Healthy living is a pain in my rear

Word to the wise:

If you set yourself a goal that you will drink a certain amount of water every day and said amount is 100 ounces and you have this great little chart that you don't want to miss a day of putting an X on because you didn't drink all your water that day, maybe don't wait until 7pm to start drinking said water.

Otherwise when you are inevitably getting up in the middle of the night to use the facilities, you might run into the exercise bike at the end of your bed, and this maybe will cause you to twist all funny and wrench your hip all weird, and then perhaps you may just end up with a wicked pain deep in your posterior. Possibly.










My butt hurts.

(But I got my X.)

My feet are cold

But if I were on the treadmill right now, exercising, like I told Sara I would, my feet probably would not be cold. 

That's all I got tonight, folks. 

So if the day after Halloween is All Saints’ Day and the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, what’s the day after Election Day? I’ll tell you what it is this year: exactly eight (8) weeks until New Year’s Eve! That means you have exactly eight (8) weeks until it’s time again to make you annual resolutions. Perhaps you were smart and kept this year’s list fresh and pristine, ready for 1/1/2009.

(True story: about 4 years ago I was cleaning out an old box of papers, and I found a To Do list from about 5 years before that. Except for about 2 things, the items on it were identical to that current day’s list. Sad.)

Or maybe perhaps you’d like to enter the new year with a solid 8 (eight) weeks of healthy living under your (by then smaller) belt!

Think about what you will be doing 8 weeks + one day from today. Think not so much about how you’ll look but how you’ll feel--about your body, the effort you gave, and how good it will feel to start January 1st with 56 days of momentum. Instead of beginning new health-related habits that day, you’ll be able to just continue on with what you’ve already been doing since early November. Make January 1st just another Thursday that you take the best care of yourself that you can, not Day 1.

Remember that on January 1st, you’ll being saying one of two things to yourself about your goals and your progress towards them (and think about which you’d rather)--“I wish I had” or “I’m glad I did.”

Vote for me!

They totally left me off the ballot today, which is unfortunate, because I have some great ideas for this country. And by "this country," I mean "this blog." My opponent (and by "my opponent," I mean "my best friend and fellow blog owner.") claims to have come up with the fabulous idea of participating in NaBloPoMo and thus breathing new life into the soggy, inedible lump that Diet Cake had become. This great idea (and by "great idea," I mean "super-duper idea") may be motivating me to do wild and crazy things like walk away from my daughter's Halloween candy stash* and leave several handfuls of popcorn in the bowl tonight rather than eat them just cause they were there. Crazy! Wild! 

Given the incredibly brilliant nature of this idea, I must claim credit. I think my opponent would agree that it's for the good of the nation. 

*I saw on TV the other day that 90% of parents steal Halloween candy from their kids. The other 10% are lying. 

Something Else I Have in Common with a Kindergartener

Besides a short attention span and a love of snack time, that is.

I wish I could remember the website I found this idea on, but I can't, and so I totally thought of it on my own! Totally. I am very smart.

One of my biggest problems with getting and keeping weight off has always been consistency. More specifically, my lack thereof. Whether its exercising or eating well, I tend to start off strong and then peter out with a vengeance. See also: August. But about seven weeks ago, I found, er, thought up this really great idea--its called "Don't Break the Chain." It was originally intended as a motivational tool to help kids get their chores done, but I'm finding it's working almost embarrassingly well to keep me exercising. Well, it originally started with exercise and then when that worked so well, I branched out to food tracking (I just added water consumption, too, and I'm hopeful this will work, too).

So here's the dope: I downloaded a 12-week calendar from here. Then, each day that I've exercised, I've X-ed out the day. The idea is to create a "chain" of X's over time, and thus the motivation lies in not wanting to mess up this chain by missing a day. I also like to write in the box what it was I did for exercise that day, just cuz it makes me happy.

Helpful example here:
Don't I look lovely? That's thanks to last night's (when I took the picture) workout, which reads "80 min. walk."
Here's a close-up:
I am now six weeks into the 12 weeks covered by the calendar and feelin' pretty darn good about it. I do take a rest day every week, but I let myself earn an X for it if I use that day to plan out the upcoming week's exercise. So far so good.

About three weeks in, I started keeping track of days that I track my food, too. I use a thin pink (my favorite color) pen and make another X over the day (notice that I didn't say I have to be perfect with my food; I just have to write it down to earn the X). Yesterday I started in with water (if I meet the ounces goal I set, I get me another X), and for that I use a thin blue (cuz that's what color water is, duh) pen. I'm sure I could get quite the rainbow going, but I'm going to stick with those three for the time being, as those are the things I need to be the most consistent about in order to control my weight.

Like I said, I'm almost embarrassed by how well this has motivated me. What's next? Gold stars? Getting to be Line Leader? But as Paul Simon so wisely said, who am I to blow against the wind. It's working, so I'm just going with it.

Please feel free to steal, er, think this idea up entirely on you're own. I hear you are very smart.

The Dog Ate my DVD Player

I very much wanted to complete Sara's inspired "Do an Exercise DVD Every Diddly Darn Day of August" challenge. Really, I did. But you see, one day in August I was baking my cousin's wedding cake when something terrible happened. The second tier of this wedding cake was supposed to be strawberry flavored. "No problem," I thought. I've made this recipe dozens of times. So I whipped up the cake batter, filled the pans and popped them into my trusty, preheated oven. I set the timer, then immediately began washing the dishes. Ha! Just kidding--I left the dishes to "soak," and turned to more important tasks like Googling my name (turns out I'm a fairly famous Harlequin novelist). Twenty minutes into the baking/Googling, I smelled a smell--not the fruitily fragrant smell of baking strawberry cake, but the acrid smell of a big fat burning mistake. With a heavy heart (it eats a lot of bacon), I opened the oven door, sending smoke spewing into the kitchen by way of my face (*cough choke sputter*). I found cake batter flowing out of the pans and onto the oven floor, where it was quickly turning into little mounds of carbon cake and creating the aforementioned billowing smoke. I turned off the oven, and began scraping the mess out of the oven, hoping that I could continue to bake the batter left in the pans if I was able to get the oven to stop smoking. (I'll save you the suspense--it didn't work.) Meanwhile, the smoke detector began to beep, sending the parakeets into noisy conniptions and causing my 3-year-old to start crying at a pitch several octaves higher than the detector. (I have yet to have my life saved by a smoke detector, but they've caused me to age 5 years on more than one occasion.) My husband walked in the door at this moment and asked, "What is going on? And why haven't you opened a window?" (see illustration). I responded the way any reasonable woman would, by throwing a handful of burning cake at him. (Hey! He happens to like burnt cake.) I missed him by a mile (I'm not good at sports [even those that involve cake] on the best of days, let alone in stressful smoky situations) and the cake landed on the dog's head. He (the dog) hardly noticed, as he was busy chewing the dickins out of my DVD player. So now you know why I wasn't able to complete the exercise DVD challenge or write in this blog for months. Thanks for understanding. 

We Are Nothing If Not Challenged

So apparently November is NaBloPoMo, or, for those of you who may prefer real words, National Blog Posting Month. This is clearly a spin-off (hee, I wrote that "spin-oof") of NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month. Know what sounds a lot more pleasant than writing an entire novel in a month? Sitting on the couch eating donuts, that's what. And also sleeping. But since Holly's been pestering me about us being more dilligent about our little neglecterino (why, I ask you, doesn't spellcheck have a problem with that word?) of a blog (and by "been pestering me," I mean "mentioned it once or possibly twice")(and since, as far as I know, there's no NaDoEatMo, though there should be), I thought this might be more realistic. Of course I also once thought it would be realistic to organize my whole house in a month, so perhaps my grasp on reality ain't so great. But we'll overlook that for now, and sally forth on the assumption that maybepossiblyperchance we could post every day this month.

Or, as Holly's favorite humor writer and mine, Eric D. Snider once said, perharps perharps perharps.