I have some bits and pieces I’ve been meaning to post but haven’t had time for, but I wanted to make a general update on the aquafit situation.
Thursday aquafit instructor is apparently being moved to Wednesday and someone else will be teaching on Thursday instead. It’s not clear whether someone else is teaching at 9:30 or 9:45 yet, but hopefully whenever the class starts, they will be punctual.
Thus concludes the saga with a sort of non-victory for anyone.
So, I was going to the gym 7 days a week, and that was working out okay, except that I was pretty tired much of the time.
So then, the doctor suggested I take at least one day a week off, and Katya agreed that would be not a bad idea. It concerned me a little because I do need the gym to be just something I have to do, and not something where I “decide” if I’m going or not, because let me tell you, if I have to decide every day, I’m not going. But between the tiredness and a lot of achey muscles, it seems like a good idea.
But then cut to yesterday, when I didn’t go the gym, and also didn’t sleep all night. I can’t help but wonder whether if I had gone, I would have gotten tired and fallen asleep instead of staying up until 2AM and then tossing and turning until 4AM.
A friend suggested I could go to the gym on the 7th day anyway, to keep up the habit, but just walk slowly on the treadmill instead of really working out. That would possible solve the habit issue, and the ‘being tired all the time’ issue, but possibly not the ‘not tired enough to sleep’ issue. Which may in fact be mutually unsolvable with the tired all the time issue, unless of course I just indulge my TylenolPM habit.
So, all in all, I dunno. Is it better or worse to take a day off? What about a slack day instead of a day off? Anyone else have any thoughts?
Ha, Katya wanted me to support myself on my elbows and toes above the floor as long as I possibly could today. She was not expecting good things, I gathered, by the fact that she suggested that ‘even if it’s only 2 or 3 seconds, that’s okay’.
Little does she know that that was the rest position for one of the exercises I was doing while I was walking. Of course, I never mastered those actual exercises — but the rest position, I figured out.
She was more than slightly surprised when I could hold it for 30 seconds.
Person #1: You look relaxed.
Easy: Are you sure I don’t look exhausted?
Person #1: Well, yes, it could be that.
Easy: That was the most cardiorriffic of any aquafit class we’ve had since I started.
Person #2: No! You think? She’s okay, but Stephanie is more.
Easy: I thought today was really hard.
Person #1: No, I think Stephanie is harder.
Easy (in her mind): That’s because a) you can 15 minutes late to class so you missed half of it and b) Stephanie makes you shut up and actually do exercises while Ashley doesn’t care if you work or not as long as you don’t get in the way of people who are working. If either of you were actually doing any of the things you were supposed to, with anything resembling good form, you would have found them hard.
This, in and of itself, is not much of an accomplishment. Except, of course, that for me it is.
Going to the gym is an accomplishment every single day, with the possible exception of Fridays, when I swim, something I’m starting to sort of like, but it is especially an accomplishment on the morning after a night spent suffering through a really vile episode of food poisoning.
It wasn’t a great workout — I was exhausted and tired and probably low on blood sugar considering I hadn’t actually digested any of the previous night’s dinner and bending over made me queasy, but despite all that, I did go. I did work out.
That’s got to count for something.
We were talking about size and weight and whether I was ever at a weight I felt comfortable with, and she asked me what size I wear.
Me: A 32.
Her: 32? Is that like a 16?
Me: No, it’s like a 32.
Her: A 32? Like 16,18,20…
Me: 30,32. Yes.
She did have the good grace to be embarrassed about it, at least.
I had a really good workout this morning. Aquafit classes were canceled for the long weekend (and let me tell you, considering I joined this gym right before the August long weekend, when classes were canceled, and then classes were canceled for the August 22-23 weekend for CanFitPro, and now they are once again canceled for the September long weekend, I’m starting to wonder what, precisely, I’m paying for) so I decided to just swim some laps.
I was still feeling a little wheezy from yesterday’s stairclimber induced asthma attack, but once I actually got to swimming, it was going pretty well. Your breathing is pretty regulated when you’re swimming, so the wheeziness wasn’t an issue.
The water was frigging cold today. And by frigging cold, I mean slightly warmer than Prince George keeps their lap pool, but still damned cold. So when I finished my first set of four laps and would ordinarily have stopped for a minute to breathe and such, I decided to keep going. I didn’t want to get cold, I didn’t want to give up the control I’d gotten over my lungs, etc.
I did 10 straight laps, then stopped for a minute, then did 10 more and stopped for a minute. That’s how many laps I have been swimming — 20, which is half a click. But by that point, I’d only spent 23 minutes in the pool, so I did another 5 for good measure.
After I got out of the pool, wheezy breath returned in full, annoying force, but while I was actually swimming, I felt pretty good.
I went in for my training session today, and my back gave me surprisingly little trouble. I could feel it, but it didn’t hurt, it was just sort of there in the background.
According to Katya, I am much more flexible than she would have expected (“for someone of my size” went unspoken) and also did many more exercises with many fewer breaks today than last week. It’s kind of weird, actually, that I have no idea. I was always acutely aware of my reps at Curves, even though you’re not supposed to count them, but with the trainer, counting reps is her thing, so I just do what I’m told.
She’s got a pretty good sense of what I can manage as a set — I’m often just barely able to pull off the last rep or two, but with one exception, I was able to make it through everything she threw at me without stopping to breathe. I did have to stop a few times between exercises — in particular when she did two things that involved my arms above my head in a row — but not so much in the middle of a set.
At 9:30, I have an Aqua Cardio class at my new gym.
If anyone’d like to call me with words of encouragement and reminders that I’m supposed to be in the car on the way to the gym, long about 9:10 or so, that’d be cool.
So, I did go to St. Louis, and I did walk for the two days I was supposed to while I was there, though not with what I describe as great enthusiasm or speed. It’s hard to walk with a hangover. I did not manage to go to St. Louis under 350lbs, though I did manage to come back under 350. I assume that was mainly dehydration. I almost, but didn’t quite manage my non-goal.
Then, after returning, I promptly stopped walking for a week. I had a lot of trouble with sore feet there, as I always do — mother$%@&ing Duck Room floors — and I seem to be developing a noticeable plantar fasciitis problem, as well.
I’ve gone back to walking though, this week, so that, at least is progress. And it’s thoroughly kicking my ass, let me tell you. I don’t think it’s just from having taken a week off, I’d presumably be over that by now. Rather, I think it’s the weather. Breathing in all that waterlogged air is just hard damned work even when I’m not walking.
… in updating my calorie counter today. It would just cry in protest. Instead, allow me to present a list of everything I tried even a nibble of in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It’s a pretty long list, but some of these were the barest of nibbles — a single kernal of pickled corn, or a 1 ounce wine sample sharing amongst 5 people, for example. Still, it’s a long and gluttonous list.
On the way there:
Chocolate Chip Cookies
At Upper Canada Cheese:
Comfort Cream Burger
Debrezini (sp?) sausage
Smoked sausage
Niagara Gold Cheese
Comfort Cream Cheese
Sticky Toffee Cheese
Smoked ricotta
Bought to take home:
Lemon Fetish
Cheese Curds
Niagara Gold
Sticky Toffee Cheese
Whitty Farms:
Garlic Peanuts
Strawberry Rhubarb Tart
Bought to Take Home:
Stawberries
Asparagus
Butter pecan tart
Butter raisin tart
Olson Foods:
Baguette with hazelnut spread
Lemon square
Fried chicken w/ potato chips
Roasted nuts
Beet Salad
Asparagus salad
pickled corn
Cherry juice
Gesundheit grape juice
The Pie Plate:
Carrot cake with orange cream cheese icing
Chocolate silk pie
Banana cream pie
Lemon meringue pie
Lemon coconut tart
Rhubarb custard tart
Steak & Guiness pie
Sunnybrook Farms:
Peach wine
Pear Sec wine
Black Currant wine
Pear ice wine
Chocolate embrace wine
Bought to take home:
Pear ice wine
Stratus:
Stratus Red
Stratus White
Ice Riesling
Ice Red
Bought to take home:
Ice Red
DeLuca’s:
Bread w/ balsamic and cold pressed canola oil
smoked trout on a stick
Mushroom Risotto
Smoked duck
Pickerel sashimi
Venison with asparagus in bacon and potato gratin
Rabbit fettucine
And, because I know Edith will include it, McDonalds:
Coke Zero
I really need to get some t-shirts for walking in, since I really only have two that actually fit, and the rest are really uncomfortably too small.
I figure if I have to buy t-shirts, they may as well be awesome, so does anyone have any favorite Threadless / T-shirt Hell / Etsy / Whatever shirt designs that I should look at? It probably needs to come in at least a men’s 3x to be the right size.
I’ve read a lot about goal setting when it comes to dieting, and the advice generally boils down to ’set small, regular goals for weight-loss and try not to think so much about your overarching far away goal’. But probably the best thing advice on goal setting I’ve ever received was from Beaglesmuggler, who has a group dedicated to not setting weight loss goals at all. Instead, they focus on behavioural goals, things they can directly control, like how many calories they eat, or trips they take to the gym, and let the weight-loss which is indirect, take care of itself.
That makes a lot of sense to me, so I’ve avoided setting specific weight-loss goals, outside of my little ticker chart which lists an ultimate goal of 150lbs. That’s probably unrealistic and is, in any case, so far off in la-la land that I don’t even think about it.
But I still find myself mentally setting goals, even when I’m trying not to, and the most recent of these is “Under 350lbs by Twangfest” which is closely aligned with “Still under 350lbs AFTER Twangfest, because there’s a lot of calories in PBR”. Assuming I don’t pork up in the next week and a half, I’m good for the first half of that goal — 349 at this morning’s weigh-in. Now all I’ve got to do is survive the after parties, where I’ll be drinking my calories (something I normally don’t do).
…moderately faster than an elderly smoker, slower than teenagers smoking pot.
That’s what I learned today whilst walking. I passed a woman being pushed in her wheel chair without too much effort, but then really had to struggle to get by the old woman who was walking and smoking and carrying groceries, and had no chance in hell of catching up to the pothead teenagers.
I had a lot of calories left over today and was really fixated on going to Dairy Queen, so I made myself a deal that I could go to Dairy Queen, but only if I ended my walk there, thus also having to walk home again after.
I did one lap around the block like normal — and it was a lap of awesomeness, let me tell you. I mark how fast I’m moving by where I am in the block at different points in my workout track, and I’ve been pushing the point in All That Jazz where Fred asks “Say, your husband ain’t at home, is he?” closer and closer to the final corner, but never quite making it all the way there. Today I made the corner and another 40 or 50 feet beyond that before Fred’s line — and that’s with having to maneuver around the wheelchair.
So I finished that lap, drank some water and headed back in the direction of Dairy Queen, figuring based on previous experience, to get there right around when I had to do my cool down and planning to walk past Dairy Queen for cool down and come back for ice cream. But when I got to Dairy Queen, there were still 3 minutes left in my power walk, so I walked that out, passing the smoking woman on the way, and then turned around and came back for my cool down, which I didn’t quite finish before I got back to DQ.
I ordered a Pecan Mudslide, ate 2/3 of it, figured the last third would probably taste a lot like the first 2/3, threw it away and walked home again. I meant to see how long it took me to walk home, not power walking, just walking walking, but I forgot.
30 minutes walking at 2.5mph equals 320 calories burned. Or is it 242?
2 weeks of this walking thing was supposed to be my big turn around, right? That’s why they call it the 2 week turnaround? So, the question is whether I’m turned around.
And I’d say I’ve turned a few degrees, perhaps, but it was certainly no volte face.
I didn’t lose any weight, I didn’t lose any inches.
On the other hand, I didn’t gain any weight or inches, either, and I ate nearly every meal in those 2 weeks out or as take-out.
I do feel like maybe I’m a little bit fitter than I was. I can do the strength training stuff more readily than I did when I started. And yesterday I was up and down the stairs all day doing laundry, something I normally find exhausting.
I still haven’t made a decision about my gym membership, but I think I’m going to keep going with the walking for another 2 weeks, and see where that gets me.
Obviously, however, I can’t continue to eat like crap and still hope to lose weight, so I’m going to start tracking what I’m eating in The Daily Plate again. Just the act of having to write it down will force me to pay attention and stop eating crap.
CHORUS: How fat and out of shape are you?
I’m so fat and out of shape, that I consider being able to get into the resting position for exercises an accomplishment.
I blogged about one of the strength exercises that’s in this 2 Week Turnaround Program last week — how not only could I not do the damned exercise, I couldn’t even get into the resting position.
Well, I’m pleased to say that I can now get into the resting position. It is not what you might call restful — I can only hold it for maybe a 2 count before I collapse, and have to take 3 or 4 breaths before I can try again — but it is something.
Why yes, I do look like a giant dork when I go walking. Why do you ask?
I may have mentioned this before, but I have an all or nothing problem.
I’ve been trying since I got home from Christmas to get my shit together, and it just will not be got, as you may have noticed by the almost total lack of posts here, the utter absence of ticky marks, and, if you’re someone who sees me on a regular basis, the once again ballooning size of my waistline.
I just keep having these mental arguments with myself about how to get started again. One part of me says I can just start back where I was before Christmas, since I could clearly handle all of that stuff in a day then, so I should be able to now. The other part of me says, no, I need to build back up in a reasonable manner or I’ll fail and hate myself. And then that part turns on itself and starts arguing about which particular ticky boxes I should start with if I’m just going to start with one or a few. The easy ones? The fun ones? The most impactful ones? The ones I started with before? The short ones?
I’ve also considered a variety of things that weren’t previously on the list — actually doing the write down everything you eat thing that I never got so far as to make a ticky mark, starting WeightWatchers, even more drastic options like Dr. Bernstein (and jesus, I hate needles, so when I’m seriously considering having needles stuck into me 3 days a week, you know the shit is bad.) and weight-loss surgery.
When my brain can agree on nothing else, it can usually agree on spending money, though. (Hey, I managed to acquire a thousand CDs somehow, you know?) Trouble is, I have all the things I need for all the existing ticky boxes so that wasn’t doing me any good. So I bought some weights and a pedometer and I’m going to try a walking workout I read about in Prevention. It’s not already on the list, so I don’t have to argue with myself about which category it falls in and whether that’s the category to start with, plus, I got to exercise my Mastercard, which is the only part of me that ever gets any exercise, normally.
And it saves me from having to make a decision about the whole “they closed my fucking gym” situation, which, if I was blogging at the time, I probably would have written about here. But, yeah, they closed my gym, so now I have to figure out if I want to go to the location that’s twice as far away but staffed by the same people as my old one, or another one that’s closer but kind of in the hood and not run by people I know.
I am going to put one other ticky mark back on from the previous list and that’s drinking 3 glasses of water every day. There’s a large diet coke sitting on my desk that says I’m returning to bad habits. Snapping my diet coke habit without even trying was something I was really proud of damnit! I drank one of the Coke Zero’s that had been living in my house for like a year since I stopped drinking coke the other day and it was skunky as hell, and for a brief moment I was all like “go, you, you had this stuff in your house for so long it went bad, and it’s nothing but chemicals, so it shouldn’t even go bad”, and then I remembered that I was drinking the shit, and I hadn’t had any water at that point that day, so I didn’t feel proud anymore.
So that’s where it stands. Water and the “2-week turnaround” exercise plan. We’ll see how that goes.
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