Struggle

So sore. Went to my strength training class last night. With the federal holiday, I was able to rope in a friend who had the day off who normally wouldn't be able to make the earlier start time of the class. Too bad, because it was so fun to have her there. Knowing I'd be meeting her there would totally remove some of the struggle from getting myself there every week. (I do usually get myself there, but not without some inner debate between my funk and fit selves.) 

I started this post unsure of its tone. I have been struggling the last week, but also doing some very positive things, so I decided to just freestyle here. Looking back over the last 10 days or so, I see positive and negative. Achievements and setbacks. And I realize that's not unique to this FitQuest, nor is it unique to me. That's just life. So how can I be positive about the negative?

I ran 18 miles last week - that's huge! It included a 6-mile run. I'm very proud of that achievement, but there's a small part of me that fears I won't be able to continue to progress. I have a training program in Excel, where I mark off each scheduled run as it is completed and I have to say lately I've become somewhat ambivalent. I'm really excited to gray out the number in the cell to signal completion (yay!), but then find one eye wandering (not literally) down the sheet and agonizing, "7 miles?! When is that run? No way!" Struggling...

Message From Above interlude: as I was staring at the paragraph and confronting my running fears, the cursor hovered on the toolbar at the top of the screen and displayed this wisdom from the Laptop Gods, "Change system appearance and behavior, or get help." I am soooo trying to change system appearance and behavior! 

So I'm thinking that admitting there is struggle is the first step. Awareness is good. Now what can I do with that awareness? This might be a good time to review and retrench. I'm on top of the running at the moment. That is my anchor, my main fitness activity with built-in progress points, increasing challenge, fairly easy to execute. (Well, "easy" is not the word, but it can be done anywhere with minimal equipment, etc.) Yoga has fallen off a bit. Or rather, I have slacked off on the yoga. This, too, is something that could be done independently. There are a couple classes I enjoy at my gym (a sunk cost as the membership is already paid, so why not go and maximize the investment already??), but could also be done at home via iTunes or using one of the many routines I happen to have from back issues of Yoga Journal or yoga books I own.

I also think I've been slipping back into on or off eating. I wrote about trying to check in with measuring some commonly eaten foods, like last post's peanut butter debacle. You say tablespoon, I say teaspoon. Let's call the whole thing off. No! Off is bad. My food planning and tracking has been a huge (you guessed it) struggle of late. I don't really plan per se, just try to have a variety of healthy fair on hand, which requires me to rely on the tracking part of the equation. And if I don't track one meal, there's no point in tracking the next and the whole thing snowballs until I can't remember when I last recorded what I ate - or what I ate for that matter. And it couldn't be easier to do! I do it online and the database is full of stuff I eat regularly. 

Alright. Enough whinging then. I already did the strength class this week. (Yay, one cell in the spreadsheet tackled!) I will do the runs. I will do some yoga, even if it is a solo session at home. I will track every meal this week and focus on assessing portion sizes. Struggle be damned, I know I can do these things this week. And I'll worry about next week when I get there.

Again already

I'm baaaaaaaack. I just posted yesterday, but that post really helped me, so I'm going to try posting more and see how that goes. For one thing, I was really in a funk over the last week and since the title of the blog is Less Funk More Fit, well, I needed to get myself sorted. I find that it's really hard for me to post when I'm feeling blah. Which is probably when I most need to write down or try to capture whatever is swirling around in my head. And which may, in turn, help someone else, which is a really cool aspect of this whole blogging deal.

Posting helped me psych myself up for the gym, which I had been trying to gear up for all day and had only gotten to 50/50 on before the entry. Exploring perfection also got me thinking about the Strength class I was hemming and hawing my way out of attending. The last few times I've gone, I have been nitpicking the moves and not enjoying it as much as I did in the past. Yesterday it occurred to me that unless I plan on developing my own fitness class, there is likely never going to be some perfect class I love every time from start to finish. So I really enjoyed last night's class. I tried to go all out ("it's only an hour") and tried to complete all the sets, even when things started burning. There was only one point I rolled my eyes ("how many freaking lunges are we going to do anyway?!"), but caught myself and made a conscious effort to shift my focus.

So much of this journey is my own attitude. I felt good about my performance in the class and instead of nitpicking my instructor's choices in moves and music, I instead appreciated her for pushing me much farther than I would have ever contemplated going on my own.

In other update news, BF placed an order for groceries online and I reminded him to order me my recovery drink (chocolate milk.)  We had some back and forth on the selection; one was my organic standby and the other was the holy grail of milk from the dairy found at area Farmers' Markets, which had just added some of their products to the online grocery service. Well, when I came back from a 4-miler today, lo and behold, both were in the fridge. Apparently BF forgot to delete the first one ordered after I found out about the holy grail. "Chug up," says BF. Mmph. I'll chug up - in moderation. But that's a lot of milk!

My last couple weigh-ins have been flatlining or to put a positive spin on it: Maintenance Preview. So I'm really trying to get my fitness on, but not in a punishing way, more of a take-the-bull-by-the-horns-you-go-girl motivational approach. I've also tried to track my food better. Today I revisited weighing & measuring, the dastardly duo dreaded by losers the land over. (Even for the sake of alliteration I won't say "dieters".) When I track my food online and select natural peanut butter (ingredients: peanuts), it defaults to 2 Tablespoons as a serving, which I thought was absurd! "No way do I eat 2 T's of PB," and I'd change it to 1. Well, 1 might be sufficient on my whole wheat english muffins, but it only covered one piece of my whole wheat toast. Enlightening. And depressing. But why track if I'm going to make up some fantasy (perfectionist?) idealized version of my intake?

I want to own my journey. My decisions. I knocked out [x] miles... I worked out for at least an hour 6 days this week... I ate 2 Tablespoons of peanut butter... So be it.

It wasn't a perfect week

I missed a run last week. And a yoga session. Ah well. I ran 3 times (4 miles twice and a 5 mile run), did a fairly intense cardio session with all sorts of inclines and varying speeds on the treadmill (cardio attention-defecit disorder? "If I keep playing with these controls and only listen to 10 seconds of every song on my iPod, maybe I can will time to move faster..."), and went to an hour-long strength training class.

Alright I feel better now.  If I had stopped my report on what I had skipped out on last week, I would still feel like a fitness under-achiever. But by looking at the complete picture, it's decent. Not perfect. But then again, neither am I.

This reminds me that over the weekend, BF and I were hauling out trash and recycling and I wanted to dump some sketchy leftovers out before we closed up the bag. He held the bag open as I emptied out some black beans that were probably delicious in Q4 2009. As I repeatedly tapped the container against the side of the trash, he finally said, "Good enough, Virgo," and promptly tied the bag close before I could realize the satisfaction of getting that last little bean to surrender to its fate.

Yes, friends, apparently those born under my sign are known perceived to suffer from an obsession with perfection. Which is not the same as doing things perfectly, but often involves a general sense of disappointment and agonizing hours spent analyzing the gap between expectation and reality.

I like to think I am laid-back and easy-going. But when the spreadsheet says yoga and there is no yoga, then I have to edit the cell to read rest. Or abandon the spreadsheet altogether and no good can has come of that (in the past). So, yes, I owned and embraced the Rest Day(s). And I haven't turned into a giant Oreo. Yet.

I said when starting out (this time) that I really wanted to pursue a plan that I could see myself living on for the long-term. No quick fixes. No juice fasts. Even if that means a slower rate of loss. So I think I have to confront the fact that I am not always going to want to work out. Well, that's quite frequent, actually. But there will be times I will not be able to cajole, harass or otherwise motivate myself to workout. Then what? Or there will be times I'll really crave some pizza - not the healthified kind I make on whole-wheat baguettes, but the studio-apartment-sized NY slice served up on way too many corners near my home. Then what?

Then you deal. In the past, either of those instances would have lead to a whole new path of fitnesslessness and gooey foods. Why can't I instead say, "hey, sloth happens...that day off means you can really bang it out on your next run" or, "that pizza was delish...good thing you ate well the rest of the week so you could enjoy that"...or... anything positive. I want the idealized and real versions of myself to get to know each other better. I feel each could really learn from the other and together they could be an unstoppable force for good on this whole Fit Quest. 

(Self)Knowledge is power, I suppose.

Bad Blogger

I think I started out with a vague goal of posting something about once a week. Yeah...

My workouts have been fairly consistent. Getting up to 25-30 minute runs of varying speed in the C25k program. Still making it to weekly yoga and strength (Body Conditioning) classes. 1 or 2 days rest in a typical week. Sort of suffering from the winter blahs though. My eating has been ok, but my tracking of said eating has fallen a bit by the wayside. 

Just typing that makes me want to log into my Bodybugg software and put in the 2 pieces of wheat toast I ate for breakfast today. At least I've been wearing the Bodybugg gizmo on my arm and meeting my activity goals most days. The contraption works on the basis of calorie deficit. Mine is currently set for a 500 calorie daily deficit. My caloric intake goal is 1900 and my caloric Burn goal is 2400. (I also have a 10,000 daily Step goal and a 60 minute daily Activity goal.)  There is a watch that syncs with the armband and beeps with a happy little message when you meet each of your set goals. The cool thing I have been monitoring is the breakdown of the physical activity after I sync it up on my laptop. There is a graph that captures the caloric burn throughout a given day. So I can hold the mouse over the time I was doing yoga and see I burned about 3 calories a minute on average (which is cool, caloric burn not being my main motivator for yoga) and sometimes I hit 15 calories a minute on my runs.  Which is probably why yoga lasts an hour and a half and I can usually run 20 minutes before I need a walk break!

I know I need to focus on both sides of the equation - the calories in as well as the calories out. I also know the perfectionist in me gets caught up and bogged down in the details of calorie tracking. "If I don't know exactly how many ounces of turkey were in that sandwich I ordered, why bother tracking...?"  And once you skip tracking one meal, the whole day won't add up, will it?? One day last week, I just overestimated everything. That was a little depressing. I need to just do it and make peace with entries being a best estimate of what I consume on a given day. And stop overthinking it!

I'm also editing the layout here, since this will likely be a loooong journey (and I'm ok with that, really!  ok, mostly...) I weigh in every Tuesday and track it here and on my own spreadsheet and on my Bodybugg software. I've decided to track it here monthly. I think that will help me see the forest/big picture more than the smaller, weekly ups and downs. I need to get a better feel for the trend and this seems a good vehicle for that.

Running on empty

I find this photo inspiring. There's water behind her, greenery. She's got her water. And it doesn't look very hot outside. When I do encounter "optimal" running conditions outside, I don't think I appreciate them. I was running on vacation in London a few months ago, but instead of experiencing it as a fit and fun way to see the sights and take in the local vibe, as a fitness magazine might suggest as a tool to not gain weight on vacation, instead I just felt like everything was really far away. Or had thoughts such as: When will this song be over? How long have I been running? How red is my face? Look at how fast that dude is! 

I always enjoy it afterwards. And am glad I did it. Honestly it does help me when traveling. At least it clears my head and sets me up to want to eat fairly well the rest of the day. I think I just have this idealist vision in my head of effortlessly running among the landmarks that I never experience in reality.

I've been doing this about a month now and seem to have fallen into a groove.  Running via the C25k program 3 times per week. (Just started Week 6 today.) One strength class and one yoga class per week, typically. And lots of walking added in whenever possible. Foodwise, I'm just eating and drinking (ahem) as consciously as I can. Tracking calories. 1900 per day on average, sometimes more or less. Not putting any food on a "Do Not Eat" list. Slow going. Which is what I say I want. Until I step on the scale. Then I have to talk myself off the ledge and remind myself about the marathon versus sprint, living on a plan I can live with for the long haul, weekly weigh-ins only data points, blah, blah, etc. Knowing all that intellectually is all well and good. I need to feel it and live it intrinsically though. 

One final note. If I really want to avoid a funk, I should not compare my weight or weightloss (or lack thereof) with others.  Like, I should not, for instance, have my boyfriend get on the scale so I can see that I've got a good 12 lbs on him! I really did not need that information today!

Pain in the neck!

This picture hurts. I should label it "Before" and put a photo next to it of myself labeled "After" wherein I'm holding my neck with a wincing-in-pain look.  I'm so there. 

It all started when I woke up early to watch my dvr of Biggest Loser, where they run the marathon. I know all the pros and cons of the show, resisted the first few seasons when it was recommended to me. ("You'll love it, big transformations, inspiring life changes..." "I hate TV, especially 'reality' TV!")  But I was hooked somewhere in Season 5. I'm a sucker for Success Stories in fitness mags too. My big beef with the show (aside from the edited-in "drama" - isn't there enough drama inherent in their weight loss stories?) is that they hardly ever show us the other side of the caloric deficit equation: the eating plans. Aside from the requisite trips to Subway. And lots of Extra gum chewing. (The product placements actually crack me up. So NOT subtly integrated into the show!)

OK, I meant that to be a lead-in to my own workout woes, but went off on a tangent. So I mentioned I've been loving my Body Conditioning class in earlier posts. I saw there was an a.m. session with another instructor and thought it'd be good to see some other versions of the class. After being all pumped up and motivated by the BL contestants running 26.2 miles, I arrived at the gym to discover I lack the ability to read a class schedule. I had the day wrong and the strength training class I thought I was attending ended up being an old-school Step Aerobics class with the new-school twist of a 3-kg ball that I had to move from arm to arm, up and down and all around. It felt like a Harlem Globetrotters try out.  Why do cardio intense classes seem so damn loooooong?  We're up, down, up, down on the step, trying not to drop the freaking ball (literally!) and keep up, come on, you can do anything for an hour, it's not a marathon for crying out loud, you're almost done....and discover 3 minutes have gone by. Sigh...

After class I took a moment to really look at the class schedule and saw there was an actual Body Conditioning class that same evening. Being all pumped up with BL motivation, I rocked back into the gym studio a few hours later to try a different instructor's take on the class. I think I'll stick with my Monday night dude. Too much focus on abs for me. I know I have weak abs. I know my core needs strengthening. I know! But I find that when you try to work weak abs in a class setting, eventually you just end up straining back muscles. Usually I'm good at ignoring the class and doing my own controlled, focused crunches or some version of what "they're" doing that I can feel in my core. (Like if they have their legs in the air for crunches, I know that is instant back spasm and I do the same crunch with my feet on the floor. If they want to bicycle crunch, I'll cross one leg and do crunches on one side and switch to the other side halfway through. Controlled.) Usually. For some reason - fatigue? - I just did whatever the instructor called out. 

And of course at some point went from working my abs to just pulling on my F&#$!* neck. Idiot! Well, lesson learned, I hope. Not a sidelining injury, just a pain in the, uh, neck. But still did my C25K scheduled run for Week 4 (getting challenging, but I'm not panicking yet...one run at a time...) And yeah, one class in any 24-hour period is probably sufficient for this aspiring "Loser" - aspiring to lose weight, not be on the show BL. I wouldn't last a week. (Uh, where's the wine fridge? No thanks, I hate watermelon gum. How about a rest day??)

And the Finale??  Danny for the win. Can't decide on the At-Home winner. Rebecca? Daniel? Shay? Those nice Red Team guys? Too many to choose. Just looking forward to the transformations!