Week 8 Scorecard



Another non-standard week (I'm beginning to believe that is the standard), but an overall decent eating and exercise one. I tracked almost exclusively calories (not WW points) to see how that went.

I also upped my elliptical workouts. I use one of the hills programs, and took the resistance from 2 to 4 for the baseline. It bumped the calorie burn from around 450 to over 600 in the same 45 minutes! My thighs cuss at me regularly, but it's worth it!

I finally did the math. If the elliptical reads the calories right, that means that more than half my food calories are being burned in one workout. I've been staying below 1200 calories a day pretty regularly.

Result: down 1.8 pounds! Whoot! That's the most in one week since the first two weeks.
Total so far: 12.9 pounds
________________________________

The 5k I'm doing is March 24th - a little over three weeks away. My max distance so far (outside in the real world) is 1.75 miles without a break. This week I'm setting a 2 mile goal (do it twice), then 2.25, 2.5, 2.75 in the following 10 days. Then I'd have a week to get to 3.1 miles before the 5k. I have absolutely no idea if my body will stand for this, but I'm pretty stubborn.

-----------------------------------------------------

I made some changes to the blog -- I finally figured out the tabs at the top. So now finding recipes is easy.

We've got a big gathering coming up this weekend - Italian food for about 40. Planning parties is still my favorite part, but this time I'm letting others bring the dessert. I'm not sure I could control myself if I had an excuse to bake again!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All the food!

Image
Hello, strangers on the interweb! I'm still alive! I still have my Blogger account. Now you can all breathe a little easier.  There are probably a dozen topics I need to write about, including how the child decided she was adult enough to move out of my house to college, of all things, but I can't do that one yet. Maybe in a couple of years.... BUT, apparently, I decided to cope with that change by cooking all the food...and eating all the food...and taking pictures of all.the.food! Here's what's been cooking at the hacienda.   I'd love to tell you that I just made all these up myself. Then I could start a new career, but this was way easier than that. I clicked a random link one day -- gatheredtable.com is my new life-saving menu planner site! You really should check it out. I've not made anything yet that we haven't liked. You can import your own recipes or ones from anywhere on the web and they'll work into the rotation. Cha
Read more

Calories and Weight Watchers.

What I've never understand about the Weight Watchers program (in any version, and I've done them all) is that it does not count calories. Anyone who has ever dieted has memorized the "calories in/calories out" mantra, but here's a hugely popular and successful program that completely ignores the calorie count of food. How can that even work? [For anyone who has not tried or read about WW, the current system counts fat, carbs, fiber, and protein, and assigns a point value to the serving of food. You're given a set number of points to use per day, with additional ones for activity minutes, and a bonus bank for the week. Stay within your points, and you'll lose weight.] So I tried an experiment. For about a week, I tracked my food on WW and on sparkpeople (dot) com -- an awesome FREE site that I highly recommend. I entered the same foods, the same quantities in order to see what, if any, correlation there might be. WW gives 26 points a day. Sparkpeople
Read more

Cheese, glorious cheese.

Image
I totally love cheese. On stuff. By itself. Any kind (except Limburger, of course). Melted, cubed, sliced, crumbled. If it weren't for cheese (oh, and bacon) I could probably be vegan. But anyway... If you've been on many diets, and especially if you've done Weight Watchers, you already know that cheese is not exactly friendly to most point-counting or calorie-watching plans. It does have an offset with protein and calcium, but I realized it's probably worth a little research.  First, a visual. This is one ounce of each of these cheeses. Generally, an ounce is a serving size - a sandwich slice, a string cheese stick, those single serve snacks in a bag -- most of those are one ounce. It's a little hard to tell in a picture, but the "bars" like Gouda and Havarti look like about the same amount in an ounce, but parmesan looks like a much more when it's piled up like this. Lesson #1 : All cheese is not created equal. It's hard to tell by
Read more