Trying To Find The Road Not Taken

It’s been a really long time since I’ve updated. After my back went out I got into a real funk and just feeling down. I also noticed my energy level was just dropping. This past week I realized I’ve been drinking coffee every single day since I started my new[er] job. For me caffeine will work for a while but then it will actually make me more and more exhausted. This week I’m taking a break from coffee. I’m having green tea and herbal tea only. The other benefit to cutting back on coffee is, I like my coffee very light and with half and half. Needless to say this is a good elimination from my daily routine.

I’ve decided to use iCal to track my health because I have it available to me at work, at home and on my iPhone. It’s very simple, I don’t have to pre-enter information and create databases. I’ve tried Traineo, but it didn’t track food as well as I’d like. I’ve tried Gyminee, and it’s ok but a pain to enter new foods in. I’ve also tried FitDay which also you need to pre-enter foods. If I’m spending my time entering foods, it’s a waste of my time.

In iCal I’m tracking my food for the day, exercise, weight and any other health related items in a separate calendar called “Health”.

I’ll post an update at the end of the week as to how this is working.

I’m putting this down as week 1 since, this is really the first official committment I’m making to logging this every week, and with that here we go.

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I have to document this week, just so I can look back at this in the future and truly appreciate how much I packed in. If you’ve written me, I was supposed to get back to you, I said I’d send you something, please don’t take offense, the week was very, very busy.

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

Putting all the puzzle pieces together on my health has been a long road. Heck I can go back on my blog to 2003 and find posts of melt downs wondering why I can’t tackle it. I have paper journals from 1997 with entries of “why can’t I get over this hurdle, why don’t I take it seriously“.

It’s taken a lot of growing up, getting through a lot of personal psychological issues in my own life and my family. For as long as I can remember, someone was telling me I was a brat and lazy. I’ll concede on the brat, when I was younger I was. Some might argue I still am.

Lisa McMillan recommended to me the book The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore. All I can say is wow, every stage of the book I feel like it was my life that was the case study for it. It’s helped me gain a lot of clarity on why I do the things I do, why I react certain ways, why I get overwhelmed and just shut down.

The book also helped me focus on why I have yet to be successful at weight loss. I know how to exercise, I used to sit home in the summers of middle school and early high school watching and going along with Body Shaping. I love to be outdoors doing biking, kayaking or hiking. So that’s not an issue.

Eating. While I don’t choose to make the best decisions all the time, I do know what is good to put in my body and how much of it I should be having. I actually like many more vegetables than I ever did as a kid. Seeing the nutritionist for two months re-affirmed that I’m not clueless and have crazy eating patterns.

What was left… The psychological/mind barrier. Why do I find excuses? Why do I shut down and feel overwhelmed still? What is holding me back from being the successful person I know I can be.

Here are the thoughts that came to my head…

• I try to do too much at once, trying to tackle 8 life changing habits at once
• I think I have to be perfect the first time out, and any falter and I may as well give up
• I feel like I don’t have enough time
• I feel the pressure to go along with what ever others are doing
• I put way too much guilt and negativity on myself
• I put too much weight in others approval of me

Now that I know what the concerns are, I can start to make changes.

STEP 1:
Find time… This is my first goal. Become a morning person. Since my biggest complaint to myself and everyone around me is my lack of time, I need to focus on making more time in my day. Once I can establish that, then I can go back and change what I fill that time with.

That’s the plan!

Good Morning!
I’ve decided to focus on ONE goal for this week; getting up early, specifically between 5:00-5:30. I did ok this morning, I set alarms up to go off at 5:00, 5:15, 5:30 and 5:45. I did finally get up and going on the 5:45 one.

I cooked up turkey bacon, organic eggs, organic spinach, organic shredded cheese into an omelette. Had some Bolthouse juice and some organic coffee I brewed too! It was quite a morning.

I left on time for the Dentist in Danbury, got there 10 minutes early! Had a perfect visit, no cavities, no issues.

Oh and I even had some time to work on my scarf which I’ve neglected for quite a while!

And last night I “graduated” from physical therapy and am going to transition into their Wellness Program.

I’m feeling really good today!

Just wanted to note for the record, who knows I may go back and read these some day. Physical therapy is going really well. This is the routine:

• 15 minutes electrical stimulation with heat pack
• 10 minutes of ultrasound
• 15 reps x 3 of 5 variations of abdominal work (crunches)
• 15 reps x 3 leg presses at 100 lbs
• 15 reps x 3 ham string curls at 30 lbs (my weak area)
• 15 reps x 3 squats with 1 lb medicine ball between knees (helps with knee problem)

I wake up in the morning feeling really good, no more stiffness. I can sit for longer periods without wanting to get up and move around. Except at church where the rock hard wooden benches with no back support irritate it.

All in all things are going much better than they were 6 weeks ago. I see the orthopedist on March 7th for my follow and we’ll see where things go from there.

The physical therapy center offers a Wellness program, which I’m going to sign up for. It essentially allows you to come in and use the gym, still talk to them for small things and get care. Bally’s will be getting a letter from my orthopedist that I will no longer be going there. The best benefit is the physical therapy place is literally 3/4 of a mile from our home, and the people are really nice and very professional.

Just posting an update to my herniated back situation.

At this point I’m feeling relatively good. Last week I had my first two physical therapy sessions and between being out of shape, and then having not exercised in 2 months, they were intense.

Right now, I’m doing some simple core work, and when I’m there, they do electrical stimulation on my back along with ultrasound.

We’re reigning in our eating out, and working as a team to eat healthier, so the progress can only be good.

Today we went for a walk in Steep Rock, it was my first outdoors hike since mid December.

As I laid on the floor tonight doing the exercises, I kept saying to myself, “you have to do this, you need to get rid of all this extra crap surrounding your body”. I’m trying hard to have hope that somehow my skin will go back, and I can look like a healthy person again. But somedays I get really fearful that I’ll do all the work and be saggy.

Here’s our progress so far. Looking really good.

We’ve been wanting to garden for a few years now, but we’ve been living in apartments. Over the summer, a friend let us borrow her Aero Garden. She has a very sustainable outdoor vegetable garden, and she had gotten this as a winter hold over.

Craig got us one for Christmas this year, so we could grow our own salad greens. It’s in our kitchen, on the pantry rack next to the cook books. It’s basically self sustaining. All you have to do is add the water, it turns the light on and off, and will let you know when to add nutrients. The lettuce takes 3-4 weeks to grow to full size, and from that point on you can harvest it for up to 4 months.

This is after a week and a half. We’re looking forward to being able to save some money at the grocery store, and have fresh lettuce whenever we want. The Aero Garden can also grow tomatoes, herbs, strawberries, and a few other things. Strawberries seem interesting to me come summer.

I’m looking forward to sharing more pics.

As a quick check-in. I was a bit worried with my back being out, basically not exercising, being horizontal and my stomach a wreck from medicine, that I might end up putting a few pounds on. Gratefully it’s been the reverse!

Post-Christmas I was at 216lbs.

Weighed in this morning at, 211.5lbs.

Since being home and eating lighter, my stomach has gotten a bit smaller and I’m definitely watching what I eat. So gonna keep this downward trend going. I’ve been craving fruits, veggies and water. Woohoo!

Onto the week, and hopefully back to exercising after I see the orthopedist for an update.