Setting Attainable Goals

August 9, 2012 by

While I am waiting for my eggs to cook, I thought I would do a quick post before I head off to the gym.  I’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics these last few weeks and have been doing something really shallow.  I’ve been comparing athletes bodies and judging which sport, in my opinion, yields the nicest bodies.  I have to say for most of the sports regardless of the sport, aside from say shot put or heavy weight, weight lifting, men don’t seem to have a problem.

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All their bodies are cut and strong.  But when you look at the girls whether it be swimming or even running they still seem to carry more body fat then the men.  Even though they compete in the same sport.  I’m not saying they have bad bodies don’t get me wrong but they seem to have more body fat when you compare them with the men of the same sport.  Which led me to question my own goals, are they attainable?  Having thighs that don’t jiggle.  Yes that’s my goal, no, it’s not to run a faster 10 k or make the olympics, or win a marathon.  It’s to have thighs that don’t jiggle.  (don’t judge)!

Anyway I have two thoughts on this.  I have to accept I am a girl.  Girls have more body fat because of our genetics.  It’s not because we are less fit, don’t exercise enough or eat too much.  It’s because we were made to have more body fat.  I’ve had four kids, one of them was a nine-pounder, without drugs, no man can do that!  It’s okay!  It’s good to be a girl.  Girls rule, boys drool!  and secondly maybe in order to get as close to my goals as I can with the genetic disadvantages that I have… (being a girl) maybe I need to train more like a boy.

 

 

Boys, men, typically lift weights, and they typically lift heavy weight.  Girls if they do any weight training lift way lighter than they should for fear of looking like Arnold.  I’ve been reading up on this subject and unless a woman uses enhancing drugs she is not going to turn out like Arnold by lifting heavy weights heck most men can’t look like Arnold without the help of drugs.  The more muscle mass you build the more lean you will become, your metabolism will run better, you will be able to eat more and you will burn more calories just sitting around.  So while I think that it is important to set attainable goals and accept and love yourself.  There is nothing wrong with being the best you can be and to do that I think we can learn something from those stinky boys and train like a them!

Filed Under: Goals

A Mother Runner that doesn’t run….?

July 30, 2012 by

Good Morning Friends!  I’ve had three cups of coffee and am now starting to feel like I can face the day.  I’m about to hit the gym and do some weights but thought I would say a quick hello before I left….. gives me a good reason to have one more cup of coffee.

 

If you’re my friend on Daily Mile, you’ve probably noticed that my kms have been really low for the past little while.  I’ve cut down on my running for a while because it hasn’t been helping me achieve my fitness goals.  I know this may seem weird to think that stopping running is going to help me break through my  year-long … plateau……. but I can’t continue doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results so I am switching it up.  The program I have decided to follow suggest 4 weeks of muscle-building, then re introducing cardio.

 

Now I know there are a lot of believers out there that believe that you must do cardio to lose weight, cardio does help you lose weight but I believe it has made me lose muscle weight and not fat weight.  I could go on and on about how I think this works, but …..  1.  I am not an expert, I’m just trying to find what works for me and     2.  It will take a whole book to explain it.

The problem is….. there is a certain ego that comes along with being a “runner”. (for me anyway)  being able to do a certain distance every month, being able to maintain a certain pace.  The thought of losing that is difficult.  So yesterday I ran…  How can I be a mother runner that doesn’t run?  The run made me so happy, the feeling of finishing a run just can’t be beat.  So I am cutting down, I am running slower to burn in the fat burning zone, and I am cutting down on my distance.  I’m not sure what this is going to do for my race coming up in September.  I was planning on training for a faster 10k from now till then but right now reaching my fitness goal is more important than a faster 10 k.

Off to pump some iron!

Filed Under: Goals

Next Goals

May 14, 2012 by

Looking forward to the next few months I have made some new goals for myself.  My most recent goal of running a half marathon has been achieved. I figured I do pretty good when I set goals for myself so I figured I’d better set some new ones.

Over the next few months the weather will be is already getting warmer, the kids will be off school so my schedule is bound to change.

I loved the 1/2 marathon distance.  I found the training was doable, it didn’t cut into my family life and I was still able to get my training runs in with little upset to my body and family.  I did however cut down on my gym classes. I continued with centergy, but totally stopped going to power all together.  I don’t know if this was a good or bad decision, but I was getting way too many aches and pains trying to do it all so I figured that was what I would give up.  Unfortunately I have really noticed a difference in how jiggly I have become in the last two months.  I wish this wasn’t true but running does a lot for your cardio but nothing for the jiggles… well for me anyway.

So over the summer I am focusing on running a faster 10 k, getting rid of the jiggles and staying centred and maintaining my core strength and flexibility through centergy / yoga.

I am hoping to do the Melissa’s Road Race in Banff in September knocking 10 minutes off my time of 1:08 last year.  I know that would put me at about the same time I did the Sun Run in but the course in Banff (assuming it’s the same as last year) is a 156 m elevation gain and at an altitude of 1500 m.  I’m used to running at sea level.  Then as we head back into fall I am going to focus on a faster 1/2 marathon time!  There I put it out there for the world to see so I guess now I have to put the work in. How about you?  What goals have you made for yourself?

 

Filed Under: Goals

Wow am I stupid!

March 7, 2012 by

I am so disappointed in myself.  I have been preaching to myself, eat right, diets don’t work and exercise and I’ll be a healthy weight.  Well I have been doing a bunch of research the last few days, weeks, years…… and I am embarrassed to say I think I have been grossly underrating….  and I was doing it unintentionally, and blindly for probably most part of my life.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want you to think I’m this anorexic or have some eating disorder or something.  This is totally different.  I eat.  I actually eat enough that I feel full and let myself have pizza and fries from time to time.  So I’m sure your saying bull Tracy…. your chubby because you have pizza and fries from time to time.  Well just listen to my theory for a minute.

I am willing to bet that most of us my friends are not CHUBBY because we overeat.  I also think it’s time that we stop beating ourselves up because we have pizza once and a while or a piece of cake.  You know I could never understand why I would gain weight.  I now believe that most people who are chubby (not obese)  but chubby don’t over eat.  You won’t find me sneaking from drive thru to thru eating bag after bag of fast food, you won’t see a bag of chip beside my bed empty from the night before.  I eat, I but I know when to stop and I know when I am full and limit the foods that aren’t good for me.

I’ve been so sick of book after book telling me eat less!  Exercise more!  If you can’t lose weight, you must be under estimating your calories you eat and over estimating the exercise calories you burn.  YOU MUST BE LYING!  I am not lying you freaking book!  Then I would throw the book at the wall…

Speaking of books, something I read in the book younger next year, that didn’t make me want to throw it against the wall was a story of how fawns (you know baby deer) stop growing in the fall and winter, but they put on weight.  They put on weight at a time when food is sparse and they are moving less and they stop growing, but they gain weight.  Then when spring comes and food becomes plentiful, they can eat all day, they begin to move more and eat more!  What doesn’t happen is the fawn doesn’t get fat because it is eating more, the fawn begins to grow again, it becomes lean and muscular, the fawn has energy to run from predators, find its food and grow strong.

Heres how I believe I got chubby by not eating enough.  Our bodies need food for fuel. Back inthe day (like before I was born) we (the human race) worked very hard, we had manual jobs and moved all the time.  We are hunters and gatherers.  We would go through cycles of having food in the spring and summer and less in the winter, there were also times we would face famine.  Our bodies were designed to get us through those tough times.  As fall would crest over the prairie …. (lol good story telling eh! anyway)  our bodies would have less work to do the crop would all be harvested the nights would come earlier and we would put on a little chub, our bodies would know there would be less food over the winter because we would not be moving as much as we were months earlier.  Any extra calories we ate at that time would be stored for future use.  That would get us through the winter.  Finally when spring arrived morning would come earlier we would begin to get our field ready for the crops to grow and the food would start to grow and we would be moving more and eating well again.  We never worried about what we ate, we ate because we were hungry and because we were working.  Now most of us don’t have manual labour jobs we spend most of the day sitting and we have food when ever we want it.  The problem is our genetics haven’t changed.  But we are smart enough to know that we don’t have manual jobs and we shouldn’t eat everything we see and we try hard to make good choices 90% of the time.  We also recognize that we don’t work on our feet all day so most of us try to get some exercise, we go for a walk, run take a class at the gym, I really believe we try.  But something is sabotaging us, something is sabotaging our bodies.  Could it be we are actually not eating enough, our bodies think it’s winter because we are eating just enough to “get by”  and that 10% of the time that we indulge and not eat properly our genetics tell our body that it better hold on to those extra calories because food has been sparse and our bodies are tired and we have not been moving so it better hold onto those extra calories as and extra pound on our hips?  Then we wake up one morning with an extra pound on our hips and what do we do we punish our bodies and feed them less for a few weeks and we move them more, we give them LESS FOOD and we EXERCISE more and we lose nothing.  Then for weeks and weeks we go around the same circle eating less, exercising, failing, eating more, gaining.  Or we start eating less and moving less because we have no more energy to exercise anymore, losing the game not any weight.  We read books, we are told we are lying, we are eating more then we say, we are not exercising as much as we say.  There is know way if we were not lying about how much we eat and how much we exercise that we wouldn’t lose weight.  We are not getting the right information, or when we are told about starvation mode or screwing up our metabolisim by not eating enough we don’t believe them how could that be possible?  So we don’t believe it we continue to starve ourselves.  Here is another good article about this…  but then again it may just be another fitness trainer trying to sell his product.

Fuelling your body, hmmm.  Thinking of food differently, not feeling guilty every time we put something into our mouths.  Athletes don’t starve their bodies, they fuel their bodies.  We need to move and eat, I believe it’s that simple.  But then again I may know nothing?

Filed Under: Goals, i may be nuts, What I Eat

The Runners Diet

March 2, 2012 by

Well another month done!  Last month I ran 87 kms, total kms 106 including the walking that I actually tracked.  I also never tracked my weight and centergy workouts on dailymile but I managed at least a three times a week at the gym.  I feel like my kms are low for training for a half, and because I run with a friend who is just starting out twice a week, I’m probably not getting the kms that I should be getting on those days, so I am going to try to add an extra run in during the week just to get a little more kms under my belt.

I have to say I am feeling a little frustrated.  I haven’t lost anything I haven’t gained, and I fear I am becoming a little obsessive.  I have had to sit myself down and re-evaluate what my goals really are, and why.  I can’t say my end goal is to be 105 lbs.  But I do want to lose 10 lbs, but more than that I want to learn how to eat without worrying that I am going to gain weight.  I want to feel that full, good, alive and energetic feeling that all these people who have started eating right, exercising, running and losing weight say they feel.  I am not feeling that, I am feeling more tired, weaker, my nails are brittle my skin is dull and dehydrated looking despite drinking water bottle upon water bottle of water.  I don’t feel more full from a bag of spinach for longer then I do when I eat a baked potato, that is such crap.  (sorry, I just think its crap…. that some guy is going to tell me spinach keeps you more full feeling for longer than a baked potato.)  I felt better when I ate more red meat and ate potatoes everyday than I do right now.

 

I am sick of one book telling me that the only thing that matters is calories in calories out; count your calories, it doesn’t matter what you eat,  just eat a deficit and you will lose.  Or Tosca telling me calories don’t matter just eat clean, exercise and lift weights.  Or the runners diet telling me to have frozen dinners and creamcicles handy, and it doesn’t matter if you run or walk or how high you get your heart rate you burn the same amount of calories for the same distance, or the younger next year guy telling me my beloved potatoes are the devils food, and drink wine every night ( i kinda like that one!)

 

IT’S NOT WORKING!!!!!!!!!  I DON’T FEEL BETTER, EATING MORE VEGETABLES, I DON’T FEEL MORE ENERGETIC BECAUSE I EXERCISE!!  I AM NOT LOSING WEIGHT EATING A DEFICIT OF CALORIES EVERYDAY.  IT’S NOT WORKING!!!!!!

And I am not lying to myself , I am not lying to myself about what I am eating or how much I am exercising.  I am nearing a point of obsessive and it’s not normal.  Really.  I track and analyze everything.

So here is what my problem is……   I am going to share some numbers here.  According to all this reading and research I’ve been doing.   Say I want to remain the weight I weigh today, how many calories should I eat?  Well according to the runners diet you take your weight and times that by 13, (in another part of the book is says times by 15 so which is right?? anyway let’s go with 13)  that is how many calories I can eat in a day and not gain any weight assuming I don’t use any extra calories by moving….  So my magic number is 1610.  That is my BMR.  Now on myfitnesspal it says my BMR is 1480 calories.  I burn 1480 calories just sitting around and if I ate 1480 calories and didn’t move all day  I wouldn’t gain weight.

So lets assume ONE of those numbers are correct, we are also told that 1 pound equals 3500 calories.  If you eat 3500 calories (and not exercise it off) you will gain 1 pound if you burn 3500 calories you will lose 1 pound.  So in theory if I have a deficit of 500 calories a day I should lose 1 pound in 7 days;  WELL!  I am here to tell you people, that is a load of crap!!!!!  I have consistently been burning conservatively 1480 calories just sitting around and lets say an average of 300 calories a day for the last 2 years for a total of  1780 calories a day, and I have the data to back this up I have kept track of every workout and every food I have eaten, I have logged my heart rate and calories on every workout, and recently I have data on how active I am even when I am sleeping…. see I told you obsessive….  Yes there are days I didn’t exercise, and there are days I didn’t eat the best and there are days that I decided I wasn’t going to log…. but over the past 2 years those are very few I promise you.  I have also had success in the past with losing weight.  But those days are long gone.

Net calories for the last 90 days

So I have been analyzing everything the last few days trying to figure this out, trying to figure out where I am going wrong, and I am not too proud to share the next numbers with you.  My net calories on average have been less than 1000.  I have to admit, I don’t find eating that amount hard, I don’t feel deprived.  But like I mention above I don’t feel energetic, or good….    But lets just ignore all that for a minute and analyze the numbers.  I’ve been burning 1780 cal and eating less than 1000.  That’s a 780 calorie deficit.  According to  all the so-called experts, doctors, and tv hosts I should be losing 1 pound every 4.6 days.  I have lost zilch.  So whats going to happen when I go into maintenance eating am I going to gain?  If I can’t lose weight with a deficit how will I ever eat normal and not gain weight?

So today I found this article http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/238282-700-calories-a-day-and-not-losing-redux?hl=700+calories

It hit home with me and makes sense.  I still question why if this starvation mode is true, then why are anorexic and bulimics skinny.  Well the reason I think, is they are eating nothing so your body has to cut into those reserves.  But I am eating just enough to make my body thinks the famine is coming so it better hold on to the chub for when that day comes?  I don’t know.  But I also don’t think a lot of these people who write these books knows anymore than I do, or maybe what they teach is good for people who are obese and have lots to lose, but for many of us struggling with 10 or 20 lbs, maybe the same isn’t true?  So starting today I am going to start eating more calories.  I may gain a bit at first but I’m going to try to do this for a good month to see if it works for me.  Maybe it won’t work at all?  I think deep down I have known this for a while, that I should be eating more.  But in all seriousness some days its hard to eat enough, especially when you are driving kids around all day or rushing out the door in the morning.  The one thing I do know for sure is that my nails are brittle, my skin has never looked worse, I am tired by 7:30 every night, I can’t add weights to my weight workouts, I feel weaker than when I started lifting weights, and I hate to admit it but I’m pretty grumpy and short on patience most days.  Could it be I’m not eating enough?  I think so.

 

 

Filed Under: Goals, Running, Training Plan
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