Food journal 2/28/2009

Lunch-
1/2 Chipotle Burrito Bowl (Barbacoa, lettuce, rice, fresh tomato/green chili salsa)
Orange Juice
2 bites Macaroni and Cheese (Ben's poison check. lol)
3 Marshmallow Eggs

Dinner-
2 slices of pizza (one pepperoni & mushroom, one ham & pineapple)
3 pieces of cheese bread

Bad Janine!

Ok, so we didn't go to exercise yesterday. :( Ben had family commitments he had to uphold. We planned on going today, but considering we have a meeting this afternoon and I need to do laundry desperately and he is still in bed, it may not happen.



Possibly kick it up a notch next week? Monday is good, shouldn't be a problem (yay, zumba!)...Tuesday looks fine, too...As does Wednesday morning (yay, zumba again!)...Thursday and Friday I'm in Columbus again, so working out in the hotel is definitely an option; I probably won't go swimming, but the fitness room is available; and I should be back on Friday with enough time to go with Ben...Then Saturday we've got a party, so probably won't happen that day...Sunday we're going to be preparing for a week in Boston! There is definite potential for increasing the workout schedule next week.

**Edit: I was right. We didn't go to the gym. Laundry and studying trumped it. We did discuss doing more working out next week, so it will most likely happen, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

Food Journal 2/27/2009

Exercise post to come later today.


Lunch-
Chicken Marinara Cafe Steamer
Cherry Fat Free Yogurt
Pomegranate Berry Fat Free Yogurt
2 Pickle halves...I guess that would make a pickle whole, wouldn't it...
CranGrape flavored water
Mini Twix
Root Beer Barrel candy

Dinner-
Beef Ramen Noodles
1/2 Chipotle Burrito Bol (Barbacoa, lettuce, fresh tomato/green chili salsa, rice)
Blackberry Izze
Chipotle Chips

Food journal 2/26/2009

I was pretty good today. I indulged at lunch and told myself I would not indulge at all for the rest of the day. I SO VERY MUCH wanted to steal a root beer barrel candy from the training candy dishes, but I didn't. It was very tempting, but I overcame!


Lunch-
Cracker Barrel Chicken and Dumplings
Cracker Barrel Fried Apples
Pretzel Bites from place in mall
Milk Chocolate Lindor Truffle
CranGrape flavored water

Dinner-
Beef Ramen Noodles
A few forkfuls of sliced olives
CranApple Juice
3 pieces Peanut Butter Dibs

Volleyball and food journal 2/25/2009

So, the gym had their open net tonight. That explains why I never make it. I am usually training on Wednesday evenings. Not this week, though. I am training tomorrow evening instead.

Ben and I went and he worked out on the fitness equipment while I played volleyball. I played for about 75 minutes. Granted, it was not a very intense workout. The league Ben and I played with in Indy was more exertion. Eh, it was volleyball nonetheless. Ben came to play for about 20 minutes or so and then went back to work on the weights. I joined him a little while later and did some leg presses. 2 sets of 12 at 180 lbs. I was pretty proud of myself.

Food journal behind the cut.


Dinner-
Chili Mac from Steak n Shake
6 oz Raspberry Frozen Yogurt Milkshake
12 pieces Peanut Butter Dibs
Milk Chocolate Lindor Truffle

Food journal behind the cut

I figured it out. I thought it would not take very long, but I thought I had found out how to do it, and then it applied it to all of my posts! That just wouldn't do. So, I found another place that showed me how to enter the code so that it would only do it on the ones where I wanted it to go. I know I would never be able to WRITE code, but I am sure as hell a lot better at READING it. :)


Food Journal: 2/23/2009
Breakfast-
10 oz English Toffee Cappicino
Strawberry and Cream Danish

Lunch-
Chicken/Tomato/Rice/Refried Bean/Lettuce Taco

Dinner-
1 small plate German Potato Salad
2 Garlic Knockwurst chunks
2 serving spoonfuls Rice
1 serving spoonful Macaroni and Cheese
1 serving spoonful Mashed Potatoes
1 cup Sausage Stew
1 Cherry and Cheese Tart
Lemonade


Food Journal 2/24/2009
Lunch-
16 oz Raspberry Mocha Cappicino
Lasagna
Side Salad (with Lite Italian Dressing)
2 Rolls
Orange Juice

Dinner-
1 Grilled Chicken Tenderloin
2 serving spoonfuls Rice
2 Perogies
Cran Apple Juice

Food Journal 2/25/2009
Breakfast-
Raspberry Muffin

Lunch-
2 serving spoonfuls General Tso's Chicken
3 serving spoonfuls Rice
1 serving spoonful Pepper Chicken
2 serving spoonfuls Mushrooms
1 serving spoonful Lo Mein
1/2 Crab Rangoon
2 Sushi slices
1 Cup of Ice Cream with Strawberry topping
2 1/2 cups Chocolate milk

Food journal

I was talking with someone the other day about this blog and they suggested that I post my food journal. As in, everything I've been eating. I didn't think people would want to read every food I ate. I will see what I can do about possibly putting things behind links or something, so you don't have to read it if you don't want to.

We'll see. I do want to be accountable for what I eat and if I'm the only one looking at the food journal, to whom am I being accountable?

The scale

I just weighed myself. I'm trying really hard not to overdo it, because I know weight can fluctuate at different times of the day, especially if I've just eaten. The number on the scale read 153.8. I know it's not much to get excited about, mostly due to the fluctuating weight thing I just talked about, but that's almost a full pound less than when I started this blog...what, a week ago? I hope it continues to go down. :)

Feet, don't fail me now!

I know I've mentioned my foot problem. Today it hurt a little more than usual. Well, let me take that back. It did not hurt as much as when I do zumba, but it hurt more than other times I've worked out in the fitness room.

I did 25 minutes on the elliptical and 15 minutes on the handbike. Even after 15 minutes on the handbike, my right foot was still bothering me a lot, so I went and read a magazine in the lobby while Ben finished his workout. It is still a little tingly.

Ben was talking with his fitness advisor guy about me. (I could hear them talking while I was on the elliptical and Ben was on a machine behind me.) Then, after I was done, I went to stand with him and he was talking to the guy about Triumph and how he hoped that working out will improve his stamina in the game. When I got there, Ben asked me how my feet were doing and I said not good. The fitness advisor guy tried to diagnose me with a disorder that I knew I didn't have. Nice try, dude. Plantar Fasciitis is in the bottom of the feet and mine's in the tops. E for effort, though.



Fitness advisors and personal trainers kind of bug me. I have several friends/relatives who are personal trainers, so I have nothing against the people themselves, just the profession. I do not really want someone telling me how to exercise. I know how to exercise. I just don't do it...often. Though, this is in the process of being rectified. When I joined the gym in Indy, the guy who showed me around was trying to sell me on the weight machines, telling me that I "needed" to use them if I was going to be losing weight so that I wouldn't be droopy and have extra skin. Thank you very much, but I will exercise the way I want to exercise. Weight machines are not my thing. Aerobic exercise is much more enjoyable for me and if I do enough aerobic exercise, it will develop the exact same muscles that the weight machines develop and burn fat in the process. In contrast, the weight machines only build muscle and don't really help with the burning fat part, since they are anaerobic exercises.

**DISCLAIMER** Obviously, I did not get a degree in fitness. I am fully aware that my views may not be entirely correct. However, I still don't like someone telling me "This is how you should exercise." I would not enjoy it and would grow to hate exercise, which would be counterproductive.



I will do exercises that I enjoy, or at least can tolerate, so that I am somewhat motivated to do the exercise in the first place. I love to dance, which is why I do zumba. I love to swim, and do so for exercise. Honestly, I enjoy swimming laps a whole hell of a lot more than I like aqua aerobics. I love volleyball. Ben and I were in a co-ed league in Indy for a couple seasons, and even for one season after I moved here...but it became too much of a hassle to drive there every Friday. I want to get started with it again here, but Ben and I keep missing the open net time at the gym. I can tolerate running on the elliptical, working on the stationary bike or doing the handbike, as long as my feet don't bug me too much. Ben enjoys doing the fitness equipment and so when we go together, most of the time I do the machines so that we can spend that time together. If I don't enjoy the exercise I'm doing or grow to resent it, it will be that much more difficult for me to be motivated to exercise, plain and simple.

Peculiar Early Morning Swim

I got up this morning to swim, since I didn't get to yesterday. When I have swum in that pool before, I have done laps in a diagonal across a very strangely shaped pool. This time, I decided to do "perimeters." Essentially, I swam around the edges of the pool. It was not enjoyable. I kept having to make 60 degree turns, which was annoying. I doubt I will do that again. I counted my strokes and a perimeter took 45 strokes, whereas a 25 meter swim takes about 25 strokes. I decided that two perimeters would be about 75 meters, though I know it was closer to 100, but I was underestimating to make it easier. I ended up swimming 525 before I got fed up, based on my 75 meter estimation.

Ben and I are exercising tonight. I will update when we do it.

Food journal is going ok. I need to start an actual notebook rather than trying to cram it in my planner. :)

**Edit** I just remembered a thought that I had while swimming that I intended to put here, and it is too funny not to share. So, like I said, I had to keep making 60 degree turns because the pool was so oddly shaped. Some of the turns were acute angles (angled toward me) and some of them were obtuse angles (angled away from me). When I would get to a bend, I would contort my body in the process of swimming to get around the angle and sometimes would need to push off from the wall I was just swimming parallel to in order to swim in the new direction. The thought I had was "I feel like a roomba." Or, I guess more appropriately in this case (for those of you who are familiar with aquatic vacuum devices), a "dolphin."

Today, Today

Ok, I was able to post today. It will be short because I am using the hotel's computer. I did not exercise this evening like I wanted. I haven't quite gotten the scoring done for tomorrow's debrief. I will finish it tonight and exercise some tomorrow morning.

That is all!

Oh, P.S. I started the food journal today. I think it is really going to help. At lunch, there were two bags of chocolates being passed around and cookies at lunch that I completely passed on, because I didn't want to write down that I had eaten them! Yay me! Though, I did have a cream cheese dessert at dinner. Hey, we were at a German restaurant. You can't go to a German restaurant and NOT get a German dessert. It would be like going to a Chinese restaurant and not getting a fortune cookie.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

I will most likely not get to post tomorrow. I will be in Columbus for a meeting, then an evaluation check. (I have to be basically verified that I am still able to reliably evaluate with the scale.) We are debriefing on Tuesday morning, so I have to stay overnight. Blah. Anyway, that means I can't go to the gym, but the hotel they're having us stay in has a pool. Granted, it is not a very large pool and is shaped very weirdly, but a pool nonetheless. I am considering swimming some tomorrow night to make up for the fact that I can't go to zumba. Or, they also have a fitness room, but I am less enthused about that one. We'll see. I will update on Tuesday night instead, since I will most likely not have access to a computer until then.

Change of routine

I know I usually swim in Fridays, but we have a party to go to tonight! There just wasn't enough time for me to get home, let the dog out, feed her, go up and get Ben and get back down to the gym with enough time to do anything. So, we talked about what the options were. We also have plans during the day on Saturday and Saturday evening. We decided to come back on Sunday and workout then. Yay! I really didn't want to skip a day.


So, it looks like you'll be getting an update on Sunday rather than tonight. :)

*EDIT*: I forgot that we had made a commitment for Sunday as well. I also forgot that I've already exercised three days this week. Monday (zumba), Wednesday (zumba/fitness machines), Thursday (fitness machines). So, it's all good.

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!

Zumba, etc

So, I went to zumba today. I think I like Wednesday AM's better than Monday PM's. The instructor is really nice and the crowd is a fraction of Mondays. The instructor gives a lot more cues and explanations of the steps, as well as a couple 8 counts of slow pace and then the regular pace for the steps. It was really appreciated, at least by me. :)



Ben got to the gym a little after I did, so he was still working out in the fitness room when I was done. I went in and talked with him for a little bit while he did the handbike and then we both went and rode the stationary bikes for 15 minutes. Then we did some arm presses (I did 25 reps-12 in one set and 13 in another- at 60 lbs. I was pretty impressed with myself. :) ) and we were done!


We went out to eat at Bob Evans afterward because we both wanted lunch. Funnily, neither one of us ORDERED lunch. He got a ham and cheese omelet and I got their "Fit from the Farm" breakfast, which was one egg white (low cholesterol!), a turkey sausage link (tasted a little funny....I think it was because it was turkey and not pork sausage), and a banana/blueberry crepe with yogurt. It was really yummy. I got a side of hash browns, too. Skipped dessert because I didn't want to eat it all myself and Ben didn't have room for it in his appetite. It was probably for the best.


I feel much better now that I've showered. I'm tired, though. Training tonight should prove to be interested. Hopefully I'll get a second wind. :)

Swimming time

So, I know I said I would post tomorrow. I'm making myself into a liar. Well, not so much a liar, since I do hope to post tomorrow, but more overeager than anything.



Ok, onto what this is supposed to be about. I was reading through the first post and realized that my swimming time really, really sucks. I thought it was just bad in comparison to actual swimmers, since I was a lifeguard for the better part of the last 10 years and was surrounded by good swimmers.

But, I just remembered that I would swim a mile occasionally when I worked at the IU Natatorium and it took me about an hour to do that. 1 mile=roughly 1600 meters. This was, geez, four years ago? Has it really been that long? Ok, three and a half, since it's technically the beginning of 2009. So, swimming a mile took me 60 minutes to do before and now an 800 is taking me 40 minutes. That's an extra 10 minutes per 1/2 mile. If I were to swim a mile, it would take me 80 minutes now. That really bugs me, which is why I'm writing about it. I'm going to pretend that it has something to do with the Nat being one of the fastest pools in the world (no joke, look it up) and thus, the water is about 10 degrees cooler than the water at the gym. I know it really does have something to do with speed, but I don't think it would make a difference of 20 minutes per mile. I'm going to pretend it does, though. :)

I'm also going to pretend that it has something to do with the fact that I don't fit into my old bathing suit very well and have to keep yanking it up as I swim so that the little kiddos in the pool don't get a free show. I dug out another one of my bathing suits out of the laundry and washed it. It fits better than the one I've had to wear. We'll see if it makes a difference.



So...
Goal: swim a mile in at most an hour at the gym.
Deadline? Hmmm. How about by June.

That gives me three and a half months to shave 20 minutes off my time. I'm going to up the pace a notch on Friday and only swim 800 and see how long it takes me. I may be just pacing myself too slowly.

A small speedbump

I got a call from Ben not too long ago. He had some technical difficulties, as they say, with some of his classwork. He had to retype an entire paper he had just done.

I told him, get your work done, that's most important. We decided that if he wasn't done by 8:30, we would not go to the gym. He was close to finished at 8:30, but not done nonetheless, so we did not go like I said we would.



We did come up with a compromise. He is going to go with me tomorrow when I go for zumba. No, he's not going to do zumba. Maybe one day I'll talk him into it.....not likely, though. Sigh. Anyway, he's going to work out in the fitness room while I do zumba and we're going to go on Thursday evening as well. Friday stays the same.



I'll post again tomorrow when we've actually done something. :)

Starting off

I have been exercising about 3x a week for the last two weeks. I seem to be creating a pattern.



Mondays I do zumba in the evening. It has not been easy to stay the entire hour it's offered. Believe me, I want to stay. I have a nerve problem in my foot that high-impact exercise, lots of stairs or driving long distances without using the cruise control makes my foot hurt like nobody's business. I have had it looked at by both a podiatrist and orthopedic surgeon. Their recommendations were the same and I've had varying success with the treatment. As of right now, I can't afford to continue a pricey treatment that has had a 33% success rate.

Anyway, I digress. The first two Mondays I did zumba, I was able to do it for 40 minutes before I had to go or my feet would go on strike. Yesterday I was able to do the whole hour! I should mention that I had figured out the brunt of my problems with the steps. My feet mostly hurt when there is a lot of steps on the balls of the feet. Unfortunately, I love Latin dancing (well, who am I kidding...most dancing in general) and zumba is, if you are not familiar, Latin dancing + aerobics. This ='s a LOT of steps on the balls of my feet. My solution was to do the steps on the heels instead as much as possible. I think this was what really did it in terms of allowing me to go the whole hour. I will have to try the strategy again next week (or tomorrow, but I'll get to that in a second) to see if it will work again or if it was just a fluke.



Ok, moving on. Tuesdays or Thursdays, depending on our schedule, Ben and I have been going together to work in the weight/fitness room. The first day we went, I did 60 minutes total with a combination of elliptical running (20 min), hand bike (20 min) and weight lifting (20 min). I remembered my love of the leg press from high school. It was the only machine I would want to do in the whole weight room when it came time to do weights for cross country or track. Probably because I rocked at it. I wondered how well I would do now, seeing as it is 10 year later. I started at 150 and did a few reps. I was fine, so I upped it to 200. Still fine, and increased to 250. I think I did 15(? not exactly sure) reps at 250 and could have gone up in weight, but had answered my question. I also did some reps on the pec machine. I don't remember what my weight was for that one. I didn't care as much. :)

The second day we went, we got there just before they closed, so we were only able to do 30 minutes on the machines. I split this between the stationary bike (15 min) and hand bike again (15 min).

We are going again this evening. I don't really know which machine I'll be on, but Ben talked with a "fitness advisor" last week and they showed him a machine he really likes. He wants me to try it out, so we'll see if it's available tonight.



I tried to go to a zumba class on a Wednesday morning once (I train child care staff most Wednesday evenings, so I can go into the office at around 2pm to balance it out), but apparently the county was under a snow emergency and they had canceled the morning classes. Don't ask me why the county was under the snow emergency. It was not bad at all. My only guess is that it was worse in the rural parts. Anyway, I have a free morning again tomorrow, so I'm going to give it another shot. It's a different instructor and when I spoke with her the other time, when it was canceled, she seemed really nice.



Fridays I've been swimming. The first time I believe I swam either a 500 or 600 meter. I don't remember exactly. I do know I swam for about 1/2 hour. I know, I swim slow. Give me a break, I'm trying to pace myself so I don't have a heart attack. Yeah, I said it. I'm not on cholesterol medicine for nothing. The second time I KNOW I swam an 800...I paced myself a little better that time. I don't know what the timeframe was. I think 40 minutes. This was when Ben was meeting with the fitness advisor and it lasted about an hour. I swam and showered in that amount of time, so 40 minutes sounds about right.



My ultimate goal is to get back to about 125, close to what I was in high school. I would settle for 130, but I don't want to sell myself short. We'll see what I look like at 130 and decide if I want to go for the extra 5 lbs or not. My current weight is....hold on. I want this to be accurate. I shall go weigh myself right now. Ok, drumroll please. My current weight is 154.6....I'm not happy about it. I didn't want to get above 150 at all. Hell, I didn't want to get above 140, but I let it happen. I am comfortable with my body. I know I need to lose weight, but I also think I am attractive (at times). That has created a number of self-concept problems. On the one hand, I'm more comfortable with my body than I was when I weighed 120. I feel more attractive now than I did when I weighed 120. A part of me is afraid if I lose weight, I will also lose some of the self-confidence I've gained as I've gained weight. I know it is unreasonable and illogical, but I still worry. I know I need to be at a healthier weight. If I didn't, I would be doing this. I know that 154.6 is not exactly the ideal weight for someone at 5'2". According to www.halls.md, it says that the "medical recommendation" for my height would be 104-137. So, I guess my 130 goal is ok.



Ok, so that's pretty much it for right now. I promise, future blogs will not be this long. This time was just an intro and also a catch-up for the last two weeks.



Off I go!