Category: My Own Personal Weirdness

Day 6 I got up and tried to do my 10 minute Dance Solutions video.  I have several problems with it: 1) There’s no instruction, just dancing. 2) I am trying to lose weight, which means that I cannot see all my muscles, so I have no idea which ones are moving.  3) I can’t dance.  So after several minutes I gave up trying to figure out what she was doing and spent the remainder of my time bouncing around energetically whichever way I could.  I figured that cardio was cardio at this point.  My heart was beating super fast, my arms & legs were flailing around, it was all good.  I also ended up walking back and forth to my parents house a few times (and mostly took the long way ’round).

Food: I had another one of my less-than-inspiring-at-this-point breakfasts.  Skipped morning snack because I knew I was meeting my parents for lunch.  Lunch was at a place called The Purple Pig.  I should have realized that this would mean less-than-stellarly-healthy, but I did expect there to be some sort of salad option.  Alas, no.  Even the safe-sounding new potatoes turned out to be cooked mush with a pound of butter in it.  I ate the brisket sandwich (surprisingly small compared to my parents food) and some of the broccoli rice casserole (I farmed out the rest under the flag of “You don’t have any of this, try some!”) and since everyone agreed the potatoes were bad, I didn’t feel bad leaving them on the plate.  So I didn’t really do too terribly badly.  Skipped afternoon snack as well, since we were doing Mother’s Day Celebration dinner.

We went out to BJ’s Brewhouse and Grill.  Even though I’d declared it my “cheat” night, I still wanted to not go too overboard, so I chose off the “under 575 calories” menu and had a yummy chicken pesto flatbread with a side salad.  After dinner I had a Klondike bar (only 220 calories, much less than regular ice cream, strangely).

Day Four was my last day of the week with my Nancy Marmorat video. Today’s focused on the "butt-ox" (I can’t help but giggle when she says it like that; it sounds like some ugly beast, silly, but true).  I like to refer to it as the "booty" instead. 😉

Foodwise: breakfast was at my friend’s house and she’d made yummy sausage rolls.  I had two of those, some grapes, and half a banana, encompassing both breakfast and snack times (we were there all morning).  Lunch was leftover sausage & polenta & green beans.  After-school snack was pistachio pudding (oh, and I was wrong earlier this week: we use 1% milk, so it’s even fewer calories).  Dinner was beans & cornbread & pickles (Wednesday night is vegetarian night at our house).

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I usually drink black tea at breakfast, green tea at lunch, then water at all other times.  Sometimes I drink extra tea, but my rule is that I have to drink another half glass of water with my tea to rule out any dehydration that might come from it. (And that’s what keeps me from drinking too much tea)

If you come to my house this week, you’ll see a whole lot of little blue post-it notes around on the walls like this:

If you are a guest here, please ignore these signs, as they are for family only.   

Nick and the kids have been asking for things they could do that would help me out, but by the time they ask, I’m usually in that lost-from-words state of exhaustion and frustration where I literally cannot think of a single thing that they could do for me.  So one day when I was alone, I got to thinking “Wouldn’t it be great if they could ask me right now?  I could come up with an awesome list!”  So I started putting up notes right where activities could be done, so when we’re in the kitchen and Nick wants to know how to help, I can point at the wall and he’ll take out the compost or when the kids are in their room looking for a “help mama” chore to complete their lists they can look to their closets (which normally need things tidied up before they can close).

(I noticed last night that there were bizarre things in the sink from the dinner Nick had made, but I was too tired to mention them.  By the time I got up this morning they were out of there.  From my list to an empty sink.  WHOOP!)

Day Three I had the same kid-in-my-bed situation, so I put off exercising until that small window of time between taking big kids to school & Greg to MDO.  Greg burst in on me at some point with a "What are you doing that for?!"  The look on his face was priceless. 

I got in some extra exercise today as well, in the form of walking up and down all the bleachers three times fast and walking to the car and back (at the very end of the parking lot from the stadium) a few times.  I also had to dig some holes for the azaleas we got from church (I dug the 3 easy ones; Nick did the harder ones later).

Food-wise:  Breakfast was a different oatmeal, a different fruit, and a different kind of turkey bacon (did you know they make one that tastes just like regular Canadian bacon?! I was so happy to find that out.)  Lunch was very difficult, as I was stuck at Track & Field Day over at the Rose Stadium…without cash.  I don’t know where it went, I just know I didn’t have it.  A very nice family brought me a meal, unexpectedly, so I ate it: hamburger, fries, and a coke.  So yummy.  Fortunately I’d skipped morning snack (no time for that lately) and then skipped afternoon snack as well to make up for all those calories.  Dinner was sausage, polenta, & green beans, all of which I ate reasonable sized portions of (double the green beans in proportion to the polenta).

Day Two was all about your partnership with God.  It reminded us not only to avoid unhealthy foods, but to remember that you can ask God to help you with that part of the journey.  That God is always protecting you and to try to remember that when you’re faced with unhealthy choices of all kinds.

So today I got up and had a stumbling block right away: a kid in my bed.  I exercise behind the closed door of my bedroom because I find exercising to be super-embarrassing.  So this was hard: do I wake up the little one to exercise or put it off hoping I’d find willpower later?  Well, I ended up letting him sleep a while longer and then trying to transfer him to his bed, but he woke up anyway.  I left him out on the couch with his brothers and went off to do my exercising.

In terms of exercise, I’m currently doing Nancy Marmorat’s video series on low-impact exercises.  There’s one dealing with different groups of muscles each day of the week for four days, using simple items like towels and one pound weights.  Yesterday worked on the stomach area and today worked the chest and shoulders (plus a warm up and several minutes of cardio). Then I’m doing balance ball exercises from physical therapy the last official exercise day of the week.  I’m hoping to also walk the other two days, but I’m not going hinge all my plans on those two little walks.

Eating wise, I did okay most of the day. Breakfast looked like this:

(oatmeal, an orange, a slice of turkey bacon, and some green tea)

We skipped midmorning snack entirely.  Lunch was some baked potato with very carefully measured sour cream and butter and a whole lot of chives (yum!) for only 400 calories of goodness.

Afternoon snack was chocolate pudding made with 2% milk (only 140 calories a serving for a 1/2 cup of yum).

Dinner was pasta & sauce with broccoli. I tried to eat more broccoli than p&s.  And then I had a small piece of birthday cake (which I found to be totally reasonable given the skipped snack earlier).