Exercise Video Review, part 1
Pick your Level: Fat to Firm Fast
The routine has good warmup and cardio. I liked the fact that you can follow beginner, intermediate or advanced exercises all along the routine without picking a particular one and sticking with it. So, you can mix any of the three levels if some exercises are easier or harder for you. The music is good without being annoying or distracting. The instructor is pleasant without having any of the creepy cheerfulness that some aerobics teachers have!
This tape does include some floor exercises for toning, which isn’t something I was really looking for. I want something that’s a bit heavier on cardio and lighter on toning, but it’s a good workout nonetheless. I haven’t made it the whole way through the tape yet, but I think it’s one I’ll use again.
I’m out of shape (who’d have guessed?), but I made it a little more than 15 minutes at the beginner level. I could have gone longer, but I wasn’t in the mood to do the floor exercises. I did some additional cardio instead and called it a night. I’m not sure if I’ll do this one again tomorrow, this time with the floor routine, or look for something heavier on cardio. I guess I’ll just see what mood I’m in.
In case you hadn’t guessed, this was my exercise routine for tonight. After two nights of Wii boxing, my poor arms will not take that again. Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d get so sore so quickly!
Habit Update, with Success Tips
You’ll remember that I committed to exercising daily this month. Well, that’s been going well, sorta.
We were out of town the first weekend of May, so I didn’t get started when I planned. After that, well I just procrastinated. I finally started yesterday and have exercised yesterday and today. I’ll keep the blog updated on how it’s going.
Yesterday my husband and I did about 40 minutes of Wii boxing and tennis. If you’re thinking that isn’t really exercise, I’d say that the boxing definitely is. I’m pretty competitive with that, so I work up a sweat.
Today, I did just 10 minutes of boxing. My arms are really sore from yesterday, and I was just tired. I committed to 10 minutes a day, and I also promised myself that I’d let myself off the hook once that was done, if I wanted.
I’m really not an exercise person, so I know doing this for 30 days straight will be a toughie for me. I’ve got some exercise videos to try out on netflix, the wii programs, the bowflex, and all of outdoors. I’m hoping that it will be easier if I try to keep it from getting boring!
Here are some things I’m going to do / try to keep myself on track.
- Variety. I’ve got several different exercises lined up, some of which are really simple to do. I’m hoping that this will keep me from getting bored, or getting one set of muscles too tired or sore.
- Reward. Like I said, I’m really, really not an exercise person. I plan on buying myself something if I get through the 30 days. I’m going to buy enough nice yarn for a winter sweater.
- Accountability. I’m announcing my goal here, aren’t I?
- Focus on the positive. While Idon’t like exercise, I also realize that it makes me feel better. I feel more energetic when I exercise, so I focus on that rather than how boring the exercise time will be.
- Don’t overdo. I have a tendency to jump right in and burn myself out. I’m resisting that urge by limiting my time and not letting myself get too sore or tired. I’d rather exercise moderately all 30 days that do a few hard sessions and give it up.
And by the way, I’m STILL working on the blog carnival. I was surprised by the number of submissions, and very pleased. As soon as I’ve finished, you’ll be seeing the post.
Anyone else out there doing your own exercise habit? How is it going?
Update on Blog Carnival
We just got back in town late last night; a friend of ours passed away.
Right now, I’m going to get some much needed sleep. I’ll be working on the posts for the blog carnival tomorrow. This has been pretty successful, so I think I’ll start doing a monthly carnival.
If you’d like to keep tabs on the results of this carnival and on the ones upcoming, subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter.
Last call for submissions
If you want to submit your health tips, today is the deadline for getting them in!
Monthly Habit Preparation
First off, one more reminder to submit your health tips articles by April 30. I’m running this as a blog carnival, so I’ll do a post with links to everyone’s submissions. Please submit yours and pass the word along as well.
I’m also prepping for my May monthly habit — exercising daily. My goal is to establish the habit of exercising every day, not necessarily get in lots of workout time. So, I’m setting a low daily goal of 10 minutes. My thought behind that is that if the goal is easy enough to achieve, I’ll experience less resistance in doing it. After all, anyone should be able to do 10 minutes of exercise, right?
I’m hoping that the habit will “stick” after doing it for a month. Only then will I work on increasing the amount of time I spend working out. For now, I’ll work out for 10 minutes and then let myself off the hook if I want to. Knowing that I can quit, guilt free, should help me build the habit.
To that end, I’ve been planning how I’ll work in the exercise. We have a bowflex that I’m getting ready for use. We also have a netflix account, and there are some exercise videos available there to watch instantly. My husband and I are going to get our bicycles ready this weekend as well.
I think it’s important to plan to change a habit. The bigger the habit change, the more advanced planning is often necessary. I’m working on being ready to kick off my habit on May 1.
Will anyone join me? If not for the exercise daily habit, then maybe there’s another you want to work on?
Calculate your Calories per Day
How many calories do you need per day?
If you’ve tried to lose weight, then you know the basic calculation; one pound is 3500 calories. So, let’s say that you want to lose one pound a week, then you cut 500 calories per day. Easy, right?
Except. How do you know how many calories you’re already eating per day? Can you safely cut more than 500, or is 500 too much to cut?
The first thing you need to know isn’t how many calories to cut. It’s how many calories you need to eat per day to maintain your current weight.
Calculate It
You can use something like the Calories per day Calculator to get an approximation. Most of these calculators will take into account your sex, age and activity level in making the estimate.
Age: In general, the older you get the fewer calories you burn.
Sex: Men will tend to burn more calories than women because of their higher muscle mass.
Activity Level: This one is obvious. Higher activity levels mean you burn more calories.
You can also get a rough estimate simply by multiplying your weight by 10.
Try a few calculators and the multiply by 10 method. You won’t get results that match exactly, but your numbers should hover around a particular range.
Observe It
This method takes longer, but I think it’s more accurate. Take a couple of weeks, maybe a month, and track everything you eat.
- Be careful to weigh and measure your food and calculate your calories correctly.
- Don’t change your diet or exercise.
- Weigh each week and verify that your weight isn’t changing.
This method is more difficult, but it should give you a good estimate of how many calories you can eat. Compare it to the calculations you did in the first section and see how close they are.
One benefit to this method is if you have a particularly slow metabolism, you’re likely to get a more accurate result. Also, you’ll benefit from developing a habit of journaling what you eat!
Daily Calories vs. Average Daily Calories
It’s tempting to think of calories as something that you should watch from day to day, but it’s really the overall effect of your calories that matters.
We’ve all experience this, I’m sure. You eat a huge meal, weigh the next morning and find that you’ve gained a pound or two. You think that it was your binge the previous day, but that isn’t really possible, unless you ate a 7000 calorie meal! (2 pounds x 3500 calories each)
What’s more likely is that you gained some water weight from the big meal, and that it will resolve itself in a few days. OR, you’ve been eating more calories than you ought to for more than one day, and you’ve truly gained 2 pounds.
Watching your AVERAGE daily calories over a period of at least a week will let you keep things in perspective. Let’s say you plan on eating 1500 calories a day, but you have one day in the week where you ate about 2000 calories. That’s bad, right?
Not necessarily, if you were able to keep your average down around 1500. So, maybe you ate only 1400 calories for a few days to make up for the splurge. I find this way of tracking calories more realistic. It allows me to not feel as if I’ve failed when I exceed my daily goals.
Wrap Up
To sum up, this is what I’m doing.
- I’m tracking what I eat this month to develop the food journaling habit and determine how many calories I can eat per day and maintain my weight.
- I’ll use those figures to determine what calorie count I should aim for each day.
- I’ll focus on my weekly calorie average, not the daily calorie count, to track how I’m doing.
Submit your health tips
As I’ve said before, I’d like to expand the focus on the blog to cover better health in general, not just weight loss.
So, to help with that, I’d like to run our first blog carnival here. The carnival will focus on tips for improving health, and it can deal with weight loss, diet, exercise, stress management, etc.
To submit an entry, post the link in a comment to this post. I’ll also list it on the blog carnivals site and provide the link here later.
I’ll keep the carnival open until the end of April, so submit your best get-healthy tips. Thanks!
Edited to add: I also created this as a blog carnival, so if you’d prefer, submit your post through there.
Simple Steps for Health Submission
My husband was diagnosed with diabetes a little more than a year ago. We’ve learned a lot in that time, but the biggest help for us is simply knowing one thing.
If it’s in the house, we’ll eat it.
Willpower is great, but it’s largely a myth as well! Try resisting those cookies or ice cream after a stressful day. Best of luck with that.
We’ve learned the hard way, if we don’t want to eat sugar- and carb-laden foods, then they had better not be anywhere in the house. Yes, that means the non-diabetics in the house have to learn to eat that way as well.
For information on submitting your own tip, read this.
The right and wrong
I’ve struggled a lot lately with my eating and exercise. Most of that I can attribute to stress and simple getting out of the habits that I’d been trying to form. However, all isn’t lost!
What I’m doing right
- No seconds. This has been huge for me, and I credit this one habit with keeping my weight in check through the winter. I don’t even think about it any more; I very rarely go back for seconds.
- De-stressing. This is another one that I’ve been working a lot on. I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that simply dieting isn’t going to do it for me. Since stress triggers my overeating, then dealing with stress seems to be a logical thing to do.
- De-cluttering. This one may look weird in a list of how to lose weight. However, I know that clutter adds to my stress, so getting rid of it also makes sense for my weight loss. Bonus, if I’m busy decluttering, I’m not eating.
- Exercise. I’ve still struggled with this one. However, I have been doing more to tone up, and I’m more active in general than I was this time last year.
What I intend to work on
- Stress. I know that I need to work harder on this area. The more I deal with stress, the less I’ll eat without even thinking about it. I have several ideas for how to make this work.
- Continue working on clutter and organization. Whether it’s the general mess, not being able to find my shoes for a walk, or losing a bill I need to pay, the clutter really adds to my stress level. My husband and I have both been working on dealing with this, and so far, we’ve been doing great.
- Me time. I’ve been making time to write almost every day. That in itself is a big help. I’m also taking time to knit, relax, do things with my husband on weekends, etc.
- Deal with immediate stress. One of my triggers for snacking is immediate stress. Whether it’s a phone call, an emergency at work, or something at home, I often deal with it and then turn to junk food to replenish. And that’s exactly what it feels like, as if I need to be replenished afterward. Instead, I try to do something else for a few minutes, like read, take a walk, etc. This is one of the toughest ones for me.
- Exercise. I really don’t enjoy exercising, so I’m not sure how to go about retraining myself. It’s something that I know I need to work on.
- Habits.I already know how useful habit forming can be. I want to return to some of the 30-day trials that I did last year and rebuild some good habits. Maybe exercising daily should be one of the first?
- Journaling.Every dieter has probably heard that keeping track of your food and exercise is beneficial. I’ve done it for short periods of time in the past, but never for any extended period. The one thing that I’ve noticed is that it does keep me more aware of what I eat, which presumably can help me not eat as much.
So, to kick off my push to get back on track, I’m going to make two changes.
- I’ll start tracking what I eat daily. I’m using Google Docs Spreadsheet so I can log in from anywhere and update it.
- Beginning May 1, I’ll do a 30-day habit building trial. My goal will be to exercise daily in order to build the exercise habit. Before I can do that, I have a couple of things I need to do.
- Buy walking shoes
- Move some things so I can use the bowflex
Of course, I’ll be posting updates to the blog. Anyone care to join me?
Dealing with Stress, part 2
Read my first post on the topic, Dealing with Stress.
I’ve been doing some reading and a lot of thinking about stress and stress
eating and how that’s affecting my weight and weight loss efforts.
This article was a real revelation to me. In short, we eat in response to stress because our bodies have evolved to need a calorie boost in response to stress. Eating that chocolate or bag of chips tells your body that everything is fine so it will turn off the stress response. No wonder that trip to the vending machine feel so good!
Of course, the easy answer is to get rid of the stress, but that’s also more of less impossible for most people, me included. I’ve found it helpful over the last week to just remind myself WHY I have the munchies and realize that it’s stress-eating, not real hunger, motivating me.
So, here is what I’ve been working on. When I feel the urge to munch, first I take a minute and evaluate how I feel. Am I worried, stressed, upset, etc.? Often I am. Then, I try doing something else for a little while to take my mind off the stress.
This often happens at work, where I’m limited to what I can do. I’ve found that taking a walk up and down the hall can help. Getting physically away from my desk and phone helps me to remove myself mentally from the stress as well.
I’ll ignore my e-mail and/or phone, particularly if they’re the root of the stress, and simply work for a while. I may switch up what I’m working on and choose something a little easier to give my mind rest.
No, I’m not resisting the call of junk food all the time, but I am resisting more than I used to.
