Saturday, August 18, 2012

school has started again!

I know I haven't checked into hippoland for a while, but hey, I'm a mom.  Life is busy.
I haven't given up the fitness thing entirely..
Over the summer I clocked several hours at the pool, some of them doing aerobicish moves while my kids played, sometimes playing with them, and sometimes reading and sunning nearby.
We now live 1/2 mile from our kids school.  This week I walked to and from with them every day.  So 2 trips Mon & Tues, and three trips Wed, Thurs, and Friday, that clocked in 13 miles of walking.  
Next week I'll add housework.
And then, after that...my master plan kicks in.  With Si Guy gone from 8-11 every day, I can hit the 9am classes at the gym...or dust off my Golds Gym Wii game.  With Mr. man working from home, and how entertaining he finds it to distract me while exercising, I'm strongly motivated towards the gym.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Aqua at 9am

is a totally different experience than aqua at 5:45 am.
  1) there are about 7x more people there.
  2) I'm mostly awake.
  3) At least on Wednesdays, the teacher is a guy....who likes using water dumb-bells.
    I really enjoyed practicing my boxing moves I learned on the Wii underwater with weights.  I also enjoyed the relative anonymity in a group that size.  All was well until it was time for the dreaded noodle.
   I'm sorry for sounding sexist, but for decency's sake, a guy really shouldn't be teaching a bunch of middle-age/old ladies how to use a noodle...at least not in a pool.My inner juvenile thought "pole dancing" when the first thing we had to do was straddle it.  We were instructed on having a "happy noodle", and a "sad noodle" as well.  One lady near me shared my thoughts apparently, saying
"I'm not sure I can make mine sad under water.  It's kind of stiff."
  Soon after, we were all waving our noodles in the air.
   Everything after that was kind of anticlimactic.  We cooled down, shook it off, and stretched.  Overall, everyone was friendly, and really, Mr. D was an absolute riot.  Who knows, I may even go back next Wednesday.


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Yes, i am back at MRCC.

Community center how I love thee.  Thy variety of classes at a reasonable cost.
The hours ranging from 5:45-12:00 for start times, and again from 4-7.
Yet there's not much variety in what I do. 
I'm back to Tai Chi.  Yes, for now, I'm back at the ever-controversial yoga.  I'm just not comfortable using weights, so my own body is my best resistance for strength training for now.  The extra flexibility is a bonus.  I've been to an aqua aerobics class....I'm going to try a mid-morning one tomorrow since getting up at 4:45 isn't my area of strength.   
This go round though, if I miss a day, I have back-up at home.   Today I chose to stay in bed at 4:45 this am when dh's alarm went off.  Therefore I used my "golds gym Latin workout" personal trainer on the Wii.  I was sweating at the end, so that's a good sign right?
   My husband was smirking at the end.  He was working from home today, and apparently likes the rhino dance moves.  I told him he should do it himself next time since he found it so entertaining.   This is why I need to get up at 4:45 to make my class....or he needs to go back to the office.

Monday, February 27, 2012

March!

March begins at the end of this week.  I have my clearance for the gym again.  There are no more excuses.
If I can't get to the gym, our Wii has 3 exercise programs at home, and a balance board!

The thing with the Wii is it isn't terribly accurate.  I suck at yoga.  This is a fact.  The Wii, through how it interprets my weight distribution from the balance board, thinks I'm adequate to great.
As long as I have the arm movements down on the dance games I'm golden.  Even though my feet are following about as well as a dyslexic elephant.
And a computerized trainer is not another human.  I like the human thing.
The Wii is still great fun.  I just think it needs to be an accent instead of the center of my program.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Goals.

    Did you read about the Romanian model on the news?  No girl should sit at home with a bag of mars bars wishing she was fat.  Just like no girl needs to starve herself wishing she was thin.
    Our goals should be about health, and whatever size we are when we are healthy is fine.  Yes, I am losing weight right now and happy about it.  Yes, I am tracking what I eat on Spark.
    Yet if I'm eating decently and exercising  4x a week or more and the scale stops at 200 that's fine.  If I get back to 180 that's fine.  If, by some miracle, I hit the number "I should be" on the chart, that's fine too....but I'm not going to stress about an imaginary goal. 
  There are plenty of other goals to be had.  I recently listed some I have for this year.  Here are some I've reached.

  1) I can now RUN, without pain.  Not very far or long, but even as I child I could not run without pain.
  2) Ditto with multiple flights of stairs going up.
  3) I am not wiped out by our bi-weekly grocery store gauntlet.
  4) I'm slowly learning to ditch the guilt about doing things for myself.
  5)  I am learning how to prioritize things better.  Kids wants do not come before my needs.   Needs come before needs.  Wants come after, no matter whose they are.   They need a healthy mother more than they want what they think they "need." 



Wednesday, January 11, 2012

January Check in.

    Well, I've been sidetracked by some pain issues recently, and it seems I have middle aged mom's syndrome and need my gall bladder removed.   The surgery is next week, so hopefully I will be back in community center form about two weeks after that.
    Yes, I said community center!  I have decided to keep resume to the aqua class & tai chi class I love, and maybe one or two others a week, or not.
   That's because I think I can do the cardio thing with the Wii.  I still play racket sports, and love the bull dodging and cardio boxing on the latin dance disc. 
(The Latin Dance itself, um, awkward.  My hips catch instead of roll it seems.  I'll keep trying.)   The kids love mimicking the instructors too, so it's something I can do around Si...but will probably be more effective when he starts school.
   My big thing this week is I've started tracking my food on Sparkpeople.com again.    It's good to see where I'm doing well, and where I'm still a work in progress.   It's nice seeing the little report at the end of the day.  It's also motivation not to just sit down and randomly graze, because I have to quantify it later!
   Sure there's still a lot of "in progress" to consider.
1) Getting fiber intake back up to 25g a day. 
2)  Consistently getting 60g of protein a day
3) Drinking enough water
4) Getting a "real gym" membership eventually
5) Using more than the nutrition tracker on Sparkpeople

BUT, I am doing something, and that's definitely better than nothing.  I'm a hippo that's about 30lbs lighter than last year.  That's something to dance about.