Week 2

Okay, so not the best week ever.  I did loose, but not as much as I would have liked.  I lost .8 pounds.  But heck, a loss is a loss!

I have a couple of things to work on for this next week. First of all, I didn't do any walking this week, I only did my back exercises.  Those are great and necessary, but not exactly an exercise that is going to make the fat melt off my bones.  So I want to go walking at least once this week.

Secondly, I don't think I did much as far as portion control goes.  I think I ate pretty much what I wanted to.  So another goal for this week is to watch what I eat and how much I eat.

-M-

Taking Care of the Back

It's been a year since I had my last spinal injection!!  I'd like to keep it that way, so something that's going to be part of my regular workout routine is going to be the exercises my doctor gave me to strengthen my back.  But I was thinking, since back problems are not unique to myself I thought I might share a couple of these exercises with you all.

First of all, we have the Wall Sit.  These are my least favorite of all my back exercises, but also they seem to make me feel like it's an actual work out.  They don't look hard, but they use a lot of muscles.  Basically, you stand about 2 feet away from the way, then lean back into it, and then slide down until your knees are at a 90 degree angle while contracting your abs.  Hold it for about 20-60 seconds and then stand back up.  Repeat 5-20 times, depending on how much you hurt.

I don't know why this helps your back other than it's just a general core strengthening exercise.  The stronger your core is the less likely your back is to move in ways that it shouldn't.  Right?  That's just a guess on my part.

I tell this to everyone that knows about my back problems: DON'T HURT YOUR BACK!!!  It royally sucks.  To this day I do not know what I did to my back, but I lost a year to it and I'd rather that be all.

-M-

A New Beginning!

Okay, it's not the beginning.  It's a New Beginning!

On my post yesterday I said that I wasn't going to weigh-in until two weeks from then, but then I got thinking about why I wanted to wait that long and I decided it was because I was afraid of the scale and I wanted to do a lot of walking and eating right before I did that.  Basically, I wanted to loose weight so that I'd feel better about loosing weight . . . 

Make sense??  Yeah, it didn't make a lot of sense to me either.

So this morning I pulled out the scale . . . and I ran away and hid for a while.

But then I came back and weighed myself and it wasn't as bad as I thought.  I weighed 300.8 pounds, which means I didn't gain all the weight back I had lost.

So, for all you new folks out there (and myself) let’s go over the rules once again.  According to this blog’s first post the rules are:

“Each time I work out (gym, swimming, going for a walk or hike etc) for 20 minutes or more I earn one download on iTunes.  Each pound I lose I earn $1 towards new clothes.  However, if I gain weight, each pound I gain will result in $1 lost in that account and if I don't work out at least twice a week I will loose one of my iTunes downloads.” 

I’ve decided to start the iTunes count over again, but I’m going to keep the $1.80 that I would have earned if I had gained the weight back while actually blogging.  

Hiking

Yeah . . . remember that whole new excuses thing?  Well, I came up with a lot of excuses and low and behold I did not do very well.

I'm all moved into my new house (all except the unpacking and a few other odds and ends), and now I need to get off my but and get back to not leading myself to an early grave.

Last week I actually did pretty well - I went for a walk on Friday night, Sunday morning and Monday night!  My Sunday walk was actually more of a hike than anything.  I left my house without water or my cell phone (bad idea) and with no clear plan.  I live in the shadow of an odd shaped bluff that many mistake for a volcano (not actually a volcano, in the picture below it's the hill underneath the moon).  When I bought my house I decided that I had to make it to the top of this peak.  I had attempted it once before, but it was getting dark and I had to turn back before I got stranded.

Well, last Sunday I woke up ridiculously early for a girl that has 1pm church.  So off I went and before I knew it I was at the beginning of the trail for this hike.  I had lots of time on my hand, so I figured I might as well see how far I can get.

The first part of the hike is not bad.  Rocky and a little steep at times, but nothing hard.  The first part of the hike takes you up between the faux volcano and the Airport Bluff (so named because it has the St. George airport on it.) - when you get to the top of this the trail splits, one going to the volcano and the other to the top of the Airport Bluff.  I chose to keep going - I knew it would be steep, but I'm not sure I really understood.  YIKES!!

I made it to the top without incident.  Towards the very top it wasn't really a hike anymore it was more of a "free form lava rock scramble."  I was scared, but by the time I got to that point I felt I had come too far to go back.

The view from the top was incredible!!  I could see Green Valley, Santa Clara and Ivins to the West, Snow Canyon and Highway 18 to the North, and Downtown St. George to the East.  It was great!  The hike down was scary and I actually fell at one point.  I have a huge bruise that I wish I could show off, but alas, it would be fairly inappropriate to show it to others.

Okay, so I'm going to start blogging again.  I'm planning on weighing-in in two weeks and then starting over on all tracking.   Wish me luck!

-M-

Week . . . I'm not sure . . . I lost count.

Okay, I know in my last post I said I wasn't going to miss any more weigh-ins.  But I was honestly too scared last Saturday to get myself on the scale.  I finally convinced myself to do it today and it wasn't too bad: 293.4.

Okay, off to work on my house!

No Excuses!

So . . . you're all probably wondering what happened to me and why I dropped off the face of the planet.  Well, I'll tell you, it's because I bought a house.  And although the house is in good condition, it still needs a lot of work.  Every spare minute I've had in the last week or more has been spent there trying to get it ready to paint so that we can get the new flooring in so I can move in.

I've decided that this is not a good enough excuse though, and I need to stay active (although I don't know how much more active I can be - I spend 5 hours there today lifting things, moving things . . . trust me, I'm sore!) and I still need to do my weigh-ins.  However, I forgot to weigh in this last Saturday and I was trying to figure out what to do.  Which is when I remembered that when I was doing Weight Watchers we were periodically given a "No Weigh-in Pass," which is exactly what it says.  If we thought we had not done well that week we could skip weighing-in.  So this is my only week for that.

I also made another decision.  I don't really want to count every day that I spend working on my house as an exercise, but I don't want to punish myself for it either.  So for the in term I am going to not take away iTunes downloads while I am working on my house.  However, once I've moved in that goes back into effect.  If I do find time to work out between now and then I can still earn downloads, or if there's a particularly intense day of working on the house (like the day we pull out the carpet . . . ugh.) then those can also count for a download.

Next post will be a weigh-in!  I'm nervous.

What counts?

FYI - I just changed the settings on my blog so that you can post anonymous comments.  If you already have an ID please use that to post comments.  If you do post comments "anonymously," please include your first name.  If it gets to be a problem I can just moderate comments, but I'd rather not.

I went for a walk yesterday . . . kind of.  My ward's FHE activity was combined with another ward for a Valentine's activity.  I went with my roommate, but I decided to walk home.  So between the two dances that I danced and the walk home I'm counting that as an exercise.

I bought a house last week, which I'm very excited about, but I've been having an internal debate ever since I bought it, and now I've decided to see what you, the readers, think about this.  I'm trying to decide if cleaning and painting and moving in can count as exercise.  Let me know what you think.