Well, if you ignore my sad start last Monday, Week 1 came out pretty great!  I completed all of my goals for the rest of the week.  I worked out at the fitness center four times, 45 minutes each time (goal was “at least 30 minutes”), logged my body stats each day on my Wii Fit, and ate fruits or veggies first at every meal, and also for almost every snack.

I ate healthy meals and snacks all week, with the exception of Sunday evening when were visiting friends, and they made some very yummy pesto ravioli (though I ate salad and then mixed steamed veggies first) and then, in honor of my birthday, made us to-die-for chocolate malts.  How do you say no to that?  So I had my malt and it was DELICIOUS.  I was a little worried this morning about what that meal would have done to my progress, but even so I lost half a pound since the previous morning.  What??  Sunday wasn’t even a workout day!  So, still steadily going in the right direction, SW-2.5 for the week.  Yeah!!  (SW = Starting Weight. )

I spent most of the week feeling super sore, all over.  Ugh.  That’s what happens, I guess, when you’ve been mostly sedentary for months and suddenly jump right into a new exercise regimen which includes The Evil Weight Machine.  Today, though, I’m feeling much better, and hope that if I keep it up I won’t feel so ache-y again.

So I went out this afternoon and got my reward for this week, the new Indigo Girls CD.  And loaded it up straigtaway onto my mp3 player and took it down with me to the fitness center for tonight’s workout.

Note to self: do not wait until evening to work out.  Do it in the morning.  I was up super late last night, and Mondays are my day off, so I slept in and was generally lazy all morning.  So I didn’t make it down to the fitness center before lunchtime, and I thought I’d just go this afternoon sometime.  BAD IDEA.  I did NOT feel like going, and just wanted to keep putting it off, and finally went a little after 9:00 tonight, and it was not much fun.  I did listen to the new CD, though, which I did enjoy.  But the walking on the treadmill for 45 minutes at the end of my day?  Not so much.  So from now on, I need to get my butt out of bed early enough to do it first thing in the morning.  Please.

So… on to Week 2!  Here’s what I’ve got going on this week:

GOAL 1:  This week I will go to the fitness center for at least half an hour three times (Mon-Wed-Fri), and on alternate days will do Wii Fit for at least 45 minutes (Tues-Thurs-Sat).  Sunday will be a day off.  I will also continue logging my “body stats” on Wii Fit each day.

GOAL 2:  This week I will log my food points each time I eat into the WW online point tracker.  And continue last week’s fruit-or-veggie-first rule.

REWARDS:  I will buy some veggie plants and/or herbs to put out on the balcony.

BARRIERS:  I am tired and sore.  It’s hard to get going early enough in the day to get to the workout before going to work.  Calculating food points can be tedious.

STRATEGIES:  Regular exercise = less soreness, soon!  I will go to bed early enough each night that it won’t be such a struggle to get up for exercise in the morning.  Food points calculation?  My strategy is JUST DO IT.

And day 1 of this week went just fine.  No repeat of last week’s fiasco!

Day 4: Hungry

Today was a pretty good day.  45 minutes on the treadmill this morning.  Was NOT easy.  But I survived it.  The plan is to go tomorrow and Saturday so I get my four day in for the week – Sunday is the craziest work day of my year, so I’m not counting on having the energy to do it after that, and I am certainly not dragging myself out of bed early enough in the morning to do it before!

Foodwise, I had a pretty good day.  Uneventful.  Managed to eat fruits or veggies before all meals and snacks, including the single brownie I had at work tonight… after munching on some strawberries that I was VERY glad someone brought to offer the group.  I don’t figure small indulgences are a problem.  It would be worse to deny myself entirely until I couldn’t resist anymore and then gorged myself on whatever deadly treat was nearest.  So one brownie it was.  And it was GOOD.  I wasn’t able to have dinner until I got home at almost 9:30 tonight.  Not so good.  I was FAMISHED, and it took a great deal of will power not to gobble down more of those brownies.  Luckily I have a box of oatmeal packets stashed in my desk, so I had a bowl before the class to help tide me over.  Next time I need to figure out a dinner I can easily take to work and heat up before evening meetings/classes.  But then it’s sort of early to eat.  No perfect solution here, but there are only two weeks left of this particular class, and it’s almost summer, so the meetings are slowing down.  (SUMMER!  And VACATION!!  Can. Not. Get. Here. Soon. Enough.)

I’m still sore from the weight machine three days ago.  Ugh.  Not nearly as bad today as yesterday, though.  So there’s that.

Day 3: Success!

The rundown -

• I am indeed even more sore today than I was last night.  Ouch.  My whole body ached all day, even after I popped a couple of Tylenol.  Here’s to making exercising a habit so this doesn’t have to happen again!  (And to taking it slow with the weight machine from now on – I swear it didn’t seem like I was overdoing it at the time!)
• Lunch started with a goodly number of juicy mini carrots, then some watermelon, and then a Trader Joe’s prepared salad which I LOVE (the Pasadena salad – it’s pretty new, and I was super excited because it is JUST like a salad I used to order all the time at a restaurant in Pasadena when I lived there years ago, and I hadn’t found it anywhere else until it popped up on the shelves at TJ’s).  Ok, so the salad wasn’t the very very best one I could have gotten, nutrition-wise (and let’s not even think at this moment about the fact that with but a little effort I could have made my own salad), but it was FAR from the worst.  TJ’s has some DEADLY salads.  I have learned to look at the nutrition labels.  Good start.
• Dinner was dangerous – a potluck at work!  Eek!  But I was a VERY good girl.  Well, I was a good girl.  Got a plate of food and made sure to concentrate on the salads and fruits and veggies.  Started with some fresh veggies and some salad, then moved on to a half-serving of veggie lasagna (so yummy and so bad for me – I count it a win that I didn’t gobble up two or three servings worth!) and some curried chicken, etc.  Small portions of the not so good for me things.  Plate not crowded.  Went back only once for half a piece of cornbread and a little more fruit.  Then the desserts came out.  Oh no!  I successfully avoided the cream puffs, and the cheesecake, and the brownies.  I got a tiny piece (two good bites worth) of HEAVENLY chocolate zucchini cake (the zucchini means it’s good for me, riiight?) and then had some watermelon and then a little half-apricot stuffed with some yummy cottage cheese mixture of some kind.  All in all, a successful venture.  It could have been very, very ugly.  I even avoided taking any desserts home with me, though a number of people tried to foist them on me.  Whew!
• I felt munchy in the evening, but instead of eating I spent 30 minutes doing Wii Fit Yoga.  Then had a little bit of watermelon and a big glass of water.

I feel so silly that it has taken me so long to take this step.  It really isn’t that hard to eat well and exercise, if you just DO it.  It’s just hard getting started.  But here I am, only three days in, and every time I live up to my goals – or go a step further and do something that’s not even an official goal for this week – I find that that just gives me even more incentive to KEEP IT UP.  Three days in, and I have set my pattern.  The goals and the community of accountability are SUCH good things – what a great way to keep me motivated to do better and better and better.

And, oh yeah, my body stats on Wii Fit today were MUCH BETTER than yesterday.  I think I have officially made up for the bigfatfail on Monday.

Day 2 was MUCH better than Day 1, thank goodness!  I am all kinds of proud of myself.  I am SO proud that I’m going to have to break out the bullet points!

• 45 minutes spent in the fitness center, mostly on the exercise bike but with a few interludes trying to figure out the big scary weight training machine.  I am SORESORESORE, which is not so good, because I can only imagine that tomorrow I will be even WORSE.  Maybe I overdid it on the “must continuously move arms in exercisey ways while biking” and the arm pull/push/heave parts of the weight machine.  Or maybe I’m just super duper out of shape.  Or both.  But still – win win win!!
• I started each meal and every snack with fruits and veggies, and DEFINITELY got my five in for the day.  And everything was so yummy – it feels so much better to eat real food instead of processed junk.
• Speaking of meals, lunch started with watermelon. (My arms hurt cutting the watermelon into chuncks.  I am that pathetic.)  Then, a cup of Trader Joe’s black bean soup with a pita sandwich made with a whole wheat pita, spread on the inside with just enough hummus to give some flavor, and accompanied by 3 oz. of chicken and some edamame.  YUM.  Next time, I’ll add veggies to the mix and it will be even yummier!  Then dessert – two teeny spoonfuls of lemon sorbet – just enough to satisfy.  My husband made TJ’s orange chicken and jasmine rice for dinner, which is surprisingly not terrible for you.  And easy.  And yummy.  Mango was the appetizer this time.
• While I was at work today I was SORELY TEMPTED by some chocolate-covered mini donuts.  I had one in my hand and on its way to my mouth before I regained my resolve and dropped it.  NO DONUT!
• Ok, I did have one cookie tonight, but only after eating some more watermelon, and when my husband got home from work I told him the other three remaining were his to deal with.  Eat, toss, hide, feed to the cats, whatever.  But I am not eating any more of them.  Those four have been taunting me for three days.  Along with 3/4 of a birthday cake in the fridge that I officially announced I would throw away, but haven’t gotten around to taking down to the dumpster yet.  BUT I WILL.  And we have eaten NO PIECES OF CAKE since Saturday, even though it’s right there every time we open the fridge.  I have an IRON WILL.  More or less.
• The Wii Fit body test gave me BAD NEWS this morning, but I am convinced tomorrow will be much better.

So, in summary – today I am WIN!

Ok, so some backstory before I get to the main story here.  We do New Year’s Resolutions a little funny in my family.  My husband’s family started it all and I got sucked in eventually.  It’s sort of like a yearlong Lent – they give something foody up for the year.  E and I have done it ourselves roughly every other year or so.  This year we’ve given up restaurants.  The rules are that when it’s just the two of us, we eat at home.  We are allowed to eat out when we’re with other people and the group is going to a restaurant, but we can’t be the instigators.  So far, we’ve done pretty well.  No outright cheating of any kind, and only a few times when it’s been in the gray area between going along with the plan and instigating it ourselves.

Two years ago we gave up chocolate and french fries for the year.  Each of us chose one thing and decided we’d join the other in solidarity.  I failed six minutes into the year.  There was a big bowl of chocolate-covered fruity things on the table that we’d been munching on leading up to midnight (all the while joking about how it was our last chance for a year).  Midnight arrives, ball drops, we cheer, conversation ensues, I get munchy, and all of a sudden I’d grabbed a chocolate and popped it into my mouth.  Didn’t even think about it.  I wasn’t the one who realized what I’d done, either – someone else saw me and asked, “Did you just eat CHOCOLATE?”  Um, yeah.  Epic fail.  I hadn’t swallowed it though, and I spat that sucker out straightaway.  But I’m pretty sure I ingested some.  Six minutes.

Today, I failed even bigger than that.

It started off really well.  I was proud of my goals for the week, and all fired up to get going on them.  Went to the grocery store and picked up all kinds of yummy fruits and veggies for the week.  Ate lunch, starting with mango.

Then we had some friends over and we decided to walk up the street to Boston Market for dinner.  Yay!  Years ago we had a Boston Market nearby and I really liked it.  We just moved to a new apartment two weeks ago, and I noticed that there was one right up the street.  But there’s that pesky no-restaurant rule.  So today was our chance to check it out.

So we got there and I got all excited about all the yummy things on the menu I remembered liking way back when.  And we were with our friends, and everything was so homey and welcoming and enticing.  So I ordered, got my food, started to eat – and it was JUST as yummy as I remembered.  Then about halfway through the meal I realized… I didn’t start with a fruit or veggie!  The VERY FIRST DAY.  EPIC EPIC FAIL.  Friends, I didn’t even have anything on my plate that counted as a fruit or veggie.  I am very embarrassed.  It was NOT good for me.  And I did NOT live up to my goals.  And I didn’t even realize it for a good fifteen minutes of chowing down.  Not a shining moment in the BetterUniverse.

As I was in the depths of regret and despair, my husband leaned over toward me and asked, “So this means you’re not getting that Indigo Girls CD this week, right?”

SOB.  I am so fail.

So here’s the dilemma.  I am not letting this be an excuse to give up.  I recognize that perfect should not get in the way of good.  I WILL live up to my goals for the rest of the week.  I WILL be proud of myself when the week is over.  But will I give myself that reward if I’m perfectperfectperfect…. starting tomorrow?  I can’t figure out if I should.  I sure could use the incentive.  But I’ve already broken the agreement.  Sigh.

Day 1: Not so great, but still resolved.

My Goals

1. This week, I will stock the kitchen with fruits and veggies, and will eat at least one FIRST at every meal.  (Thanks, Joshilyn, for the fantastic idea!  I’m totally stealing it.)
2. This week, I will go to the fitness center and work out for at least 30 minutes at least four times. I will also log my stats on Wii Fit every day.

My Rewards

1. If I stick to both goals, I will buy myself the new Indigo Girls CD.

Barriers

I’m not so good at keeping the kitchen well-stocked. It will be hard to change the bad habits of inactivity and laziness. I always hate the idea of going to the fitness center until I’m there and actually doing it.

Strategies

I will plan my menu before going to the grocery store and make sure to include enough fruits & veggies in the plan. And I’ll work out in the mornings before work.

Catherine of ThisGirlRemembers here, with a new endeavor.  Thanks to the fabulous Joshilyn Jackson, I’m joining the posse of folks participating in the BetterU program, a 12 week project to get healthier in small, manageable steps.  This is just the kick in the pants I need to get motivated enough to do what I’ve been planning to do for quite a while: be intentional about what I eat, get that exercise in, have more energy and vigor and just generally feel healthier than I have in quite a while.

So.  Check back later today for my goals and rewards for this week, and if you should feel so inspired, head on over to BetterU and join in too!