Day 4 (I've found my calling!)

So I was far too tired to post this at 12:30 last night. Here is my post for yesterday. See you again late tonight for an update on today's activities!

6:10 am- Breakfast. I seem to keep waking up earlier and earlier no matter how late I go to sleep. I’m not dying of exhaustion or anything, but there is something with my internal clock that really seems to like the 6 o’clock hour.

Breakfast Pizza (Market Day—egg, cheese, sausage, bread)

White tea (I decided I’m going to start logging my drinks as well. There are a lot of things I leave of this blog like the handfuls of nuts or cheerios I have here or there, and also things like the sports drinks Dr. Rome asked me to drink after working out. I have decided to share those as well, so you truly get a complete picture of what I consume on a daily basis.

8:30 am- I was all ready to go on a run up at Hawken after dropping off Kennedy at school, but I couldn’t drag myself to get out of the car for the life of me. I kept staring at my shoes and at the road ahead of me. It occurred to me then that self-motivation might prove to be an issue, especially when I’m in college and have a million and one better things I could be doing. Lucky for me, Personal Wellness for the Modern College Student saw that one coming. Here are some of my favorite tips for motivating yourself to get off your butt:

1) Find a buddy because it makes you much more likely to keep your appointment and routine and to work out harder if there is someone to push you

2) Mix it up—by doing different things that work different parts of the body, you will keep from getting bored and stuck in a rut.

3) Have a Back-up plan in case something in your day changes. Instead of throwing exercise and good habits out the window, go to plan B.

4) Incorporate extra activity into your daily life. If you don’t have it in you some days to just buckle down and do the workout, find ways to trick yourself. By walking instead of driving, or taking the long way to class, you get the exercise your body needs without having to go into “workout mentality.”

Now, I like these suggestions, but I am going to alter them a little bit. I know that if I work out with a partner, I get crazy super competitive, or otherwise go into my own little world. Either way, not fun for anyone involved. But I do like the idea of a set time every day to do what I need to do. I also do much better when I have someone else to motivate and push me… I think the solution to that one might be group classes! I try my first one tonight. It’s called “Zumba” at Urban Active—a mix of Latin dance and goodness knows what else. But I know I love music, dancing, and moving my hips. I also know that a class like this sounds much more appealing than a 2 mile, solo run. If I like the style and feel of it, I will definitely pick up more classes. I am looking into kickboxing and aerobics—both of which incorporate dance, variation, and fun versus intensity and repetition. If I go there and like what it is all about, when I go to college, one of the first things I will do is look into group classes like these ones.

Mixing it up for me is going to be key. I get bored easily and I don’t like to do things that bore me or that I dread doing. I think that I ran into a wall with the running today partially because I just did it yesterday. I need a change of pace. I think in college, I will need to have several lists of exercise options that I can choose from and change it up.

My schedule is always changing, and when it does, I often throw my hands up in the air and say forget it, and throw all of my hard work out the window. For instance, if my friends end up going to McDonald’s after I’ve already eaten well that day, I will often just eat again anyways because it’s easy. If my day suddenly changes and I go to the movies during the time I was supposed to be running, I often won’t exercise at all that day just because the schedule changed. For college I need solutions to this problem, including little workouts to squeeze in throughout the day when the plans change, and ways to remind myself that I don’t have to eat it just because it’s there.

Incorporating extra activity into my life will be key for me, because there are many days when I just don’t feel like doing anything. So instead of torturing myself and dragging myself to the gym, I will need ways to trick myself into getting the exercise in different ways.

12:00 pm- Lunch. Still no groceries. Awesome. I tried to do the best I could given the circumstances.

Can Campbell’s Beef Vegetable soup

Small Pink Lady apple

Then I was still pretty hungry and lacking a good source of protein in my meal, so I mixed frozen peaches and strawberries with vanilla yogurt and whipped cream, and it was super delicious.

When I was done with that, I still wanted more, but I couldn’t tell if it was my mind or my stomach talking. I grabbed a square of Hershey’s dark chocolate and headed up to my room to regroup and give my body and my brain time to get on the same page as to whether I was still hungry or not.

One of my biggest problems is simply being in the kitchen too long. Being around all that food makes me want to eat it, and often tricks my body into thinking it wants more. One of the best tricks I’ve developed is escaping to my bedroom and waiting ten minutes, really listening to my body to see if it still really wants more. Sometimes it does, and I will go downstairs with a clear head, ready to make a healthy decision, and sometimes it doesn’t, in which case I stay upstairs and find another activity so I’m not bored and thinking about the food that my body isn’t really asking for at all.

3:00 pm- Still hungry. My body has made that clear. Even though I knew I’d be eating dinner in an hour, I knew I needed a good snack.

Small Green apple

Serving peanut butter

Chex Mix

I was slowly realizing how the large amount of activity I was doing was affecting my body and how much food I needed in a day. I am doing a LOT, and therefore, need significantly more food than when I wasn’t exercising.

4:00 pm- Dinner

This is about the most unorthodox dinner you will ever encounter, but remember, it was at 4 o’clock. That’s already unorthodox.

Market Day Chocolate Cake

12 oz. 2% Milk

½ cup cheerios

5:00- Introduction to Urban Active. Holy moley, this place was HUGE. They even had a movie theater with a bunch of cardio equipment in there. I had a 30 day free pass from the Cavs on fan appreciation night—hey, I’ll take it. I took the coupon in and they walked me through the giant fitness palace. Weirdly, they started the tour in the tanning beds. There is nothing healthy about a tanning bed, folks. Nothing. And it was weird for me because it seemed like everyone working there was a tan-a-holic. Boys, girls, old, young, didn’t matter. I have no idea why fitness is associated with tanning but it irks me. Some of the highlights of Urban Active were the women’s only section, with a tv and a lighter, less intimidating atmosphere than the regular floor. They also had a giant circular room with a fan for spinning, and a HUGE studio for group classes. I couldn’t understand why they needed a room so big…

5:15 ZUMBA!- Oh, that’s why…75 people…and they were turning a bunch of people away at the door. Thank goodness I signed up. Ok in this class was the best mix of women, men, old, and young. There were about 6 teenage girls, a large group in there twenties and early thirties, an equally large group of seniors looking to get their groove on (including one with the most KILLER set of legs I have ever seen. Like, not a wrinkle, not a vein, and firm as any), and even a good showing of guys. I found myself a little spot in the mirror and waited. The teacher, a tall, absolutely ripped guy wearing a pink cut off came jumping in the room. He had so much positive energy, it was ridiculous. He put his headset on and we got to work. At first, I felt silly jumping around and clapping. I imagined my boyfriend watching me do that. Oh my. But after about the first minute, I decided I didn’t care. I started jumping and clapping along with everyone else. I can’t even express to you how much fun and energy was in that room. It kept me upbeat and smiling for the full hour. Also, this workout was non-stop for 60 minutes. I never stopped which felt awesome and was very different from my sports that were start and stop.

At first, I will say, the grandma with the legs was kicking my butt.

A) She had skill.
B) It took me a while to figure out what in the heck was going on. I was one of two ZUMBA! Nubs in that class.

Basically, its Latin dance music—salsa, mambo, merengue, bachata, and samba—often times remixed with favorites like Beyonce and Lil’ John. The steps we do are all related to the dance we are focusing on for that particular song, but they get mixed with jumps and claps, and booty shaking. It was absolutely awesome. As far as the steps themselves, I couldn’t jump for anything. My leg wasn’t really helping me out. The lack of muscle was kind of limiting my activity. I will say the thing that I have always been wonderful at is any kind of hip movement. You name the move, and I’ll be the queen in about ten of working on it. I think it’s all those Hawken school dances...

I cannot say enough good about my experience in this class. By the end I was dripping with sweat, my legs were shaking, and I was smiling up a storm. I’m headed back to Urban on Friday to try out “RetroRobics.” I think I am going to try to do a class most days of the week.
AHA!

I’ve found my calling. Group fitness. Just as I predicted last night, the class works for me. It’s a scheduled time every day. I don’t have to drag myself to do something I don’t want to do. The teacher and the people around me do all the motivating for me. I don’t have to self motivate at all. I love dancing, and really, that’s all it is. Also, it’s different from soccer or basketball in that it’s constant movement. It really is a workout. Decision: I want to get the majority of my exercise from group classes at UC. I have to look into what is offered at the fitness center. If they don’t have any, I will join an Urban Active in Cincinnati.

9:00—Hungry. Again.

I was up in my room almost ready for bed, when I decided the feeling I had been wondering about in my stomach for a couple hours was clearly hunger. I just couldn’t believe I still wanted food after all of that. I marched downstairs, and mother had gone to the grocery store. Hallelujah. I grabbed a bowl, and my favorite snack, ice cream (cookies and cream today), as well as a chocolate chip cookie and an oreo. Might not sound like much, but I was very concerned about the fact that I thought I was having too much. But then, when I got back upstairs, I thought about what I have been doing activity wise, and how I had really not been changing a whole super lot about how I ate from when I was doing nothing to when I was working out a lot. That’s what caused the “snack attack” a couple days ago. My body was telling me it needed more. With that thought in mind, I ate my desert guilt free and went to bed.

Now,Let Me Lay Something Down for You...

Let’s talk about The Diet for Teenagers Only. Basically on pages 34, 35, and 36, there was a major misstep, at least in my eyes.

Issue #1:
Now, I may be hyper sensitive, because, again, I come from a background of eating disorders and having to be very careful about what is said. The first thing that I didn’t like, “while you’re getting ready to go through all these changes, there is one diet trick that really works and you can start it right now! It’s a food diary…Keep track of what you’re eating, how much water you’re drinking and most importantly, how you’re feeling.”…Whoa. Alright, well sounds harmless enough. I mean after all, I am chronicling a basic outline of what I’m eating every day right here on this blog. The difference between just stating what you eat and a food diary, in my eyes, is the counting/calculating/obsessing over numbers. Any time someone tells you to be super strict and exact about the amount of calories you eat, and then make you write it down on top of that is asking for trouble. I realize that for some girls, this may work no problem, and not be a big deal at all…it might even help a lot! But I just know from certain situations I’ve been in and things that I’ve seen, that behavior like this can be very eating disorder triggering. SO, I will be disregarding that section of the book for sure.

Issue #2
This brings me to my next point, and slightly larger issue with these three little pages. I will say before I begin that this book redeems itself immensely from page 37 on to the end of the chapter. But a lot of times, redemption doesn’t matter. All it takes is one comment, or misstep to really set someone off depending on the kind of person they are. Here we go. BMI stands for body mass index. Basically, it compares your height to your weight and gives you a number that puts you in a certain category based on what those numbers divide out to be. The book gave steps to calculate your BMI. To prove a point, I will do mine for you now.

1) Divide your weight in pounds by your height in inches.
I don’t really care about sharing this information with you. I don’t weigh myself ever. It’s just not something that’s okay in my house. When I go to the doctor’s office, they don’t tell me how much I weigh. But I will say I know I am somewhere between 150 and 155 pounds. For this exercise, we’ll go with 55. I’m also exactly 5’8.”…Therefore, 155/68= 2.279 and some change.

2) Divide the answer from Step 1 by your height in inches
About 2.279/68= .0335 and some change.

3) Multiply the answer from step 2 by 703 and that’s your BMI.
.0335 X 703= 23.565
OOOOKAYY. So, I just went through all those long winded steps to come up with this number, 23.565. I flipped the page in the book and there is this chart putting all these numbers in categories based on age. Well, it just so happens, that the “slightly overweight” category is from 23-25. Ok, so according to the book, I’m slightly overweight.

But here’s the thing. I’m not. I’m an athlete. And beyond that, I have some big muscles for a girl. When I lift weights, while most other girls use 10s, sometimes 12s if they are feeling like pushing the envelope, I’m using between 17.5s and 20s. My legs are defined and powerful from hours of jumping drills and running my butt off. Bottom line is, muscle weighs more than fat and BMI doesn’t take into account body fat percentage, making people with lots of muscle fall into very interesting categories.

Issue #3
The icing on the cake was this quote right here, “Some people have naturally larger builds and aren’t meant to be skinny minnies.” (so far so good, because that statement is completely true) “If you are one of them, accept it and move on to being as healthy and beautiful as you can be.” (I don’t like that so much. The qualifier on the end “as you can be” rubs me the wrong way. Why not leave it at “move on to being healthy and beautiful”?) “The skinny, pretty women in this world aren’t always the most attractive.” (Wait. What!? Skinny, my friends, does not equal pretty. Skinny and pretty are two separate things. You may be both skinny and pretty. But just because you are skinny does not mean you are pretty. I have a big problem with that statement. )

Verdict: This book has a ton of great information. The facts about vitamins and minerals and which frozen foods you should choose and what foods to eat when you only have a vending machine, and awesome recipes are SWEET. And I can’t wait to write about all of these things because they will really help for college! But there are a couple chapters right in the middle having to do with the actual diet itself that this book proposes that I have a big, BIG problem with. It could just be my background, and things that specifically irk me. But I think you will find that books like this are not designed for the individual, and because of that, can often send the wrong message.