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You may want to avert your eyes

My wonderful friend and enabler in fitness, Ann, has convinced me to do a month-long ab challenge.

Ouch, right?!

I’m sure the days I go to yoga and have to do a million chaturanga’s and then have to do the ab challenge will be painful. Worth it, but painful.

Instead of June, we’re doing it in May. (and as such, created a Google doc just for May)

And, well, today’s May (OMG how is it MAY already?! Jeepers) and so we shall begin.

Since I seemingly enjoy 1) posting pictures of myself on my blog and 2) torturing myself I thought it would be fun (read: stupid) to take before and after pictures.

So, here’s the before.

…and here goes nothing.

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Weekly Plan

I really enjoyed my meal and exercise plan from last week and since I’m seeing success with planning my meals (nearly 2 pounds gone, yay!!) I wanted to keep it up for this week.

We have a lot planned for this week – all fun things, but I think our meal cooking might become quite derailed if I don’t have a good idea of what we’re going to do for dinners.

I’m also changing up my exercise plan a bit. The weather took a big change this week and it’s far too cold and slippery for me to run outdoors, so I’ll be changing up my exercise routine a bit.

Food

While running errands on Saturday I picked up two kinds of Happy Planet soups, Coconut Thai and Santa Fe Chili. I wasn’t feeling up to making another vat of soup and I’m comfortable with the type of ingredients Happy Planet uses, so I picked up soup for express lunches for this week.

I even approve of the nutritional information

I will admit the sodium may seem high, but since I’ve planned my meals I know that everything else we’ll be eating will be low in sodium, so for a daily value it’s not terrible.

Most important, I’m excited about my lunches. For some reason lunch is my least liked meal of the day and if I don’t bring something I’ll enjoy eating I know I’ll end up buying lunch, and that’s never a good idea!

Exercise

RIPPED classes are dumbbell classes that combine cardio and compound movements, like squats and bicep curls with cardio intervals in-between sets. Highly effective in putting on muscle and torching calories. I also love the spin classes because they’re a crazy intense cardio workout (I’m not sure if I love spinning two days in a row, so I might make a last minute Saturday swap) and (I hope) will keep my cardio high for when I return to running. (I could always run on a treadmill, but I’m not a huge fan of treadmills).

Does planning work for you, or do you prefer to go with the flow?

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Hello Wagon

Now that I’m back home for a month before travel gets crazy, I’ve decided is darn time to set myself up with a workout schedule and stick to it for the next month!

Thankfully, we don’t have a whole lot planned, so I’ll be able to plan dinners and workouts without much issue.

Here’s what I have planned for the next five weeks.

This takes me to Sunday November 10th. I’ll be flying to Houston that day for work and so begins a crazy month of lots of work-related travel, so hopefully I’ll be able to find something to stick with.

Here’s my plan until Christmas

And this, my friends, takes me to January 6, 2013.

Wowee!

I’m sure evens and, well, life will happen, and I’ll miss a workout here and there, but I think having a plan and sticking to it will help things along.

I’ve even managed to transfer my plan into my awesome Planner, so I can check things off with a smiley or frowny face, depending on how it goes.

Next up?

Meal planning.

I hate meal planning.

If anyone has ways to make this less painful for me, please let me know!

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Meh

Well.

I did it.

I finished my 5th half marathon today in my third worst time ever.

But?

I did it.

I’m definitely not fully pleased with my result, but missing my last 3 weeks of training and mildly injuring myself didn’t help things.

The good?
I ran my fastest 10 k ever in 55 minutes.

The bad?
It totally killed the last half of my race.

I had planned on running with the pace bunny for time, but due a totally disorganized start I spent 8km chasing the pace bunny without a walk break when I should have been running 10 minutes and walking 1 minute. That? Totally wrecked my last half.

Truthfully, I really, really wanted to quit a few times. From 11km to 15km I wanted to die. I hated every single step.

Once I reached 15km I decided since there was only 6km left I might as well run it, but my body had other ideas. I started to find it really, really difficult to breathe.

Not fun.

That said, I still fully plan on running a full marathon next year. I’ll just be sure to actually train for it.

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Reset

After yesterday’s bit of a downer post, I think it’s time for a reset.

Time for me to refocus where I want my energy to go. I’ve spent the past week thinking about what might have been and, honestly, it’s time to move on.

In the grand scheme of things, the mortgage issue will get sorted (oh, believe me IT WILL) and our condo will sell. We’ll buy our house and be able to move on from there. While a delay of 6 months will suck (mainly because it wasn’t in my plan and I like my PLAN) it won’t be the end of the world.

And so

I’m going to focus on me – on being healthy, instead of on being a grump. I’m sick of being a grump.

(I’m sure y’all are also sick of me being a grump).

I think it’s obvious that Cassie is my huge blog crush and so when she posted her All About the Numbers: The Sequel on her blog today it seems exactly what I need.

(source)

And?!

It comes with a handy way to track progress. (Can I just say I’m super jealous of Cassie’s mad design skillz).

SO AWEOSME (I just need to convince the husband to let me use his fancy colour printer to print it off!).

My reward?

A shiny new pair of Frye boots!

SQUEE!

I’ll be in Houston for one of the final weeks of the challenge (thankfully I’ll be back in Calgary in five days! HOLLA!!) so I’ll have minimal challenges to overcome with respect to work travel.

Here’s Cassie’s plan

(source)

I have a feeling I may modify some of these challenges (I don’t see the scale as a crutch for me, so I may sub in something else for that one) but I think it’s totally, super awesome. I love it. I love what it focuses on.

I’ve even created myself a (boring looking [does anyone else type “borking? I do it all the time!]) Google spreadsheet to track each day so I can then update the pretty sheet each week.

I love that this doesn’t really focus on daily things (with the exception of the plank, which I think is fabulous!) but on overall health. If I need a break from exercise or whatever, that’s fine, it’ll just be made up in the remaining days.

I love it.

If you’re interested in playing along, head on over to Cassie’s blog to download the tracker for yourself!

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Cowgirl Cleanses: Day 3

I had a bit of an epiphany between day 2 and day 3.

I was consuming roughly 1100 calories drinking the cleanse juice, it was low, but I certainly wasn’t staving myself.

What if the cleanse is more about consuming good, nutritious whole food and less about limiting food intake and starvation?!

Light bulb moment there, folks!

So – I decided to shake things up a bit on day 3. Sure, I still had some juices to drink, no biggie, but I also wanted real whole food – like protein!

8am – Cashew milk. I figured some fat and protein would be beneficial in the AM

10am – PAM. Because this drink is the bestest drink evah!

Noon – salad for lunch. Mmmmm. Real food!

2pm – Green juice. I brought it with me and thought it would be a good snack supplement.

6pm – steak dinner with my cousin and his girlfriend. The Cowboy cooked. It was amazing.

Weight Wednesday: 145.1

Weight Thursday: 142

Weight Friday: 143.1 (probably from the pizza consumed at 9pm)

Concluding thoughts:

Do I think cleanses work? Yes. And no. I don’t think they’re a way to drastically lose weight; I think, if done properly, they can be a way to reset eating habits resulting in more mindful choices around food. Yes, I did eat pizza on the cleanse, but I made a conscious choice to consume the pizza, ate once slice, and stopped. Feeling full is not a feeling I like and this cleanse helped to reinforce that. I don’t have to eat food just because it’s there. I can make mindful choices and, heck, sometimes even choose something different than what everyone else is eating. Just because they’re all eating chocolate, doesn’t mean I have to, right?! Right.

The end.