As I mentioned yesterday, my weight and fitness will continue to be a priority this year, so I thought I'd write a bit about what I'm doing these days.
I still love going to the gym regularly, and it's still the same old elliptical/tv/music routine. At least if I have the TV on and music playing, it keeps me interested. And depending on the pace of the music and what I'm up for, I like to think some of what I do on the elliptical qualifies as interval training. I usually keep my tempo at a minimum of 140 bpm, and max out at 160 bpm. But boy, can I feel those extra bpm! Some days it just feels SO good to go fast and breathe hard and sweat like crazy.
And I think feeling good about your workout is so important, because I have found I can't really count on it to see lasting weight loss. I know I'm burning more calories than I would at rest, and I try not to use those calories up, but it is so easy to overestimate your calorie burn and to gobble up that loss. I think working out helps my general mindset more than anything. It helps me feel calm, it's a constant reminder that I'm working toward better health, and it does eat up some time when I would otherwise be checking the kitchen for snacks.
My typical gym routine on a weeknight is to get home around 4:30-5, change into gym clothes, grab a small snack if I feel extra hungry, and get to the gym by 5:15. I like to watch Jeopardy until it's over--it's a great show for the attention span I have at the gym. Then I try to find something else to watch until about 6, finish up, wash my hands (always! I just don't trust that people clean the equipment that well), and leave. Then I like to drive around a little bit while I drink some water. I consider this a bit of quiet "me" time that helps me focus on how my day has gone and what the rest of my night will look like. Then I get home and change into my pajamas (clean yoga pants), and eat dinner around 6:30. By 7, it feels like the work of the day is mostly over and I can relax. I actually try to get into bed by 9 each night, so I really only have 2 hours of downtime (optimistically) when I'm in a snacking danger zone. And I don't often feel like snacking right after dinner, so the whole gym thing at night is really helpful in the sense that it limits my grazing time.
As for eating, I'm currently just tracking calories using fatsecret.com
This is a free app. I first signed up for it years ago but never used it. Then a blog post at runsforcookies.com reminded me about it. Katie at that site has been successful using various tools, so when she recently recommended fatsecret.com over others, that was a good reminder for me to give it a try.
I don't know if it's just that I struggled with the WW app going down so much, but fatsecret.com seems so easy to use. It's easy to find food you need to track. You can enter by meal type, but I just load it all up in the default breakfast category because I just want to keep track of the number of calories. Also, unlike Weight Watchers, it's turning out to just be so much easier to count calories than Points. I thought it would be more difficult because WW allows you to skip counting fruits and veggies, but that's really not turning out to be a major concern. Points are not readily available for items. You have to look them up in the WW database, or scan, and often whatever you need in't there. So then you have to deal with the calculator and enter the 500 data points to get the one Point value. Calories, though, are just so easy to find for so many products. It's even listed there on fast food menu boards these days. It's just a lot easier to me to count calories than Points.
Right now I'm aiming for eating fewer than 1,500 calories a day (the amount I ate when life was easy and I didn't have a family or a deskjob and lost 50 pounds.) One lesson I learned from being on WW for so long is that you can really max out the amount you eat by eating high quality foods. People who are in the WW newlywed phase often say "but not all calories ARE created equal, and only through WW can you learn that." Well, if you're counting calories and load up on lean protein and salads, that's going to be clear when you get to the end of the day and have 500 calories remaining.
For a while I was tracking my workout times in fatsecret.com as well, but I got a new fitbit for Christmas (my first baby died in October after years of dedicated service). So I'm just using the fitbit to track activity and keep it separate from calories I take in. I'm sticking with my previous goal of 10K steps per day.
So, I feel like I've got my cardio handled, and my calories figured out. One other component of my fitness I have struggled with is weight training, or really, just adding exercise in that is not the elliptical. I've got all sorts of DVDs that attest to my desire to broaden my exercise horizons, but lazy me can't seem to bother to even get one playing most days. So I remembered that it's 2017 and there are tons of free resources on the Internet and voila! I found FitnessBlender.com
This site has a variety of free videos, they are searchable by length and type, and you can favorite them and add them to a calendar. I'll be honest and say I've only done a few so far but they are perfect for someone like me (lazy, reluctant, feet dragger). I've been sticking to workouts that are only about 10-15 minutes and target upper body, lower body, or core. I do these in the morning before my shower--that's why I need them to be short. I add the workout to the calendar once it's done so I can track my progress in that regard. If I just do a 10 minute video 5 days a week, that's 50 minutes of strength training per week I wasn't getting before. I'll take it!
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