Strong Start

I am obviously going to be eating the most boring food after seeing your 2 posts, but I did put in an effort by creating a list of planned meals for the week!

Grocery shopping was also on my agenda today, it was surprisingly empty there!  I ended up buying bananas, frozen berries, kiwis, celery, spinach, cucumbers, avacados, all natural peanut butter, almonds, greek vanilla yogurt, hummus, whole wheat bread, bagels, and tortillas.

Below are some of the meals I plan on trying this week (They can be found on this blog: Undressed Skeleton which has some good lower calorie recipes)

Banana Breakfast Bread

Strawberry Banana Bagel

Tropical Jungle Salad- for part of lunch

Weekend Deli Delight

My workout was also very successful.  Here is what I did for my first day:

– 5 minute warm up on an eliptical

– 20 squats with a 22.5 weight

– 40 lunges with an 18 lb bar (20 each leg)

– 20 deadlifts with a 22.5 lb weight

– 40 crunches

– 40 butt-lifts (not really sure of the real name)

-20 minutes of cardio on the treadmill

The entire workout was around 45 minutes and stretching before and after was about 15 minutes total.  I felt pretty good after!  Looking forward to my hour long kick-boxing class tomorrow and some good meals (and the first day back at work from a long break)!

Day 1

I think Patrice and I must’ve been on the same wavelength, because I went grocery shopping today as well!

I bought a lot of good stuff:

-canned beans

-kale, garlic, onions, potatoes, peppers, avocados, and bananas

-standard milk, eggs, bread (I got multi-grain sandwich thins and whole wheat pitas–I’m going to have homemade falafel sometime this week for dinner)

-pita chips and mutli-grain tortilla chips (I know I’m going to have salty snack cravings and I figured it’s better to satisfy it to prevent myself from binging something else. . . which generally seems to be the case)

I don’t remember what else I bought, but it was all good, normal grocery stuff without snacks (minus the chips).

Today’s Meals:

• Breakfast: a Korean pastry (I wasn’t very hungry and it was very small. Oops.)
• Lunch: Veggie scramble–two eggs, kale, onions, garlic
• Dinner: pork chops (seasoned with a little salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder; seared in pan then baked in oven), sautéed veggies in olive oil (kale, onion, garlic, green beans), and polenta (I did add a little bit of butter and parmesan cheese for added flavor and fat)
• Snacks: Clementines (I think I’ve had like 4 already today)

All meals came with water simply because that’s the only beverage I had other than wine in the apartment.

Today’s Workout: ~60 minutes

• 10 min warm up on elliptical
• 3 sets of 12 reps on three of those leg/glute machines (I don’t know what they’re called)
• 3 sets of 12 reps each of shoulder and arm stuff using free weights
• 3 sets of 12 reps each of squats and lunges with free weights
• About 2 minutes total of core stuff (I need to bump this up)
• 25 minute run
• Stretching

Haha, clearly I don’t know any technical terms for these exercises, but whatevs. Also, I may have gotten a couple disappointed looks/head shakes from a couple of the trainers while I was running because they know I like the treadmill. I get self conscious doing strength training because I’m not very strong and I probably look silly. Right now it’s super busy at the gym–especially today! Holy new year’s resolutions! I need to learn how to tune people out. It’s different from working out at the YMCA where it was usually either empty or filled with people 2-3x my age.

I’d say Day 1 has been pretty successful overall!

It’s super cold out. And windy. And not enough snow. Yuck.

Keeping Your Resolutions

As expected, Yahoo News has published an article on advice for sticking with your New Years Resolutions.   The first 2 points apply to our goals for 2012.  If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here are the basics:

For Losing weight:

– Recording what you eat

– Avoiding diet foods, drinking diet sodas actually increases waist size over time

– Increase water intake

For Fitness:

–  Commit to exercising for a month- take it 30 days at a time

– Find what makes you want to exercise (Dancing, exercise buddy, joining a group)

– Move more (march in place during commercials, get off a bus one stop early, etc)

~*~*~*~*~*~

Here is my plan for today:

– Recording exactly what I eat on MyFitnessPal app

– Doing the following exercise (as found on Pinterest)

 

Sounds do-able to me!

The Healthy Eating Plate

To get started with healthy eating, I feel like it would be good to have a general guide on the basics.  Below is an example of a “Healthy Eating Plate” found on the Harvard School of Public Health‘s website  (originally spotted on Pinterest of course!).

I have a great deal of work to do, particularly in the Veggies and healthy protein areas.  I do pretty well with not drinking sugary drinks and whole grains but I can definitely do more.  Where do you guys feel you need work?

The entire site is actually really helpful for nutrition tips.  Definitely check it out!

~*~*~*~*~*~

Also found on Pinterest is this simple weekly set up for workouts.  Basically, I think it is a good start if you want something fairly easy to begin with this month.  It will be good to expand on this as we start to get used to the routine of actually going to a gym and forcing ourselves to be active.

Tomorrow’s the day girls.  AND GO!

First Post and 5Ks!

So I was thinking as a way to kick off this blog, we should all post our personal goals for the year.

One of my goals this year is to run a 5k before my birthday, which as we all know is May 6 AKA best day of the year.

I found this website that has a few Chicago area based races taking place this year. I definitely plan on doing the Long Grove St Paddy’s 5K on March 11 and maybe the Chi Town 10K on April 1.

I thought it may be fun if you guys would like to join me! It’s $30 for the St Paddy’s race and $40 for the Chi Town race.

Also if you see any other races in the area, I’d be totally down! I figure if I have a set date to be kind of in shape by, it’d be more motivational than saying “I want to do something sometime this year maybe”.

Let me know what you think! I’ll post the rest of my goals later when I think of them. 🙂