with Richard Simmons and his fanny pack.  No one judges up in this here joint!

THE PRIZE

Whomever has the most points at the end of the shebang gets a $30 gift card to either Amazon or Wally World and an extra homemade knitted/crocheted good (which I haven’t exactly decided what will be yet).  In the event of a tie, I will draw a name randomly.  Also, if I’m the only one participating, it’s easy to randomly draw my name!  :P  Funny how that works!

This OPERATION goes from  November 5 through December 30, 2012!  

Question of the Day:  Do we have any takers?  If so, please post the mental health choice you picked and sign your name in blood in the comment section (okay, not blood… I have a germ issue!)

The Luckiest Unlucky Person in the Universe!!

That would be me!  I made vague mention of achiness in yesterday’s post… to cement my doo hickey durr butter status, here is the story.  We drove to St. George this past weekend in Southern Utah, which would have been cool and all but the stars of doom and clutzitis followed me down that way and made sure they made their presence known.  I ain’t even joking around.  They hid themselves beneath one of my fat flabs and got nice and comfy until they could make their September debut… they come out at least once a month.

All was somewhat well (according to my lowered level of well anyway) until early Sunday morning when a few of us decided to go on a hike.  It was early due to the fact that St. George is a desert and still gets up into the mid to late 90s in the day time.  Who wants to swelter to death in the desert!?  I mean besides a super model.  The hike went okay on the way up.  I skipped trying to scale the slippery flat rock part of the process.  Something about gravity and weight and clutziness and because it was the smart thing to do.  That and every time I tried to walk up it I’d immediately slide back down to the bottom.  PASS!

On the way back down from the hike, not 100 yards from the car, my ankle turned and I went flailing head first like a torpedo at an all-you-can-smoke rock concert.  As I was lying there picking red dirt from my nostril spaces, I was most amazed that nothing felt broken.  My ankle hurt, my side hurt, my pride hurt, but nothing was broken.  I got up and hobbled my way to the car, thanking my lucky nostril hairs.

Not 2 or 3 hours later on a set of cement stairs, taking pictures of sister Lindsay’s family, I stood up from sitting on a stair, got all discombobulated, forgot I was on stairs, missed a stair and went head first flailing and skidding my way down 3 or 4 stairs.  I sat there with my nose pressed against the pavement for longer this time… because I was shocked at my idiocy level… TWICE in the space of 3 or 4 hours?  REALLY!?!?  When I finally came to, I swore… helled and damned all over the place (the nephews were tres impressed)… now instead of hobbling on my left ankle, my right knee was jacked up and I felt like a Mack truck had drug me behind it along the freeway for 12 hours.

And today… well, today on the day after, I feel 99 years old.  Bending, walking, putting a dagnabbed shirt and deodorant on… PUTTING PANTS AND SOCKS ON… all not possible due to my creakitis.  I also take 18 hours to walk up a flight of stairs on account of the fact that I have to do one at a time whilst leaning against the wall.  Is this what it feels like to get old and decrepit?  Whiplash is a real thing, yo!  Meanwhile, if anyone needs me I’ve reserved a room in the nursing home/psychotic ward.  If they let me take my strait jacket off once a day, I’ll be sure to answer the phone.  And that’s the story of how I garnered the title of Luckiest Unlucky Person in the Universe!  How many nearly 300-pound folk can go flailing around face first several times in a day and still be unbroken?  I rest my case!

Question of the Day:  Have you ever face planted?  Broken any bones?

 

Hacky the Hedgehog…

Here’s a little math equation for you… what is the square root of the… see… I can’t even think of any dagnabbed math problems.  So much for that horrible calculus class I done took… horribly I might add.  The real problem is this… what happens when you have zero rain plus 8 trajillion idiots using forestry?  Times up… FIRES!!!  I’m sure the whole country is having fire issues.. but when you live in a fishbowl of a valley sandwiched between beautimous mountainage, you get what’s called the summertime/falltime inversion… or as I like to call it hack up a black lung by Christmas.  I won’t bore you with the scientific stuff (aka I have no idea the scientific stuff), but somehow the smoke from all the surrounding forest fires in all the surrounding states gets caught between all the mountainages and just lingers in the valley as a constant haze.  I ain’t seen the mountains since Independence Day!  :P  That’s a lie, but I’m an expert exaggerator… totally using my talent.  It’s like Smoky the Bear turned into Hacky the Hedgehog.

This past week it’s been particularly thick and icky and we’ve had what they term “red air” days.  Days where you aren’t supposed to go outside to exercise due to the horrid air quality… I always ignore that warning, and that, my friends, pretty much sums up why I’m so dang wackadoodle doodle all the day.  The smoke inhalation has damaged major brain cells.  I don’t think it’s reversible.  I’ve been out wogging (walking/jogging like a walrus) every night this past week and every night I’ve had to stop and try to catch my breath on account of the fact that it was like trying to breathe in a bowl of creamed corn.  YUM!!  Next week’s menu plan right there!  One cool thing in all of this, the sun always looks like a big ole ball of fire balls when it’s setting… which, let’s face it… is not as cool as blue sky!  Come back to me blue sky!

Question of the Day:  Have you had state forest fires?  Do you heed red air day warnings?  

 

The Apocalypse!  Also, you will notice that that truck seems to be coming right at me… Run me over, feller… see if I care!

Smogville… aka the place formerly known as mountains!

Biking Man-a-way…

You know you’re from Northern Utah when you can pronounce this city correctly:  Mantua.  Nice try foreigners… you said it wrong.  It’s pronounced Man-a-way (great name right… men away) and it’s nestled in Sardine Canyon between Logan and Brigham City.  Totes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it city, but it has a lake/hole with water poured into it.  I’d heard that there was a trail all the way around the lake that one could ride a bike/walk on… and I’d wanted to take the bike out there for months and months to do it, but never found the time.  Having come back from Vegas to discover that I needed to stay around town to situate my schooling, I decided to make a day trip of it one day and headed out.

One problem… the day I picked to go, my dad hadn’t come home with his pickup truck, but his work bus instead… and sadly Beulah the Buick’s trunk space had room for a tricycle and a Barbie car… not a bike or two.  I didn’t let that issue derail me and instead begged my dad into driving the bikes in his bus to Brigham City where Madre and I would drive out, meet him, and steal his truck.  Using the ole noggin for something other than keeping my head from caving in… THUMBS UP!

The trail was more of a hard-packed gravely thing… but it was a pretty nice trail.  Madre complained that the scenery wasn’t pretty enough.  What did she expect from a town with no men… I JOKE!  It wasn’t as pretty as my Tony Grove or Bear Lake would have been, but there were some nice parts.  I can find beauty anywhere these days… unless it’s a gas station bathroom stall… ain’t nothing bee-u-teeful about those places… no sir!

The bike/walking trail is actually that smaller one to the left of the road.

Madre growling about the scenery on her Gramsy Bike with a pair of aviators in hand.  Who says biking don’t mean you can be a fashionista too!

For those of you unfamiliar… them there are trees… and that other stuff is polluted sewage stores.  :P

The beach portion… there were some dudes water skiing… or more like belly flopping every 5 seconds.  Better than the 0 seconds I could have been up.

Check out my pal, Mr. Bee… we had to become pals on account of the fact that I’m allergic to bee stings.  Back off… I ain’t afraid to use this mace!

I’d do it again.  Just need to rent me a bus of some kind… oh, and note to self:  Invest in bee mace!

Question of the Day:  Do you have a favorite walking/biking path/trail?  Where is it?

Focusing On Change…

You know how when you have some sort of lifestyle change… you get a new job, you move towns, you have a kid, you go to prison for embezzling corn nuts, etc., etc., etc.  So, your lifestyle changes and the previous lifestyle you had so carefully crafted kind of goes out the window because of the change of focus… getting accustomed to the new.  I’m feeling a bit of that right now… on a very small scale… adding 2 classes to my schedule has changed my focus, which is ridiculous because I’m all about balance and a healthy balance includes a lifestyle of health.  Get my drift, Prison Patricia?  I need to be more conscious of my eating and my intensity whilst exercising.  I refuse to get out of the habit just because there are now other things I could be doing to fill that set aside health-butt-kicking time.  It’s not impossible, it just takes some thought, a pinch of effort, and every once in a while a good ole fashioned swift kick to the nether regions.  Consider this my good swift kick to the nether regions.

I pinned this article on Pinterest a few weeks back… intent that I’d come back and read it when I got 12 seconds… tonight at 4:30 in the morning I found that 12 seconds… so much for that early to bed crapola I went spouting on about.  The article was titled 15 Signs Your Diet Will Fail… and even though I despise the word “die”t with every ounce of my fat flabs, I read it anyway.  Some good stuff in there.  Stuff I wholeheartedly agree with and stuff I want to agree with but am too lazy to want to put into action.  Though, I have to say when I’m firing on all 5 billion cylinders, I do follow most of this advice.  A quick rundown:

1.  Your plan promotes rapid weight loss.   Take that and shove it Biggest Loser!  Rapid weight loss means eventual rapid weight gain somewhere down the road.  I don’t know about you all, but I want this as a lifetime thing… not having to redo it every 4 years.

2.  You don’t exercise.  Um… DUH!  Did you also know that they call an orange an orange?  My goal for this one.  UP THE INTENSITY…  I can no longer get away with doing the same intensity as I could 235 pounds ago to lose weight.  I’m more in shape now… and the same walking pace is not going to cut it.  And PLEASE for all that’s holy and right with the Solar System… do your dagnabbed weightlifting routine on a regular basis, Whitney… for serious!

3.  You do cardio without strength training.  My biggest, biggest, biggest issue on the exercise front… biggest!  Someone come over here with a ball bat and smack me upside the noggin until I get to hopping regularly.  Who cares if you think it’s boring… shut up and do it!

4.  You cut out an entire food group.   THANK YOU!!  I’ve harped on this from the beginning.  I’ve never believed in cutting out a group of delectables.  The no carb diets don’t work long term… sorry to burst the bubble… it’s reality, folks.

5.  Your diet requires you to buy premade meals.  That’s why I cringe at Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, etc.  Real food tastes better… real food is better for you… and you need to learn how to make real food.  What are you going to do, buy a 60-year supply of Jenny Craig food just to make sure you keep the weight off?  NEGATIVE!

6.  You skimp on shut eye.  Note taken.  I’ve been a nonsleeper at night since the age of 11.  It’s a hard thing to get out of.  I do think I’d be better off if I could get more sleep… and less likely to graze the household at night.  I’ll eat a piece of furniture if I’m hungry enough.

7.  You don’t pack your lunch.  Common sense.  Preparing ahead of time will totes thwart that I’m so hungry I could eat the fake meat they serve in the McDonald’s Big Mac spiel.

8.  You don’t read nutrition labels.  Yep!  These days nothing goes into the cart without looking at that thing.  I’m always comparing calories and fat and sodium levels.  I’m a total geek, but all the cool kids are doing it.  Ask Urkel!

9.  Your diet is too regimented.  You know those people who say that they will never touch sugar and they will never touch any food that hasn’t been blessed by the organic nymphs of lettuce land?  The ones you want to club in the head with a Twinkie?  Live a little… every once in a while… good grief, Charlie Brown!

10. You skip meals.  I used to do this… I’d eat one huge meal at night and barely anything earlier in the day.  STUPID idea.  There’s a reason keeping your blood sugars level throughout the day is a good idea.  And it totally helps with wanting to binge because you’re so hungry you ate the cat.  I notice when I plan to eat 5 or 6 times a day, I’m so much better off than the times I eat 2 or 3 times.

11.  You over-snack.  I make my day into mini meals rather than big meals and snacks.  That way I’m eating all day… but I always have those days where I graze and eat my mini meals… and that’s about as smart as installing a telephone wire whilst standing in water.

12.  You don’t eat enough protein.  I used to struggle with this at the beginning of vegetarianism.  I’m quite good at it now.  I’ve read up on the best way to get in protein without eating meat whilst having it be a complete protein.  I’m now always over my protein goal.

13.  You go low-fat.  I struggle with this.  I buy low fat because low fat means lower calories which means Whitney gets a bigger serving.  But when they take out the fat, they have to add something to it to compensate… and that’s usually sodium or sugar.  Plus, the body needs some fat.

14.  You refuse to try new foods.  I’ve gotten A LOT better about this over the last 3 years.  Vegetarianism really jump started the new foods thing.  I still have quite a ways to go to get out of the picky eater department, but I’ve grown leaps and bounds.  That’s a pat on the back!

15.  You don’t keep track of what you eat.  PUT A STAMP ON THAT SUCKER AND NAME IT FREDRICK!!  Saying that you can guesstimate in your head what you eat never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever works.  EVER!  The days I don’t use myfitnesspal to track my food are the days I’m wayyyyyy over in calories.  I need to be more regimented in tracking my weekend eating as well.  I don’t… and that is one of my main problems right now.

Pretty smart stuff right there, right?  Y’all… Whitney is inspired to sit down, shut up, and get back on a better regimen.  Two weeks of class taking is enough getting-used-to time!

Question of the Day:  Of the above-mentioned list, which one is your hardest to overcome?  

T