21 Day Challenge

Welp, someone needs to get back on the healthy eating road. Hot summers in Texas have been lending themselves well to ice cream, and July went above and beyond the call of duty to help out little ice cream cones that needed to be eaten. And lemon biscuits from Costco. Yum. And then there are the little Twix Bites that my husband buys. When you leave an open bag on  the counter, they're going to jump out of the bag and into my mouth. Pretty much the only things from this list I haven't been eating is cake/donuts/muffins/pastries/nutella, etc. So, yeah, my eating has been on the sweet and snacky road lately, and that needs to change.

Some of the girls in my writing group were talking about a healthy eating challenge recently. You don't have to start any particular day, but a new month is as good a time as any to start.

Day 1 Breakfast: 1 mug chai tea, 2 eggs scrambled with a piece of cheese, 1 cup of cherries.
Day 1 Lunch: I'm not 100% sure what will be for lunch. I might make a vegetable stir fry and serve with brown rice.
Day 1 Dinner: lamb kebabs. I made souvlaki wraps last night and have more marinated lamb to cook. I will have with the salad vegetables tonight, not in a wrap.
Day 1 Snacks: I love Mary's Gone Crackers seed crackers. I am going to make some hummus to have with them.

Also on the agenda: movement. Not an easy thing for me, my left hamstring is better, my plantar fasciitis is ok (not great). Now I have a compressed sciatic nerve in my right hip. Ugh.

Wish me luck.

Baby Steps

I've eaten a lot of race fees this past year. I didn't want to, but sometimes your body says no. Emphatically. Not even taking account how hot it gets in Texas during the summer, there are days where even taking dogs for walks is too much. My hamstring issue is better. Not gone, but better. The lack of energy is still there, and going strong. One side effect of peri-menopause that I never expected was zero energy because you can become anemic. When I remember to, I take iron supplements, but I'm terrible at remembering to take any sorts of pills. So, anything I do has to be in baby steps.


Which leads me to my new "training plan." I was so totally psyched when my Fitbloggin Bella teammate finished her half-Ironman the other week. Way to go Stephanie!! I was swimming back and forth the other evening in the pool when I got an idea. I'll do my own half-Ironman. It will take weeks to complete, but with baby steps, I believe I can do this.  My pool is small, just 23 feet long, including the half round step areas. I calculated (based on how I swim in the pool) that I will have to swim 158.4 laps to equal 1.2 miles for the swim portion of my half-Ironman. (I'll round up). I swam 40 laps (down and back equals 1 lap) on Monday evening. I'm looking forward to finishing the swim portion!  For the bike and run/walk portions, I'll do laps around my neighborhood. The three block loop section that I live on in my development is roughly 1 mile (1.1 on the outside sidewalk). This will be easy to track. I see people out running in the afternoon. To me, that's nuts. It's 100 degrees out. Not my idea of fun, so I'll be getting my ass out of bed earlier and take the dogs for walks while I log my miles.


Not glamorous, no cheering crowds, but baby steps on my way back to moving. 

Depressing reality

It's starting to get warm, here in Texas. Today it's 81 and sunny. That means it's almost time for the pool water to be warm enough to swim.  We don't have a very big pool. It's downright tiny compared to the others in my neighborhood, but I'm more doggy-paddle swimmer than crawl stroke swimmer, so it works for me. Last week I had to get a couple of bags of salt for the pool.

 My word, it took some oomph to lift the bags in to the back of the car, unload them, and carry them out back. I set the bag down on the patio, and it tipped on its side. That's when I noticed how much each bag weighed.

40 pounds. That's about how much I need to lose. If it's that much of a struggle to carry around a 40 pound bag of pool salt, how much of a struggle is it for my body to carry around that much extra weight? How much strain am I putting on my joints? On my back? On my feet? How much am I risking injury by carrying around this weight? How much better would I feel when I run, if I wasn't carrying around 40 unnecessary pounds? It's given me something serious to think about.