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Category Archives: Exercise and Fitness

Bought some hand weights tonight

Written on November 5, 2009 by hollie in Exercise and Fitness, Recipes I Try From Books:

The old hand weights were too small (1lb and 3lb, that I’d use while doing aerobics), so Greg and Beth and I picked up some new ones today. I have a set of 5lb, a set of 8lb, and a medicine ball that weighs 8lbs, that I’m already having too much fun with. Everything was surprisingly inexpensive.

I also got 101 Ways to Work Out With Weights today, and it looks great. The author looks like someone sculpted her muscles onto her with babe clay. I found it pretty inspiring after looking at raw food waifs for the last few months, who all seem to think thin is beautiful. I haven’t seen a single woman raw foodist with visible muscles yet.

I worked out for awhile tonight with the weights, taking it very, very easy. I made a list of the exercises I did so that I can build up from them over time, and I also took my measurements. Oddly enough, I enjoyed the yellow tape time. While I didn’t care for some of the numbers, I like data, and I like the idea of getting super crazy strong and having muscles I can actually measure. With the exception of my waist which made me nervous because visceral fat is so volatile; I didn’t feel afraid of being big. Rather, I felt like I was delineating my space, and now it’s time not to shrink necessarily, but just transform the soft stuff into hard stuff. Doesn’t that sound like more fun than just “losing weight”? I think so.

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I went swimming every day this week (I am the cleanest person in Seattle)

Written on October 23, 2009 by hollie in Exercise and Fitness

Beth got NEW PINK GOGGLES! And she has to wear the NEW PINK GOGGLES all the time! This right here is why I went to the pool every day this week.

I wasn’t trying to overdue it (honest!), but I think I did. My second week of The Plan started out great, with salads and swimming happening right off the bat. And then, as you look at the calendar, you can see it just didn’t let up. Beth got new goggles, and she had to use them ALL THE TIME. I am not kidding. Have you every seen a kid try to eat Cheerios with basically no peripheral vision? Awesome.

I swam with her every day, and I was busy busy busy with errands, trips, out-of-town visitors, and housework. I haven’t been sleeping great, as I often respond to overwhelm by stealing solo time late at night, when the house is asleep. This usually means a movie, and that usually means I don’t go to bed until 2am.

I’m so zombified I can’t even socialize without wearying. Right now, as I type this, the guys and a bunch of our friends are sitting out in the living room, watching a movie after playing games. The kids are crashed out in their beds – Beth and I swam for an hour today with Auntie Sonja, and Miles did a 3-mile bike ride with his school, and then all three of us went to a park for an hour with friends. I’m in my room, wiped out, alternating between reading and dozing off. After I write this, I’m going to make some tea and whine about being old.

I can feel my body getting tighter, as if it’s trying to rally itself for the next week of grueling activity. Batten down the hatches! She’s going to drive us into the ground again! What’s funny is that this week’s tally, while impressive for me, isn’t actually that much activity. I mean geez, maybe a half hour a day, average, of my heart rate being up? Yet it’s a lot more physical exercise than I usually get, which is pretty sad. And here I wonder why I’m fat. It isn’t fair, man! Why can’t you burn more calories through typing?

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Young man, there’s no need to feel down…..

Written on October 14, 2009 by hollie in Exercise and Fitness

They might want to wear something more comfortable in the weight room.

…..I said, YOUNG MAN, come and get your free personal training…..ummm…..

I joined our local YMCA back in August when we moved in, and I’ve been going pretty regularly, at least once a week (such great moderation!). I usually go swimming with Sonja. She said yesterday that going to the pool is our version of going to coffee. Then she said, “That makes us a billion times cooler, you know.”

“That and like a billion other things, dude,” I said. “We’re just cool. We can’t help it.” It’s helpful to say “dude” whenever you talk about how cool you are, especially when you’re in your mid-thirties.

“I tried to be ‘not cool’ one day, and failed,” Sonja said.

“It’s the risk you take being us,” I proclaimed. Uh huh.

Anyway, when you join, you can get a free consultation with one of the trainers, who will give you a basic training program that you can design to suit your own needs. After that, they’ll keep track of you for 12 weeks and answer any questions you might have as you go along. This is perfect, since I’ve been wanting to do more than swim, but I don’t feel like I know my way around the weight room yet. It will give me a chance to get acquainted.

My appointment is on Friday. I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

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I ordered a FitBit

Written on October 13, 2009 by hollie in Exercise and Fitness, Weight Loss

It gives you a severe electric shock whenever you eat sugar. JUST KIDDING! Hahahaha, oh that look on your face was priceless.

This purchase actually happened yesterday before The Moderately Great Weight Loss Plan. I just want to say that now, in case someone is tempted to jump on me for Doing Something New. Someday I’ll get lambasted for Doing That Annoying Capitalization Thing, and I’ll blame it all on Winnie The Pooh. Who had a problem with sugar, I’ll have you know.

(I’ve been like this all day, sort of rambly and tired and battling a major headache. I might be getting sick. I apologize ahead of time.)

I bought the FitBit after doing some research on the BodyBugg, which my friend Saska owns. The weird thing is that there exists a gadget that gives you data about your body, and I didn’t get one the second it came out. Where was I? Reading Milne?

She loves her BodyBugg, and has talked about it before at her own blog, and I’m always THIS CLOSE to ordering one, but then I decide that it’s too expensive. It’s $200 to purchase, and then you need to spend money every month on a subscription (one blog said it was $15/month), which I find frustrating. Any sort of device that collects my personal data seems like it should be mine after I buy it. I shouldn’t have to keep paying to get the information it’s collecting on me. Not to mention, while it’s supposed to work with the Mac, a read a dozen reviews of people complaining it didn’t. So I kept looking, and in the Amazon forums for the BodyBugg, someone mentioned the FitBit.

So what the heck does it do? From the website’s FAQ:

The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took you to fall asleep, the number of times you woke up throughout the night and how long you were actually asleep vs just lying in bed. You can wear the Tracker loosely in your pocket or clipped to your clothing, even bras.

Calorie data from the Tracker is very similar to those from energy expenditure measurement devices used in clinical research. The Tracker will give you a good sense of how your activity levels change from day to day.

The Tracker is also one of the most accurate pedometers. We’ve tuned the accuracy of the Fitbit step counting functionality over hundreds of tests with multiple different body types. For most wearers, the Fitbit should be roughly 95-97% accurate for step counting. We spent a lot of time ensuring that this accuracy is achieved even when you wear the Fitbit loosely in your pocket.

Sleep data from the Tracker correlates very strongly with results from polysomnograms found in sleep labs.

It’s an amazing little device, and it costs just $99. The website that it delivers your data to is free to access, and you can even set up your account and begin tracking food before you have your FitBit, which is what I’m doing right now (this is my calorie-counting). It gives you daily feedback on your activity level, your food consumption, and your quality of sleep. The battery for the device lasts about ten days, and it uploads all the data wirelessly through a base station, both Windoze and Mac compatible.

Over and over I’ve read from people using these devices that how much they thought they were moving and how much they were actually moving was completely different. Using this helped them see where they were off balance, as well as show them how many calories they burn in a day, and how their food intake stacks up against their activity.

It’s actually the sleep monitoring that I’m most excited about! One reviewer, Elaine, posted this detailed and incredibly useful blog post over on Spark People (check out her update as well), which showed screen shots of the readings she got while sleeping one night. She was able to see how certain activities at night disturbed her sleep (her boyfriend coming home), and she even noted how the device apparently caught her moving around during the time her alarm used to wake her up. She noted on her screen shot, “Old habits die hard!”

I have very frustrating sleep problems, which include waking up from what appears to be a good night’s sleep only to be exhausted and worn out. While my FitBit won’t ship until the end of October (I saw on their Facebook page that they’re saying JANUARY now), I’m hugely looking forward to seeing what my nights look like when graphed out for quality of sleep. Am I moving the whole night and not realizing it? The FitBit will tell me.

Beyond that, it will be, hopefully, an incredibly useful motivational tool to find that balance between what I take in and what I expend energetically over the course of the day. And balance is what I’m looking for right now.

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30 minutes of stationary cycling later

Written on July 22, 2009 by hollie in Exercise and Fitness

and I have concluded one thing:

If you’re going to read a book while your knees are pumping up and down, do not try to highlight at the same time. The text now looks like my four-year-old got her hands on an orange pen and went to town. Which is sort of apropos, since the book is about parenting.

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