Today Was a Good Day

I am happy with myself today! After dropping my son off at school, I needed to go to GNC to see if they had the whey isolate powder that I wanted (I saw it on their website and it was pineapple/banana flavored and I thought it would go well in a smoothie). I decided I would walk the mall until the stores opened at 10am. I got there at 9:10am with less than 1,000 steps on my pedometer. I listened to the Kelis station on Pandora (which I absosmurfly LOVE) and got my walk ON!!!! They kept playing upbeat songs and I kept up a swift pace. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes I was walking 5mph. Not the whole time, but a few intervals. I was walking faster than everyone, which isn’t saying much because I’m a naturally fast walker. I forgot to use my ankle weights, though. Did I tell y’all I bought ankle weights? We’ll get to that later. By 10:20 (the time I arrived at GNC) I had over 9,700 steps! I got my 4 miles in and then some in an hour’s time! And the last 2K steps I did really slow; it was my last lap and I figured it could be my cool down. I can’t wait until the weather allows me to walk outdoors and I can take advantage of all the hills while I walk – excellent workout. After I left the mall (without whey protein isolate, might I add, b/c I didn’t want to buy 2lbs of something I may not like), I had my 10K steps for the day, the first time this week. Actually, I came really close on Thursday with 9,643. Anyway, to show you just how lazy I’ve been since (not really, I had to pick my son up from school because he had a fever and wasn’t feeling well, so I’ve been taking care of a sick toddler all day), as of 11:56pm, I only have 13,390 steps (8PP). I was sure I’d end the day with around 17K steps.

Yesterday I put in 60 minutes on the Wii playing some Wii Fit Plus games. I had a lot of fun, too! I have totally been slacking on my Wii workouts lately. I broke a few records yesterday, too! SNOWBALL CHAMPION!!!!!!! And on the Ski Jump I got a new high score! Pretended I was whoopin’ some serious ass during Rhythm Boxing and played a couple games I’d never played before, like Penguin Slide, which I actually kinda liked. Tomorrow is Tuesday, Last Chance Workout, and the 1st of the month which means Tales from the Tape. And I cannot WAIT!!! Part of me wants to do it after midnight tonight, but I won’t do that. I will wait until I weigh-in on the Wii in the morning. I’ll take my measurements while my son is eating his breakfast.

After I left the mall, I went to Borders since they are going out of business. The sale was alright. Still not cheaper than Half Price Books, but ok. Even still, most of the inventory was gone. I’ll try back in a week to see if the sale has gotten better. At any rate, I still walked out of there with some books (20% off) and a couple magazines (40% off). And when I got home, I noticed one of my books (a cookbook of slowcooker/one pot meals) was only $0.98!!! That’s real close to free!!! 🙂 I also got a few weight loss magazines. The book I’m really looking forward to reading, though, is You Are Your Own Gym (YAYOG). I finished the introduction to Weight Work for Women (we talked about that the other day, remember? I’m starting on Wednesday). The rest of the book demonstrates the exercises and is broken up by warm-up/cool down stretches, the upper body, the lower body, the midsection body, and the workouts. Very straight forward and very to the point, I like it. The other day I decided that I would also start going back to Pilates once a week for 10-12 weeks. So when I saw YAYOG, I had to get it! In my old blog, I remember saying (after first beginning with Pilates) that I would never lift a weight again. I liked the workout so much and I loved how I was getting stronger just using my body. So I want to incorporate that into my strength training (ST) workouts, just to switch it up a bit. So I’m going to start reading tonight and try to be done by the end of the week. After I finish the book, I’ll decide just exactly how I want to do it swap out exercises, every other workout (one with weights, next with body-weight, etc), every other week, or a combination.

So I have two books to help me tone up, but guess what else I got? The Ultimate Workout Log (TUWL)! Now, normally, I’m a journal person. I have countless spirals and bounded journals that I use for various things. I love stationary; I get it from my mama! Anyway, I hadn’t actually figured out what I was going to use for logging my exercises for ST. I have a lot of copies of the Body-for-Life training logs, but I didn’t really want to use those. So when I saw TUWL, I had to get it! They had a couple others, but I liked this one the best. It gives me 6 months worth of Since I’m starting on Wednesday, today actually starts week 1 (since when was Monday the first day of the week?) so I’ll log my mall walk as cardio exercise for the day. Same with tomorrow, I’ll log whatever I do for my LCW as cardio exercise. Then on Wednesday, I’ll have my first real strength training day. The first 2-4 weeks I am only shooting to do ST two days a week. Once I get a hang of the exercises and feel more comfortable, I’ll move up to 3x a week. I’ll start on Wednesday and Sundays.

I can’t wait until I get invited to “the” Gun Show. And I WILL have my face in that place eventually! Guess where I’m stopping by on the way to The Gun Show? ONEderland! I am! I realized I don’t have too far to go before I get there, either, only 12.7lbs. I’m 212.6lbs right now. That means I’m only 2.7lbs away from having the second digit in my weight be a zero (baby steps, you understand). And then I’ll only be 10lbs away from ONEderland! There are 45 days until my birthday. That’s 6 weeks. If I bust my ass, like seriously work, I can give myself the best birthday present ever: ringing in 37 at 199 or less! That would be awesome, it really would.

And before I go to sleep, I just want to say, I can’t believe I’ll be 40 in three years. Where they hell did all the time go? But how sweet is it going to be when I am looking fiercely fabulous at forty? To be in better shape at 40 than I was at 20? Yeah, I’m lookin’ forward to that. (*cue my exit music*)

WIO & WW Pedometer

I went to WW today to buy a pedometer. I decided that I would still buy it for the simple fact that it tells me how many points I’ve earned for the day. I’m still going to get the Omron pedometer, though. I’m nerdy enough to wear two pedometers and pretty enough to pull it off. LOL I couldn’t wait to get home so I could Walk It Out. I wanted to see how accurate the game is when it comes to counting steps. I also wanted to see how accurate the pedometer was at counting activity points (AP).

As a warm up, I decided to play some WiiFit games. I started with about 2500 steps. I ended up playing Basic Step first and got PERFECT RHYTHM!!!! That means all my steps were perfect! I took a picture of the score screen:

So of course I wanted to see if I could get a perfect score in Advanced Step. I played FIVE times. Didn’t even beat my high score. BOO!!! But that was 25 minutes worth of Advanced Step and according to WW eTools that equals 2AP! So I was happy, even if I couldn’t beat my personal high score. Played Snowball Fight for my last 2 minutes so I could get my 30 minutes in on the Wii Fit. I ended with about 4500 steps. At this point my pedometer said I’d earned 1AP. Nope! 2! On to WIO…

I started with 4,720 steps (at 3:45pm). According to the game, I took 21,413 steps. So far TODAY (at almost 11:00pm), my pedometer shows 21,443, so clearly, the game is not accurate. I walked for 98 minutes and according to my pedometer, I had about 17K steps when I finished, for a difference in about 13K steps. That sounds about right b/c when I walk outside, 4 miles gets me about 8800 steps, so 6 miles should get me a little over 12K steps. So the pedometer is more accurate as far as steps. The game is accurate when it comes to mileage, though. I took all the songs out of the playlist that had less than 120bpm (except 2 or 3), so I feel I had a pretty good pace. I sweat much more today than any other time playing the game. Anyway, here are my stats:

Burned 737.6 calories
Miles 6.2
The town is 19% complete
I have 62/120 songs!

And I got another rainbow today! I walked for 90 minutes, but only had 6/7 spheres. I had to walk for another 8 minutes to get the last sphere. So worth it! Looking for rainbow spheres gives me something to do while I’m saving coins for large purchases. Today I planted 3 flower fields, built at least 3 boutiques, and bought lots of song and zodiac pieces. Still no constellation complete, though. It was a really good walk. I had a lot of fun today!

So it’s the end of the day and I decided that I really like my WW pedometer. It tracks ALL movement. So there’s a pause button on it (for like when you are driving). I’m never going to press the pause button because I know I’ll forget to press it again and I’d rather have a few extra steps than to not count my steps at all. Here’s what’s cool about it. I tracked my activity points for the exercise I did today, 12AP. My pedometer says I’ve earned 14AP!! There are two settings on the pedometer: All Day and Activity. If you set it to all day (which is what I do), you won’t start earning activity points until you have taken enough steps to cover what would be considered regular daily activity. I’m not sure what that exact number is, but I didn’t have any AP at 2500 steps, but I had one at 4700 steps. So somewhere in between there; I’ll try to pay more attention tomorrow. I’m planning on only using the AP values it gives me on days I don’t exercise. On days that I exercise, I’ll use the values in eTools for whatever activity that I do. That seems like a pretty good plan.

I have had 128 minutes of activity today. I think I’m done. No Zumba and no jump rope. I’m ready to shower and go to sleep. Stay tuned for a video tomorrow after my weigh in. Good night!

Wii Fit Age

I forgot about my monthly Body Test on the Wii Fit! First of all, I’ve lost 1.3lbs since Wednesday. I’m happy about that. Aunt Flo is coming next week, so I was concerned not just about this past weigh-in and the little gain, but about next week as well. I’m going to work on drinking more water so that I don’t retain as much. And I am not giving in to any crazy ass cravings, either! I will NOT let AF wreck next week’s weigh-in!!!

That being said, my Wii Fit age is (drumroll please): 23!!!!! But again, it was the first time I’d ever done the tests that they gave me. Not too shabby. 🙂

Wonderful Weigh-In Wednesday

I lost 5.2 pounds!!! I couldn’t be happier! How do I think I did it? First off, I think some of it is weight that should have come off last week, but I was on my cycle and probably still bloated or retaining water or however that works. But even still, -5.2lbs is AWESOME!!!!!! That brings me to a total of 7.8lbs lost. I’m so happy the scale is finally moving down. ONEderland, I’m comin’ to join you, honey!

So what did I do last week? One thing I notice is that I didn’t eat all of my points each day. I was sick this past weekend and didn’t really have much of an appetite. I had to force myself to eat what I did. One day I had 13PP left over. This actually concerned me because normally that makes you not lose any weight. But I was satisfied and not hungry at all. I didn’t use many of my weekly allowance points and I didn’t use any of my activity points! I think that’s a great accomplishment!

Of the 6 things I blogged about last week, I accomplished about 4:

1) I wanted to do more activity. Last week I worked out 3 days, this week, 4 days. That’s an improvement. This coming week I will do 5 days, no excuses.
2) I actually did pretty well with eating more veggies. I didn’t try a new food last week, though. This week I will try asparagus.
3) On the junk food tip, I didn’t overdo it this time! If I wanted to indulge, I indulged (e.g., Skinny Cow ice cream).
4) I did drink more water this week, and I did fine on my fluid intake. I would still like to improve on my water intake, which should be easy since I’ll be working out more.
5) I bought the snack bags, but I didn’t separate anything into them. I didn’t really snack like that this week. I did eat 23 almonds today that I’d kept in my car for emergency purposes, lol. I will definitely make some more snack bags of those.
6) I still eat sporadically; it’s not consistent. I will still work to improve on this.

All that being said, I’m very happy with my week. I’m getting used to this new program and it’s helping me to make better choices. I’m finally thinking before I eat. More than anything I don’t want to undo the good I’ve already done. So even on days I don’t feel like working out, I still get on the Wii for at least 30 minutes. Had I not been sick over the weekend, I would have earned even more activity points. And although I should take it easy today, I have every intention of putting in about an hour on the Wii today. It is honestly the easiest thing about this whole journey. I don’t dread working out; even if I don’t feel like it, I don’t mind playing the Wii. I can’t wait to take my measurements on Saturday morning. I’m looking forward to seeing if I lost any inches at all. I doubt it; my clothes still fit pretty much the same. Then again, who knows. We’ll see in a few days.

My goal for next week is -2.2 pounds so I can have an even 10lbs gone. I will work even harder this week than last week. My Power Phrase for the week is HARD WORK PAYS OFF!!!

So far, my Wii is helping me to lose weight. Today is my 42nd day on the Wii. And I am FINALLY seeing some results. I’m SO glad I didn’t give up or throw in the towel when I couldn’t get the scale to budge. I resisted the PointsPlus system, but I think that it has a lot to do with my losses. That along with the fact that I just feel a lot more accountable when I go weigh in with WW. I’m loving this new PP program. Sure, some foods are a lot more points, but that’s what makes me choose healthier alternatives.

For example, Kellogg’s Smart Start used to be 3 points. Most things that have gone up in points with the PP system have gone up, like, 1 point. Not my favorite healthy cereal, it went up to 5 points! I haven’t eaten any since I started WW! I’m taking a multivitamin every day, so I’m not missing out on the nutrients. It’s just not worth 5PP, and that’s without the milk! OH! My loss today also made me lose a point. So now I only get 34PP each day. Smart Start is a total points luxury. At least my Laughing Cow Cheese Wedges are still only 1PP, but Multigrain Wheat Thins (to go with the LCCW) went from 3 to 4PP. But it’s all fine because whereas before fruits were about 1 point per serving, they are now all FREE!!! NO POINTS VALUE! So I can snack on fruit without having to subtract it from my daily points target. That helps A LOT!!!!

So that’s my week. Another goal is to blog more. I really do have so much to say, time just gets away from me. I’m going to do better!!! Here’s to another great week!!!!

10-Minute Workouts on the Wii

I did the 10-minute Super Hula Hoop and I survived!!!!! Woowhooooooo! It is REALLY hard to engage your abs while doing that, but I did try the whole time. After that, I played Rhythm Boxing for 10 minutes. Another good workout; I was drenched in sweat from both of them. Each of those earned me 1AP, so I have 2AP so far for today and 8AP for the week. That was just my fun little warm up. Today is like my Last Chance Workout, lol. After I rest a little bit (and finish this entry) I’m going to do my Gold’s Gym workouts; about 15 minutes Cardio boxing and 15 minutes of Dance. That will give me two more AP. THEN I’ll play Just Dance 2 for a little while. I’m going to play online with a friend next week, so I need to work on my moves! Practice, practice, practice! I’m going to try the Just Sweat part of the game today. Let me get my GG workouts out of the way so that I can have brunch.

Working out with the Wii

That’s what I’m about to do, but I needed to document this before I forgot. I just ordered two new games from Amazon: Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout and Gold’s Gym Dance Workout. Now, I’ve wanted the Dance one, but was putting it off. I never really wanted the Cardio Workout, that is until I played Wii Sports Boxing yesterday. Yesterday was my first time playing the Wii Sports game that came with my Wii. I played with my friend Carla back in October, but I’d forgotten how much fun Boxing was! I didn’t think it would be as fun playing against a computer character and not have my opponent standing next to me, but it was still fun! I wanted to just keep playing over and over and over! Can you say SWEATING?! I knew I had to order GGCW after that. I figured since I was ordering it, I could just go ahead and get the GGDW, too. What was I waiting for?

My plan is to set up an actual schedule of games to play to help in my calorie burn. Sometimes I’m just playing aimlessly, and end up sweating, and that’s OK. But I want to put together an actual program to help with my fat burning. I’m thinking of buying a heart rate monitor (HRM) to make absolute sure that I’m within fat burning range. This site can help you learn more about your fat burning heart rate. Like I was saying, I want to set up a Wii workout regimen that will ensure I burn the calories and lose the weight. Yes, I’ve been using my Wii consistently. Yes, it makes me sweat. My only concern is that the time that my heart rate is in the optimal fat burning range is not a long enough time. That’s why I need the HRM, just to be sure. I want to make sure I’m burning as many calories as the game says I’m burning.

Having a plan will make sure I’m not just playing to have fun, but playing to lose weight (and having fun in the process). Varying which games I play will ensure that I don’t get bored. It will also be a way to sort of cross-train. I will continue to use the Wii Fit Plus to do Yoga and Strength training. There is a new Yoga and Pilates game that came out yesterday. I’ll wait to read more reviews before I decide if I want to invest in that.

Ok, off for some fun. I’m going to warm up with some Wii Sports Resort games and even a few Active Life Explorer games. Then I’m going to Walk It Out for an hour. I really don’t feel like it, I’d rather take a quick nap while I have the chance. But I’ll do it anyway.

Getting ready to SMASH IT!!!

So far, Day 1 hasn’t been so bad. I guess since I was hungover yesterday and could barely eat anything, this was a perfect day to start. I haven’t had any crazy cravings or anything like that. I don’t feel like I’ve eaten very much, but at the same time I feel like I’ve been eating all day.

For those of you who know about the Fat Smash diet, allow me to tell you that I don’t follow it to the letter. I don’t believe I have to. The purpose of the diet is to create better eating habits without complete deprivation for the rest of your life. So for me, in these first nine days, I kind of cut corners. I eat veggie burgers and other veggie products. I’m even gonna make some gluten-free pizza with veggie cheese and veggie pepperoni. I know the crust will be good because I’ve made it before. I used Garbanzo Bean flour, Brown Rice flour, and oat flour. I know that oat flour is controversial when it comes to being gluten-free, but since I don’t have a gluten allergy, it’s fine. Really, I just need it to be Fat Smash friendly, which it is. I also use Truvia sweetener, drink a bottle of Propel Fitness water, and add Crystal Light to one of my bottled waters every day. Anywho, I’m not just eating fruits and vegetables in the way that Dr. Ian probably expects. But it works for me, so why fix it?

I went to the grocery store today to stock up on some produce. I have a new goal to try a new food every week. This week’s food is spaghetti squash. I bought a small one so in case we don’t like it, I won’t waste too much food. I’m going to make my own sauce out of tomato puree and I’ll add green peppers, onions, garlic, and mushrooms. That should be good enough. Oh, I’ll probably add some kale, too. Why not? I wonder how it tastes and what it’s going to feel like in my mouth. I have texture issues.

I can’t believe Day 1 is almost behind me!! Tomorrow for breakfast I’m going to have an omelet with 2 egg whites, spinach, and mushrooms; two slices of MorningStar Farms veggie bacon; and a cup of cantaloupe. My mid-morning snack will be a smoothie made with 6oz of fat free plain yogurt, 1 medium banana, and some frozen berries. Not sure what I’ll eat past that, I’ll figure it out in the morning.

So far I’ve only gotten 30 minutes in on the Wii. But I did unlock the 6 minute Super Hula Hoop! Go me! I’m already tired and I need to still do my first entry for 100 Days of Weight Loss. So let’s get to it!

Next post: Day 1 of 100