Nutrition update: I learned an important lesson today. If history is any guide, I'll need to learn it several more times before it sticks, but here it is.
- Counting calories is not enough, the quality of the calories matter and so does the timing.
Here's how I know. It has been a nice lazy Sunday at my house. No real plans, one kid a little under the weather, so we just kind of hung out. It seemed like a nice day to take my son to a movie, so we settled on catching Thor in 3-D. I liked it, he found it a bit slow between fighting scenes, but that isn't the point. The point is that I like movie candy and I fixated on having some Dots at the movie. I thought I was being pretty slick and just had a PBJ sandwich at lunchtime which left me a calorie budget for candy. It also left me too hungry..,
Hunger is an enemy to my success. It seeps into my brain and turns on the rationalizations at full speed. Today my friend hunger got me to believe that I had a right to full size box of movie Dots. I even did the math and saw it was 650 calories, but somehow I thought that was ok because I'd make up for it in the gym. When I arrived home, I plugged it into myfooddiary.com and realized I had a lot of work to do if I planned on eating dinner tonight. In addition, I realized I was still vaguely hungry and didn't feel that great.
So the lesson is to plan and manage my eating better. A slightly larger lunch sends me to the movies less famished and I would be able to make rational choices. I might pass on candy or just eat part of a box. Instead I had to work my ass off in the gym tonight and I was just burning off wasted calories. Food should be fuel, not always a reward.
Exercise update: My penance workout today included 25 minutes on the spin bike, 25 minutes on the elliptical machine and 20 minutes walking the dog. This matched the box of Dots and got me back to even. It was also a lot of work and it was my third day working out in a row. One of the joys of being 40 is I simply don't recover as well as I once did. That leaves me with the need to work out tomorrow (weigh in is Tuesday, so I want to be ready), but not a great amount of energy to do so. My lack of recovery ability could be an entire blog topic. It's really noticeable to me for the first time. I got slow a long time ago, but this is the first real sign of being older to hit home with me...
My goal for tomorrow is to get in the pool and to write up my 8 week plan of attack for my triathlon in July. Hopefully I'll be ready for a good weigh in on Tuesday as well.
Random Musings: I was invited to a graduation party for a former student over the weekend. Not that big a deal, except I haven't been a teacher since 2002. This student was in the first class I ever taught, 2nd grade in West Salem in 2000-01. She'll never know what a big deal it was to me to get that invite. My teaching career was pretty short and when you leave it as quickly as I did, you aren't sure if you were any good at it or made a difference. Even if this young woman was simply being nice (or fishing for tuition bucks:), being remembered 10 years later was a pretty great moment for me.
I'm also pretty close to a decision on school for me. I'm leaning against, since my main reason for going is fear of what might happen if I don't. Fear based decisions wear you out, I think I'd like to stop making them...
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