Week 4, Eat to Live

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Quote du jour: “Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.
Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.”
― Charles M. Schulz

UPDATE:Done. I do feel a bit silly. Okay, a lot silly. But I did it anyway.

Made it through week 4 of the Eat to Live diet. Couple slip ups. Not with eating meat or grains or such, more a matter of eating things that I THOUGHT were low sodium, but turned out not to be. I shall avoid all sauces for the next couple weeks.

Usually, I don't track my weight this closely, but for the six week diet I decided to make note of how well it works. On Sunday, I gained four pounds overnight. An overnight gain like that suggests water retention, hence my suspicions about the sodium levels in the sauce. I'm not asking for advice on how to change this; I am merely keeping track.

Otherwise, I am enjoying the simplicity of this diet. Lettuce might not be very exciting to eat, but I like how it makes me feel full without feeling weighed down by greasy food. I don't have any qualms about eating with people who are downing French fries and cheeseburgers. So long as they don't expect me to join in, it's all good.



Exercise du jour: 15 minutes waving my arms around with an exercise band and trying not to feel foolish. If people stare I will smile and nod and Act Confident. What the hell.



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Armed and dangerously silly

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UPDATE: Done! I may be a nut, I may be a nerd, but whatever else, I'm true to my word.

Quote du jour: “Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.


I've got a new idea for making a fool of myself in public. I spend three hours a day sitting on a train. Why not work some exercise into that time? So I've packed an exercise band in next to my lunch. The Wes train in the afternoon starts out with few enough passengers that I can do some arm exercises without putting someone's eye out.

I tried it last Friday. The conductors suggested some good exercises. And what the hell. Haven't been deliberately foolish in a while now.

Exercise du jour: 15 minutes waving my arms around with an exercise band and trying not to feel foolish.



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Do over Day

Quote du jour: This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


FAIL on both exercising and organizing and eating right. Decided to get a migraine instead. Today is a do-over. Just pretend yesterday didn't happen.


Exercise du jour: 45 minutes elliptical, 15 minutes cleaning/organizing. It will get done!!!



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Eat to live, week 3

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Quote du jour: I consider the 70s to be the youth of old age. So all you women out there who are afraid of getting older, just keep your orgasms in place, eat a lot of vegetables, take exercise, and you'll be fine.
- Betty Dodson

Finished the third week on the Eat to Live six week diet plan. Only lost a pound and a half this week. ("Only," she says.) I blame the pizza. (Yes, I could blame myself for lifting the pizza to my open mouth, but that's far less satisfying. Anyway, blame is boring. Done now. Moving on.) Had a little problem with the innards when I introduced ground up flax seed into the diet, but other than that the transition to eating high fiber has been amazingly stress free. I am pleasantly surprised.

Interesting note: Friday, the day of the Dreaded Pizza Encounter, was the first time in weeks that I felt hungry. I knew in theory that a diet of mostly rabbit food makes me feel full more than a high-fat low-fiber diet would, but this brought it home.

I'd eaten only low-fat food that morning to balance out the pizza, so I was quite hungry by lunch time. For about five minutes after I ate the pizza, I felt satisfied. Then I was hungry, a gnawing hunger that wouldn't go away until I ate a couple cups of lettuce. Then the stomach was happy, purring instead of growling. Damn. I really am turning into a healthy person.

Exercise du jour: 45 minutes elliptical, 15 minutes cleaning/organizing. Maybe if I post organizing up here, it will get done.

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Sleep savings time

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Quote du jour: If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters. - Jim Davis, attrib.


I propose a new time system: Sleep Savings Time. Why bother with saving daylight? It's all going to be gone once night comes around.

Actually taking the day off exercising. My legs feel swollen from the steady regime of nothing but elliptical, so I'm going to spend my exercise time clearing things up so that I have room for exercise DVDs or using the rower. I've done so much exercising lately that I don't feel lazy for taking the day off.

Exercise du jour: 15 minutes stretching.

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Onward and downward

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Survived the pizza peril. As expected, suffered a reversal temporarily on the downward progression. It helped that I was prepared for it. Back to being good. Onward and downward.

Exercise du jour: 60 minutes on the elliptical. It shall be done.
Update: DONE

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Perils, pitfalls, pizza... and a plan.

Quote du jour: And Jesus saith to him: If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And immediately the father of the boy cried out with tears, I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief!
- Mark 9:23-24

Today is a short day at work, but it's a day filled with perils and pitfalls. Yes, today is pizza day. One is expected to attend. One will feel obliged to partake. It's showing Team Spirit, or something like that. I know that when faced with the pizza, I'll probably end up nibbling.

What I'm most concerned with is not losing momentum. I'm almost halfway through the six week diet plan; this is about the time when I'd expect doubts & difficulties to start dropping by for a visit. I've been losing weight at the rate of a steady 2 pounds a week, which is a great way to stay motivated. I've been averaging an hour a night on the elliptical. Things have been good.

Even a vegetarian pizza that's been commercially made is going to be stuffed to the gills with enough sodium to choke a horse. I've learned enough to know that it's going to add pounds on the scale, that I'm going to feel most irrationally annoyed, and that that I'm going to feel irrationally discouraged. Even though I believe the diet works, I will start to disbelieve in my ability to follow it in faith.

So the plan is this:
ALL DONE

• Eat a ton of fruit and vegetables for breakfast
--DONE

• Start the day with 15 minutes on the elliptical --DONE!


• Work in 15 minutes of walking while waiting for the morning train --DONE!


• 45 minutes on the elliptical this evening

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Second week doing Eat to Live

Quote du jour: The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. ~Charles Caleb Colton


Survived another week on the Eat to Live eating plan. Lost another two pounds, despite the Unfortunate Chinese Food Incident, which is not to be sneezed at even if it is allergy season. One thing I've noticed is that my weight is not fluctuating wildly up and down as it used to before I started this. Is it just reduced salt intake? I'm curious.

Another curious thing is how sensitive the taste buds are getting. Is it because so much of the diet is green, leafy, unspicy? I had a bowl of sweet, sweet early strawberries with some tart blueberries mixed in. Even ten minutes later, my taste buds were acting like a bunch of stoned hippies in a brownie factory: "whoa, man, that was, like, intense, dude.*"

Of course, that is not always a good thing. Yesterday I went out to eat at a restaurant with a bunch of people. It was the first time I'd eaten out, since I've been on this eating plan, at a place that didn't have a salad bar. All you could get was stir fry, though you could pick out what you wanted them to put in the wok. I thought I was playing it safe by getting a vegetable stir fry, but that sauce! Argh! I can still taste it. Forget Chinese food making you hungry, I was full for the rest of the day.

Update: exercise done!


Exercise du jour: Going for distance. 60 on the elliptical.

*Yes, my taste buds are Californian. They talk like that.

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The Joy of Exercising

Quote du jour:

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
~D.H. Lawrence

Very strange thing. Last night, I'd planned a short 15 minutes on the elliptical. But once I got going, I didn't want to stop exercising. Don't ask me where my Inner Slug was; he must've taken the night off, because my body felt full of energy. I wanted to work out. I ended up doing 40 minutes on the elliptical for the sheer joy of movement.

I'm trying to remember the last time I worked out for the sheer fun of it. It's the kind of thing I associate with childhood. These days, fun is hanging out with friends or playing a game, not exercising. I'm not complaining, not by any means. Just wondering when that joy went away. I'm glad it came back last night.



Exercise du jour: No plan. At some point this evening, I'm going to get on the elliptical and move, but how hard and how long, those details I will leave up to my inner child. Might be fun.

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