This is the chronicles of two long time friends (currently living on opposite ends of the planet) trying to change their lifestyles, and not go mad in the process.
It's product update time, for no other reason than I couldn't think of anything else to talk about. It's been 156 days since I started using the nintendo DS personal walking trainer. As mentioned in a previous post I bought this as a christmas gift to myself. I was curious as to how much walking I was doing everyday for my job and thought this game would be a good way to track it.
5 months in and I have to say that I'm still very happy with this purchase. It has allowed me to find out just how much I move, not only getting to and from work but while at work as well. The set up is extremely user friendly. You just throw the monitor in your pocket or purse and the light will flash red below a set step target, and green once that target is reached. You can change the daily step target easily, and the system tracks all the gathered information and graphs it for you. This really lets you get a better view of your walking activity being able to see it over the long run and not just day to day.
One thing I had not expected was the mini games that came with the system. The one that I got my competitive streak going is Walk the world. It's pretty much exactly what it sound like, there's a globe and to walk all of it you need to unlock images with the steps you've accumulated. The images start at low step counts of 10,000-12,000 and by the end they're 38,000-46,000 steps to unlock an image. 1 image equals 1 percent of the globe, and today I finally finished.
I don't quite know what will happen now. If my walking will just unlock more images in earth, or if I'll start to walk to the moon. I'll let you know once I do. In the mean time I know that it took me 5 months to accomplish this. In that time my average steps per day have been 15,000, and my average time frame for walking has been between 10am and 10pm.
I can honestly say now, after having used it daily for 5 months, I would recommend buying this product. So long as you already had the DS, if you don't have one just go with a regular pedometer . Because though the tracking and mini games are fun they just aren't worth the cost of a DS, luckily I love Mario Bros.
Tara
p.s 4 weeks and counting till I return to Canada, and have access to a scale again.
Friday, May 27, 2011
I'm back , well sort of .... I still don't have a working computer but I do have access to a kind of working one .... for now at least. Well moving is going well how I expected it to go slow and painful. But it is almost done. and then I will have time to get my computer fixed. On the plus side it takes me 2 whole minutes to walk to the gym from my new place yay!! less time then I had thought it would take.
And having my own house with Inara walking and trying to get stuff done around the house is actually great I mean there is a lot to do but it feels good.... for the first time in over a year and a half I have been going outside and playing in the dirt , I know it might sound weird but it was AWESOME! pulling weeds out of my garden and playing with Inara outside in the backyard is so great, and it is great workout too.
at the same time there is so much space in our new house I don 't know what to do , I have an up stairs AND a downstairs !! not to mention the stairs are my friend it feels so good to have this much space. I am trying to commit my self to going to the gym everyday except for one day on Sundays. I am going to make sure now that I live so close to the gym that I get at least an hour at the gym when Damian gets home from work. I miss my me time at the gym.
I am really sorry to hear that you aren't feeling well Tara and hope you get better soon. Being sick and working out is not fun at all.
I'm sick. Not with anything serious just a head cold. It's reached the extremely annoying phase, but hasn't passed into "I'm not getting out of bed" territory. I'm crossing my fingers that this is the peek and when I wake up tomorrow I'll be feeling a little better.
My head cold did get me to thinking, at what stage of being sick should you stop working out? Obviously I know the answer if it's something serious like pneumonia, but what about the more minor stuff that everyone gets from time to time? So I decided to do what everyone who has an unanswered questioned now a days does, I googled it.
The answer's actually fairly straight forward. If you're sick from the neck up, meaning sneezing, sore throat, nasal congestion, and a runny nose (basically everything have) then you can workout like normal. Just be prepared to ease up if you feel dizzy or anything like that during the workout. If your symptoms are below the neck, like chest congestion, stomach issues, or a chesty cough go ahead and give yourself a break. Working out when you're this kind of sick will just do more harm than good. The below the neck rule also applies to all over muscle ache, fatigue, and fever. It all boils down to, exercise a cold and rest any type of the flu.
One thing I would add is that if you don't work out at home like me, maybe you should take a break from working out even if your illness is above the head. I just think it would be inconsiderate to go to the gym when you're sick, especially if you're not sure if you're still contagious or not. You really wouldn't want to catch the same illness back in 2 weeks time from someone you originally infected.
As all my symptoms are above the neck I'll keep going as I have been, 30-50 minutes of circuit training, the burpee challenge, and loads of walking. Hopefully I'll feel better by my next post.
The title pretty much tells it all. My parents have recently told me that they want to join me in getting fit. The problem with this is that they don't really understand about calories or BMR, so this post is going to be a basic breakdown of what you need to know for healthy weight loss. It breaks down to this, it's all about the math.
My Dad's an engineer, that explains much of my nerdiness.
I'm going to break this down into 3 sections, calories, BMR, and the basic math for losing large amounts of weight versus the last 15lbs.
Calories:
A calorie is a unit of energy, and when it comes to calories within food 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. 1 lb of fat is equal to 3500 calories, so if you want to lose 2 lbs a week you will need to have a deficit of 7000 calories. At it's basic level calories are fuel for your body, like gas is fuel for a car. A car only needs as much gas as the tank will hold, anymore has to be carried around in separate containers taking up space in the trunk. So, when you eat more calories than your body needs your body creates excess fat, which is often stored in your trunk. The amount of calories your body needs in a day is found in your BMR. You can easily find how many calories are in your food, there are books with the numbers listed as well as websites and aps that all provide this information.
BMR:
BMR stand for Base Metabolic Rate. What does this mean? Well if you were in a coma BMR is the amount of calories your body would burn to keep you alive and to sustain basic bodily function. BMR is determined by age, hight, and weight. Where the BMR proves most useful is when you use you age, hight, and goal weight to find your BMR you should be eating at. My personal BMR looks like this, Age: 29, Hight: 5' 4", Goal weight: 135lbs = 1778 calories per day. So long as I eat slightly less than 1778 calories per day I will lose weight even without exercise because I will need to burn my existing calories to maintain basic functions like breath. Exercise on top of this will accelerate you results which will help motivate to stick with this calorie limit.
One important, the reason age is a factor in the BMR calculation is because as you age your BMR will decrease. Meaning when I can 39 my BMR to maintain a weight of 135lbs will be 1400 calories per day. This explains how someone can eat everything in sight and be skinny as a rail in their 20's and suddenly find that they don't fit into the same size once they reach their 40's when they're still eating exactly the same. If you don't have time to go online and use a BMR calculator (LINK HERE --> http://www.bmrcalculator.org/)
A quick and dirty way you can find how many calories you shouldn't eat below is this. For women 100 calories for the first 5 feet of hight, and 5 calories for every inch past that, then multiply by by 10. For men 106 calories for the first 5 feet of hight and 6 calories for every inch after, multiply by 10 and you have the number you should never eat below. Eating below this number will damage your body, and sabotage yourself in the long run. For more information feel free to check out the lecture found at the link, http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/special/NutritionFreeLecture.aspx.
Math:
The math is really what brings everything together to allow you to achieve health and effective weight loss, and maintain it in the long run. The basic mathematical formula for weight loss is this,
A + B - C = D
A = Is your BMR.
B = The number of calories burned outside of your BMR.
C = The calories you eat.
D = A positive number is how many calories you've burned. A negative number is the number of calories you have added.
So long as D is in the positive numbers you will lose weight, the larger the number the more weight you will lose. When you have a large amount of weight to lose you can have a large end number without any problem. When you are at an unhealthy weight your body wants to shed access calories so you wont freak it out. When you have a small amount of weight to lose the story is very different. If you have a small amount of weight to lose you're probably already healthy, this is something your body wants to maintain. Burning large amounts of calories in this situation will only make your n=body think it's in danger causing it to hang on to it's energy reserves. So, if you want to lose between 5 and 15 lbs you're better off keeping your end number around 500 calories per day, your body will give this weight up without being pushed into panic mode.
Your B number ca be figured out a couple of ways, the most effective is via a heart rate monitor, or bodybugg type gadget. There are also aps that will calculate this for you, and websites that offer estimates on how many calories certain exercises burn.
There you are, everything you need to know for calories, BMR, and basic weight loss... or really as much as I understand.
Now for a treat for all of you who stuck around this long.
No one actually enjoys working out, and anyone who says that they do is lying or mentally ill. Exercise is something you do because you have too, admit it there are a load of things you'd rather being doing than exercising.
The key to keeping up a successful workout routine is to find something you hate a little less than everything else. For me, I seem to feel the least amount of venom for circuit training. I can do 30 minutes, I don't get bored, and it's easy to increase the difficulty over time. The contrast to that is yoga. No matter how many times I try it, no matter how many different variations, I just can't get into it. Don't get me wrong I can do the moves, I just don't care. I gave it a final valiant try, but I'm admitting it here, I don't like yoga and I'm probably not going to do it again.
Oh, and to make up for my last somewhat depressing post here are some rainbows and kittens.
So yes Judgement day is coming but the end of the world isn`t until October 21st 2011 , so we have some time to send out our post end of the world cards. what was that you ask? yes they do have post end of the world cards just like this one :
so you better get out there and start sending your post end of the world cards to people that just don`t give a rats ass. But seriously people come on?
I guess we`ll see if we really should have listened to Jesus.
sorry gotta run baby is crying ........... by the way I suck
Along with being zombie awareness month, May has the distinction of having a biblical apocalypse happening init this year. Saturday the 21st to be exact, so if the zombies don't show up at least you can use the recommendations from my last post to combat the hordes of demons that will be showing up soon.
I love clever counter protest signs.
I'm not really that worried, mostly because I'm agnostic, and that the bible says only God can know the "true" end time. I guess this group missed reading that line with all the "math" they were busy doing to find out the day hell on earth would happen.
Is that why there's so many Police Academy movies?
What this all means is that I don't get an easy out on my latest challenge. Speaking of which, today was day 11 of the burpee challenge and I'l still with it. I get a little winded after I'm done, and I see that soon I'm going to have to start added a sort of schedule or rhythm to the burpees. I'm thinking One minute of burpees and one minute of walking till I'm finished that days number.
There is a real ending coming in my near future. In roughly 40 day I'll be ending my year in Japan and returning to Canada. I don't know how I'll react to the jet lag on the way back to Canada. Going to and from England I had not trouble, slept for one day and I was back in the swing of things. Coming to Japan was another story altogether. I was feeling the effects for a couple weeks afterwards, I really hope to avoid going through that again. I'll just have to wait and see.
First off, I would like to apologies for my extremely late post. I have been trying to get access to Blogger since thursday, (thursday in Japan, wednesday in Canada) but kept getting a message that maintenance was being done making the site read only. With that out of the way, on too the blog!
May is zombie awareness month. Yeah, you heard me right ZOMBIE AWARENESS MONTH. This fact has only recently come to my attention, and as a hardcore horror fan I would be remiss if I didn't find a way to write about zombies here. Oddly enough finding information wasn't hard, just go google "zombie fitness" and you'll find a load of sites dedicated to the subject.
Got to work those brains off some how.
Both The zombie survival guide By Max Brooks, and Zombieland make persuasive arguments in support of physical fitness. With Zombieland's statement "Fatty's die first", though blunt, is probably true one when it comes to escaping a horde of the undead. The next question is, what kind of fitness is best for a post zombie apocalypse world? That all depends on the format of the zombie survival fitness class that you take, and yes, there is more than one.
They may have numbers on their side, but you have cell regeneration.
There seem to be 3 general areas to concentrate on if you want to be prepared for the day that the dead walk the earth.
1. Running
In Night of the living dead Barbara had it right, you want to live you kick off your heels and run like hell. We're talking sprinting, running while being grabbed onto, and endurance. To help with this you can try running while attached to a resistance band, while carrying weights, or dragging another person. Not only is this good cardio, but adds a strength element into the work out. Speaking of which....
2. Strength
Strength is the jack of all trades when it comes to surviving zombies. The most obvious use is in dispatching your rotting enemy. The weapon that first comes to mind, is of course, the gun. But, let's be honest, not everyone has access to a gun. You have to be able to use what you have at hand, be it baseball bat, fire iron, or shovel. You better be abel to swing it like you mean it, because you only get one shot. The second area that strength comes in hand is evasion. Remember zombies can't eat you, if they can't reach you. Climbing over obstacles, or to higher ground quickly and efficiently could just save your still beating heart. Exercises that can help in this area are of the old school variety, pull ups. push ups, general arm exercises. Kettle bell training can also work well, as it involves fluid, quick movements with heavy weights.
3. Balance and stability
Any fan of horror can tell you that a stumble during a chase can spell doom, and a twisted ankle can be the kiss of death. We all know you don't need to out run the zombies, just one of your friends. Improving your balance and core stability can help prevent injury and will maximize the impact of your other workouts. General abdominal and back exercise are all you need for this are, if you want to get fancy try doing your upper body workout on one leg. This forces your balance to improve, because if it doesn't you fall, simple as that.
There you have it, the three areas you need to focus on if you want to increase your chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Fitness is no guaranty of survival, but it's better than being lunch.
yepp so by this time next week we will be in our new place. And with that comes a lot of boxes and things in disarray. As well Inara took her fiirst steps all by herself last night. so now the fun begins. But what I'm trying to say is with packing and running around with Inara and going out for walks and and and , is that I'm being very active and it feels great : ) , hell I am so tired at the end of the day but it's so worth it. After next week this whole craziness of moving will be over and I can enjoy my new house with Inara and Damian, plus the gym everyday !! so excited to get back into a normal routine again. That and no one can tell us to do anything or that they have to come in if I don't want them to, you know why ?? because it's OUR house!!! haha
so ya it's getting warmer here and that's so awesome ! so glad that I don't have to worry about the weather anymore and I can just go for a walk down by the lake and have fun with Inara. I feel great and eating way better and less, but that`s probably due to the weather and me able to get out more and being way more active.
My clothes are fitting better and I feel like slowly but surely I am getting back to the old me and that feels great.
anyways I gotta go , but I will write again on Monday.
by the way next Friday and the following Monday will be hard for me to get my posts up so I will try to write a few during the week before I move, since I don`t know when I will get the internet at our new place. just wanted to put that out there.
I know that I have been less than positive lately and well I just don't want to be like that. I hope you can understand. I have had a hard time as well getting to the gym and making time for the gym. Not to mention picking the right choices in my diet has kinda sucked lately.
But the other day something really crazy happened , it was as if someone just flipped a switch *click* and my eating habits went back to the way I ate before I was pregnant. Just like that. It was weird, but I am not complaining, I feel better and even lighter since the switch went off , plus I have lost a few pounds already.
But I am still doing the video's you gave me and walking a hell of a lot more. As well as soon as we are done with this whole moving thing I will be going to the gym almost everyday b/c I live 5 minutes away from it and I can walk!!! I can't wait wooooooooooo!
I am just really happy that the switch went off , I feel like the old me but still a mama. So my first mother's day was more interesting than I really wanted to be , we went to Alliston last night woke up had mother's brunch and blah blah blah , then we left. On our way home we got rear ended by some Douche bag in a truck on the QEW, and now I am sitting at home with Inara while Damian is reporting the accident at the cop shop in Port Credit. WOOOHOO.
But non the less I am happy that I got to spend the day with my little girl Inara :)
As I've mentioned before I work at 4 different locations, one location in particular is very out of the way. So much so that I need to take a taxi to the train station at night so I can get home. Last night how ever my taxi didn't show. It wasn't the worst thing to happen, as it was Saturday my class had ended at 7:15 so I wasn't in trouble of missing the last train. The weather was also quite nice so I decided to walk rather than go to a store and try and pantomime "call a taxi" to the employees.
My original guess on how long the walk would take me was an hour and a half. This guess was based on the taxi usually taking about 20 minutes and the fact that I would be walking in the pitch dark (Japan doesn't have a lot of street lights). In the end I wasn't to far off, I got to the station in 80 minutes.
Update on the burpee challenge! So far so good. Really I'm only 4 days in so I don't have much to say. I'm guessing once I reach 15 or 20 I'll start to regret starting, but we'll have to wait and see.
In the effort to find something I could add to my routine I came across something called the 100 burpee challenge. The concept is simple, you go from 1 too 100 burpees over the course of 100 days, with a buy in if you miss a day. Meaning that if you were to miss day 3 on day 4 you would do 7 burpees. A burpee is a cross between and strength and aerobic exercise. It Begin in a standing position, drop into a squat position with your hands on the ground, kick your feet back while lowering yourself without a pushup, return your feet to the squat position while straightening your arms, leap up as high as possible from the squat position with your arms overhead.
There are multiple variations, some have different jumps, or no jumps. While other involve push-ups of different styles. I'm just going to be doing the standard version as this isn't something I've been doing in my other workouts. This also works well for me as burpees can be done in a small space and really at any time. I'll give you occasional updates on how I'm doing with the challenge.
woo I am not at home yay , the weekend was awesome we made to my aunt's without me letting Smelly out on to the highway, which did cross my mind once or two. But yep it was so beautiful outside and we spent most of the day on Saturday playing in the grass and me chasing Inara.
So, today I was going to have a nice relaxing day at home while packing and cleaning and such but after my shower to my surprise the management of my building came and showed the apartment with me in my towel which was totally AWESOME! not.
While I was away we went out for dinner at a local restaurant and well it was interesting to say the least everything had "with bacon" or "chicken fried" on it. It was kind of ridiculous. But , the best was I saw chicken fried macaroni !! that got me laughing. I stayed away from all that which wasn't hard but I was curious as to how it tasted.
this is what fried macaroni looks like
it just amazes me how that shit can still be on some menus but I'm not one to judge.
