Contains Food And Exercise Talk
so, y'know, skip it if you don't want to read about that.
Today was another C25K day. I wanted to do it outside, again, but I totally failed at getting up early enough for that, plus there was a dusting of snow on the ground, which, while it was pretty trivial in the New England scheme of things, did not seem like the best idea given my propensity to turn my ankles.
So I figured I'd see how compatible the program was with the treadmills at the gym.
Turns out, not half bad. I put the machine on the manual setting, and just changed the speed whenever the app told me to -- 3mph for walking, and 4.5mph for running. The treadmill has a timer on it, and a distance-covered display, and it measures your heart rate by the grips. I may have been kind of ambitious with the 4.5mph, because it got my heart rate kinda high, but I felt okay doing it, so I stayed there. The treadmill even has a five minute cooldown pre-set on it! And this time, I got the app and the audiobook to play well together, and my chapter finished with one minute to go, which I thought was convenient. I re-did day 1, though, because of how messed up Monday was.
Tomorrow I have the "fitness assessment" that you get with one of their trainers, as part of the deal. I think mostly I want to know what weights I should start at on weight machines if I use them.
I've also started playing with the SparkPeople diet-and-exercise tracking app, not especially because I want to lose weight (I told it I wanted to lose five pounds, because I'm female and American and this is practically a default) but because I wanted to see if I was eating WELL, and not putting my body into famine mode from eating too little (which happens, as my Lamictal kills my appetite), and getting enough protein and so on (important for me, because with the PCOS I should be eating Zone-style 40/30/30 lower carb). And
eternaleponine 's been using it for quite a while now, and has entered the nutritional values for Things I Cook, so she shared them to make it convenient for me.
Things I've discovered: the barcode-scanning feature for entering new items is The Best Toy, I've been getting woefully little protein (so I had tuna for lunch to fix that), and Panera bagels have about a zillion calories.
Seriously, though, the barcode-scanning is awesome. That tuna wrap I made for lunch? I scanned the tuna, the Greek dressing, the store brand tortillas, and I tried to scan the romaine but nobody else had, so that one, I entered the info by hand.
Obviously the key to getting me to pay attention to this stuff is to make it all seem like toys. Toys are good.
Likewise, the "reminders" gadget is better than the "to-do" gadget on the iPhone, because it has tickyboxes.
eternaleponine suggests Greek yogurt as a solution to the not-enough-protein issue. I think I'm going to have eggs for breakfast instead of oatmeal. I like them better than oatmeal anyway.
If this stuff continues to feel like playing with toys, I might even be able to stick with it.
Today was another C25K day. I wanted to do it outside, again, but I totally failed at getting up early enough for that, plus there was a dusting of snow on the ground, which, while it was pretty trivial in the New England scheme of things, did not seem like the best idea given my propensity to turn my ankles.
So I figured I'd see how compatible the program was with the treadmills at the gym.
Turns out, not half bad. I put the machine on the manual setting, and just changed the speed whenever the app told me to -- 3mph for walking, and 4.5mph for running. The treadmill has a timer on it, and a distance-covered display, and it measures your heart rate by the grips. I may have been kind of ambitious with the 4.5mph, because it got my heart rate kinda high, but I felt okay doing it, so I stayed there. The treadmill even has a five minute cooldown pre-set on it! And this time, I got the app and the audiobook to play well together, and my chapter finished with one minute to go, which I thought was convenient. I re-did day 1, though, because of how messed up Monday was.
Tomorrow I have the "fitness assessment" that you get with one of their trainers, as part of the deal. I think mostly I want to know what weights I should start at on weight machines if I use them.
I've also started playing with the SparkPeople diet-and-exercise tracking app, not especially because I want to lose weight (I told it I wanted to lose five pounds, because I'm female and American and this is practically a default) but because I wanted to see if I was eating WELL, and not putting my body into famine mode from eating too little (which happens, as my Lamictal kills my appetite), and getting enough protein and so on (important for me, because with the PCOS I should be eating Zone-style 40/30/30 lower carb). And
eternaleponine 's been using it for quite a while now, and has entered the nutritional values for Things I Cook, so she shared them to make it convenient for me.
Things I've discovered: the barcode-scanning feature for entering new items is The Best Toy, I've been getting woefully little protein (so I had tuna for lunch to fix that), and Panera bagels have about a zillion calories.
Seriously, though, the barcode-scanning is awesome. That tuna wrap I made for lunch? I scanned the tuna, the Greek dressing, the store brand tortillas, and I tried to scan the romaine but nobody else had, so that one, I entered the info by hand.
Obviously the key to getting me to pay attention to this stuff is to make it all seem like toys. Toys are good.
Likewise, the "reminders" gadget is better than the "to-do" gadget on the iPhone, because it has tickyboxes.
eternaleponine suggests Greek yogurt as a solution to the not-enough-protein issue. I think I'm going to have eggs for breakfast instead of oatmeal. I like them better than oatmeal anyway.
If this stuff continues to feel like playing with toys, I might even be able to stick with it.