Weighing In and Operation Weekend: Day 1

Okay so yesterday was my weigh in day. I've been doing WW for almost a month now. This was my fourth week on it and so far I've lost 9 pounds. So I only lost 1 pound this week, but to be fair its that time of the month, and so I am 100% sure that I would have lost more, if it had been a normal week. Not that it really matters, because in a couple of days the bloat will have gone away! I'll be interested to see what next week says, because I know my body pretty well by now and when its this time, I know I will have a hard time not gaining some weight.

I have to say that I'm nervous for this weekend. The past two weekends I havent gone out with my friends for dinner and drinks because I'm scared of being naughty! But then what do I do when I stay at home? I have a beer and order pizza, and then after that I just eat what I want. So I absolutely have to get my weekends under control. I also havent worked out the past couple of weekends. I do Zumba all week, sometimes 3 times (thats three hours, yo!) a day. I was running, but doing both the Zumba and the running was just too much. So I decided that I do want to keep running, but the best time to do it would be Friday, Saturday and Sunday because those are the days that I find myself straying because there arent any classes to take on the weekend.

I figure if I have a plan in place for this weekend, I wont be able to be bad. Honestly, during the week, its not like I deprive myself of anything. I have a skinny cow frozen treat every night after dinner, and that takes care of my sweet tooth and for lunch I have been eating this really good soup with brown rice. Snacks are hit or miss, sometimes I do juice, or sometimes I eat some tuna salad, or just fruit. So I dont feel like I'm missing anything. If I want chips with lunch, I buy a small bag of them, because I cant keep a big bag in the house without eating them all. So maybe I need to just plan out all my meals for the weekend as well, and maybe some treats :D too!

So today I decided that I would go to the gym at 2:00. I eat around 12, so it would give me 2 hours to digest and be between snack times so my stomach doesnt feel like its attacking me during my workout. When I first started running and swimming this summer, I would do it too close to my snack time and by the time I got to the swimming, my stomach would be rumbling like crazy! As I would do each lap, I would tell myself, one more lap closer to a snack!

When I signed up for WW, I decided to try out the ActiveLink, mainly because I'm always curious how much activity I'm really doing. Maybe its the OCD in me, but I always want to know exactly how much I'm moving and burning. Let me say that this thing isnt a Bodybugg by any stretch of the imagination. From what I can tell it's like a fancy pedometer. The really annoying thing is that it calibrates for a week, and it takes away your ability to put in activity points. So for a whole week, you dont know what your activity is. I like it okay. If falls off my pants a lot. I've lost it on walks with the dog twice now. So now I clip it to the elastic of my panties, so at least if it falls of, its not going to fall far!!

On a normal Zumba day by the end of the day, see 8:00 I get 100% activity. This is doing 2-3 hours of Zumba. You can tell how far along you are by taking the ActiveLink off your belt and laying it on a hard surface, and it will light up along the edges. There is a 100% on the left corner and when you get all the bars lit up to the 100% in green, you have hit your goal for the day. There are two more bars and so you can get even more past your 100%, so far at 4:39 today I'm at 113% of my activity level. That was only walking/running for an hour and swimming for 30 minutes. Sad thing is, that it takes me ALL day to get that when I do Zumba! I earned 9 Points Plus for that workout! Not bad I would say!

This is how much activity I've done today

When you hit 100% it gets excited and they all flash

ALSO HOLY COW!!! I have amazing/freaking awesome news!!!!!! I ran/walked 5k today in 40 minutes. Yeah!! I totally rocked it. I set the time for 60 minutes because I REALLY wanted to see how long it would take me to get to 5k. When I first started this about 5 weeks ago I was running for 15 seconds and walking for 45. Now I run for a minute and walk for a minute. I can run for about 5 minutes straight before I start to get really really tired. So I'm not quite ready for straight running yet, and I'm cool with that!

This is my sweaty super excited 5k face!

Next week is going to throw my schedule off, and it would have been thrown off no matter what because after next week, I start my summer class. I shouldnt be nervous about it, but I am. I'm nervous for next week because I'll be at my mom's house. There is nothing wrong with it there (love you mom!) but I wont have my Zumba classes, swimming pool, or my treadmill. So I will for sure have to come up with a plan for next week otherwise, I probably wont workout. I think though, that instead of Zumba I'll do the Turbo Fire workouts at the same time I would be doing Zumba. That way, I'll still have my schedule. Its just when school starts that everything will be thrown out of whack.

My class starts at 8, so I wont be able to go to the aqua Zumba class. There is another class that I was doing at 7 am on Monday and Wednesday and I wont be able to go to that. Technically I could probably swing it, but I would be going to school sweaty and disgusting two days a week. PLUS I have a work study, which I'll be working 20 hours a week. So no matter what, everything will be shaken up and I'm going to have to find new times to workout. Its only for a month, and for that I'm greatful! But I dont want things to change so soon! I feel like I've finally gotten into a groove and I dont want to mess it up (i'll stop whining now!)

Sorry this post is so dang long!!! 

Healthy Eats: Cooking for One (or two) People

In my last post I mentioned that a couple of my girlfriends and I had started working out and eating dinner together in an attempt to keep each other accountable. We are all in school together and so when we can we would try to get together and make a healthy dinner. It was super fun, before everyone got busy again with school, or boyfriends (husbands :D) or commuting. The things I took away from doing those meals were awesome for people who only cook dinner for one or two people and so I'm going to share the tips with you because I dont know about you, but like I have said before, cooking a whole casserole and having to eat it all alone gets SO boring after the 4th lunch/dinner, and you can only freeze so much. So onward to the tips!

1. Buy It Frozen- yes you read that right. I try to buy as much fresh fruit and veggies as I can, but sometimes its hard to eat it all and to me, there is nothing worse than leftover vegetables unless its something that I'm going to eat the very next day with dinner. I have found that buying a bag of frozen broccoli and just pulling out what I need with dinner makes my life so much easier and its always fresh!

2. Buy it Frozen times 2?: Okay so same with frozen meats. I know I just said this about the veggies, but you can buy a couple of pounds of fish (I love salmon) that come individually packaged, pull it out in the morning to defrost (in the fridge) and cook it when you get home and its wonderful. You can do this with frozen chicken too. There are hundreds of dishes you can cook chicken with, but you dont have to buy a whole pound and cook it all at once.

3. Spice it Up: One of my favorite things is to play with spices that you havent tried before. Having people in my kitchen cooking who knows what makes me happy but nervous because I never know what it will taste like, but some of my favorite new dishes have come from the girls cooking with something I wouldnt have ever tried. So find a seasoning that looks good and start playing with it, if you dont like it, at least you tried. Cavenders is GREAT and goes well on everything. 

4. Play With Your Food: I was telling my mom today that the meals that satisfy me the most are the ones that are pretty. Whether that is with different color veggies on your plate, or with how you present it, even if its just you. You look at it and feel like you made something thats worth eating and you feel happier and making the choice to put different veggies on your plate, like summer squash, broccoli, asparagus (those are my three stand bys for right now) bell peppers, zucchini or anything else makes you feel good about what you are eating. Plus, if you have more veggies on your plate than meat or carbs especially with Weight Watchers you are eating a whole lot of good for not many Points Plus.

Ground Turkey!!

5. Ground Turkey and Greek Yogurt: Two of my (brand new, for the greek yogurt) favorite things! I have found recently that its hard for me to make a big dish out of the ground turkey and still want to eat it. Just like the casserole thing. So I saw one of the fitness people I follow on Instagram (follow me I'm ladylizza) and on Facebook makes patties out of her ground turkey and then puts the on whatever she wants. You could freeze them and reheat as needed if you dont think you can eat all of them in a week! Talk about being able to mix up your meats if its just that easy. I do this with my turkey and I LOVE everything I put it in!

Greek yogurt goes well in just about anything that you can use mayo for. I have substituted it for deviled eggs, salmon croquettes, and tuna salad. Imagine the possibilities. Especially if you get the non fat or fat free greek yogurt. It has a gob of protein in it and has a nice tangy flavor, not much sugar and lasts for a long time in the fridge!

With those tips you should be cooking for yourself (and your plus one! or even your family) in no time! 

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Switching topics! I do want to say one of the things I'm most excited about is my potted plant garden that I started! I have two tomatoes that are growing on two of my 4 plants, and I have a pepper plant that has three little baby peppers on it! I named one of my tomatoes Alfred. He is the big one. I'll feel almost bad when I eat him. I also have two watermelon vines and a basil plant, plus some hanging ferns and two little potted flower plants. They all make me happy when I take the dog out for a walk!

This is my first Tomato

All plants lined in a row

Alfred!!

See how big he is!?

Summa time

I have debated over and over again if I want to keep writing this blog. I feel like every time I sit down to write it, I start, look at what I wrote and stop, erase and keep going with my day.

Me and Corey

This summer has been nice. I have visited my family, gotten to spend time with friends, spent a week alone with my husband and I have been doing my best to work out and eat healthy. I would say every day is a struggle, and some days are, but for the most part, I'm taking this time off (only two weeks or so now before I start summer school) to try to get into as many healthy habits as I possibly can before I have to start school back, that way its not so much a struggle as a necessity.

He LOVES my time off from school!

Generally I try to work out at least two hours a day. I figured because I have so much free time, that it would be silly to not spend as much time as I can in the gym. I have found that the best thing I can do for myself as far as exercise goes is that I have to find things I can enjoy. I've started (slowly) running. I'm at maybe a 17 minute mile, if that. I do Zumba every day of the week, and I even started doing an aqua Zumba class two times a week in the morning. I've decided that I dont get much of a work out, but it helps to work out the kinks I get during everything else I do and I always leave feeling refreshed and ready for the day. I wont be able to do this when my summer class starts, but that's alright.

There is also a cool stationary bike at the gym that I like to use that is like an elliptical where you can move your arms too, so on some days I use that. I've found that I have a really short attention span and unless I am talking to someone while I do a bike or elliptical, I have a hard time staying motivated to keep on the machine.

I have also been really working with how I eat. I flat out dont buy things that I know I will eat in one sitting. I dont know about you, but its a lot easier to eat a bag of chips than a whole bunch of bananas. So I dont binge on fruit and veggies, so they stay in the house all of the time. I always have strawberries, blueberries, watermelon and I go through a lot of bananas. Thank goodness for summer time! I am also enjoying learning to cook one person small meals. The casseroles and stuff are good for the winter, but I find myself getting really bored with them after a few days. So I have been loving the chance to cook fresh vegetables like squash, zucchini, asparagus and broccoli, just to name a few.

Weekends are still really hard for me, there arent any Zumba classes on the weekends, so usually I try to go to the gym to swim laps, because those are my days off. It really helps to mix things up, and doing the laps for an hour in the pool is a huge workout for me.

Lastly, I started Weight Watchers. I did this for a couple of reasons. The first was that with programs like My Fitness Pal, or Lose it I never know how many calories I should be eating. And it just flat out confuses me. I go to a calculator that it supposed to tell me how many calories I should be eating a day to lose 2 pounds a week, and it gives me a vastly different number than MFP or LI. So I just decided to try WW out for three months (thats what I paid for because it was cheaper) and see how it goes. If It doesnt look like I'm going to benefit from this, I'll stop the subscription and work with something else.

So far though, it seems to be going well. I've done it for three weeks now and I've lost 8 pounds. If nothing else I feel healthier, especially when I am eating really well all week. I really enjoy trying to find healthy things at restaurants and especially enjoy cooking now that I have the time.

That's the update for now. I'm just going to keep chugging along and we'll see in a couple of weeks how well I'm able to cope with a new schedule and school and working out.

At the beginning of this a couple of my friends had started eating healthy with me, and working out, but so far I'm the only one that is really into keeping it going. You sure cant make people do something they dont want to do, especially exercise!