Sprung!

Spring, that is. Happy Vernal Equinox! I hope your first day of spring was as fabulous as ours.

We celebrated by having pancakes for breakfast.

Okay, we actually just had pancakes for breakfast without realizing it was the first day of spring, but any day with pancakes is a good day as far as I’m concerned.

The sun was shining though, so this afternoon I had to head out and check on things in the yard.

 

We even found some catnip, leftover from last fall I think, but the cats seem to agree that it’s still good stuff.

There are still patches of snow out there, and it still cools off quite a bit at night, but it really was a beautiful afternoon. After hanging out in the garden for a bit, I headed out for a short walk. Then I came back and decided I could use a good stretch so I came down to the basement for some yoga.

I remembered I had Yoga Download’s Solar Flow #1 that I’d been meaning to try for quite some time. I looked at the pose guide first and almost changed my mind; I thought it might be too much for me today. But then I decided to just try it and do what I could do. I was so glad I did; it turned out to be such an enjoyable session.

This evening, Husband and I met up with some friends to try out a new Thai restaurant which turned out to be quite good.

All in all, it turned out to be a great day!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

We had absolutely fantastic weather last weekend – there was a bit of rain, but mostly it was sunny! And warm! I like warm. :)

It turned cold on Sunday night, and it stayed chilly until today which was another warm and sunny one. I was pretty tired when I got home from work today, but I couldn’t resist going outside for a few minutes.

So I exchanged my St. Paddy’s Day green leather boots…

 

For my Smurf Blue rubber garden boots…

And made my way out to the yard.

There’s still snow in spots, but it’s melting causing the usual swamp effect at the bottom of the yard. Happens every year in the spring.

 

Spring! Did I really say spring? Maybe it’s not quite here, but when it starts to get all warm and sunny I want to soak up as much as I can. So do the Fabulous Felines; they really didn’t spend much time outside over the winter, but now they are wanting to go out. Even if they have to head to high ground to keep their feet dry.

I definitely saw some paw shaking today. Poor guys. I bet that snow melt is cold.

But hang on guys. Spring is definitely coming. So say the Snow Drops.

  

 

I confess, recently I have been going back and visiting the early posts from last year’s garden blog. I needed to see colorful pictures of sunny days and growing things. It helped. Right now I’m just hoping that the warm weather is here to stay. We’ve had quite an intense winter and I’m ready for it to be done.

In case anyone is wondering about the fitness & diet stuff – things have been up and down. I’ve been really busy and feeling overwhelmed a lot of time time. I had a couple weeks of headaches and stiff neck, so I’ve been trying to take things easy and do the best I can (also why there hasn’t been much blogging going on). I’m hanging in. That’s about all I can say.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Okay, it’s not quite spring yet, but we had our first little taste of it.

All last week we were having cold weather and snow flurries. A bright spot was when this came in the mail on Wednesday…

Oh the anticipation!

Still, it was looking like gardening season was a long way off. I think the deer agree with me.

 

But on Friday it started to warm up. And in the space of a few days we went from this:

 

To this:

 

It’s truly amazing how quickly the snow disappears once the weather warms up.

I was feeling pretty crappy all last week. Exhausted, headachey, stiff neck and shoulders. I wasn’t quite sure what was causing what, but it was a long week. I got 10 hours of sleep on Saturday night though, and yesterday I finally felt better. I headed out and about to do some errands, and thoroughly enjoyed the warm day.

This morning I was wakened half an hour earlier than I wanted to be so that Husband could tell me that another neighborhood cat had managed to get itself trapped inside our fence.

The first time happened about 3(?) weeks ago, at 9:00 on a snowy Sunday night. I spent an hour crawling around the yard (the snow was seriously too deep to walk in, crawling was easier) trying to figure out how to get the cat out. I had visions of it being stuck in there still spring. I dug out the gate, but it was frozen shut. That time the cat finally got out by climbing the cherry tree.

This time, due to the warm days we’ve had, I was able to open the gate and set the poor critter free. Then I checked out the fence and found a spot where the fencing had come away from the fence pole and fixed it. Hopefully that will be the end of strange felines inside the fence.

Tomorrow the temperature is suppose to start dropping down again, but I think, just maybe, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Spring is coming.

February Review

More snow storms! On Friday and yesterday. It just doesn’t stop this winter! I think the winter blues may have officially set in. I’m really just wanting to curl up with a blanket, read a book, and not do much of anything else.

I think that shows in Feburary’s Workout Summary:

Feb 28: Treadmill Walk[45 mins]

Feb 23: The FIRM Hi-Def Sculpt[45 mins]

Feb 21: Treadmill Walk[45 mins]

Feb 19: The FIRM 500 Calorie Burn DVD[60 mins]

Feb 17: Treadmill Walk[40 mins]

Feb 16: SP Full Body DB Circuit[20 mins]

Feb15: Treadmill Walk[45 mins]

Feb 10: Fat Burning Fusion DVD[45 mins]

Feb 08: Gentle Hatha Yoga #2[30 mins]

Feb 07: RC Dial It In Workout B[40 mins]

Feb 04: Cardio Intervals[25 mins]
Feb 02: RC Dial It In Workout A[45 mins]

I’m too tired tonight to come up with much else to say, but here are some winter views to show how buried we are.

 

Can we have spring now please?  

Hormone Diet Update

I kept wanting to post updates all last week about how things were going with The Hormone Diet, but just didn’t have time. As the week wore on, I also came to the conclusion that I need to go back and re-read that chapters on diet. I thought I would do ok with the lists in the book, and the tracker that you can print from the site, but I found myself feeling confused.

According to the list & tracker, I can only have one serving of whole grains or sweet potato per day. I can have one serving of dairy (i.e. plain yogurt). I am supposed to have protein with every meal & snack. I can have one serving of beans per day.

May sound fairly straight forward but, since I prefer to have most of my protein come from vegetarian sources, I like to have beans/legumes and a whole grain for lunch. That means that I can’t have sweet potato or another serving of whole grain for supper? Or since I’m counting that as my protein (beans+whole grain = complete protein) is that ok?

She is also big on protein smoothies, made with whey isolate protein and berries for breakfast. I’m not big on smoothies and I don’t really want to go out and buy a protein powder at this point (not saying I never will, but I think it should be entirely possible to eat a healthy diet without protein powder). If I can have a smoothie with whey protein and berries for breakfast, why could I not have yogurt & berries for breakfast?

Possibly I am over-thinking.

So I’m feeling the need to go back and review, to make sure I’m understanding correctly and also to hopefully understand the reasoning behind these rules.

As for sticking to the rules, I definitely wasn’t 100% last week, but I knew I wouldn’t be. I am on a ‘use up what we have in the kitchen’ kick, which means some foods that are not on plan. I tried to stay on plan for breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack and didn’t worry about it too much for dinner. I did add up my calories the first couple of days and I was coming in around 12—0 1300 calories.

By Wednesday I really wanted a cookie. On Thursday I had one.

This week….Well, it’s only Tuesday and already it is one of those weeks where nothing is going according to plan. Actually, I guess that started on the weekend. Just lots going on. Hoping things will slow down and get back to normal tomorrow.

For now, gotta run!

The Hormone Diet

I hear the ground hog saw his shadow, but we’re still seeing an awful lot of winter in these parts.

We’re trying to put on a brave face, but dude; there’s a lot of snow out there.

When the sun shines, it looks pretty.

But somehow the living room looks more inviting.

 

Okay, now that’s out of the way…The Hormone Diet.

This is going to be short because it’s been a busy weekend and it’s getting late and Dr. Turner (author of The Hormone Diet) says I should go to bed at 11:00.

Dr. Turner covers almost everything – diet, exercise, stress management, sleep, skin care and sex (she says you should have it). The idea being that if your hormones are out of whack, getting them back in balance will help you to lose weight, not to mention potentially improving other health issues you may have.

In theory, I like this whole mind-body-life approach. It makes sense – you want your body to be performing optimally so that it can do all the things it needs to do, including burning fat and building muscle.

That said, the diet is pretty strict. I’ll be honest, I looked at it and thought: This is not a diet I could be happy following.  But. I’m going to give it a try.

Husband’s parents visited us last summer on their way to and from Ottawa. Mother-In-Law talked about this diet quite a bit, and this was the first I’d heard of it. She and Father-In-Law had been following it for a while and having great success. To paraphrase, MIL had tried many other ways to lose weight and this was the first one that worked for her; she was not having cravings, she felt satisfied with what she was eating and the pounds were coming off.

A pretty good recommendation as far as I’m concerned. Also? MIL is a nurse.

However, I still held off because it sounded way too complicated and strict. But it stayed there in the back of my mind. Husband has been saying more and more that he needs to do something to lose weight. To look at them, Husband and MIL have very similar body types. I thought that maybe we should give this a go.

So I bought the book.

I still think it looks complicated and hard to follow.

But I feel like I should give it a shot.

I really should be starting off with a two week detox, but I don’t feel quite ready for that. Also, based on the quizzes in the book, I don’t test positive for any of the hormone imbalances. Dr. Turner says you should have 2 clear weeks to do the detox, and we’ve had lots of social stuff going on lately. Fun but not so great for detoxing. So, I’m going to do my best to try and stick to the diet – I imaging it will feel like a bit of detox anyway – and see what happens.

Wish me luck!

January

It turned out to be a stormy month.We had 3 snow storms in 3 weeks, and there is another one in the forecast for this week.

In between all those storms, things have been busy. Some fun stuff and also some work stuff, so I ended the month feeling pretty tired out.

I have also been trying out some new workouts – from The Female Body Breakthrough by Rachel Cosgrove. I had followed along with great interest as Charlotte and her gym buddies tried it out. I read the book for myself in early December.

I won’t go into any detail about the book here – because it’s been so long since I read it – but I will say it was a quick read. I actually got through it in an evening, though I skimmed/skipped some parts. The ‘why you should lift weights’ arguments are not new to me, and I found the client success stories got repetitive. Hence the skimming. I guess the ‘Revolutionary’ bit is the reduced cardio in Cosgrove’s program.

I can’t claim that I have been following the program; basically I’ve been trying out the strength training routines. I’ve done 3 of the 4 phases so far. A lot of it feels pretty familiar to me, especially having worked with Lindsey last winter & spring. Again, the difference would be the reduced cardio – and reduced overall training time.

I do think it is a solid program and would probably be good for someone looking to get started on a weight training plan. I’ve enjoyed the workouts, I find they go by pretty quick – though that may have something to do with my discovering The Great Buffy Rewatch on Nikki Stafford's blog; I’ve been inviting Buffy and the Scoobies along on my workouts (Yes I own all of the DVDs. Shut up.) which keeps me entertained.

I should mention here that I was able to skip through the early phases as a lot of this is familiar to me. The 3rd phase is definitely more difficult – Ms. Cosgrove increases both the difficulty and the reps for a lot of moves. Seems a little unfair.  :)

Also, these workouts are designed for a gym, not for a home exerciser. I was able to adapt/adjust/substitute based on past workouts (Lindsey in particular is good at adapting gym moves to home equipment). And I did the same thing if the difficulty level proved to be impossible – either adjust to make the exercise doable or reduce the reps. It’s good to challenge myself, but trying to do something that is too hard for me is just going to lead to frustration or injury – neither one of those is good. So my philosophy is to back off and work my way up.

Workouts

Jan 31: RC Dial It In Workout B[40 mins]
Jan 29: RC Dial It In Workout A + Treadmill Walk[60 mins]
Jan 27: RC Dial It In Workout B[45 mins]
Jan 24: RC Dial It In Workout A + Treadmill Walk[75 mins]
Jan 21: RC Define Yourself Workout B[45 mins]
Jan 18: Treadmill walk[40 mins]
Jan 16: RC Define Yourself Workout A[40 mins]
Jan 13: Burn & Firm Pilates DVD[45 mins]
Jan 11: UB Circuit + Abs[40 mins]
Jan 10: LB Circuit + Treadmill walk[40 mins]
Jan 08: RC Define Yourself Workout B[40 mins]
Jan 07: Treadmill walk[45 mins]
Jan 05: RC Define Yourself Workout A[60 mins]
Jan 03: RC Base Phase Workout B[40 mins]
Jan 01: RC Base Phase Workout A[40 mins]

 

I also read The Hormone Diet this month. That one took a bit longer to get through than the Cosgrove book. Still mulling that one over, but I will post my thoughts eventually. Maybe there will be a shoe post as well. You never know.