<p>Went grocery shopping with DW. It is very surprising to see how many runners on the streets. The winter running clothing definitely adds colors to the snow covered grounds. </p>
<p>One lady has a full belt on with two water bottles and other accessories. </p>
<p>Of course, I would rather run indoor at this weather.</p>
<p>Off to a good start today; 2 mile walk, per usual, then off to the gym with H. 3.1 miles on the elliptical; took me 37 minutes, but I was also making some adjustments to the level along the way. I also took a look at the circuit they have lined up and will most likely do that tomorrow for a bit of variety. </p>
<p>MOWC, I think you get the IronWoman award today. Wow. Yesterday I saw a young man out for a run…in shorts. When I walked sabadog I was properly dressed for the wind and my cheeks were still burning and chapped. This kid’s legs were so red and white I can’t imagine what they felt like. As a mom, it was all I could do not to leap out of the car and throw a pair of sweats at him.</p>
<p>Several pages back there was a discussion of tights which inspired me to order a pair. I bought the cheapest ones I could find online which were EastBay for $19.99 (+ almost $8 shipping which hurts, but oh well…) and I love them! Feel great and keep my legs warm. </p>
<p>I am almost feeling human again, but still have some lingering cold symptoms after 6 weeks. I almost thought it was allergies, but the symptoms are slowly abating.</p>
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<p>That’s very kind of you to say. But, um, no, not really. My scale would have disagreed with you. In fact, part of the lure of the long distance running was the hope to shed a few pounds. A lot of my running friends had the same experience, although I will say, this was more common with the women than the men. Good luck to you, keep us posted on your training.</p>
<p>Today’s workout
4.6 miles of wet, soggy brisk trail walk with Nordic poles. 1 hour 5 minutes.</p>
<p>Today, out for 3 mile walk with DH in the AM, 26 regular body weight squats. Probably 2 more miles of walking this afternoon. </p>
<p>When younger, I could eat just about anything and not gain weight, as long as I was exercising in any way. This isn’t true anymore for me, either. Moving to get the heart rate up is important, but adding the weights assists greatly with weight control. I’m not sure if this is because my heart rate is definitely elevated while I’m resistance training, or if the added muscle (oh please let it be there!) helps with metabolism and hunger suppression. Thoughts?</p>
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<p>We’ve got nothing calling me to the outdoors right now. The snow mostly melted and what little bit left old, gray, and solid ice. So no snow shoeing. And it’s been just ridiculously cold. Way too cold to head to the mountains. I may be an idiot, but I’m not crazy enough to be out in White Mountains with temps below zero. I supposed I could go for a walk/jog on the salt crusted neighborhood roads, but honestly, that’s not much more enticing than the Airdyne!</p>
<p>Supposed to be sunny and a high of 25 tomorrow so I may head over the Audubon Center and do a quick 3 or 4 mile nature walk (with MicroSpike) along the lake just to get some fresh air.</p>
<p>We need a big shot of snow.</p>
<p>41 min run. Mid 40s and dampish but not raining, yay. Signs of a busy gopher. Many walkers and a few runners, including one I haven’t seen before who must do distance. She was wearing one of those backpack canteens.</p>
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<p>Lots of frozen ponds around. How about ice skating?</p>
<p>There’s always ice fishing in Meredith too.</p>
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<p>Do your actions match your goals?</p>
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<p>I think it could be even worse for those of us who work at home. We’ve got ready access to the entire kitchen full of junk food! As I changed my diet, I found that a lot of my snacking was habit/learned response. If I didn’t snack, I wasn’t actually hungry.</p>
<p>There’s also a theory that snacking begats snacking. I’d bet that your hourly snacks are carbohydrates. These are going to trigger an insulin spike. The insulin tells your body to store fat while you burn carbohydrate to lower your blood sugar. When the blood sugar is reduced, the insulin levels fall, which throws the switch and allows you to burn stored fat again. The problem is that falling insulin levels are apparently a major hunger signal to the brain. So, eating the carb snack sets up a roller-coaster of biochemistry that makes you hungry every hour or two. It’s a fast clock.</p>
<p>There’s no reason to eat every hour. If you are 150 pounds with 20% body fat, you have over 100,000 calories of stored food to burn from your fat cells. That’s how bears make it thru the winter. The problem with the constant snacking is that the carbs trigger insulin which throws a switch and keeps you from burning stored fat until insulin falls. At which point, you get hungry from falling insulin levels. The idea that you have to eat every hour or two through the day seems to go hand in hand with a high carb diet.</p>
<p>I suspect that there are biochemical underpinnings to my inability to stop eating Christmas cookies or Doritos or red twizzlers once I start. I also suspect that laying off the carbs helps me not feel hungry when I go as long as 8 hours (and a workout) between my large lunch and my large dinner. Over the past week or two, that lunch and that dinner are the ONLY times I’ve eating (other than half n’ half in my coffee). I’ve not been exeriencing any hunger pangs.</p>
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<p>The happiest day of my life (well, almost) was the day I thru the ice skates in the dumpster prepping for the move!</p>
<p>Pragmatically, I suspect ice skating would be the fast track to wrist surgery for an ol’ (formerly) fat guy…</p>
<p>But, maybe I’ll get to walk on Massebessic Lake tomorrow. I had hoped to snow shoe on it, but we a missing a major ingredient for that!</p>
<p>idad are you referring to junk carbs or any carbs? Is my snack of an apple or 10 carrots bad? Should I stick to almonds or a hard boled egg?</p>
<p>I tend to eat more calories when I’m at home on the weekend as my wife makes me stuff and it’s hard to say no. She knows my dietary approach but she still makes more or less what she wants to. Today, I’ve had 500 calories before 5 PM. On a workday, it’s typically 150. I have to be careful tonight if I want to keep calories down.</p>
<p>My daughter has a bag of jelly beans on her desk. I was quite tempted to have one last night. What’s one jelly bean? They’re so small. Well, you can’t have just one jelly bean. Or one Triscuit. Or one Dorito. But not having any snacks at home can help decrease eating. If you have to go through the effort of preparing something (or someone else does), then you’d have to wait ten or twenty or thirty minutes for the food and you might then decide that it’s not worth the bother or the wait.</p>
<p>I think that it’s pretty hard to lose weight if you’re eating through the workday. Michael Phelps can get away with that but I’m sure that I can’t.</p>
<p>I have to agree, BCE. I am doing much better now that I have more of a routine. Breakfast, go to work, lunch, go to the gym, errands, cook dinner. No eating after 7 pm. When I was working from home that also meant I was eating/grazing continuously, and it was mostly carbs. iDad, I learn something new from you almost everyday.</p>
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<p>Junk carbs. Refined carbs. Big insulin spikes that set up the quick hunger cycles.</p>
<p>Apples and carrots have a lot of fiber, which slow the absorbtion and don’t produce the insulin spikes. You don’t want to eat apples all day, but on the continuum of snacks up and down the aisles of the grocery store, apples and carrots would be among the best! Almonds and hard boiled eggs are probably even better because they have protein instead of sugar, but – I don’t know about you – there’s a limit to how many hard boiled eggs I can eat. </p>
<p>And, conversely, there seems to be no limit to the amount of salted almonds I can eat once I open the package! I try to save 'em for hiking snacks. Dangerous for me to have a 16 ounce bag of almonds in the house, opened… In fact, I would have to say that almonds are a big reason I’m back to tracking my food for a couple of weeks!</p>
<p>The day started out icy and overcast this morning, but turned beautiful so I had a nice run, which I just logged in on my running spreadsheet: route #2, means 4.2 miles, watch says 35.36, spreadsheet says 8.29 pace, 54.47 miles, month to date. This spreadsheet is great because I only input 2 numbers, route# (1,2,3,or4) and my time. If it were more complicated, more inputs I wouldn’t do it every time I ran.
Now, bring on the chocolate chip cookies!!</p>
<p>NJ, is that a spreadsheet you developed yourself? I use the Livestrong web page and have mapped out my dog walking routes, which has worked really well.</p>
<p>And enjoy your cookies! I’ve been known to enjoy a cookie or two. I think we all have.</p>
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<p>Great stuff!</p>
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<p>I need to modify my spreadsheet. At the moment, I enter distance and then cut and paste the time, minutes per mile, and miles per minute calculations. Then modify the miles per week calculator. It’s a bit of a headache to enter the time because I enter it in minutes and seconds and convert it to decimal fractions for the other calculations. It would be nice to enter it as mm:ss. I would need to muck with string functions to enter it like that but it would save me time in recording stuff.</p>
<p>back from the gym. Don’t know if I should be happy or sad.</p>
<p>breeze pass mile 1. The boredom shows up at mile 2.5, at mile 4.5 every part of my body says enough. However, after mile 5, the possibility of completing my first ever 10k in life keeps me going. </p>
<p>As I just pass the mile 6, the timers kicks in to “cool down” cycle. Apparently, the quick start mode has 60 minutes as the limit. </p>
<p>I was able to raise the cool down speed to 5.5 MPH and completed my first ever 10K. But I did not get to 8 as I planned. The final was 6.41 miles.</p>
<p>Could I do 8 miles at 6 MPH? I guess I could. Could I do 13 miles at that speed? I am not sure.</p>
<p>One thing I know for sure - I can run a 10K under an hour on a treadmill. It is not that hard - physically. But it gets to be really really boring.</p>
<p>You should always be happy with a PR.</p>
<p>The boredom is why I’m finicky with my music tech solution. Good music helps a lot.</p>
<p>You can always stop, reset the treadmill and resume too.</p>
<p>Our treadmills in the office reset at 90 minutes.</p>