I'm a Wannabe Ice Diva

So what is all of this health stuff for?  What is all of this exercise for?  Inspired by my Momalah learning a hobby and some lady on an Oprah rerun, I now have a goal that will give me some direction.  I'll give you a hint...

Please excuse the aerobic exercise musak and the commentator..."Look at the position in that camel...that's good."

Debi Thomas was a favorite in my family - I remember my Mom and especially my Aunt Corrine rooting for her during the 1988 Olympics.  This is when I became a fan of figure skating.  All of this time I thought that I had missed the boat.  I thought one needed to be training at five years old in order to do this, and then I saw the lady on Oprah who began figure skating in her 40s or 50s in order to lose weight and get healthy.

Well, cheers to that!

I have decided to begin adult figure skating lessons in March or May (depending upon financial budget)!  Triple Axl, here I come!  Okay, perhaps one needs to learn how to skate first...but I am extremely excited and feel that the exercising that I'm doing now is going to contribute to getting me ready for this learning experience.  Thank goodness I love everything about falling too!  I'm sure I will get quite a few time-outs due to my laugh attacks...hopefully I will learn to contain it a bit, but then again, if I haven't learned how to do that for the past thirty years, how the hell am I going to learn how to do that now?...Perhaps, I will fashion some sort of mask and gag so they cannot hear or see my face contorting into hysterics.

Until then, my exercise will have a new meaning as it prepares me for the skating lessons...you know, so that way I don't break an arm or leg in the first week...if this happens in the third week or after a month, I will feel quite accomplished indeed! lol

...please knock on wood...   :)

Exercise - It's What's For Dinner

As you know, I've been doing the myfitnesspal thing in order to keep a food diary and understand calories better.  My calories are quite low - 1200 daily target in order to lose 1.5 pounds weekly.  This has been difficult to accomplish honestly.  The only way that I have found to be successful is by burning some calories through exercise.  Right or wrong, I am exercising so that I can eat more and still be successful on reaching the target without going way over it.

I've always heard that if one eats less than 1200 calories daily that the body's starvation mode is activated...then I heard that it was eating less than 800.  I really don't know which number it is, but none the less, I do make sure than I have ate at least 1200 calories so that I don't run into this.  Don't worry, y'all, anorexia does not live here!

Antoinette, one of our readers, wrote about great success with her Jillian Michaels DVDs, and this encouraged me.  I had just dug them out of hiding and have used them quite a bit over the past month.  Thanks, Antoinette!  I mean, why did I bother to buy all of these DVDs if they are only to be piled away gaining dust?

The following DVDs are ones that I have been doing lately and have enjoyed for different reasons:

Jillian Michaels: The Biggest Winner - Shape Up Backside:  AKA "The Orange One" in the Set
* Burns a lot of calories so I can say yes to a cookie.

Jillian Michaels: The Biggest Winner - Shape Up Frontside:  AKA "The Red One" in the Set
* Again, burns a lot of calories and both of these dvds will help me create more muscle...I need it!

The Tracy Anderson Method Dance Cardio
* Intense cardio that challenges me enough and stays interesting and humorous.

Crunch Fat Burning Pilates (Featuring None Other Than Little Miss Poised- Ellen Barrett)
* When I get done with this, I feel great!  Better posture and I feel extremely ballerina like...not enough to try out for the Nutcracker, but you get my point.  I feel taller, leaner, less clumsy...even if it is only for a day, it's worth it.

Walk Away the Pounds with Lesle Sansone - 1 Mile and 2 Mile
*  I use these when I want a little more cardio that is easy-going, or for days when I don't want to exercise.  There's no excuse to not do one of these workouts.

Prevention Dance It Off! Express Workout with Jennifer Galardi
* Different dance sections...It's fun, gets me sweating, and despite some of the cheesy espressions and enthusiasm, I like it.  I have future plans inspired by this workout DVD that you'll see soon...heeheehee...

The Tracy Anderson Method Mat Workout
* This one is EXTREMELY CHALLENGING to me, but I have future plans of incorporating it more often once my body is a bit more conditioned.


So there you have it.  I am kind of a workout DVD junkie because I prefer tripping over my feet in the privacy of my own home and can get as cheesetastic with the moves as humanly possible.  Have you done any of these workouts too?  Do you have any suggestions or ones that you really love?  I would love to know!  Thanks for reading, and have a fantastic weekend!

Speedo Man and Outsiders/Insiders

Last night I was inspired by a man in speedos.  His name is Jerry Davis and a local news station in Portland showed this scantily clad man jogging between the piles of snow on the streets of Chehalis, Washington.  This is the genius that inspired me - he said that if he's not improving himself, he's working on dying and he's too young for that.  He is almost seventy years old and there he is, jogging much further and faster than I could dream.

People in the town have not always been very supportive of Jerry, but that has changed over time.  Some were disgusted by his presence, while others were accepting from the start.  A quick youtube search about this man will reveal what I'm talking about.  We can be so judgemental about each other until we take the time to get to know each other.

Which brings me to something that has been on my mind.  I noticed a large amount of complaints on fb about newbies populating the gyms to the tone of "Damn them with their resolutions!  They're taking up my space and time!" and scowling remarks as the resolutionists walk, instead of run(HOW DARE THEM!), on the tredmills.  This evidently has the same effect on the regular gym goers annually as they eagerly wait for the resolutions to fail after a few weeks.  I know because I was one of the regulars one year.

I had joined the gym in November and had been going regularly enough by New Year's that I considered myself to be one of them...kind-of.  I was somewhat between the two groups.  I simply began my resolution a couple of months ahead of New Year's crowd, so I was somewhat of a resolutionist-in-disguise as the hardcore regulars accepted me into their group.  Well, should I really say accepted?  It was more like the trainers would call me by first name and acknowledge my presence, I recognized the faces of the men who loudly grunted in the far corner with the free weights, and I was acquaintances with the guy who looked like Nino from the movie Amelie and an old man named Charlie.  None the less, it was significantly different from my previous gym going experiences (I did an ethnography about joining and going to the gym as my thesis for an Anthropology class a couple of years before this and had an extremely different result).  Anyway, I felt this time around that I was entitled by New Years.  Entitled to scowl at densely populated gym as I went inside.  Entitled to getting my time on the tredmill without such a long wait.  Entitled to see these new people as a passing fad.  Entitled to see them as outsiders and not belonging.

It felt good to feel this way.  I felt better than them.  It was ugly, hateful, childish, and false, but it felt good to my weak confidence.  It declared that I was one of the group, an insider at a gym!  WOW!  What an amusing thing this was!  Yet, I had to shun these feelings of entitlement out, because I knew what a lie it was.  I knew that I was one of them and they were me...I had only got lucky for the time of year in which I had joined.  It was as simple as that.

True to fashion, guess what happened?  I came down with a horrible cold mid-January and stopped going.  The end.  I followed my old pattern right along with the some of the resoltionists, and confirmed to the regulars that I was laboring all that time in a disguise.

So anyway, the whole point of this long post is to bring up the myth and reality of Outsider/Insider mentality.  It is a real division if we believe it is.  It is a cohesive social device in a group.  One of the ways in which we establish this social glue is to exclude others.  It is an ugly device in human nature, but it's there.  The bottom line is that this is all false thinking.  We know it is.  We know there are no outsiders and there are no insiders if we use higher thinking.  Jerry Davis is a spandexed one of us.  The resolutionists are only the regulars in an earlier form.  We need to have patience and handle each other carefully.  They are us and we are them...yeah, the ending of V for Vendetta thing.

After all, if we're not supporting each other in improving, we are supporting each other in dying, and we're all too young for that.

Gaining to Lose and An Honest Prick

I recieved this post on my facebook wall from a great friend and thought that it was definitely worth sharing.  I don't know who Scott Sonnon is, but the paragraph came with the photo and it was a good read.

"Does this photo convince you now, to throw away the scale? You will GAIN weight ...to shape up! Why are you trying to lose WEIGHT? Are you competing in a sport? Weight is irrelevant if you're not fighting in a weight class. Lower fat by upping muscle. Stop worrying about weight, and start increasing the coals in the furnace: muscle. This is especially true for women, who naturally have less genetically given muscle mass. You cut, and you'll gain (skinny fat.) Build to lose fat. Stoke the furnace, and throw away the scale. If you need a measure, how do your clothes fit today?"

By: Scott Sonnon

Okay, so what do you think?  I'm thinking that perhaps Jillian Michaels weighs at least 1,000 pounds...

But really, the reason why I am posting this is because this crap is happening to me.  I have been exercising like one of those healthy people in Lifetime movies (they have severe personal problems though, but there is always a scene inside a gym or of the main character jogging down the street).  None the less, I have been doing a wide range of exercise dvds lately, including some weight training.  I know that I am gaining muscle.  So why is it such a huge disheartening thing when my weight goes up by a couple of pounds?
 

I know that I'm gaining muscle and I shouldn't look at the numbers as a fail.  I have to remind myself that more muscle will burn more calories, and actually I'm creating a great foundation for long-term weight loss.  I need to look at the big picture...or the pictures above!  This image has stuck in my brain and I'm glad that it has - it is a great reminder of health and fitness not being determined simply by a single number.

I will never get rid of my scales though.  Whenever I don't have scales in my home, I gain weight.  The worst incident of this was when I lived in Florida.  I went without a scale for about a year, and managed to gain about 55 pounds!  That's quite impressive for the timespan of a year!  The only significant measure of this was how I felt emotionally - I was terribly insecure at times.  It sounds ridiculous, but I honestly had no idea that I was that much heavier.  It was kind of a funny thing really...like a bus that parks in a compact car parking spot.  You would think that my clothes would tell the story, but they didn't because I wore a lot of baggy type of clothes - straightlegged men's jeans with more fitted shirts...they were either t-shirts, or stretchy type of shirts...

In fact, the only person in Florida who said a thing was an anonymous man at a fun gay bar who came over to me right in the middle of a song he was dancing around to and said, "I used to be just like you, but then I lost 60 pounds, and honey, I've never felt better!"

Honesty is not always the best policy...the prick.  Oh well, it was news to me! haha!