Diet/Exercise/Health/Wellness Support Thread

Parent Cafe
6541

<p>Humbling day at the gym at our resort today.</p>

<p>First exercise I started was the oblique side bend with rotation on the Roman Bench:
<a href=“http://www.flexfit24.com/images/Paramount%20Roman%20Bench%2045%20Degree%20Back%20Extension%205600.jpg[/url]”>http://www.flexfit24.com/images/Paramount%20Roman%20Bench%2045%20Degree%20Back%20Extension%205600.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I do this all the time at home, never had a problem whatsoever. However, whatever manufacturer this fitness center uses, they use a different material for the padding that you rest your hip on. It does not cooperate with the material of my compression shorts (think sliding down an aluminum slide on wax paper) and on my second rep up, I slid backwards and landed on my butt on the floor after stumbling a couple of steps, not able to save myself. Was quite embarrassed and immediately looked around to see if anyone saw me. There was one lady close by but she didn’t indicate in any way that she had seen me fall. Got up off the floor, walked back over to get on the machine (this time using a towel as a buffer between my hip and the pad), looked up and saw a security camera on the ceiling about ten feet away. Oh well, I gave someone a good laugh today!</p>

<p>Oh, but it started out even better. The fitness center is located in a spa and all the doors from/to the locker room (which is better furnished than my house) look the same. I had been shown how to reach the gym from the locker room the other day, but today I mixed up doors (I told you, they all look the same) and opened a door I thought would take me there. Took a few steps inside, realized I was in a locker room, but wait, I’d just walked out of one locker room… how could I be in another, unless, yes, it was the men’s locker room. I quickly realized my mistake and got out the door before anyone saw me (don’t know if there were security cameras around there… didn’t stick around long enough to find out), and found the correct door that led me to the gym. </p>

<p>Did I mention how much I miss my trainer? I absolutely refuse to do any bench pressing without someone to spot me and I’ve yet to find anyone who looks remotely capable. Have done some dumbbells on an incline bench, but without my trainer there to lift them up to me, I am stuck at 15/20 lbs. as opposed to the 30-35 I am able to do with him. </p>

<p>Have done a lot of walking/hiking and nothing around here is flat! I swear it’s uphill both to and from the beach!</p>

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<p>Hello All! Sounds like everyone has been busy. I missed working out on Friday and Saturday but hit the gym with H yesterday. Got an hour in on the bike and did my pushups but then had to leave. Meal selection has not been good so hopefully back to normal when everyone heads home today. Leaving for the gym in a few minutes. H is back to work and D1 didn’t want to work out today…she needs to so it made me a little sad. D2 works out all of the time but she goes to another gym. Trying to figure out how to motivate D1 to drop some weight before her wedding. Not looking like it is going to happen.</p>

<p>edit: Yay! D2 coming with me!</p>

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<p>We’re snowed in at the moment. I need to do some shoveling around the car and clear the ice off the car. I guess that’s a bit of a workout. I don’t think that I’m going to the office today unless the weather lets up. This is the first bad weather that we’ve had this season so we’ve been very lucky in the Northeast.</p>

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<p>Up 6.5 lbs. in two days–a new p.r.! Hamstring/glute is sore, we’re snowed in, not sure if the gym is open or if I’ll be able to do anything if I can get there. Took Christmas day off, but don’t want to have to take today off, too. Yikes!</p>

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<p>My workout today will be shoveling the 18 inches of snow from our very long front path.</p>

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<p>Is that your weight or the amount that you’re lifting?</p>

<p>Did a little shoveling this morning. I haven’t done that in a while. No real problems. What helped is my son’s goggles from his chem lab. Those are pretty nice when snow is blowing around pretty hard.</p>

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<p>I haven’t seen that commercial! You mean someone else thought of putting a dog on a treadmill? haha. My springer really loves it. He runs 5-7 miles every other day with DH and when it rains, he gets so bored (and into trouble!)</p>

<p>Re: bootcamp. The only drawback is there isn’t the one-on-one between the client and the trainer. A personal trainer that I worked with a few years ago would check my posture consistently so I wouldn’t get hurt and my workout would be more effective. I see some bad posture sometimes at bootcamp and I’m afraid someone will get hurt.</p>

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<p>When I started this eat less/move more thing back on February 11th (my two-year ex-smoker anniversary), I wrote down 3 goals:</p>

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<p>I never allowed myself to think in terms of a big weight goal. Instead, I just started taking it five pounds at a time. The bottom axis of my tracking chart was always the next 5 pound goal. When I got to it, I moved the axis down five more pounds and started again. This gave me the motivation of hitting the next goal over and over and made the task seem manageable. If I started fixating on the thought of buying Pringles, I could just simply convice myself to hold off, not for all eternity, but just 'til I hit the five pound goal. Just a week, or whatever.</p>

<p>Truth be told, I did imagine an ultimate goal back on that first day. It was calculating how long it would take to reach it that made me switch gears and go with incremental goals. Back in February, when I was still inhaling sour gummy worms and getting winded carrying the mail in from the street, I couldn’t even wrap my arms around the thought of “exercising” and “dieting” for more than a year. Back then, I still pictured myself as an ol’ fat guy and the thought of an ol’ fat guy doing all that for so long was enough to stop me in my tracks, motivationally. I didn’t (couldn’t) understand how much the way I think about moving more and eating less would change with each passing five pound goal. It’s a dynamic process.</p>

<p>Anyway, before the enormity of the challenge scared me into five pound goals, my ideal “ultimate” weight imagined back in February was losing 70 pounds. I knew that weight because, crossing it the other way many years ago was when I had to bite the bullet and begin the process of buying larger clothes.</p>

<p>The first 50 pounds flew off (relatively speaking), averaging 1.75 to 2 pounds a week. So, every three weeks I was hitting another 5 pound goal. Since then, it’s been a lot slower. The curve has flattened out and I’ve only been losing, on average half a pound to one pound a week. So the five pound goals have come slower, taking a month or six weeks. It also means that the normal fluctuations up and down are no longer masked by rapid weight loss, so I tend to see more bounce. Plus, I’ve upped my weight lifting signficantly as I’ve gotten more fit, which has meant adding a bit of lean muscle weight.</p>

<p>This most recent five pound goal has required maddening patience, especially because it’s included both Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with deserts and beer and wine and stuffing so on and so forth. </p>

<p>Well, I’m throwing my arms in the air this morning and screaming TOUCHDOWN! because not only have I hit another 5 pound goal, but this one is special. It’s my 14th five pound milestone, meaning I’ve finally hit the goal I barely dared to even imagine back in February – 70 pounds.</p>

<p>I’m sure I’ll bounce of it a few times (I was so close 10 days ago, I could practically reach out and touch it), but I’m marking this day and doing a little celebration.</p>

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<p>Happy dance for idad!</p>

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<p>Wow. Congrats!!!</p>

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<p>Huge congratulations, idad. Just awesome.</p>

<p>Did my 5 mile low HR “run” in fresh powder this morning. Beautiful but not easy.</p>

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<p>YAY for idad!!! Congratulations!!! Way to stick with it and be an inspiration to so many of us here. I am so excited for you and proud of you! Hooray for you!!! :)</p>

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<p>I’m about to have a bowl of my world-famous chili for lunch and then head out to manhandle the snowblower for an hour or two. That’ll be my workout for the day. I’ll throw on the heart rate monitor. I bet it’s a pretty good workout, even for an ol’ (formerly) fat guy.</p>

<p>It’s a light fluffy snow, so it should go pretty quickly, but we’ve got quite a bit of it. It’s 25 degrees with a howling wind, though.</p>

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<p>I feel your pain. My wife and daughter walked in yesterday just as I finished my workout. I was on my hands and knees on the floor, bent over, panting (damn mountain climbers!) My attitude towards this workout stuff is:</p>

<p>Sometimes the bear gets you! And sometimes, you get the bear!</p>

<p>So, the bear got on you the Roman Chair yesterday, but you’ll get the bear tomorrow.</p>

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<p>I hear ya. I cooked my fresh lobster on Christmas Eve. Six losters steamed, picked, and then sauteed in lemon and butter. A splurge. We couldn’t eat it all, so my wife bought two containers of lobster bisque that I kicked up a notch with the leftover lobster we had big bowls of that last night – a huge splurge, but it’s Christmas.</p>

<p>I just watched my wife and daughter polish off the bisque for lunch. 370 calories per serving. OK, cool. But, then they added a grilled cheese sandwich for each of them. Slice and a half of cheese, two slices of bread, some butter. I mean, they are looking at 750 to 800 calories for lunch! That’s not counting the ravioli we are having for dinner or whatever was for breakfast or the snacks or the leftover desserts. I’m just shaking my head, wishing they would do My Plate for just one week. But, I can’t say anything. </p>

<p>Bad enough that I’ve given them both Rachel Cosgrove’s book, [The</a> Female Body Breakthrough: The Revolutionary Strength-Training Plan for Losing Fat and Getting the Body You Want](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Female-Body-Breakthrough-Revolutionary-Strength-Training/dp/1605296937]The”>http://www.amazon.com/Female-Body-Breakthrough-Revolutionary-Strength-Training/dp/1605296937)</p>

<p>I wish I could communicate that it doesn’t take a lot of deprivation. It just takes getting started.</p>

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<p>Congratulations ID! :D</p>

<p>I am already eating a lot healthier without really trying, now that I’m home and back on my “normal” (i.e. home-cooked Chinese) diet. I can avoid junk food easily enough when it’s rarely in the house; at school, in the dining hall, it’s really hard to skip three choices of ice cream and freshly baked desserts at every meal. Not to mention the amount of cream and cheese that goes in everything except for a few steamed/boiled vegetables that seem tasteless to my soy-sauce-expecting tongue.</p>

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<p>Keil:</p>

<p>The good news is that college kids don’t have to eat that “healthy” or go crazy watching calories. You just have to avoid the layering fat food on fat food. Don’t have the second helping of pasta and the ice cream and the pie…</p>

<p>One of the tricks I’ve learned is to balance something high-calorie with something low calorie. So, if I’m having a big steak, I’ll have simple roasted asparagus or broccoli instead of one my 500 calorie salads for a side dish. I’ll have the salad with a grilled chicken breast. And so forth. I think that simple concept can be applied to dining hall food choices as well, even though the total calorie target may be higher than I’m shooting for. Have the pie or the ice cream, but not both!</p>

<p>The main thing I would do in a college dining hall is put a limit on the number of times I would eat pasta and bread each week. I’d also learn to cobble togther a good oil and vinegar salad dressing and do some serious salad eating, especially for lunches.</p>

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<p>We got to the gym yesterday, but skipped the aerobics part of our usual workout because we need to run errands in the city and wanted to get back before the roads were impassable. I think we got plenty of aerobics today with over an hour of snow shoveling each! Twenty two inches!</p>

<p>I feel reasonably good about last year’s resolutions. I didn’t write anything down, but my goals were to get out and take walks in addition to the gym - which I did do at least once most weeks, to record my food exercise and food intake to get a better handle on what it would take to lose a pound every two weeks and to eat more vegetables and fruits and seriously cut back on bread and cookies. While I had (and still have) a lose 30-40 pound goal eventually goal - I had no intention of trying to lose it within a year. My goal was to have a diet that would allow me to lose that eventually, but would also be the diet for the rest of my life. I lost 17 pounds and think I’ll probably lose 10 to 15 pounds this year on the same diet and exercise routine. I bought some heavier weights for home use, so that on days when I don’t have time for the gym or it’s too hot for a walk I can do some of i-dads favorite exercises.</p>

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<p>FYI:</p>

<p>[Calories</a> Burned Shoveling Snow - By Hand](<a href=“http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-burned-shoveling-snow-a170]Calories”>http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-burned-shoveling-snow-a170)</p>

<p>:) Not a bad workout!</p>

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<p>Keil, if your cafeteria doesn’t have soy sauce could you just stick some on the steamed vegetables? You could bring it with you, or lobby the cafeteria to have it as a condiment.</p>

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<p>Not much of a workout for me. Nearly three years ago, the week I quit smoking, I had to stop and catch my breath after every lap up and down the driveway with the snowblower (long driveway on a hill). Today: 95 minutes. Peak heart rate 74% of max. Average heart rate 59%. I didn’t even get up to Airdyne warm up level. Bah. Humbug. </p>

<p>I didn’t do much in the way of shovelling by hand. Just a bit in front of the garage doors go get the snowblower out and some around a car that was parked outside.</p>

<p>Probably should climb on the bike and do some intervals, but I’m concerned enough about this little injury that I’ll probably give it a rest.</p>