How many points in 2 bottles of barium?

Yes, I went MIA for way too long.

Things have been wacky in my world the past couple weeks. I bought a new vehicle, my best friend's mother died, I got a raise, I had severe abdominal pains and today I had my very first CT scan! Let me just say, the barium isn't sitting so well for me this evening. I am not so much HappyBlogChick as GassyBlogChick at the moment. I haven't a clue what the abdominal pain is all about - it is fine this week but last week was a nightmare. I'll keep you all posted and you'll know soon after I know.

So anyway, I apologize for being out of touch. Everything got a bit overwhelming and I had to take blogging off the list for a while.

I hope all of you are doing fabulously on your weight loss and fitness journeys.

As far as my exercise and weight goes, I stalled on the running last week completely, and maybe part of the week before that ... it's all running together (so to speak. Or should I say all NOT running together? Anyway...). But I'm back at it this week - I ran Monday, I ran Wednesday, and I will run Saturday. My couch to 5k schedule is all whacked, but I'm up to running 28 minutes. Unless something gets in the way, I'm still doing the 5k on April 19th.

Weight-wise I'm maintaining. I've had a day or two when my weight bobbed up into the above 134 danger zone, but only a couple times. I'll update my weight tracker soon and you can see for yourself.

Chances are in the next couple days I'm going to hit everyone's most recent posts and get caught up at least a little. And I will try to post again before too much time passes - really! I will!

Body fat & other test results - woo hoo!

Yesterday I went to the gym and got a follow-up fitness test. I was originally tested back in October, right before I started working out with the personal trainer once a week. The plan was to re-test in January. The assumption was that I’d be at my goal weight in January – let me just say HA! to that. But anyway, now I am at goal so it was time for the re-test.

I am pretty darned happy with the results of the test. Check it out:


Some observations:

• Based on my body age, my husband is officially robbing the cradle. OK, maybe not, 15 years isn’t THAT much, but still. I’m a young’un.


• My husband was concerned that my blood pressure was too low, but I looked it up and I’m fine.


• I’m disappointed that my biceps don’t seem that much stronger. I can only lift 3 more pounds? Come on, really? That just seems downright WRONG to me. And how annoying is it that bicep strength is the only strength measure? Hello … I have a LOT of other muscles. But nevertheless, that’s the measure. I think I’ll be exercising my biceps a little more in preparation for my next fitness assessment. Full body workout, schmull body workout, I always say. (Kidding, I’m kidding.)


• My body fat is nice and low but not too low … either the low end of normal or in the athlete range depending on what chart you look at. I do wonder if it's accurate, though. Not to geek out on you or anything, but I really wish she'd repeat the test over a few days so we can assess test-retest reliability here. I'm half tempted to see how much it would cost to get a DEXA test done.


• My weight ALWAYS measures higher at the gym than at home. I figure that’s not a concern since when I weigh myself at home it’s the morning (vs. the evening at the gym) and I’m near-nekkid (vs. wearing workout clothes and running shoes at the gym).


• I wasn’t focusing on flexibility, but somehow I got more flexible anyway.


• In my real age, I got a year older. Dammit.


• All in all, those are big changes!

Yay!

In other news, my weight is 0.2 lbs above my goal (looking at the past 7-day average). I think this is completely annoying and I’ve decided the answer is to change my goal to “below 134” because I’m perfectly comfortable with how I look at the moment, I'm making healthy eating choices, this is normal fluctuation, and, quite frankly, to think I’m over goal right now is nuts. SO THERE. I thumb my nose at you, you stupid scale.

Couch to 5k Week 7: DONE!

Last night I completed week 7 by running my last 25 minute run. The run was extra-special and extra unusual. How so? My husband and I ran together! That has never happened in the history of our 7.5ish year long relationship. Granted, we’ve only been running for a few months, but even so … wow!

Hubby called on his way home from work saying “I’m heading to the gym to run.” At the time, I hadn’t done my run yet. I figured what the heck, and invited him to run with me here in our neighborhood. I was nervous about the idea … he runs faster than me, I’m used to running with music but didn’t want to be rude and play music while we ran together, we’d never done it before (what if I look funny when I run; what if we end up fighting about running and all hell breaks loose and bad things happen; what if my heavy breathing repulses him … or excites him…) … I wasn’t sure how it would go. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.

So try we did. I set the pace, which meant that he started out slower than he was used to. He said in the long run it was OK, though, because the pace felt right for him towards the end. Maybe it’s because this was my last 25 minute run but his first 25 minute run, I don’t know. Whatever made it work, I’m glad it seemed all right to him. And it worked for me, too. Although strangely enough I found I went a little slower yesterday than I’d gone in my last 25 minute run. I can’t explain it – I don’t know if I was just tired, or if having him with me changed my pace. I guess I’ll find out, because guess what?

Now we’re talking about making this a weekly thing! Woo hoo!

Wednesday night may become husband/wife running night. We might even invite a friend who works with my husband to join us – he was doing c25k too, last I heard. As long as he can tolerate my turtle-pace, the more the merrier. If I head across town to meet him/them near their office we could go to a number of different pretty running trails instead of running around our neighborhood.

This plan would be great for both hubby and me, since it means I have another reason to get out of the house (yay!) and we’ll end up always working out at least twice a week, on Monday (with the trainer) and Wednesday (doing our together-run). Some weeks hubby has a hard time getting all his workouts in – maybe this structure is the key.

My husband was SO sedentary when we got married. Looking back to 5 years ago when we were just about to be married, and then looking at now, it is AMAZING the difference. He’s eating better, he’s working out, he’s lost weight, and he’s gaining muscle. He’s no super-athlete, but that’s not what I’d want anyway. I’m just so happy for him that he’s becoming healthy.

And from my perspective, it’s great for selfish reasons, too. It’s easier for me to stay on track with healthy eating and exercise when he’s on the same page. It makes me soooo happy that this increases the chances of us having a long life together. And … um … TMI WARNING … the healthier we both get, the better the sex is (and I tell ya, it was good before).

Now THAT is a benefit! Hooray for being healthy!

Where am I? Volume 9 (Alternate Title: Second verse, same as the first)

It’s Wednesday, so it’s time to ask the question I ask every Tuesday … Where am I in my weight loss health and fitness journey?

Yeah, I’m late this week. Oops.

Anyway, where am I? Well, as I mentioned yesterday, I am AT GOAL in terms of weight! Yay! The last few weeks I've been de-emphasizing weight because it was making me crazy to focus on the scale when the numbers were decreasing soooooo slooooowly, but this week I’m all about talking about weight. I’m at goal! All my pants fit again, shopping is fun again, I’m satisfied when I look in the mirror. There’s nothing crazy-making about being at goal.

The thing is, there’s nothing FINAL about being at goal either.

This isn’t the end of anything, really. I get to eat a wee little bit more, I increase the calories some, but otherwise I have to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Don’t get me wrong, I have a sense of accomplishment about reaching goal and I’m going to reward myself for getting here, but I’m also well aware that the journey isn’t over. Heck, it’s hardly begun.

I’ve been at goal before. Actually, I’ve been at goal a couple times. I’ve never STAYED at goal. When it comes right down to it, my big overriding goal isn’t to be at my goal weight, it’s to stay at my goal weight. That, for me, is the true challenge.

So, a quick moment of celebration and badge-tasticness:

(It says at goal and maintaining … I am at goal, and since I’m looking at the average weight from the past week, I’m calling that maintaining. Yay for a pretty badge!)

Now, back to the business of living a healthy life, because the journey isn’t over.

On to EXERCISE!

Exercise: My goal for last week was 3x cardio via couch to 5k workouts and 2x strength training. Uhhh, yeah. I’m glad I got that “goal” badge because I sure wasn’t going to get the exercise badge this week. I did 1x couch to 5k and 0x strength training. Thank goodness for new weeks – this week has already gone better than last week.

And thank goodness my slackerness last week doesn’t seem to have affected my ability to run 25 minutes. I did OK with my run on Monday (which is, for me, the start of the new week). It was hard, but I took it slow and it wasn’t impossible. I’ll do a 25 minute run again today – wish me luck! Today will be couch to 5k week 7 day 3 … later this week I start week 8 and increase my time to 28 minutes. YIKES.

Oh yeah, and let’s do the official numbers on the weight loss:

Weight loss since last Tuesday: 0.8 lbs (134.0 vs. 133.2).

Weight loss since fall 2007 (most recent leg of weight loss journey): 19.2 lbs (152.4 vs. 133.2). Hmmm, I bet I’ll get a 20 lb badge at some point. We’ll see. I’m happy with my weight right now, but it never hurts to see a bright shiny new badge, and it falls in my weight goal range …

Total weight lost (entire weight loss journey): 33.8 lbs (167 vs. 133.2).

I want to thank all of you for your support on this journey and helping me celebrate my new at-goal status. It means a lot to me. I’m looking forward to having all of you join me here in maintenance-land!

GOAL!

I'm illegally accessing Blogger from the office. This will be fast, as any moment the computer police will swoop down upon me, confiscate my computer, and lock me away for eternity.

But I wanted to let everyone know the big news. Not only am I at goal today, I was at goal yesterday!

Yay!

But d'oh! I could have already been celebrating!

Apparently I was temporarily unable to average numbers yesterday. Please don't tell my boss ... I'm supposed to do analysis type things for a living. Averages should be the least of my analytic worries. Ha!

Anyway, did you hear what I said? I'm at my goal weight! My past 7-day average is a tad under 133,* and my goal was to get an average of 133 or below.

Woooo hoooooooo!



* Please feel free to check my math. Because it seems that's necessary, you see.

Worst timing EVER

I need to go into the office tomorrow (like, real live in-person drive aaallll the way to the office kind of go in to the office), and the timing could NOT be worse.

I may weigh in tomorrow morning and officially be at my goal weight.

Maybe.

But can I share the news with my blogger friends tomorrow morning, one way or the other? NO.

Aaaaaaaaaargh!

People, people who need people ...

This past week was officially the worst couch to 5k training week I’ve had. I ran one time – only one time! – out of the three times I was supposed to run. I also did ZERO strength training. Phhhhhhhht.

When I look back at what I did instead of run, I have to say it was very good for me in a non-physical way. I saw my friends more this past week than I have in a loooong time. It sounds frivolous, and it was fun, but it was also a very good thing for me. Working from home, I really need opportunities to be around people. When I was working SO much week before last, I was getting a little crazy. My poor husband tolerated at least one meltdown that probably would have been prevented if I’d just gotten myself out of the house and into a face-to-face encounter with friends. It is hard on me mentally and emotionally when I go a while without seeing anyone but my husband, and I only see him a couple hours a day at most on weekdays. The working from home thing has its benefits, but it also has some serious drawbacks from a mental health perspective.

So although my physical health from an exercise standpoint went to hell this past week, I feel better mentally and emotionally than I have in a while. Although my not-running on Tuesday was due to house-cleaning, the rest of the time it was all about PEOPLE. I did dinner with friends on Wednesday, happy hour with different friends Thursday, girl-time shopping and dinner with yet another friend Friday, lunch out with friends and my friend’s new boyfriend Saturday, dinner out and then going to a bar with husbands/significant others Saturday night, and then my husband and I had our neighbor over for dinner last night.

Human beings! It was so nice to spend time out of the house with real-live-and-in-person humans. How I’ve missed the human beings! Oh, the joy of human contact!

I know you think I’m kidding, and I am being overly dramatic, but I’m dead serious about needing human contact to stay sane. And not just contact with people who bag your groceries or ring up your purchases – contact where you connect with people via in-person conversation.

The challenge for me is to figure out how to fit in exercise AND human contact AND eating well all at the same time. This past week I definitely got the human contact, and (even with all the eating out) I did fairly well at the eating well. I ate a lot of grilled fish and veggies, asked for lots of substitutions, and avoided a lot of breadbaskets. The scale is up a little this morning, but the pattern isn’t different from the pattern I see most weeks (up a little on Sunday, up a little more on Monday). The scale numbers will start dropping again tomorrow or the next day.

But anyway, how do I fit in all three – exercise AND human contact AND eating well – every week? I think that’s something I need to work on. I have some ideas, but if you guys have suggestions, I’m all ears.