Jellyfish legs

That's what I have right now. Jellyfish legs. :)

Ben thought he may have to watch his cousins tonight and we almost postponed the workout, but then plans changed and we were able to go!

We started out on ellipticals next to each other and were able to talk a bit about our days, which was nice. We did 15 min on the ellipticals.



Then, because the new machine he wanted me to try wasn't available when we first got there, we switched to the new machine when it freed up. It was interesting. I felt very zero gravity using the machine. Almost like running on one of those bounce houses. (COMPLETELY off topic, but has anyone heard of AirBall? When I was in college, they rented it a couple years for the school spirit week and it was a blast! It was a huge bounce-house type thing and you played it like volleyball except there were 9 people to a team. Each side was set up like a tic-tac-toe board and that was your "zone." You could hit the ball -which was a huge rubber ball, btw- with any part of your body and the same person could hit it more than once. You also had as many hits as you wanted to take in order to get it over the net. Points were scored when the ball hit the ground. You could play it off the "walls," but they were the mesh stuff, so it wasn't very easy to do. OMG, it was such a workout and you were so sore afterward.) Anyway, we worked on that machine side by side again for 15 minutes.



Then, I did 15 minutes on the handbike while Ben did a cool down walk in the hallways. That machine is rough on him and gets his heartrate really high, so he always takes a little extra cool down off the machine. I was almost done on the handbike when he got back from his cool down. We switched off and he went 20 minutes on the handbike while I read a magazine about people who had lost a lot of weight.

I kind of had mixed feelings about the people they spotlighted. Some of them were very close to my height and very close to my weight and they were being celebrated. Now, granted, they started out in the 200+ or 300+ pound range, but here I am trying really hard to lose weight and they get a magazine article written about them. It was a little discouraging.

There was something that I got enouragement from. It was about their diets. Not the yo-yo or crash diets they had tried, but their eating habits. At first, I looked at what they used to eat: fast food several times a day, foods high in fats and lots of soda. I thought to myself, I hardly ever eat anything like that. I do indulge in fast food probably more than I should, but it ends up being about once or twice a week, so not like a regular part of my diet by any means. I was starting to wonder, despairingly, what can I improve upon in MY diet?

I already eat pretty well. My lunches 90% of the time are a microwaveable meal, a pickle, water with a flavor packet and a cup of yogurt (almost always fat free...I'm a little OCD about my fat free yogurt. Even if it's 99% fat free, I rarely buy it and when I do it's begrudgingly). Sometimes I switch the yogurt out for applesauce. Now, I know that the microwaveable meal isn't the best, but what can I replace it with? Seriously. There isn't much to choose from. I hate for things to go bad and when I'm grocery shopping for just me, buying things like bread, deli meat, salad fixings, etc are not cost effective because they usually just go bad. So, I get things that will keep. I don't mind eating salad. In fact, this morning I forgot to grab food to eat for lunch and so I ran to a sub shop to buy lunch. They have AMAZING chili...like chunky tomato soup with meat and beans. Ohhhh, so good. So, I got a bowl of their chili and a salad. Yesterday, I trained in the evening and wasn't able to bring something from home, so I went to a bread place and got a tomato/mozzarella sandwich and a bowl of broccoli and cheese soup. I don't feel like I eat badly, even when I do get it from a restaurant.

I forgot to mention what I usually eat for dinner. Most nights, it's pasta. I make a marinara sauce out of tomato sauce, diced Italian-style tomatoes, green olives and some spices and I eat the pasta with that. I know pasta is a lot of carbs and stuff, but I love it so much. So, the article in the magazine spotlighted a guy who lost weight by cutting the amount of flour he had in his diet, namely pasta. I know I can get the whole-grain stuff, but it just doesn't taste good to me. I'm making an icky face right now that you can't see. Just imagine it.



Anyway, here is what I decided will happen:

1. Replacing the pasta I eat with rice. I can have pasta on occasion, but for the most part, I'm making the switch to rice. Essentially the same amount of prep/cook time and can be eaten with most of the same things as the pasta can.

2. Look into getting a GF grill. When I cook chicken now, it has to be done in a skillet, so I end up using butter. Now, the butter I use is pretty much the best butter you could possibly get in terms of healthiness. It's a diet butter with omega 3 and made with olive oil. But, still, if I get the GF grill, I can cook it with no butter and no butter is better than even the best, healthiest butter.

3. Try out some new recipes that Ben and I talked about. He wants to eat more veggies, so we talked about which ones he likes. I like vegetables for the most part, with a few exceptions. We came up with tomatoes, corn, potatoes, green beans and edamame. I decided I could take some of the ingredients of my sauce (the tomatoes and tomato sauce), dilute it and add the above mentioned foods to make sort of a vegetable soup. We even discussed putting in some rice with it, rather than noodles. Talking about the rice got me thinking about another way we could prepare almost the same ingredients. We both love the Mongolian Barbecues and I thought if we cook the foods we talked about and put it over rice, it could be like a vegetarian entree.

4. Start a food journal. I am really not looking forward to it, because I know it will take a lot of work to remember to write down what I eat, but I think it will be important. A couple that we are close friends with are participating in a saving contest through their bank and one of the things the savings coaches had them do at the beginning was make a spending log. That way, they could track the money they were spending and identify areas where they were spending money frivolously and where they could cut their spending without making huge sacrifices. I think of this as something similar. I think that if I write down what I eat each day, I will be able to identify where I can change what I eat, how much I eat or cut out certain types of food without making huge sacrifices.



We'll see how it goes. Keep your fingers crossed!




*EDIT*: So, I got curious about the AirBall game I had gone on about. I tried to look it up on the internet. After spending about 10 minutes trying everything from "Airball inflatable" to "Inflatable volleyball game" to "Adult bounce house" (which, the last one only got me a bunch of disclaimers for adult supervision), I FINALLY found something that was close enough to what I remembered. It's called Ultra Volleyball. I encourage you to look it up. It was so much fun!