City2South

One of the reasons I am keen to get started again is all because of an event I did a few weeks ago. 

On the 16^th of June, I was part of an inaugural funrun in Brisbane, called City2South.  It was a 14km race which could be run or walked or wheel-chaired.  It was 14km of pain!  Haha, not really, but it was long!!  The course started from the city CBD, wend itself around the river, through the university, to finish in a park on the other side of the river.  The early morning stillness and quiet was wonderful!  The hill that went from 12-13^th kilometre was not wonderful.  The karaoke station in which the sponsoring bank would donate $50 for every person that sang was great fun!  (Crocodile Rock).  :D

Actually, yes, I was in pain by the end of it.  My new shoes (which I had bought 2 ½ weeks prior and thought I had already broken in enough) gave me blisters.  Only on the one foot, but man, did that make the last 4km or so slow going!  It was right on the ball of my foot, so that meant I was walking quite wobbly for a bit!

I saw a link for it on a news website back in March and I decided it was a great way to get myself motivated and kickstarted to get myself fit again.  I even convinced a friend to enter it with me. J  She’s gotten very focused on her health lately and has lost some weight in the process.  She’s stopped eating the foods that were making her sick, and has really upped her running.  She’s big into running now, which she enjoyed when she was in high school.  I didn’t know her then, so it’s so cool seeing her get into it.  J  Anyhow, she’s one of my motivator buddies here.  Because I know she’s taking better care of her health, and lost some weight in the process, as well as juggling work and family, it makes me feel I can too.

So, we signed up!  I had to keep emphasising to her that I wouldn’t be able to run it, but I think we kept up a pretty good pace.  Especially in the beginning.  We were dodging crowds for the first 5km or so as we were powering through.  At about the 8km mark however we slowed right down.  And that was because of me.  I hadn’t gotten in as much preparation as I had wanted and the longest distance I had covered in the lead up had been 8km.  My legs, back and FEET! were aching.  I had to keep stopping to stretch my feet.  And then of course, I worked out further along that I was getting a blister.  But I didn’t want to stop.

I had two goals while completing this race:

1.       I didn’t want to be the last one crossing over the finish line.  I knew I was going to be slow, especially after that halfway mark.  I was very conscious of the fact that I am overweight, and finishing last and slow was just going to draw unwanted attention to myself.  I didn’t want that.

2.       I wanted to finish within the allotted cut-off times.  There were three points along the course where the organisers were watching for the stragglers.  If you were late for the cut-off point, then you would have to forfeit the rest of the course and make your way straight to the finishing point.  I didn’t want that.  If there was going to be anything more humiliating than finishing last, it was not getting to finish at all.

Luckily for me, I didn’t let my friend down, nor me.  I do think my friend was a little frustrated with me and how slow I was by the end, but she kept shrugging it off.  She’s a runner, so I guess she’s more used to the longer distances.

But, how’d I do?  I think I did okay J

75^th last – woohoo!

 

Mid-Year's Resolutions

Oh-No! I found this post lurking in my drafts folder. Please pretend it went up on Monday 1st July like it was supposed to! Then there will be another post following...

Okay, so, once again, I stopped blogging for a little while. Okay, a long while. And during the last five months, when I haven’t been blogging, I haven’t been as motivated to get fit & healthy as I could have been. Work here has been a lot busier than I expected it to be. Life too, I guess. And that has meant that I haven't been taking care of myself as much. But, I think I'm starting to get a better hang of my life here and my routines. Balancing out work commitments, life commitments, friend commitments and family commitments. It's been tough, but something I am starting to be better able to do.

The knowledge that I am unfit and unhappy has been on my mind this whole time. I hate being fat and overweight, not fitting into my clothes, people seeing old photos of me and going 'Is that Kathleen?! But she was so skinny!' *sigh*I hate it.

So, I trying, once again, to do something about it.

I’ve kept up with dancing, but I had to cut it back to only 2 hours a week. Tuesdays & Thursdays. And even then, I haven’t been able to go each time because of work commitments. But I’ve been very glad of it, I missed dancing when I lived back in my old town, so I’m certainly making the most of the opportunity I have here. Unfortunately, that has meant I’ve also taken opportunity of the takeaways and convenience foods not 10m from my doorstep, and haven’t been eating well.

But I realise that, and I guess, as long as I do realise that, there’s always time to start over again, right?

And what better time than the start of the month? Especially when it starts on a Monday? In the middle of the year? That’s why I’m calling this my mid-year resolution!  Cheesy, I know. :-S

Now, what exactly are my mid-year's resolutions? Funnily enough, not too different from my New Year’s resolutions.

· Consistently complete a food journal – including calorie counts.

· Attend dance lessons twice a week

· Walk to work at least once a week

· Lose 20 kgs by the end of the year

· Maintain work-life balance

I’ve already started to make progress on these.

11. Feb. 13

Oh dear, it's happening again.  I'm starting to get really busy and therefore slack off in my efforts to get healthy.

I'm not going to lie.  Last week, I ate terribly.  Tuesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday lunch were all convenience foods.  Either takeaway from the noodle bar on the corner, or fast food on my way home from dance classes.  And I'm paying for it in more ways than one. 

• Number one, I obviously didn't do myself any favours when it came to trying to lose weight.  I haven't gained anything, but nor I have I lost any weight.
• Secondly, I was far more tired by the end of the week than I had been in the weeks before.  I was so exhausted Friday I kept losing my balance and I could feel a twitch in my eyebrow.   
• Thirdly, my face started to break out in pimples - huge ones that are going to hang around for days
• Lastly, I haven't helped myself learn new habits about healthy food choices. 

I am annoyed with myself for doing that all week, but in a way, I'm glad because it showed me what a difference nutritionally-poor food does to me.  After only a week, I was slower, more sluggish, more prone to whinging.  In the previous weeks, where I was eating better, I felt better.

So, planning needs to happen!  Planning my meals, planning my grocery shop and planning on cooking/preparing/making food.  Last week, I kept running out of time each evening to cook, or I hadn't done the washing up yet, or I was missing a key ingredient (the spinach for spinach pasta, etc).  Little things like that, which led me further and further astray. 

Tuesday and Thursday are definitely out when it comes to cooking food that night.  My dance classes keeps me out of the house from 6 until 9 or 9.30.  Given that I get home from work somewhere between 5.15 and 5.45, I'm cutting it close.  Aqua Aerobics finishes at 7.20pm, so by the time I get home, shower, rinse my togs, it's edging towards 8pm.  Late enough to be eating dinner, let alone cooking on top of that. 

So that really only leaves Wednesday and Sunday to cook dinner.  I have to admit, I find it hard to cook anything on a Friday night, I tend to prefer leftovers, or takeaways.  Something quick and easy.  Saturday will vary.  Most Saturdays I cook, but there have been known to be lazy ones.  So, I am determined to cook food this Wednesday night.  Especially as I need to take something hefty in to eat on Thursday as an afternoon snack, so I eat food before my dance class.  I think that's what made me go for a (large) container of noodle stirfry after dance on Thursday - I hadn't eaten properly that day.

As a result of all this poor planning and poor eating, last week I stopped logging my food.  I know I should probably go back and fill it in, and confront myself with just how much food I was consuming.  On Tuesday (the night that started it off), I logged my fast food.  But I also logged my dance class, so the calories weren't so bad.  I'm quite sure the rest of the week will not be so good.

If I can end on a positive note however, I did exercise three times last week.  Monday Aqua Aerobics, double dance Tuesday, double dance Thursday.  Hopefully they count for something!

Counting the Calories

Late last year, when I had stopped blogging and exercising, I still kept up with reading about weightloss.  A lot of the articles I read point out that weightloss is 80% food/20% exercise (I just made the exact numbers up, but more food than exercise).



So, in order for that to make a difference, I needed to know exactly how much food I am consuming every day. Thank goodness I was on holidays for five weeks, because it can be time consuming. But the more I fill in, the easier it gets. So far, I've been doing it for about four weeks.

 

It seems I really do overeat. I should be consuming somewhere around 2100 calories, just to cover my BMR. I'm consuming closer to 2300. So, is it any wonder I'm not losing weight? I figure, I'm going to try to aim for 1900-2000 calories per day, in order to lose weight. This should give me weight loss of about 500g per week - a nice steady level of weightloss.

 

I started using an online website, called mapmyfitness.com because they allow you to log workouts as well as food. They have a database of food and it is possible to add a food that they don't have.  This is probably the part that is the most time consuming however.  There are a lot of foods which I eat that aren’t on their database.  It’s really frustrating to remember to hold onto to the wrappers or packets of everything I use in making food, just to then enter all the data in.  The website doesn’t currently have an app which syncs to the food diary, so I have to manually key everything in.

 

I know quite a few people in the blogosphere use myfitnesspal and I found out some of my friends use it too.  In fact, one of my friends lost eighteen kilos by using myfitnesspal.  I had a quick look at it and it seems that there are a lot more foods on their database than in the one I currently use.  So nearly two weeks ago, I swapped to myfitnesspal.  It has been so dead useful.   Nearly every food that I eat is there.  Especially handy as being in Aus, all our brands are different.  There must be a huge community of people using it, because even the supermarket brands are there. 

Myfitnesspal has calculated that my daily calorie limit, in order to lose 1lb per week, (450g) that I should be eating 1970 Calories/day.  I put the settings on the lowest exercise level because I haven’t been regularly exercising enough each week yet.  I think when I know exactly how my routine pans out, and I’ve been regular doing exercise three times a week, I’ll adjust the settings again to properly take that into account.

 

By Monday, I should hopefully see some result of trying to eat carefully.  Of course, my eating patterns haven’t been perfect.  There have been days when I have skipped breakfast because I was running late.  Days where instead of cooking dinner, I have eaten snacky food, like crackers and oat slices and fruit all evening.  Days where I have eaten two dinners.  Days when I’ve forgotten to log everything I’ve eaten.  Days when I’ve “forgotten” to log everything I’ve eaten.  Most of those days overlapped to make 3 days in total where I haven’t been on track.  But on the whole I think I’ve been pretty good. 

2 Feb. 13

Just a quick update to let you know that I am still blogging and looking after myself and working towards getting healthier and fitter.

Work has been really busy.  Still trying to get my feet on the ground.  Lots to learn.  I’m in a much bigger organisation than I was.  However, because I’m new, I don’t have to have as many responsibilities, which means getting to go home sooner – yay!  My client workload is about the same, however, there are more people to bounce ideas off, which is great.

We had awful weather last weekend.  The remains of a cyclone had tracked its way down along the coast and caused a lot of localised flooding, power cuts, trees over roads and so on.  It was a mess.  Also, unbelievable that so much damage could come from an ex-cyclone.  I don’t ever want to be caught in a real one!  Horizontal rain was not an exaggeration. 

It was also impossible for me to get to Aqua Aerobics on Monday night because of the rain and storms.  So disappointed.  But I can’t wait to go again this Monday.  I have even been swimming for nearly two weeks and I’m really missing it.  I found swimming quite relaxing and meditative even though I was pushing myself to swim stronger.  I need to get myself a routine happening so that I can get to the pool before work.  Either that, or remember to pack my swimming gear into the car, because I have a key for the pool at work.  That would only be an after work thing I think though.

Roads cleared enough by Tuesday that I was able to go my dance class on Tuesday.  Only 1 other girl from last week came back.  I don’t know whether it wasn’t what they expected or what, but I was kind of expecting them to not come back.  I could kind of tell from last week, that they weren’t as into as they should have been.  On the other hand, there were four other ladies there.  And they seem like they’re going to come back which is cool.  Also, the teacher convinced me to come along to the intermediate classes.  *Rolls eyes* Two lessons at beginner level and I’m already intermediate.  Go me!

Thursday night was another dance class.  Different style to Tuesday’s.  Tuesday’s dance class is faster and more aerobic while Thursday is slower and more muscular.  In fact Thursday s two classes back to back.  So, two hours of dance – yay! 

I may or may not be trying to make up for the fact that I missed out on dancing for the last five years by now cramming four hours of dance in a week.  J Honestly, I’m very happy about it.  I probably shouldn’t take up any more hobbies or activities at this point though, not if I still need to keep the house clean (and finish unpacking.  I have two rooms still full of boxes! O_O), and meal plan and go grocery shopping and cook dinner on the nights when I’m not dancing…

Weekends are my time to relax.  So I’ve spent all day catching up on webcomics, blogs and watching the Twilight movies. 

Tomorrow, I’m going for an early morning swim and then shopping for some more professional work clothes.  Everyone dresses in a far more corporate style here. 

Yet another reason to keep working on getting fitter, healthier and losing weight J