Weightloss, an update

Well on Saturday I went to Springsteen with Mia and Carol and had a blast. In the course of consuming a few beers, we made some pinky swears as to weight loss by approx my birthday - and they say don't promise drunk what you wouldn't do sober, so here I am sober and still happy I made a pinky promise about it.

The first step in my mind is starting to do a better job of tracking my calorie consumption on a daily basis. Livestrong.com (not org, com is a commercial site for general health stuff) has a feature called Daily Plate which I really like, so I have been keeping track there. There is a feature on it that tells you how many calories you should consume based on your weight and height and how much you would like to loose a week. It has been VERY helpful so far, even though I am close to the limit by the time I leave work, since I usually work out after work, but since I usually don't eat a dinner, since I have a pretty substantial breakfast and lunch during the week.

I have also come up with a coping mechanism for when I am craving sweets, which only works during the winter - CLEMENTINES!! Yes it is that time of year again, and I am using it to my full advantage - I am up to about 5 a day (approx 180 cal total) and it has been working REALLY well. I have also been the queen of portion control. I can have chips and dip, but I measure out one serving of dip and one and a half servings of chips and that is it, which has been working well. When you don't have the whole bag and container of dip in front of you, you tend to eat slower and not as much.

I will be weighing myself once a week on Sundays, so I will give you a delta on 11/22/09.

What are your weight control/loss tips?

In the meantime

I will post updates to my master plans, in the meantime let me just say that the yard work plan has gone a lot better than any of the others.

I just watned to link you all to a blog that did an interview with one of my favorite comic writers - Jef Mallet - he writes Frazz, talks about biking and triathlons, resides in Michigan, and is overall a pretty cool sounding guy.

http://humbletriathlete.blogspot.com/2009/11/frazz-giveaway.html

One giant project -> many tiny ones...

Today I start testing the concept that when you have a large task ahead of you, pick if off in manageable chunks each day. I have 3 tasks in mind and I plan on blogging about them to keep me honest

Task 1 - loose 30 lbs by my 30th birthday in 30 weeks. I am horrible overweight right now and I don't like it. Not one bit. I have been mentally telling myself I need to do something about this for months, and now seems the time. Day 3 - I managed not to indulge in the Krispy Kreme donuts nor the cupcakes that were brought in, although I did indulge in some Almond Joys and Reeses peanut butter cups. I was proud that I did not buy any Halloween candy this year, even though I went to all the stores the day after Halloween to pick up decorations for next year. I must say that my new job makes weight loss challenging because, much as the freshman 15 in college, our workplace has something similar since whenever there is a celebration, there is also cake... I also will be going to lifting class shortly, and hopefully getting some miles on the indoor track. I need to start making up the lifting classes I miss though, which shouldn't be TOO hard (I hope) since I have a Y membership and they have most of the same machines.

Task 2 - finish off they yard work - raking/mulching all the leaves and getting the garden beds ready for winter without destroying my shoulders in time for swim season. Day 1 - I did some yard work right after I got home, but this daylights savings BS is killing me - Sunset at 5:27?!? Ick. The good thing is from Friday to Monday, they are predicting sun and temps in the low to mid 50s, which is perfect yard work and I am really really hoping I can get it done by Monday. I did the side hostas and raked about 1/5th of the yard into a pile, to make it easier for mulching later this week hopefully. Updates to follow.

Task 3 - get my house into guest ready condition before the holidays. I am a bit of a pack rat and this whole summer of training did not help with that in the least. That is why I am really gonna work at getting the house ready to be visited on a regular basis - which means no just shoving everything into the room that isn't being stayed in, no piles and piles of stuff. It means a clean house with a manageable amount of mess. I am not sure I contributed anything towards that today, if anything, in the opposite direction, but it is on the list, so now it is official.

I would more than welcome your words of encouragement and ideas towards these goals

Roku Love

So I just got a Roku off CraigsList from a fab guy named Adam who is a poor student who had to cancel his Netflix account and I have to say his loss is my gain! It took all of 5 min to set up and I will be watching it a bunch this weekend I expect and will give a much more thorough review as I form opinions.

but for the moment, I lurv Roku

Updates in reverse order...

So I am trying to catch back up on the whole blogging thing - and I am gonna do it in reverse order since Muskoka was so epic from a physically challenging standpoint.

Getting to Muskoka

So the epic journey started at 8:30 am on Friday - I had been up for a few hours at that point cause I was a huge packing slacker. I managed to finish the laundry the night before, but I was rather freaked out about how much crap I was bringing, but I figured that Adrienne has a Element, it wold be fine. At a smidge past 8:30am, Megan pulls up and we introduce ourselves. She is Adrienne's super crazy friend who was doing Dances with Dirt on Saturday, then cleaning up and driving all the way to Muskoka to race the next day, and according to Adrienne she was gonna beat us all as well (which she did... by like an hour... I'm not sure she is human). We had to take her bike so it could be racked on Saturday since she wasn't expecting to get up there until about 1am.

Anyways, shortly after, Adrienen shows up and we start figuring out how to fit 3 bikes, a set of wheels, and all my crap into the car, which actually wasn't THAT hard. I get my loaner ipod set up, and off we go. On the way out we decided to go through Sarnia, and the trip up 94 was pretty uneventful. Got to the border at the same time as a ton of motorcycles (it was a PERFECT weather weekend), so getting through the border took a bit (plus Adrienne picked the slowest lane, she claimed it was her secret talent). Once we had gotten across the border, we stopped for a potty break and this little service station with a really nice ladies room - one of those outdoor accessible ones, but with decorative tiles with such a pretty pattern. It was a total shock given how sketchy the station was. At this point I took the keys and rocked it through London (402 -> 401) and the traffic of Toronto (401 ->400).

Once we go through Toronto, we had to stop for gas and we stopped at the service stations that are provided on the freeways - sorta like a toll stop, but no tolls. For some reason my credit card wouldn't swipe, but the pump I pulled up to only too prepay, which was not actually explained anywhere, so we had to do a u-y and go the wrong way to go to a different pump. Crazy Canada. We also got some Wendy's at this point and I got some chickeny things with my traditional mandarin oranges, but no potato this time. I love that they offer stuff aside from fried food if you want it. Adrienne took over driving at that point and off we went.

As we headed north, it started to get hillier, and almost mountainous. I conked out for a bit at this point (car rides do that to me) and woke up at about the point we left the 400 for smaller roads. The roads up north are sorta like what you see in Penn and southern Ohio where you can tell they had to dynamite to build the road through the rock. At this point I am starting to think that I might have signed up for a harder race than I expected. Too late now!

Up Up and Up we went!

This was first look on the way to the resort:

Once we get to the hotel, we had to run the gauntlet of security, assuring them that we were really staying at the resort. We parked the car (15 min limit!) and waited in the line to check in. We were helped by the friendly resort lady and got to read the bear warning.

After getting the coveted parking pass ( and parking lecture), we went out to the car to grab the bikes, with the help of our new assistant Trevor - he helped us grab the third bike and up to the room we went. When we got up there we had to wait for the cleaning crew to finish vacuuming, and were really confused because we were told that no one had checked into our room, but there was a bike and some luggage already in there. I check the tag, but all it had on it was "To Sweets" Who the HELL was Sweets and why was he in our room?!?

Turns out Sweets was Dave, who had managed to check in about 20 min before us. Feeling better about knowing who was actually in our room, we went down for the second load, this time with Trevor and a luggage car. As anyone who knows me, knows I don't travel light. Here is a fuzzy view of Dave from our parking lot (aka the transition area)

We had a great room on the 4th floor, overlooking the transition area which was pretty much perfect. It made it really easy to see when people were going down, and it was fun to listen to the announcements while laying in bed napping instead of being down there.

Once we got all the luggage up, we parked around back, then walked up, through a putting green, then up to a restaurant patio, then up to the hotel room (you will note how much I said up... there is a reason for that). It was nice at that point to just take a moment and veg and refresh ourselves after 8+ hours in the car.

Well that is all there was of getting there, Registration and Pre-Race prep (ooo and the expo) comes next!

A few good links...

Just a brief update as I am still working on my posts for Philly, DALMAC and my Half Ironman...

There was a good post from Fat Cyclist about what to do when someone you love has cancer, which led to a second post about what to do when you have to call 911 for someone in your house. Awesome advice in both

911
http://100poundsago.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/what-to-do-when-you-have-to-call-911-for-a-loved-one/

Cancer
http://www.fatcyclist.com/2009/09/15/how-to-help-a-loved-one-starting-cancer-treatment/

Promises

I promise to write about Team Fatty Philly soon (like this weekend after I recover from putting in 100+ hostas and othe plants)

Really, Honestly and Truely!

Lana