My Stinky New Friend

It seems like this happens each year around this time. I start feeling like a giant, lazy slug that's stuck in my house because of winter and the frigid temperatures outside. The frigid temperatures are slowly becoming bearable temperatures which make me want to become more active. So I dug out my fitbit and my athletic pants from the bottom of my drawer, strapped on my Nikes and outside I went.

I've been trying to log the recommended 10,000 steps daily and that requires either a brisk walk outside or a ride on the treadmill. I nearly always prefer outside. I've been changing things up and going the opposite way I normally do for my walks. This makes me walk past one of the neighbors houses that adopts all the drop off dogs. We get quite a few stray dogs each year and those sweet people take them in, neuter them and get their skinny little bodies back up to weight. Right now they have five dogs that run out to greet me as I walk by. Most are sweet, one is standoffish and there is one that barks aggressively but doesn't harm me. I've decided the best way to deal with the swarm of dogs is to become their friend.

This worked pretty good, although now instead of barking at me and then going back home, one of the five dogs follows me on my 3 mile walk. He's a sweet dog.

He walks with me and keeps me company, occasionally finding a stream to bathe in. He climbs up the bank and makes sure to stand right next to me before shaking the creek water off. He's my stinky new friend.

Each time I go for my walk now he runs from his house and joins me. It's nice to be outside and active again getting fresh air and sunlight. I feel less like a slug each day.

FitBit: A year later

It's been a year since we got our little FitBits. I wasn't sure if I would use mine regularly but I'm happy to report I still wear it a year later. It's a nice little bit of motivation in my day. I enjoy the interactive website that takes the data off of the FitBit and tally's it up into nice little charts showing when you are most active, how many calories burned and miles walked.

The other fun thing about the website is your ranking. You can invite your friends that also have FitBit's and it tells you how many steps they have walked which can in turn motivate you to try to beat them for the week. We used to have quite a few friends and family members on the leader board but over the months they've slowly dropped off (either losing their FitBit or just not wearing it anymore). It's down to just Sean and I now.

We have a friendly weekly competition to see who can out step who.

Shhh.....I'm beating him this week.

Results

If you might recall at the beginning of March I gave myself a new monthly challenge. It consisted of giving up sugar. I gave up: desserts, no snacking after dinner, no sweet drinks and pretty much any other refined sugars. My dilemma was deciding if I would indulge in the many birthday activities we had this month. Then Sean said "you make the rules!" and I was like "heck yea I make the rules!". So I allowed myself to indulge in cake at the three birthday parties we celebrated this month.....oh and the retirement cake that Rich brought here with him. Excuse me, the MASSIVE birthday cake he brought here. Ugh. BUT, even with these few treats I managed to drop six pounds this month. It was nice to see the scale go down every week instead of going up like it's been doing all winter. Another four pounds and I'll be at my happy "everything fits" weight so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.

So my new challenge for the month of April is to continue with the sugar free month (and there is only one birthday in April so woohoo!). I'm also going to start wearing the FitBit again and get 10,000 steps each day for the entire month. I took the FitBit off for the month of March and it's been very freeing. I felt like it was a ball and chain and I would try way too hard to get steps in and then feel disappointed when I didn't reach my daily goal. It became stressful. This month I sat on the couch and read a book every day (What Alice Forgot was an interesting read....recommended) without feeling like I should be up and moving to get in my steps. Relaxing and removing the stresses of the day worked this month, but I need to get my hiney moving again. It's warming up nicely outside and the kids and I are running around and bouncing on the trampoline (which counts on the FitBit as steps) so it's time to get monitoring again.

The Wednesday Write-Up

-I have pink eye. Again. That is all I'm going to say about that. *sob*

-I've been disappointing my pedometer lately with the sad little number of steps I'm getting in a day. It must be known how hard it can be to attain those 10,000 daily steps in winter. Some days it feels nearly impossible. But I've made it a priority again this month and I've been making great strides in my activity levels. At first I made a daily date with the dreadmill.....I mean treadmill. As long as I had a new magazine or game on the tablet I was good to go. I'd get on it for 30-45 minutes at the highest incline. That would ensure I'd get all my steps. Then even that became a complete bore. So my new goal is to just get moving more throughout the day. I turn on a little Luke Bryan on iTunes and Greta and I dance. Or while I make dinner I jog in place. Sometimes I race Wesley to the South fence and back (the kid beats me more often than not). Occasionally during the day I'll start jumping as high as I can fifty times. The kids think I've officially gone off the deep end I'm sure. Although now they've stopped asking what I'm doing and ask if I've gotten my steps for the day. All these crazy things I do in a day add up and at the end of the day I get my 10,000 steps (which is five miles by the way). It feels good and it's so much more fun than the treadmill.

-Wesley is doing great in school, I'm really proud of his progress this year. He's becoming a reading pro. We are reading a book a day in an effort to increase his confidence in reading. Keep it up dude!

-Greta's newest hobby is going outside and collecting odd shaped branches and twigs and transforming them into her "stick men". She glues googly eyes on them and "paints" them with glitter glue to make clothing. One even dons a hair bow. Naturally she prefers to play with them rather than the oodles of store bought dolls and toys. She's pretty creative for being four years old I think.

-Lately I've been getting a case of the munchies in the evening around 8 pm. I got in the habit of getting a big  snack nearly every night and I knew I needed to quit it. So I decided to start having a nightly cup of decaf coffee. The warmth filled up my stomach and stopped the cravings. It worked like a charm. Then I was reading online different ways to flavor your coffee without all that store bought artificial stuff. There are a lot of interesting ideas out there, for instance adding a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice to the coffee grounds. That one is delicious. The key is to not add too much which makes it overpowering. But my favorite idea, which is a very simple idea, is to add cocoa powder to your mug then pour the hot coffee over it. I tried adding cocoa to the coffee grounds and it plugged up the filter making it very slow to drain through. But cocoa in the mug makes this lovely hot chocolate decaf coffee which is delish in the evening as sort of a guilt free dessert. I was just using plain old baking cocoa up until this morning when my shipment from Amazon arrived. I decided to order some organic cacao powder. Not familiar with cocao? It's got a great flavor and now I'm getting all sorts of health benefits from it as well. 


*Cacao contains more antioxidant flavonoids than red wine, green tea and blueberries *Instantly transforms smoothies, desserts, pies, and other recipes into the healthiest chocolate *Great source of magnesium, calcium, zinc, iron, copper and potassium

Here is the stuff I got on Amazon. All around good stuff to add to your diet. It's got a decent amount of protein per serving as well ( 6 grams). Anyways, thought I'd share.

  

Will walk for latte

So I've discussed my new found love of pedometers in the past. I purchased one and have been logging as many steps as humanly possible for the past several weeks. Well hubby came home from work last week and told me that his company is offering a promotional deal through FitBit that allows employees to get a FitBit Zip for $10 (they are originally $60). I'm sure right now you are asking yourself "What the heck is a FitBit?" I must admit I was asking the same thing myself. Well apparently they are nifty little devices that track your steps, calories and distance. It has Bluetooth in it so that it will sync wirelessly with your computer and phone to keep track of all your information. I thought for ten bucks lets give it a go. Sean got one too. So yesterday our little FitBits arrived, mine in white and his in grey.

I've been wearing mine around all day and have actually acrued my 10,000+ steps already by 4pm. Score! If you are within 20 feet of your computer it will sync all the information so all you have to do is log into your account to view your progress. I would think if someone had to lose some serious weight this would be an fun way to do it. I'm not trying to lose much of anything, I'm just trying to be more active. And it's working! I find if I reward myself for achieving my goal steps then I'm much more likely to get to my goal. Lately my goal has been this:

Iced vanilla chai latte from Starbucks. Heaven in a cup. Can you believe I hadn't stepped into a Starbucks ever in my entire life up until about a month ago? I received a gift certificate to Starbucks for doing some free sculptures and decided to check it out. I had no idea what to order or how to order for that matter. It was a bit intimidating. All that tall and grande crap. I think I figured it out though. I started out with some awful orange flavored iced coffee, couldn't do it. Was talking to Rich about it and he suggested a chai latte as it's Randi's favored Starbucks drink. Bingo! Delish. It might just make all that walking moot but it's worth it.

I've been thoroughly enjoying my free time during Greta's preschool. It's a whole 2.5 hours to do whatever I want. I savor every minute of it. Sometimes I get my beloved chai latte and head to the park to log a few thousand steps. I love this park, it's virtually deserted and other than trying not to step in goose poo it's quite lovely. I know one lap around it is roughly 1200 steps.

It's been hard not feeling guilty about doing absolutely nothing for 5 hours a week. I look around at all the diligent people hard at work and wonder if I should be doing something productive. Then I think "Gee Mandy, you've been raising or gestating small people for the last six years of your life, I think you are entitled to a five hour break every week." Then I promptly go put my feet up and play some Playstation3. Life is rough.