The things I do wrong.

There are certain habits of mine I'm going to have to overcome in order to lose body fat. This weekend has been full of bad habits. Here's the list:

1. Not having good healthy food around the house to eat. This has been a problem for the past couple of weeks. I sometimes make it to the store for salad materials or eggs, but often times I run out. Then suddenly, I find myself too hungry to bother going to the grocery store AND cooking, that I end up eating out which is NEVER good for the bagle.

2. Not having the materials for a quick breakfast. I always have stuff around for scrambled eggs or migas. But if I have to wake up early, I typically don't have time to cook eggs. If I don't have anything quick on hand, I skip breakfast, thus fucking my metabolism for the entire day. This happened to me last saturday when I had to meet up with someone at 8am. I didn't get around to lunch until about 1 and was so hungry that I ended up not only eating out (again) but also eating fries (with mayo!).

3. The eternal temptation of beer. For the past several years, my social life has been drowning in hops. I love beer. I love hanging out with my friends and enjoying a cold Fireman's No. 4. Because I love beer so much, most of the friends I have acquired in Austin share this passion. I can only seclude myself so long before someone shows up with a six-pack. Being the free-wheelin' gal I am, I've never been known to pass up a beer. Now, I'm going to have to learn.

What I've gleaned from this list is that I need to make sure I'm organized enough to cook for myself. I've been trying to restrict myself to one day per week in which I eat and drink whatever I want, but that hasn't been happening due to the above problems.

Today I had a really amazing bike ride / workout. It really made me feel like I want my diet to work for me so my workouts are constructive rather than preventative (that is, I don't want to work out and think "i need to burn off that beer or those enchiladas", i want to work out and enjoy it for exercise's sake).

In order to control my filthy habits, I will do the following:

1. Tomorrow I'm going to go grocery shopping.
2. While I'm shopping, I'm going to buy some good cereal for breakfast emergencies.
3. Now this is the tough one. I'm going to have to learn not to drink beer every time I go out. Beer once a week is plenty for any reasonable human being. If I can stick to my food-plan, it will be easier to stick to drinking beer once a week as well.

turning things around

sometimes it's really hard to commit to a decision, no matter how much i know that decision is going to be good for me.

for the past few months, i've been meaning to get my body in shape. and although i've been going to the gym, i've also been smoking and drinking rather heavily.

the trouble was, as much as i knew i needed to stop, i never really made the decision to actually do it.

so i set a date, May 17, on which i would quit smoking. it's arrival was anticlimatic: one last smoke with a beer and that was it.

i've been cancer-stick free for about 3 days!

this quit has been going really well. i'm pretty shocked that this one tiny feat of self-control has made me feel exceedingly more optimistic about my physical capabilities than i have in a couple of years.

last time i quit, i went straight to the bar. this time, i took a couple days off from drinking, avoided temptation, and went on redirecting my energies into cleaning, working out, and computing.

now i'm feeling the inertia of clean-living and i think i might stick to it for a while. i've got my gym-zen back, at least momentarily. i got back into weight training today; it was like falling in love all over again. i've been doing cardio lately and I HATE IT. i like cycling and sports, but i hate fucking treadmills, elliptical machines, and other boring contraptions. like sports, there's immediate gratification in lifting weights. cardio machines are just torture. they put the tv on to make it better, but when they tune into soap operas and FOX news, in only gets worse.

strange, i'm not really missing the booze, so i think i'll just keep on abstaining from beer for a while and really devote myself to losing THE BAGLE.

i'm doing a little experiment: i started counting my calories. it's easy to have a calorie deficit when i'm not drinking beer! also, if my numbers are right, it's definitely possible to lost weight and still eat really amazing food. my body burns about 1900 calories a day, plus the 300 or so I burn at the gym (total guess but why not). and if i ate around 1500 calories of food today, that's about a 700 calorie deficit (give or take (probably take) a hundred or so). And check out the yummy food I ate:

pizza with zucchini, mushrooms, green pepper, onion and tomato
spinach salad with blue cheese, walnuts, and raspberry vinegarette
tacos with grilled veggies, fake meat, avacado, and spanish rice!!!

(apparently i've also been diverting my spastic-nic-fit anxiety into cooking.)

life is good at the moment, now time to get some sleep.

training for the marathon

no, not me. i will probably never run a marathon due to my strong distaste for running and general inability to commit to long-term relationships, er, goals. however, i think people who run marathons must be determination gods, and it gives me great pleasure to learn that my friend, dennis, is training for his first marathon. i was reminded of lia's tales of toenails falling off as a result of her training. a quick internet search found a useful article on this common condition in marathon runners:

Injury Archives: Black Toenails