My three tips for weightloss success

Someone asked. I posted. I liked it, so I'm posting it again.

My top three tips for successful weightloss. (I don't like the term weight loss though because it's not only about the weight loss itself, it's about being healthy and staying that way)

My # 1 tip is that you need to make your health a very high priority. Just as important as work and family. You get up and go to work every day even when you don't want to. Now you need to treat being healthy the same way. You eat well and work out every day, even when you don't want to.

My #2 tip is that this is a lifestyle change. In order to be successful you will never, ever, ever be able to go back to your old ways. EVER. If you think that once you lose the weight, that you can go back to the way things were, you WILL fail. You will gain all the weight back and then some.

My # 3 tip is to use this time to determine what you want this new lifestyle to be. Where do you see yourself in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years.

/soapbox

Addict it is...

I did my longest run to date yesterday. 18km. New records abound. :) (OK, I know I'm the only one that cares about that stuff. :P )

If you had asked me yesterday, the run was not good. It was sunny, but it was really windy in a few places. I really don't like the wind. At about the 12km mark I got a butt cramp. TMI WARNING! It felt like my insides were going to explode out my butt. No, it's not a runners trot issue. I know those well. This is different. I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about, but holy painful. Spasm. Cramp. Ouch. I had to walk to relieve that. I did think at one point I was going to have to call for a ride home though. But I managed to walk it off. At the 15 km point I hit the wall. I was done. It took every ounce of energy I had just to keep myself upright, on two feet. One foot in front of the other. As I got home, I realized I was .5 km short. So I kept going. Walked right on past the house. That's some serious issue right there. Every muscle from the waist down is screaming for relief and you say, "Just five more minutes".  When I was done, I had completed it in 2:46:00, with a pace of 9:11 per km.

Oh boy I ached. My legs hurt. My feet hurt. I was mentally and physically exhausted. I couldn't stand up. I couldn't sit down. I was chilled right to the bone. I was sick to my stomach. I was weak. My brain was fried. I couldn't decide if I wanted to cry from the misery or laugh at the ridiculousness of what I am putting myself through.

What am I thinking? Someone yesterday asked me if I was training for a marathon. Before yesterday's run, I was planning on running at least a couple in 2013. Yesterday I wasn't sure if I wanted to put myself though the grueling training. For a few minutes I wasn't even sure I was capable of completing the training to do the half in May. Let alone the 4 halfs I was planning to do this year.

My wonderful husband massaged my legs for a few minutes. It was wonderful. I could so get used to that. <3. But then he took me traipsing through the Wal-mart. Do you know how BIG a Wal-Mart is?????  If it weren't for the massage, I think I'd be pissed.

So, Wal-Mart, grocery store, supper, a soccer game (watching, not playing) and bed. That was how the rest of my day went.

I do have to talk about supper for a minute. I made a new salad last night from the salad book. Beef Stir Fry Salad. I altered it a little bit. Instead of using the veggies as listed, I used 1.5 cups of thawed Kirkland Stir Fry vegetables.

And instead of making the dressing as per the recipe, I just picked up a bottle of Mandarin Ginger dressing from the grocery store. The salad was awesome. (I have some more for lunch today.)

Where was I? Oh yea, bed. That's right. I turned on some Dragnet and off to lala land I went.

This morning I got up, no aches, no pains. I was actually a little more limber than when I usually wake up.  I felt freaking FANTASTIC!!!

Guess what. I can't wait to do it all over again next Sunday.

This is a pretty good addiction. You feel horrible while your doing it, but THEN the high kicks in and the pain is all but forgotten.

I've done 87km so far this month. On track for a total of 131 km for February.

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.

It's been a very very long time since I puked all over myself over indulged like this.

I just ate 800 calories of cheesecake.

It was good, but it wasn't 800 calories good. And I'm feeling a bit ill.



I'm feeling a tad bit on the guilty side too. Which I don't normally do. But I don't normally eat 800 calories of cheesecake either.

I could have eaten half and been happy. But no way, I had to oink it all.

I took Fat Friday to a whole other level. And unfortunately it's not over yet. Not until after pizza and drinks. At least pizza is home made veggie pizza and drinks are vodka's and club sodas, so the overall damage will be minimal.

Oh well. It's in ma belleh now. I'll have to save some room on Sunday after my run to make up for it.

That's my confession.

PS: it was a penny a calorie too.

Have a good weekend.

Now that I have that over with.

I ran the quarter marathon (10.55 km) yesterday in the Falmouth Freezer.

We had a rain / snow / ice storm on Saturday night, so the race was postponed until 1:00 pm. Courtney came with me and we picked up a new friend along the way and met some more new friends once we got there. The roads were so bad, that of the 75 people that had registered for the quarter, probably only 20 showed up. It looks like they are going to run it again on Friday night. (?)

The temperature wasn't so bad. -6C. And there was either not much wind or the wind was being blocked. There was an open 2km stretch that was a bit chilly. I did get an ice pick headache at one point, the wind was so cold. But it didn't last long.

The roads that we were running on were really bad. Snow covered. Ice. Slippery. There were a lot of cars on the roads. There were a couple of times where I was actually worried and had to stop and get off the road with cars coming. If they had slid, they'd plow right into me, and there wasn't going to be a damn thing I could do about it. And hilly. Whoa, It was hilly. Way hillier than you would hope a race would be. But I actually didn't mind it too much. Any route I ever run has hills on it. So, I'm used to it. The piece de resistance, my friends. I came in DEAD LAST. I did, however manage to finish probably ten seconds ahead of the winner of the half marathon.

As much as I've complained about it, it really wasn't a bad run, for a long run, for me. It was a really sun shiny day. I don't get to run too much in the sun these days. So, I really enjoyed that. I got to have some free soup. I won a gift certificate from www.roadid.com. I already put my order in for reflective wrist bands and a shoe pocket.  I met some great people and I'm really looking forward to running with them again. (OK, running way way way behind them. LOL. Great job on the times.) And I got to spend a few hours with Courtney, which doesn't happen very often these days. And even though I came in last, I still ran a PR time for anything over 10K. Which is pretty amazing because of the road conditions.

So, all in all, not a bad day.

The Dreadmill, Dexter and Dinner

So, Dexter and I did 16km on the treadmill on Sunday. Two and a half hours. Holy CRAP!

I hate the dreadmill. Hate it. It's so boring. Even watching TV didn't really help. But I did it. And I hate it less than a winter windchill, so it was my only option. I did cheat a little, if you call it cheating. I kept the incline on 0. And I did manage to keep my pace to plan. I actually could have done a little better. I lowered my speed for a bit and then forgot to increase it again. Anyway. It's done. I could do it again, if I had to.

I will say, I definitely needed that run. I felt FANTASTIC the next day. I didn't realize how I was starting to feel crappy until I felt good. Crappy starts to sneak up on you. One bad meal. One missed workout. You slowly start into the decline of yuck. You're tired. You're dragging your ass. Which leads to more bad meals and more missed workouts.

Week 1 of February down. Only 3 more weeks of winter left and then things start to warm up. I know we haven't had much of a winter this year. We have been really lucky. But February is still cold. It is still the coldest month of the year and it is still really wind chilly.

Lets talk about Dexter for a moment, shall we. I have been listening to people rave about this show. For years. In case there is anyone left out there that doesn't know about the show yet, or didn't click on the link above. Dexter is a cop. But he's also a serial killer. He only kills bad guys though. So, that makes it ok. Well, I suppose once the police catch up to him, it won't be so, ok. I'm only on show 4 now, but it looks like his cop father suspected he was going to turn into a serial killer and coerced him into only killing the dregs of humanity.

Did I think it was awesome and fantastic? Not really. Will I sit down and do a Dexter marathon on some boring Sunday afternoon? Only if I a dreadmill is involved. Will I actually finish watching the series, or will it end up in obscurity? I probably will. Eventually. It did pique my curiosity enough that I'd like to find out what happens to him and his sister. And what the Chief is hiding. 'Cus he is hiding something, isn't he? You don't promote a boob to a homicide detective if you want crimes to be solved. Right?

If you are interested in watching the series, Netflix has seasons 1 - 3.

Now onto Dinner. I've seen a couple of "What I ate Wednesday" posts, but I'm not organized enough to actually take pictures of everything I ate / eat today. But I do like taking pictures of my food (no worries, it's not ABC food. Well it is ABC now, but I didn't take pictures of the ABC part. HAHAHA Kid humour)  and I have taken some pics of some great stuff over the last week, so without further ado, I present my version of What I ate Wednesday.

This is my husbands version of a healthy banana split. I had this for dessert after my 16km run on Sunday. It's 1/2 cup vanilla ice cream, 1 banana, 1/2 cup of sliced strawberries (we buy them frozen by the bagfuls at Costco) 1/2 square of semi sweet bakers chocolate and 1 1/2 squares of a Lindt extra creamy chocolate bar. It worked out to be about 400 calories. It was SOOOO freaking good. I'm drooling for another. But at 400 calories, I'll have to wait until my next long run.

There's a little story about my next picture. I got a Christmas present from my Aunt on Sunday. "Apparently" she wanted to make sure she got my Christmas present to me before I went back to work after my Christmas break. She has Alzheimers. I should be happy that she still remembers who I am. But I can definitely see the progression of the disease in her. It was a nice present. It included Company's Coming Meal Salads.  The recipes look fantastic. And since I love salads, I can't wait to try every single one of them. This is the first one I made. It's a Steak & Sweet Potato Salad. It was also really yummy. I had some more today for lunch.

This is 4 ounces (1/2 cup) of cooked steak, cut in bite size pieces. 1/2 cup cubed cooked sweet potato. 1/2 cup asparagus. 6 grape tomatos cut in half. 3 inches of english cucumber sliced. 1.5 cups of romaine lettuce. 1 tbsp of Blue Menu light Parmesan Cheese and 1 tbsp of Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing. For a total of 330 calories.

Well, I guess that's all I have to say today. That was a long post. I'm glad I got some pictures in there too. I kinda feel like a post is missing something if it doesn't have pictures. Every post should have a picture, right?

Until next time.

Not much of an update

I don't have much of a running / health update. 

Last weekend was the RV show, so we hung out there for four days. We'll see, come camping season how it panned out for us. I was kinda disappointed with the selection of RV rigs there this year. No A-Class at all, for the dreamers. No B-Class. Two truck campers. A couple of hybrids. It seemed like it was either high end travel trailers and fifth wheels or hardtops and rpods. The couple of mid-pack trailers I did see had really, really poor layouts. No master bed. Just bunks and kitchen. So, the adults (assuming it's ma and pa and little ones) would have to set up and take down the table to sleep. Been there. Done that. Is NEVER going to happen again. What a pain in the ass that is.

As for running, I was finally able to get out last night for a little 5k'er. It was really good to get back out there. My time was horrible. Horrible. But I still enjoyed it. I also managed to get out to my bodypump class on Monday (New release is a killer) and yoga yesterday. So it seems like I'm back on track.