Tag Archives: 20 books and 20 lbs

20 books & 20 lbs (week 3): A wonderful weigh-in

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Normally, the last thing in the world that I would say is, “I really loved what I saw when I stepped on the scale!”, but this is one of those cases where I do have to say it.

I LOST THREE POUNDS LAST WEEK!!!

Oh sure, I haven’t hit my goal weight yet, but since I lost three pounds between weeks 1 & 2, and got to start my third week on a high note, it gave me an extra incentive not to reach for a larger (or additional) helping when I didn’t really need one. For lunches this week, I tried taking a Lean Cuisine meal a couple of times a week to see if that would help me have a second meal that had a bit fewer calories than I usually had. It’s a dicey proposition, since I never find myself really *full* after a Lean Cuisine “meal”. It seems to me like those are entrées that are meant to have something else with them…fruit, bread…a sandwich…(just kidding).

A coworker suggested I try Kashi frozen meals, too, so I may check those out. I was laughing quite a bit at the freezer section of one of the refrigerators in the break room on my floor at work – it was mostly full of Lean Cuisine items with various people’s names scrawled on them in Sharpie marker. Yeah, it’s not just me. I’m curious about how the freezer drawer will look in, say, three months.

Once I get a few more weeks in, I’ll likely start publishing a chart of my weight changes; for those who know me well, it’s clear that I loves me some charts!

Adding in exercise is still a bit of a challenge, but I did manage to get a quick workout in this week. I’ve also been able to keep up with the #plankaday challenge, so this means that I’ve done almost three full weeks of it! I’m up over a minute without falling over, but getting much past the 1:07/1:08 mark is still a little tough. Seeing how Elizabeth at the Boston Globe (@BeWellBoston) can manage to get over 5 minutes, I figure I should be able to increase my time over time. It just takes practice and keeping at it. (Or so the theory goes.) DH and I are still trying to work the kinks out of a workout schedule that gives us both time to exercise, and I need to get on the stick and use the time I have to my advantage – when I have it.

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Speaking of keeping at it, I’m still making progress on “A Tale of Two Cities”. I’m about one-third of the way through, and the book still hasn’t yet unfolded enough that I can see all of where Dickens is going with it. The humor continues, though, and it’s perfectly clear that his hatred for and derision of the wealthy class is quite solid. I also get a chuckle whenever the French scenes with Madame Defarge pop up, since they always make me think of Cloris Leachman’s role in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, part 1”. Yeah, that’s probably not what Dickens was HOPING I’d think of, but that’s how it goes.

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And, continuing the high notes, I turn the big FOUR-OH(crap) today. I don’t feel forty. I don’t feel twenty, but I don’t feel forty. Maybe that’s what forty is supposed to feel like..a year of walking around saying, “where did my thirties go?” Hopefully I’ll have lost a little more when I come to this Sunday’s weigh-in; that would certainly make for a VERY happy birthday.

20 books & 20 lbs (week 2): Planks for the memories

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I figured that if I get into the habit of doing weekly updates, it’ll force me into some measure of discipline about things, and there’s no way that my goal to read 20 books and lose 20 lbs in 2013 will work if I don’t have some discipline about it. So, here’s an update…and if you’re playing along at home, feel free to comment below with YOUR updates. This game’s open to anyone who wants to participate, although you should only set goals that work for you. My goals work for ME because I set them. And, while it should go without saying, I can’t let it go: don’t set ANY weight loss goals and/or exercise without having talked to your primary care physician first. I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on TV, and I don’t have any designs on being a doctor. On the plus side, you don’t need to talk to an English teacher before you set your own reading goal…so, that saves you at least one phone call.

20 books: still on book #1. Okay, it’s not a ton of progress, BUT it’s still only the second week of the year and, to be fair, it’s Charles Dickens. It’s not like I picked the standard beach read. I will say that the story of “A Tale of Two Cities” is a pretty amazing book so far. It’s a slog, much as Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” was, but if the payoff is half as good as what I got from Stephenson, then I’ll probably come out a Dickens-lover. We’ll see. Some days, I really love having a chewy read. Other days, I just want something mindless that I can breeze through without thinking. The next book may be something a bit more lighthearted…lest I weigh myself down (no pun intended) with too much depressing material.

20 lbs: hard to say, but I clocked in on Sunday AM at 221.4lbs. Not knowing where I was on January 1st (primarily because of a near-pathological fear of what the scale may say), I’m using that as my starting point. This means that I should be ending the year no higher than about 201lbs. It’s still far away from where I want to be, but every journey begins with a single step…and every weight loss begins with a willingness to admit that you NEED to lose weight. When I go for my physical in a few weeks, I’m hoping that I will be back down to where I was when I went last year; it would be disappointing to have to come in higher than where I was back then.

I haven’t yet gotten my exercise program in order; dh and I still need to sort out a schedule that allows us both to work out in an equitable fashion. He has all of his triathlon training and conditioning to do, and I know he doesn’t get as much time to do that as he wants. I haven’t yet set aside any time, and that has more to do with my lack of interest in losing any sleep than anything else. There isn’t a ton of time in the evenings for working out yet, but we can get back to alternating days when we do kiddo pickup & dinner in order to make it work. We just haven’t gotten back into that groove yet. Having two drop-offs in the morning and two pick-ups in the evening really has thrown us off a lot more than I expected.

So, what have I done, then? Well, I’m not being a complete schmoo. Last week, I started participating in the #plankaday challenge – the brainchild of Dr. Sherry Pagoto, a licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at UMass Medical School. She started the Plank A Day Revolution as a way to get people to make small change. All you have to do is perform just one “plank” per day. It’s great exercise for your core muscles, and you can do variations on it to give yourself more of a challenge. The basic move looks and feels like a pushup, except that you keep your forearms on the floor. I’m up to about a minute before my body is shaking enough that I feel like I need to take a break. It seems like the majority of folks who participate on Twitter tend to add the picture snapped from their phone of the timer, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

 

Whew!

 

If you want to join in, feel free to give it a shot! Just make sure you are up to the physical activity and talk to your doctor and yadda yadda YOU KNOW THE DRILL BY NOW. Make sure that you use the hashtag #plankaday on your tweet and expect a visit from the Plank Police if you fall off the wagon for a few days. You can even get a plank penalty if you’re behind…so make sure you’re able to keep up!

Also, massive props on this to Elizabeth Comeau, the author of the Get Moving blog and a driving force behind the @BeWellBoston Twitter account, as well as RadioBDC. She celebrated her one year blogiversary on RadioBDC earlier this week, which is a pretty awesome milestone. If I didn’t follow RadioBDC on Twitter (and listen to them during the day), I wouldn’t know about Elizabeth’s work and wouldn’t have caught on to #plankaday, much less been bitten by the bug to participate. Elizabeth talking up #plankaday on RadioBDC and Twitter inspired me to give it a shot, and I’m glad I’m doing at least something until I can do more. See, radio will save us all…or at least that’s my hope.

20 books and 20lbs…can I do it?

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When my sister and BIL came over for dinner the other night, she mentioned that she was nearly done with her goal of (IIRC) 20 books read in one year. I thought about that and considered that it might be a fun goal to have. Of course, I read only a few pages a night unless I have something in that “can’t put down” category, like the Hunger Games trilogy – which I just DEVOURED. I then thought I should up the ante on myself a little bit.

So, with that, I present not a resolution but a GOAL:

In 2013, I’d like to read 20 books and lose 20 lbs.

At least half of the books need to be new books or books I haven’t read within the last 5 years, so I won’t be just re-reading the same stuff I read at least once every two years (like “Twilight” books or “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson).

And the weight loss isn’t about a b.s. goal; I want to look better in my clothes. I want to lose some of the chub in my cheeks. And I have utterly no clue how I’m going to do this yet, but I promise that it won’t be through a gimmick. No cleanse. No diets that specifically restrict foods I’m not allergic to. I may try the “plank a day” idea, but that’s not a gimmick so much as a way to try to get your core and arms toned.

I’ll post on my progress at least once a month. I can promise that much at least.

I’m also not making any resolutions or goals about blog posts. I could post to my blog every day, but I’d just be posting b.s. I’d rather contribute things that I think are interesting to me, and that’s just not going to be every day.

So, first up: “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens

I recently read “A Christmas Carol”, mostly because I wanted to read Dickens’ original words that have been remade into so many wonderful movies. It made me realize there was plenty of Dickens I’d never read but that I thought I probably should at least give a decent go. DH, realizing that this meant yet ANOTHER trip to the bookstore, headed me off at the pass and bought me “A Tale of Two Cities” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” for Christmas. So…Dickens begins 2013 for me.

And we’ll see how this goes. Happy New Year y’all…