Ordinary Day

( OIA... )

Miles since July 27th: 36.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 3011.2
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 174.2
Miles to Hobbiton: 1450.8

(Hrmm. I need me a good 'doing exercise' icon. Maybe something involving bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender, just to go with the Katara healing icon I'm using now.)

Haven't had an exercise/food update in a bit, so here's this.

I failed to do weights on Wednesday. This was not entirely due to lameness; there's this bit that's gotten kind of swollen where I had the mastectomy, and I'm a bit concerned that this has gotten aggravated somehow due to my recent chest exercises with the weights. I did have a followup with Dr. Towbin on Thursday morning (more about this in another post), and he seemed to think it was okay. So I did do weights yesterday morning. But in the meantime, I'm also employing the mini-icepacks I was given before during prior procedures, to try to encourage that swelling to go down.

I have not lost any weight to speak of this month so far, which I'll admit is a little disappointing. However, I also haven't had any significant gains. I've been hovering right around the same immediate area I was in at the beginning of the month. Given that my energy levels have been improving, I'm willing to chalk some of this up to the weights exercises starting to do a little fat->muscle conversion.

We had an article up the other day on the Times site talking about how food diaries work for people for one strong reason: that as long as you're honest with yourself about it, it provides accountability. People were quoted in the article as saying how they found themselves avoiding eating certain things because they didn't want them to be on their food logs. I myself have begun to experience this--it's how I've managed to talk myself out of oh, say, buying Zingers at the corner market store, or getting snack chips out of the vending machines at work.

I have also begun to look for alternate snack concepts like dried fruit packets from Whole Foods, stuff that would store well if kept in my desk drawer at work. Found some tasty dried mango bits that I may be sampling again. Y'all will also notice I've been plowing through Tic-Tacs like they were water. This is an attempt to satisfy the urge to keep my mouth occupied--with something that's hardly any calories.

Meanwhile, ( food data for the last several days, feel free to skip... )

And, the walking log:

Miles since July 10th: 22
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2955
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 118
Miles to Hobbiton: 1507

This past week has gone pretty well with the weight loss overall, minus one too-heavy dinner on Tuesday evening. I am in fact currently the lightest I've been all year, which is a pretty nifty realization to make.

My appetite has started to significantly adjust, just by virtue of ditching the soda and aggressively managing the snacks. I'm kind of surprised and pleased that I'm not actually missing the soda very much. And, aggressive snack managing actually gives me a little bit of a something to look forward to in the evenings, now that I've discovered that good dark chocolate and good green tea go well together.

I had my first weights workout in ages on Wednesday night, using the 10's, which was about right--I broke into quite the sweat using them, but I was also able to do quite a few reps on the various exercises, enough that I might need to bump up to the 12's in the next session. That I was able to more or less remember how all the exercises went was a good thing, too. But I did also determine that 1) my "general Celtic" playlist (which has a sampling of various favorite artists off the iPod) is better for treadmill than weights, and 2) I really need to remember to stretch and warm up properly before I do these workouts.

I can still kind of feel the ache in my right shoulder, in particular. This was of course the side where I've had the surgeries and radiation, so it doesn't surprise me that it's weaker than my left.

I'll have my next weights workout tomorrow morning. And, if I play my cards right, I might actually break into the 170's by Monday--but we'll see. That's a good immediate goal, though I'm also thinking about the longer-term goal of how far I can get with this by the end of the year. Into the 130's by my 40th birthday is definitely within the realm of possibility.

And now, a bunch of food data!

( Probably OIA, Only Interesting to Anna... )

And, walking:

Miles since June 29th: 13.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2921.9
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 84.9
Miles to Hobbiton: 1540.1

Had the appointment with the nutritionist today, which went about like I expected, only longer--solarbird and I were there for an hour and a half while this woman quizzed me thoroughly about my history with food and weight and such.

The good news is, she was pretty pleased with many of our already established eating habits, and she approved of my ditching the soda and of my strict snack rationing. The bad (albeit expected) news was that I need to bump up my fruit and veg intake, and also definitely resume my free weights exercises. I also need to ditch the efforts I'd started to have juice with lunch, on the grounds that juice is less helpful than having actual fruit. Meanwhile, Dara has been advised to edge the veg up during dinners, and the nutritionist made a good suggestion about putting the veggies on the plate first, so as to have them dominate the territory.

I am to keep up with this food log thing. And I think I'll be resuming the weights on Saturday when I'll have my first window of time free to work 'em in. Till then, I'll keep up with the current food habits; I'm already seeing improvement in my appetite just by ditching the soda and by rationing the snacks. And I've been inspecting the drink shelves at Whole Foods to see what I can purchase to drink with lunch that a) isn't water and b) doesn't have too many calories. The HonestTea brand seems potentially good; I found their "Community Green Tea" flavor today, which had only 34 calories to the bottle and just enough cane sugar and orange flavor to it to make it not too bad. I think this'll be my lunch drink for a while.

I think that in the interests of keeping this in the forefront of my brain, I shall start adding food log data to pertinent posts (like this one). And just to throw in other pertinent numbers, I'll resume more regular tracking of my walking as well. I'll slap this stuff behind a cut, though.

Meanwhile, the Stunt Boob has been acquired, and it's surprisingly comfy and natural-looking. Enough that it boggled both me and Dara. Should it happen that I have to postpone reconstruction surgery for whatever reason, I think I'll be able to put up with wearing this for a while.

( Today's food and exercise stats... )