And a month later...

Here I am, past day 60, Day 63 to be exact, and it's not been a good month.

I'm not going to get into specifics, but things have been about as bad as we've seen them around here.. lots of stressful things going on, and our workouts just became the easiest thing to let go.  We just needed one less thing to have to worry about. So, days 31-60 were not as they should have been for us on Power 90. 

I did however make a decision that for me at least, I am starting over at Day 30. This makes the fact that I stopped blogging on day 30 pretty handy actually. I'm just going to pretend the last month didn't happen, and start from here.

On Day 30 (formerly known as Day 60) I did the Strength Training 3-4 workout... well okay half of it. It's pretty hard core compared to 1-2 AND I hadn't really been working out regularly.  I may have to just go back to 1-2 for a week or so, then try 3-4 again.  I want to get some heavier weights though. I think that'll help my progress a lot actually.  Right now I just have two 5lb dumbbells.

Day 31 was actually my birthday. Hubby, my 11 yr old and I went to the lake and swam for a long time. I'd say I was in the water about 2 hours. I've been trying to be a better swimmer, so I wasn't just splashing around.  I was working on my form for a few swim strokes, as well as doing underwater exercises.  I try to do all the cardio moves I can remember underwater since I am much more flexible underwater. Seriously, I had no idea I could lift my leg so high, or my knee, but when I'm in 5 ft deep water, it's easy. Sure makes climbing back up the steps out of the lake harder though haha!  I was worn out!

My nutrition has been far from "clean eating" though. This is mainly due to finances.  Healthy food is expensive.  It's also due to stress.  I'm sorry, but sometimes I NEED chocolate.  To hell with what other people think.

I've only gained back about 5 lbs and those are starting to come back off (some was water weight I think). 

I've gotten the treadmill set back up as well since it's so hot outside these days. Since I was so proud of myself for walking 5 miles on the walking trail a while back, I want to work up to doing 5 miles on the treadmill, then work on seeing how quickly I can do 5 miles. It would be great to be able to work up to 7 miles as well, since the trail we walk on is 3.5 miles long, so a round trip is 7 miles. The great thing is that on the treadmill I have a laptop holder, so I can watch my TV shows on Netflix while walking. I need to find more shows to watch though.  I'm running out of stuff!

Hopefully I'll do better this time around and post here more regularly with good updates! I did it a month,  I can do it again!

Power 90 Day 18 - Losing momentum

I'm 3 days away from the 3 week mark for Power 90, plus the 6 day fat burn... so basically a month for us. I know it's working, but I am still getting discouraged.  I've read over and over how I should not get hung up about what the scale says, but it's hard to let it go. I've gained 3 lbs according to the scale we have.  of course it's a cheap ass thing.  It's digital, but must be the cheapest digital scale available. /rant.  Anyway, the measuring tape isn't changing much either! I just don't get it.  I can see muscles developing and I feel stronger, but the tape isn't getting shorter?  Why?? 

The one thing that has really kind of kept me from chucking it all is that I tried on a pair of shorts I've had forever. I've never been able to wear them.  I got them on clearance at the end of summer one year,  there were 3 pairs, different colors. I think they were sized wrong or something cause they say they're 18W, and I wore an 18W back then, but they wouldn't come close to buttoning when I got them home. I was pretty ticked off about it.  I've had them so long I know I moved with them 4 years ago. They've been put in the give away bag so many times, and every time I take them back out saying they were such a good deal, and shorts cost so much now and I REALLY need to lose enough to get into them. Well, yesterday, I was looking for shorts since it was so hot, and I found those 3 pairs in the back of my bottom drawer.  I figured, what the hell.  might as well try.  I knew I'd be disappointed.  I think I almost wanted an excuse to just give up... it was that kind of day. But OMG they fit.  I even tried on all 3 pairs to make sure.  Oh they're tight, but I can fasten them and wear them without feeling like I'm being cut in half. I was astounded! Last time I tried, there was about 3 inches or more between the buttons and the button holes.  Nowhere near meeting and buttoning.

So, that was a good thing, but I still find it hard to get excited about that when the scale and tape aren't budging. I know it's a mental thing, but that's me.

This past weekend not doing the Power 90 workouts has made us both lose momentum.. though life isn't helping.  Doing my workouts while kids were still in school was easy.  I'd get up around 1pm and do the workout and get cleaned up and dressed before they got home.  Now they're home all day with friends running in and out.  I have instituted a rule about no friends in the house while I workout, but it barely works. We get interrupted all the time, even by adults. Today, I laid in bed much longer than I should have.  I just really wanted to get some extra sleep. Finally I rolled out of bed at 2pm, then piddled around a little, and talked to my kids. I was about to go workout, then take the gilrs and go for a walk like last week (though it was pretty hot and I was wishy washy about that).. then I suddenly realized I had a bill I HAD to pay today, and needed the car.  I texted C to see if he had paid it for me or was coming home for lunch.  He texted right back that he was on his way.  So much for the workout! I got ready while he ate lunch and then took him back to work then went on to pay the bill. I figured I'd go ahead and do grocery shopping for the week since I had the car. Called Rhiannon at home and we hashed out a menu and she gave me ingredients I needed from the recipes on Team Beachbody, and I got the groceries.

By the time I got home, and got all the groceries put away, it was time to make dinner. Then it was time to get to work.  So, yeah, no workout for me today. I could do the workout after work at 3am, but last night I could barely move at 3am and couldn't keep my eyes open. I'm thinking about just getting up early tomorrow, doing my strength training workout (which is what Day 19 should be) and then go to the pool at the campground and burn some calories there. I'm not sure though. I'd have to take C to work at 8am for me to have the car all day and that's a bit early for me.

Maybe I'll just do both DVD workouts sometime tomorrow.  I could do Day 18 cardio when I wake up then do the Day 19 strength training with C when he gets off work at 5. I'd love to go swimming though. We'll see.

I just wish my shorts fitting was more of an incentive for me.  I've got some hangups I need to get over.

Oh here's a shot of dinner. Baked chicken with a little olive oil and Italian seasoning and a sprinkle of parmesan with my spinach and baby arugula salad with blackberries and sunflower seeds, and home made baked sweet potato fries.

Different Kinds of Workouts This Weekend

Saturday is our rest day (we get one a week), so we had to fit in a workout on Sunday.  This wasn't really hard for me, since I was home with the girls all day.  Christopher was working 10am-10pm and had the car. He was going to work out in the morning before going to work, but didn't get to it afterall.  Weekends are rough on our routines.

I got up around 12:30 as normal and planned on doing my workout as normal, but then I had a great idea. I had the girls get dressed and into walking shoes, and we headed out. I knew from using runkeeper.com that Sav Mor grocery store (which is where I always get produce and many other things on my list) is only a little over a mile from our house if you walk through the neighborhood behind the elementary school. It was a beautiful day, and a walk would feel great, and I decided it would be my cardio for the day. Maybe a little mixing it up would help in my weightloss and getting toned up.

We walked down the road to the new connector road they just put in last year, complete with nice wide sidewalks. It's such a blessing. It goes over the hills between us and town. At the top of the hill if you turn on a little road to the right, you come in the back entrance to the elementary school. If you keep going instead of going up to the school, you end up in an apartment complex. I think it's one of those low-rent project ones. It's a really nice neighborhood though, with playgrounds and landscaping and lots of big shade trees. On the other end of the complex is the road that goes up the hill to my bank, and divides the apartments from the big shopping center. It used to be KMart and Ingles way back in the day, but now it's Tractor Supply and Sav Mor with a high-end furniture/decor store in between them. We decided to walk on to the next shopping center next to it, across another street. It now houses a cash advance place, a game store, the now-closed theater, Staples, and Big Lots.  We walked all the way down to Big Lots where we got the girls Power Ades and I got a big bottle of water.

Christopher's KMart is directly across the 4-lane from Big Lots, so I *could* walk to Kmart and get the car sometime if I ever needed it for some reason I guess. Runkeeper says it's exactly 1.5 miles from my house to Kmart's front door. The problem is crossing the 4-lane. Even with a red light, it's still dangerous. I'd sure not do it with kids. This town is really not pedestrian-friendly. We lucked out that we can walk where we do without getting into much any traffic at all.  We live right where we can come in the backway to everything on our side of the 4-lane.

On our way back, we stopped at Sav Mor and I got an avacado and some tortillas for the black bean veggie tostados. I don't know how I missed putting those on my list before, but I was glad to be able to "run" out and get them easily.  We also got some strawberries and rhubarb for our surprise dessert for Christopher.  As we walked back past Tractor Supply, I got a big re-usable shopping tote bag (didn't think to bring one with us) and a 6-pack of tomato plants they had marked down to $1.  That was a great deal!  The girls took turns carrying the heavy tote back back home, and I ended up with it the last half mile or so. And it';s all uphill to our house after we cross the hill between us and town.  You kind of cross the hill in one spot, walk up the road a bit, then walk back up the hill to our house.  There's nothing but a briar-filled field between our house and the new road, so we have to walk around.  It's fine though.  I needed the cardio. Boy, was I sweating by the time we got home! I definitely got a workout.  The tostados that night were so yummy!

On Monday, Memorial Day, Christopher was off work (Hooray!), so we got up a little earlier than normal (well for me anyway) and loaded the Explorer up with towels, a quilt and lawn chairs, then headed to the lake. It's a little over a half hour away by backroads. Wish it was closer, but at least we have it at all.  So many of the public swim areas have closed, and this one is still free!  They have a special swimming area with trucked in sand, the big orange depth rope thing and big orange buoy things dividing us from the boats. I love just sitting and watching the boats.  We counted 21 around the swim hole at one time. There was a guy sitting on the grass playing guitar. That was nice. I wish it had a little shop like the one I went to when I was a kid.  It sold pizza and had a juke box that piped music down to the beach which was actually all sand even out of the water.  This one we go to now is just sand in the water with grass on dry land. I remember hearing J Geils Band songs played over and over on that juke box the last summer I got to go before it was closed down. 

The water was SO cold. BRRRrrrrrrr! We knew it would be.  The damn hadn't let the water  go up til recently, and it had rained pretty hard recently.  Besides, the weather hadn't been very warm for long. In fact it was just barely above 80 when we went with a cool breeze.  Once we finally got in the water and almost used to it, it made it easier to just stay in the water.  Getting out, in the breeze was just too cold to think about. Finally the sun came out from behind the clouds and it warmed up nicely (outside the water anyway).  After what felt like 2 hours in the water, Christopher and I got out and sat in the sun to dry off.  He still has such a nasty sunburn.  He didn't think to reapply his sunblock when he got out of the water. It'll turn to a tan anyway, which is what he wanted.

While we were in the water, he and I had decided to do some of our cardio workout since it was so much easier to move in the water.  We did the knee raises and I could get that leg way up so the knee was out of the water (which was above my waist).  We tried doing the kicks, which was hard with the resistance of the water, so we figured it would be helping the workout. When I went to climb the stone steps to get out of the water, I could barely pull myself up.  I could REALLY feel gravity hit full force. Christopher had actually done his Sunday workout early Monday morning, so we were both due to be doing the strength training workout for Monday.

By the time we got home, we considered working out for a moment, then decided we were too worn out and sore from swimming.  I don't know how the girls were even still awake. They were in the water a good half hour or more longer than we were.  We started immediately on getting dinner prepped and cooking.  We had two small lean steaks I got on mark down, as well as spinach parmesan turkey burgers for us, as well as hot dogs for the girls. Oh we also grilled corn cobs in the husks. Made baked home made potato wedges and sweet potato fries and a salad. For dessert we made a low-sugar strawberry rhubarb crumble and had light vanilla ice cream with it. Oh it was SO GOOD!

It was a really good day and the girls kept commenting on how much fun they'd had and how good the food was.  What was nice was that it was just the 5 of us. The teens really had a great time swimming and playing together in the water.  They made some great sisterly memories that day.  Zoe had fun with us til we got out then made a slew of friends as always.  There are always several dozen kids there. I miss sitting there, listening to the guitar player and the speed boats and seeing all the boats on the water and the people having fun, and my kids having a wonderful time. 

Imported Post - Power 90 Day 5 - So Much For Privacy

This morning before work, I packed C's and the girls' lunches, which took some time, then headed to bed. So when I woke up this afternoon, I was dragging. I was determined not to skip my workout, but I was running out of time. The older girls get home on the bus at 3:20 and it was already after 2:30.  I HATE being walked in on during a workout - or watched by the kids. Then I remember both of them were going home with their boyfriends because of parties or volunteer stuff. So, I wouldn't be interrupted.  So, I relaxed, took my time and started the workout.  Today is strength training. I was 20 minutes into the workout, when Rhiannon and her best friend Moneesha came through the front door. There I was in my sports bra, shorts, hair a mess, and probably unshaved armpits, holding a resistance band over my head in the middle of a military press I think it was.. or one of those high ones. I paused it and went to my room. I was embarrassed. Not only for how I looked, but how the house looks. It's a freaking mess right now. So, it ruined my whole groove. Tonight, I am going to do the workout over again with Christopher since he's doing his after work. Since we only have one resistance band, I'm going to head to the store a little early and get some weights. That way we can do the strength training at the same time.

Tonight's dinner/my lunch is chicken stir fry from the power 90 booklet.  It's not really much of a recipe, just cook the chicken in a little oil, add the veggies and a little soy sauce and serve with brown rice. What struck me though is how much better stir fry is with fresh veggies.  I used to only use frozen veggies in my stirfry and it was not the greatest food to eat..  this was AMAZING! Fresh is best!

Update: I got two 5lb dumb bells and worked out with Christopher after he got off work. It was actually a lot of fun to work out with him. Working out in front of people is an issue I am going to have to deal with.  This summer I'll have my 3 kids plus all their friends running in and out of the house all day, every day.