It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song

I only have 7 more free sessions at Fitness Together, and I'm worried that I won't have accomplished enough. I want FT to be able to use my before and after story to show what great work they do, but I've only lost 8 pounds so far and no one has noticed a difference in my appearance. I had Liz take a picture of me to compare with the one she took when I started, and I actually think I looked better in the before picture.

I decided I was being crazy, so I put the pictures aside to look at when I was more rational, and guess what--I still thought I looked better in the before picture. Well, I've got 3 more weeks to have a better after picture. I brought my worry up to Mark when we trained together this morning, and he thought I was disappointed for myself, so he was reassuring me that I've made appropriate progress for the time I've been working out. I guess if Mark isn't concerned that I won't make a good story, I shouldn't be.

I'm very pleased with my progress. I would like it if my weight went down faster, but I feel great! I feel muscles where I didn't before, I can feel the fat disappearing like glaciers in global warming, I'm eating really great food and not having any trouble staying on the diet, and I'm loving the taste of food in a way I haven't. All that's good--stop worrying!

I had two great workouts today. I told Mark about the pain I was having in my ankle, so he had me do a lot of exercises that involved balancing on one leg and then the other. I would have thought that would have exarcerbated the problem, but it worked. Here are pictures from my two favorite exercises from today. I know, the first pictures look like I'm a person in the witness protection program demonstrating exercises while concealing my identity. Anyway, I would step onto a 1 foot high platform on one leg and then do presses. I did that about 40 times .

 

 








For the above exercise, I stood on one leg, holding onto a weighted cable, leaned forward until my leg was straight behind me, and then stood up and did a one-arm row, all without putting my foot down. I think I did 60 of these--4 sets of 15. Or was it 4 sets of 10. All I know is that I was really ready to stop at the end of each set--the sign of a good exercise.

Then tonight, I did spinning at the Y with Peggy. My ankle had been aching a bit, so I debated whether or not to go. I decided to err on the side of going, and if it hurt, I could always stop and come back home. I'm really glad I did, because I was able to make it though the whole hour. I didn't try to stay with Peggy--no jumps of standing for 8, sitting for 8, etc., but I stood a lot and tried to pick up my cadence both standing and sitting. I was able to get my heart rate into the 160s, and according to my heart rate monitor, burned 840 calories. I'm really pleased to have lasted the hour.

Let It Snow!!!

We had a great blizzard here last night and today! The city and state declared a state of emergency and asked everyone to stay off the roads (coming from Minnesota, it was a bit of an over-reaction), so I spent the day at home, working in my comfortable chair with a fire going, watching the snow swirl outside the window. Beautiful! Here's a picture of the file cabinet man in our front yard through the snow:

The bad part of the storm is that my training appointment got cancelled. I hate taking off two days in a row. I considered working out at home, but I'm going to work out at Fitness Together both Thursday and Friday, and don't want to overdo it.

I read a really interesting article in livestrong, talking about the value of interval training. Here's the link:
 
http://www.livestrong.com/article/113860-interval-training-burn-fat/

The article talked about how you can train at higher intensity and burn more fat by doing interval training--alternating periods of very high intensity with recovery periods. It also talked about how you are less fatigued training that way. The timing of the article was perfect, because I had been puzzling about the differences between my training on Saturday and Monday at spinning class. Both days my legs were dead. I had had a really hard training on Friday which led to dead legs on Saturday. On Monday, I had done 120 squats, which resulted in my legs being dead Monday night. Saturday, Peggy led an endurance class where she was basically trying to keep our heart rates constant throughout the hour, with neither high periods of intensity nor breaks between songs. I struggled throughout the hour and couldn;t get my heart rate above the 140s.

On Monday, though, Peggy led us in interval training, and I was able to get my heart rate up into the 150s and 160s pretty quickly and return to that level regularly throughout the hour, even though my legs were very tired. As a measure of how much harder I was able to work out, I ended up burning about 75 more calories in the same hour time by alternating periods of high intensity with recovery. Again, this is something I wish I'd known when I was doing inline skating marathons. I would push myself to maximum effort for the whole 26.2 miles. I would get really fatigued and think I had no fuel left to burn and eat some caffeinated goo, thinking the caffeine and sugar would get me going again. I can now see that if I had alternated sprinting with recovery, I would have had more energy and probably would have finished in less time.

I really wish I could use this knowledge in another marathon. What I need is a long term goal other than getting in shape and losing weight. The North Shore Inline Marathon every September in Duluth, Minnesota has been that goal for many years. I've thought about whether I could have a biking goal--my brother Tom does the ride across Iowa nearly every year. But at this point, both biking and skating make me nervous. There are so many hills around here and I can too easily imagine hitting a bad spot in the road, a rock, or popping a tire and breaking a bunch of bones. Not quite the images I need to inspire me in a biking goal. Similarly, I've only fallen about 5 times in the 15+ years I've done inline skating, but all it takes is once.

Any ideas?


Hey, if you'd like an inspiring story of someone getting into shape, read this one. The before and after pictures are astounding:

http://www.livestrong.com/blog/blog/jacobs-success-story/

Can't Get Enough

Calories on Mondays, that is. My goal is to eat 1,950 calories a day, and at least 1,600 after subtracting the calories I burn exercising. That's hard to do on Mondays. I estimate that I burned 172 calories in 45 minutes at Fitness Together in the morning and my heart rate monitor estimates that I burned 747 at spinning class this evening. That means I need to eat 2,519 calories of food to be at a net 1,600 for the day.

I never in my life have had trouble eating the number of calories I need on a diet. It's usually a struggle to stay within my caloric limit. But this is the first time that my focus is on both the quality of the food I'm eating, along with the calorie count. My goal is to eat food that will support my recovery from exercise and building my muscles and bones. So no sugar or alcohol and no processed food. I also try to eat many small meals during the day to keep my metabolism high.

Here's what I ate today to try to meet my caloric need:

Breakfast before exercising: protein shake with whole fat yogurt, protein powder, banana, blueberries, raspberries, and peanut butter--494 calories
Breakfast after exercising: 2 fried eggs on brown rice with steamed kale--301 calories
Lunch: homemade blackbean soup, toast with melted cheese on it--414 calories
After lunch: apple and cheese--224 calories
After, after lunch: almonds--83 calories
Before spinning: protein bar--230 calories
Dinner (I was not hungry at all, but knew I needed to eat, so I didn't eat the chicken dinner I was going to): yogurt with almonds, blueberries, protein powder, raspberries, pumpkin seeds--584 calories

So after all that food, I had eaten 2,330 calories, netting 1,411 after exercising, 439 short of my goal and 189 short of my minimum. I feel stuffed and can't imagine trying to eat anything more.

I remember reading an article about what Michael Phelps ate on a typical day--he had to eat thousands of calories because of the amount of exercise he does each day. I couldn't understand why he ate so much crap. It makes much more sense to me now. It's hard to get enough calories without putting down a pizza or two.

Anyway, it's a great problem to have, and much preferable to the one I normally have when I'm trying to lose weight!

On the Road Again

I'm in Minnesota. It's a balmy 14 degrees out, up from a low of 3, and working to a high of 14. Tomorrow is going to be the hottest day of my visit, with a high of 15, and the coldest day, with a low of 1. I can hear the furnace struggling to keep the house warm, taking brief pauses to catch its breath before resuming its work. There's about a foot and a half of snow on the groud and some truly amazing snow banks on the side of the road. I don't think the snow that's on the ground is going anywhere this winter--I can't imagine how high those snow banks will be by the end on January.

I weighed in yesterday and have lost 4.3 pounds in two weeks! I do not want to give any of that weight back to the scale because of my trip. I am committed to returning at the same or lower weight. I came up with a plan for enjoying food while traveling--make a delicious stir-fry of shrimp, onions, and snow peas on brown rice, but by the time I finished grocery shopping and made dinner, I just wanted to see the Celtics beat the Knicks. It looked like it was going the other way, but Paul Pierce made the game winning shot with .7 of a second left on the game clock. Go Celtics!

So I brought some food that I thought would be satisfying--some apples, raw sweet peas, and some energy bars. The airport was causing the normal cravings--a man across from me was making his ice cream cone look like the most delicious thing ever. But I stuck to my plan, and for the first time ever, spent the entire flight talking to the person next to me, and my food cravings disappeared. Maybe that was what I was really looking for--the nourishment of human connection.