Take the longest day waste it all away

Wow, the last few days have all blurred into each other. I've got some craziness going on at work, and then there are the workouts.

Tuesday's weigh-in wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped - I've lost half a pound. But less is always good, and to be perfectly honest, my eating habits haven't been stellar. I haven't tracked what I ate for the past couple of days, which sucks. So back on track tomorrow. My snacks have definitely been better, and I'm really trying to watch those empty carbs.

Small changes are less painful, and I'm doing great with the exercise. I only made it to 3x cardio last week, thanks to Saturday's lunges and my inability to move from the couch on Sunday due to the intense pain in my hamstrings. That pain continued to Monday so I took that day off as well.

Tuesday I was back at Le Pro to do cardio in the morning, and workout with Tracy in the evening. Two-a-day workouts sounds really tedious, but actually isn't that bad. Since I'm only doing weights with Tracy, I don't sweat much so I only need to shower after cardio. And 30 minute chunks are much more agreeable than a whole hour.

Tomorrow morning at 7:15, I have a free "Bhangracize" class at the Pro Club. Not sure if I want to get up that early, so I'm going to play it by ear. If I don't make it for that, I'll do cardio anyway.

At some point I need to find an outfit to wear to Kristine's wedding (hi Kristine!). I might wait another week or two to see if all this weight training helps in the clothing department - I tend to see results pretty quickly when I lift weights, even if the number on the scale doesn't change much.

Anyway, the next problem for me to tackle is the food. I've been to Kidd Valley twice this week, and I'm sure their grilled cheese is better than their burgers, but yet not too healthy. Somehow the food in the fridge just hasn't appealed to me. Sad.

Good thing this is a 6 month program! Plenty of time for me to exchange lame habits for good ones!

Sun comes up it's Tuesday morning

OK, it's not really Tuesday morning. But I couldn't come up with a song lyric that contained "morning" in the 5 sec before starting this post.

I have officially completed my first 3 workouts at SHS as of this morning. And I'm still standing. With Jell-o legs, mind you, but we won't dwell on that.

First off, I *LOVE* the 30 minute trainer sessions. It's too short a time to contemplate my hatred of exercise. We do 2 (and sometimes 3) quick sets of 10 of the various exercises and I'm done. Not a lot of time between sets, so I don't even have time to think about how much exercise sucks.

And I'll let you in on a secret - after a week of regular exercise, I'm actually starting to hate it less. I love that virtuous feeling I get when my workout is completed before 10am. I like the slightly sore feeling I get the day after a hard workout. And though in reality I'm not any thinner (yet), I feel just a little bit better about what I see in the mirror.

Today was a harder workout than Thursday. We did walking lunges across the room and back. Those have never been my favorite, and I'm already feeling it now - I can't really stand up for long periods of time (aforementioned Jell-O legs) and tomorrow will be BAD. Right before the wedding last year I was actually doing those lunges with 15-lb weights. Crazy.

Tracking my food intake has been a bit harder - I'm actually a day behind now so I need to go reconstruct what I ate yesterday. The Web-based tool I use at SparkPeople.com is really easy, but I just seem to forget to do it. I'm not sure how to remind myself to do it - any tips from you out there?

We circle round each other waiting for reaction

Today was a good workout day, which counteracts the bad food they had at the Company Meeting.

I did 30 min of hard cardio at Le Pro Club, and my heart rate ranged from 152 to 173 which is 80=90%+ of my MHR. Yay. Since I'm quite out of shape, it gets up there pretty quick and stays there without me feeling like I'm going to pass out. I guess it'll get harder as I get more fit, but I'll worry about that later.

My first actual workout with Tracy was today and it was fabulous. It was over before I knew it - 30 min of weight training, 2 or 3 sets of 10 of each exercise and that's it. Had to do full situps, very hard, but that was the worst of the bunch. This is the kind of workout I could get used to - quick and dirty, get in and out of there, and that's it.

Slight annoyance of the day - they confiscated my healthy snacks at Safeco Field when I got there for the Company Meeting. But even without my snacks I managed to stay under 1300 calories today. Woo hoo! So far, this isn't bad at all :)

I don't care what they say about us anyway

A quick post about a movie we saw this weekend. We watched Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle on our new projector. It's a movie I've wanted to see since it came out but never got the chance. It came highly recommended by our friend Dave.

First off, I don't recommend this movie unless you're a fan of the humor in "South Park". It's very crass. If you can get past this, it's hilarious (and very smart, in a sly way).

I *LOVE* that the two main characters are Asian-Americans. Not caricatures (aka Apu on The Simpsons) and not foreigners with accents - two regular guys. These guys are portrayed as being loser-cool, attractive to women and not the typical nerd stereotype that Asian Americans are usually stuck with on American TV and movies. The movie doesn't have much plot but is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. And no, I wasn't stoned.

There's some controversy on the Internet (do a search on Sepia Mutiny) about how this movie is disrespectful to women. It's true, there's a lot of typical frat boy humor in it. (Reminds me of my favorite line in South Park when Cartman says "Get back in the kitchen, bitch and make me some PIE!"). But the point was not to make a PC shiny happy movie where all are represented in a positive light.

I'm just glad that a mainstream funny movie, stars two Asian American guys. There aren't a whole lot of people like us on TV or in the movies (Bend it Like Beckham being the major exception). I think Canada and the UK TV shows are further ahead in this respect. But it's nice not to be "invisible" anymore, and not to always be the doctor or computer geek on "Law and Order", though props to them for having any Asian American characters at all.

So if you saw the movie, what did you think? And as a side note, I thought it was interesting I used the word "freakshow" in the last post. If you saw the movie, you'll understand why.

The first cut is the deepest

So I had my first sessions yesterday at SHS and was too tired to write. Turns out my "behavioral counseling" is actually next week, so I only spent 2 hours there yesterday.

First I met Tracy, my trainer, who's tiny. She also doesn't take any crap from slacker exercisers like me. She accurately pegged me as a person who doesn't do sports because I wasn't good at it when I first tried it and thus gave it up.

Sadly, I have 40% body fat according to their bioelectrical impedance measurement. She said she thought it might be off since I was dehydrated. Ugh. Let's hope it's off by +15%, that's all I have to say.

We spent the first session figuring out what my baseline was - what my heart rate looked like in 6 min of cardio, and how much weight I could lift for each exercise I had to do. The starting weight was one where I could just complete 10 reps with good form. I guess I picked the right weights because I am sore today.

She also made me do as many calf raises as I could do (30) and wall squats with the giant exercise ball (60, but for the record I could do more, we just decided to stop), and crunches in a minute (30).

Our first real workout is tomorrow, thankfully for only 30 min. I'm on my own to do cardio so I think I'll do that in the morning. I'm supposed to do cardio at 80% of my MHR which is 190 for my age.

After my meeting with Tracy, I went to see the dietitian Marilyn who reviewed my atrocious eating habits for the past couple of weeks: very few vegetables, a lot of deep fried goodies, and lots of eating out.

She also asked me to rate my motivation on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being "Nothing can stop me from succeeding on this program". I answered honestly, and gave it a 3.5. She asked me to rank my confidence in success from 1 to 5, and I gave it a 3. I've tried a lot of times to do this, so I'm a little worried about how this time will be different. But I do think this will work if I can figure out how to stick with it.

Marilyn emphasized that this was not a "diet" but just a way to eat. The first thing I'm going to work on is eating a better balance of carbs and protein. My target is 175g per day which is about 3 servings per meal, with some more left over for snacks. I'm also supposed to focus on getting around 45g of fat per day, which is fairly high for me when I don't eat out.

So the first two days haven't been too bad. I've been tracking my intake on SparkPeople so it automatically counts fat, carbs, protein and calories. Today was 1175 calories, yesterday 1560. And I didn't really have to think about it too much while I was eating - I just tracked it all at the end of the day.

Tomorrow morning I'd like to get to the Pro Club early to do my 30 min of hard cardio before we go to the Company Meeting and sit on our butts all day. So far, so good.