When Works For You?

I know that it is supposed to be "whatever works for you," but for us, it was more about when does exercising work.  Of course, everyone is different.  When we started walking it was more of a "when we can get it done" type of strategy.  That was typically in the mornings, but not terribly early.
Then we decided to start going to a class (Yes, I am talking about Gold's Fit again).  We needed a time that would always work.  This meant that during the typical daytime hours was out.  Kara and I have varying schedules and it was very unlikely that we could consistently get a day class to work.  It also seemed like the evenings would work.  Specifically, the kids have different schedules of needing to be picked up and dropped off places.  It is also true that during the span of a day, I can come up with millions of excuses why I can't exercise that day and AT LEAST 10,000 of them are amazing reasons that cannot be ignored.

So, when works for us?  You guessed it.  Early morning....ugh.  I never thought that we would be getting up at 5 am for a 5:30 am anything.  The first week was rough! So, how do we do it?  I tell people that I get out of bed at 5am and typically wake up between 5:45am and 6:00am.  By then, I am already at the class and almost done ;)  Well, it isn't quite like that, but maybe closer than you might think.  Basically, the alarm goes off and no matter how we feel we get up.  After all, we usually have to pee anyhow...yeap, that's right, drink water the night before also :) We also have our clothes out so we don't have to look for anything.  Basically, minimize the effort needed to make it there. So, does it ever actually get easy, you may ask...maybe a little, but it is still early.  That said, it does become a lot like muscle memory.  You end up just doing it because it is a habit.

I guess at the end of the day...it is really finding a time that mimizes the excuses and reasons for not going, planning ahead, and following through.  It does eventually become a habit and that is what has worked for us.

Running Lights???

Wednesdays are always a tough day.  Tuesdays tend to be long and in the evening we are running kids to and from things or working late.  So, as usual, on Wednesday morning we woke up to go to Gold's Fit at 5:30am.  It's funny, people ask me if it ever gets easy...so far...not yet, but it does feel good after we are done.

Anyhow...back to the main reason I am writing.  This evening we were driving back from picking up a child from school.  It was getting dark and we were driving down the road that we normally walk down for our walks.  On the side of the road, we noticed something blinking.  At first, I just assumed that I was hallucinating from the lack of sleep or hunger, but Kara saw it too.  Then we saw more blinking! The lights were even in different colors! Before long I felt like we were watching a Disney light show or maybe a wonderful kaleidoscope of magical glowing butterflies (Yes, a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope)!

It turns out that it wasn't anything quite like that, but still as cool.  They are running lights for shoe strings, shoes, and more.  It was a running group and they all had these lights.

No, we have not seen these and we hate that it has taken so long for us to find this little gem.  That said, you can bet that we will have to try a few of these out.  At that point, we will be able to easily move between the world of the day walkers and the world of the night walkers :)

Crazy Spring Weekend

Another crazy weekend in the books. The weather was beautiful this wknd. We got in our 3 mile walks on Friday and Saturday. Trees are already blooming here so allergies were insane!! Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and had the chance to get out and get some fresh air. Heard the best thing from my cousin today. Her and her husband have "Fat Ass Victories"....Bob and I are totally going to start sharing some of ours. Love it. If anyone has any they would like to share please do. We would also love any other advice or recommendations.

We had high hopes to go the gym on Saturday or Sunday and start lifting more and taking the kids on a hike Sunday but I caught a case of the Pink Eye somewhere so that sidelined all public plans for yesterday and today. Bob got in a quick 1.5 mile run with like an 8.5 minute mile or something crazy like that. I napped while he did that :)

It was recommended that we try UMP by Beverly and we did and all we can say is WOW. We got the cookies and cream and I think I could drink it in place of every meal (I'm not going to do that but I totally could). Highly recommend it.

We also got some new shoes this weekend. Bob got the Nike Revolution 3 and I got the Zoom Winflo 3. Mine feel like I am walking on a cloud! Probably should have started with a smaller walk to break them in because I ended up with blisters on the back of both heals which was a bummer but I still think they are fantastic. I am curious to see how they will do in our GoldsFit class since I had to miss today (although Bob came home and looked like he was dying so I am kind of glad I couldn't make it..lol).

Thanks Y'all. 

Sunday and Boiled Eggs

Finished up a pretty solid week...well except for a few minor hiccups called Friday and Saturday.  Kara has already posted that we are trying to have more protein in our diet and we walked 5 days of the week (we missed Tuesday and Friday).  We will have to see how that plays out over the next week or so.

Today was a wonderful day.  In fact, the high temperature may have been some where around 78 degrees.  So, we started off the day with a lovely family walk.  The kids absolutely loved it and by loved it I mean...did NOT want to go at all.

Here is our "family" selfie...Andrew is just "a little" behind and Alyssa is way ahead of us.

After our walk, we had time to relax and enjoy the nice weather and we decided to have a steak dinner.  Our meal included steak, pineapple, salad, and a new recipe that we are trying with mashed cauliflower (It was OK, but probably won't try that one again).  That said, I did want to share something about a handy dandy egg cooker that I got for Christmas.  This story makes sense because we are having boiled eggs on our salad...haha

Long story short, For Christmas I asked for an egg cooker and Kara thought that I was crazy.  Good news...I GOT IT!!!  This thing is absolutely amazing and I use it all the time.  It cooks 7 eggs at a time and it will soft boil, medium boil, or hard boil the eggs (It actually steams them).  While I have not timed it, it takes about 7 to 10 mins and you set it up and just press a button so it takes almost no time or effort at all.  I have included a picture of the one that I use

Even better, the eggs are SO EASY TO PEEL.  I haven't had a single egg that is hard to peel.  Now it could be the steamer or it could be the little hole that they tell you to poke in the shell, but it is great! A few other things, but I haven't tried them yet, the manual says that it will also poach 2 eggs or cook 3 eggs.  Really, I love it for the boiled eggs.  Just thought that I would share.

Anyhow, dinner worked out well :)

Got it done.

It wasn't pretty and it wasn't fast but we got our 3 miles done. I really need to start wearing my knee brace when we are out there so we can speed back up.  The weather was beautiful when we were out walking...still in the mid 60s at 5 pm...come on Spring :) We really enjoy our time together on the walking path. It is like a mini date...it lets us unwind and talk about our day. We had crockpot chicken chili cooking so it was all ready when we got back from our adventure (recipe below). These days that start with the gym at 5:30 a.m. end up feeling like they go on and on forever. Throw in kids homework, a high school application, and a grade school book fair we needed to attend...I am ready for the couch and a skinny cow ice cream bar :)

Have a wonderful night
Kara

Crockpot Chicken Chili
2 cans of corn
2 cans of black beans
2 cans of rotel
2 1/3 less fat cream cheese
2 packets of Hidden Valley Ranch
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp onion powder
Few chicken breast
Cook on low for 6-8 or high 3-4.
Shred chicken with about an hr to go.
Makes about 12 servings- roughly 250 calories a serving.

Zucchini Bread Recipe

The whole family loves this modified version of the Zucchini Bread my mom always made (not sure who she got the recipe from). Would love to hear any suggestions to make it even better. Have heard you can also substitute the sugar with applesauce but haven't tried that.

Preheat oven to 350

Mix
3 beaten eggs
1 cup applesauce (instead of oil)
3 tsp Vanilla
3 cups Shredded Zucchini
1 cup Splenda sugar blend (instead of 2 cups of sugar)

Blend in
3 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3 tsp cinnamon

Pour into 2 loaf pans
Bake for 50-60 minutes
We cut each loaf into 14 pieces which makes each piece 83 calories each

*have also done mini muffins. It has yielded 93 muffins at 36 calories each. These take a lot less time to cook...like 12 minutes or so if I recall correctly*

Happy cooking
-Kara

Just another Manic Monday

Today was brutal for a couple reasons. First off, we probably shouldn't have had such a good time on Super Bowl Sunday. We definitely paid for all the food we ate and the drinks we drank. It was wonderful spending time with friends but 4:45 this morning came way to fast. Secondly, the workout this morning was just exhausting. When your body was already mad at you this was not the kind of workout you wanted to do. The workout was:

-Warm up stuff like a little jog, butt kickers and stuff like that.
-5 min jump rope warm up
-500 meter row warm up
-4 rounds of a 9 minute circuit of:
     10 burpees
     150 jump rope
     350 meter row
     150 jump rope
     10 burpees
(If you finished in the 9 minute then you rested until the 9 min was up)

Needless to say...I didn't get much of a rest. I ended up modifying the burpees during round 3 and took out the pushup and dropped down to 100 jump ropes at the end of the 3rd round...I mean I've had 3 kids...I'm lucky my bladder was holding as well as it was but there are limits :) Bob did great and finished all of us but he still thinks he might be dying..lol.

Started doing some protein shakes today too because we were told we need more protein. Wish it tasted a little better. Did a 2 mile when Bob got home from work today. It was so nice to be outside in the Spring like weather. Ending the night with some quality ice time :)

Have a wonderdul evening
-Kara

Ouch

So yesterday we had to do burpee box jumps at Golds Fit. I CAN NOT do box jumps...like just the thought freaks me out. One of the trainers was doing 30 in box jumps so I thought that I would be cute and climb the box which in turn gave one of my fellow gym folk a heart attack (I'm rather clumsy and I think he was afraid I'd fall off...lol). Needless to say, I bruised the heck out of my shin (the picture doesn't do it justice but you can see it). Moral of the story...skip the box all together :)

-Kara

Intro

It has taken me a while to start the first post.  I sort of felt like the first post should be a good start....but...well, we are already a year in to it.  So maybe just a quick post to tell you how we got here.  By The Way...I will not always proof read and so...well...there may be just a few typos ;)

January of 2016 was the point where we had finally had enough.  We were on the same page! In the past one of us would decide to be healthy while the other one would, well...not! That just never seemed to work.  After all, who could say no to a beer and pizza...as a midnight snack.  Yeah you get the picture.

Now, in the past we had tried different things ranging from at home workout equipment (does anyone remember the Gazelle?

Yeah, we tried it!  Elliptical Machines?  You name it we tried it, of course they all ended up being fancy drying racks for clothes.  We also made monthly donations to multiple gyms.  Well they called it a membership...I think...We never really went so who knows what they called it.  Well, I never went, Kara did :).

Anyhow, by this time we decided that we were so out of shape that we did not really need specific equipment, the simple THOUGHT of walking would raise our pulse, cause us to be short of breath and make us crave a beer.  So that's what we did.  WE WALKED.

Starting in January we really changed four things...

1) Eat Less:
No matter how you slice it (pun intended) we can eat a lot of calories and fast.  We started tracking our calories.  I know that this is a pain, but we did find MyFitnessPal as an App seemed to work really well.  We decided to drop our calories down to about 1500 calories.  Once we started paying attention to calories, I realized just HOW MANY CALORIES I would eat in a day.  Probably 3000 a day, easily and that does not count the weekends.  So, once we started cutting out our calories, I was grumpy (that is the nice term, we had other terms for grumpy that I won't put on here).  That said, a friend of mine put it simply, you can EITHER not eat a snickers bar (which is good for the 30 seconds it takes to eat it) OR you can eat it and then run 2 miles.  Do the math, if I was eating 3000 calories, I would need to exercise all day every day, just to maintain my current weight and I knew I couldn't do that.

2) Plan our meals:
Something that would ALWAYS get us in trouble was talking about what we were going to eat at 4pm.  At that point you only have an hour or two to figure it out, GO to the grocery store, AND then fix it.  Who in the world wants to do that after a full day of work?  So, what would we do...eat out.  Believe me, there are very very very few options where eating out is a good idea (and we didn't choose those).  We started planning our meals 2 weeks out and we would stuck to it.  That didn't really make our kids happy, but we were making many more healthy choices, which made number 1 (eat less) much easier.

3) Exercise:
We started walking.  As I had mentioned earlier...we did not need to do much to get our heart rates up.  So we would walk, at first it was about 2 miles and it took forever. Then we found a path that was 3.2 (yeap about a 5K).  We starting walking it at least 3 times a week and Kara would usually walk 5 or 7 times a week.  Now our little stat trackers would tell us that this would between 600 and 900 calories, but I don't know if I believed it AND we did not get to eat that many more calories because of the walk.

4) We did it together:
For us the walk time became a time to chat.  It was one hour with no TV, kids, cell phones, or work.  Just regular communication, old style.  We knew from the past how important talking was, but this was at a whole new level because it was a regular thing and was also associated with something healthy.  We would bond in the past, but it usually revolved around food or beer.  This was something that was healthy and made us feel good about ourselves.  Plus we were changing and growing youngerish together.  Don't get me wrong, when we walking faster, we may not say a lot (because we would need to breath) but we were still there together.

I don't know if this is something that would work for everyone. These are not brand new ideas.  We even took a class for 15 weeks about Eating Less Moving More and Losing Weight.  That said, what we were doing was a just enough for us.  In fact, the first month we each lost 10lbs.  Talk about a motivator.  The second month, again, we lost about 10lbs.  By then clothes stop fitting and maybe we would even treat ourselves to a new shirt.  After 2 months of that we started to do the math of where we would be by pool time.  Between the seeing the results and sharing the trip with each other it just seemed to work.

So, here we are now...January 2017.  Between the two of us we have lost about 150 pounds.  The weight lost has slowed down (they say we are gaining muscle, but I'm not sure).  Back in the fall, we started doing Gold's fit at Gold's Gym (it is their version of cross fit).  We are sticking our healthier life style, but it isn't always easy.  There are weeks were we feel like we are winning and weeks that maybe we don't.  We like to try new things, continue exercising together, hike, and whatever seems to be a good idea (note that these are not always healthy).  So, we have decided to share.  We share what was fun, what wasn't and even how things are going (the ups and downs).  Please feel free to join us!