Goal Setting

In starting DDP yoga I have listened to Diamond Dallas Page's e-book, "Own Your Life" several times now. One of the biggest things he talks about to achieving ANY dream, but especially focusing on weight loss, is goal setting. This is nothing new to me. Setting goals is how you know you want to get stuff done. However, I hadn't thought about it until he put it like this. "You have to know where if you ever hope to get there." Goals are a roadmap that tell us how far we have to go, and show us how far we have come. Taking pictures and measurements along the way help remind us of how far we have come when we have had a bad day. Or realizing that for the first time in years (yes, years) I can touch the ground with my hands almost completely flat on the floor. Anyways, I figured I should write down my goals and put them out there. If I don't write them down then they aren't real. At least that is how it is working in my mind.

There is a small rule for my goals. They have to follow SMACKDOWN. Nope, not listening to a former wrestler at all. But here is what it stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Compatible
Keep it going - do it like a ritual
Do it
Own it
Write it down
NOW

Short Term Goals

1) Lose 30 pounds
2) Run a mile without walking
3) Eat 3 servings of fruits and veggies a day
4) Try a "meatless Monday"

Medium Term Goals

1) Lose 75 pounds
2) Be able to get into the first part of crow pose - my knees to my elbows and start balancing

3) Run a 5K without stopping to walk.

Long Term Goals

1) Goal weight of 160 pounds. I am being flexible with this and seeing where I am happy at.
2) Be able to do a supported headstand

I will be updating my goal list as I go. Revising/editing some goals. Adding new ones. Marking dates as they are completed.

I have decided to not put a timeline on these, especially the ones that pertain to weight loss goals. I stress myself out enough without adding a timeline in to it. And some months are great, others aren't. And I don't want to feel like if I have a bad month that I have screwed up my timeline and have failed. Basically I am wanting to set myself up to succeed, not fail.

Thanks for reading.

Time To Try Something New

Life and stress have been taking their toll on me. I am ashamed to say I have gained back all that I lost prior to my wedding plus some. I have been trying to find inspiration and my way in general the last few months. I have been feeling lost in general and not just in regards to my weight. Pretty much every day, if not several times per day, I would watch one particular YouTube video. It went viral a while back, and I loved it. I still find it so inspirational.

I keep telling myself that if Arthur could do it, I could. I have had so much trouble finding time to get to the gym. After taking my husband to work since we have one car, working, picking him up and dealing with traffic I was spent for the day. I didn't want to drive back across town to go to my preferred gym location and swim. The location I go to is the only one that has a pool. So something needed to change.

One night after watching Arthur's video I decided to start reading more about DDP Yoga. I like yoga anyways and something lower impact would be good for me. Well a few weeks back and bit the bullet. I bought one of the combo packs to try and see how it goes. Marshall has even said he is willing to give it a shot.

It has been a week and I have worked out every day so far. The workouts are awesome. I think the longest one is 40 minutes. Most are around 25-35 minutes. It is very easy for me to work that in to my day. And while I am not a wrestling fan and all that, I like DDP's style. Do whatever you can and just keep trying. You will get better and stronger and be able to do more. And I am!

I am getting into positions easier, holding them deeper, having better balance and getting my hear rate into the zone easier with each work out.

On the TeamDDP website they encourage you to take beginning photos just to show yourself how far you have come. I have taken them and at some point I may share them here. I don't know. I am ashamed and embarrassed to look at them. But it is motivation for me to make myself healthier.

Time to get a little Steampunky!!

For once I am writing a post that does not involve my weight loss battle/struggle! *gasp shock horror* I know it is shocking!

I just haven't felt like writing a whole lot lately. I am still doing what I can day to day on the weight thing, but life is happy and I don't feel like writing about a lot of it. However, since the goal of this blog was to...well...blog. I figured it was about time I started blogging about the geeky things that make me happy, like it says in the description of my blog.

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In March my husband and I are going to the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, Washington. To say that we are excited would be a gross understatement! We get to go someplace new, eat lots of awesome food, be nerds, dress up, and meet other nerdy people. Personally I am the most excited to meet Cary Elwes and get his autograph and hopefully a picture with him. If you don't know who that is, shame on you! But to make it easy, his most famous role is that of Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Yep. I'm giddy and geeking out.

If you want to see the line-up of what's going on, you can check it out here: http://www.emeraldcitycomicon.com/

Along with all of the typical meet-n-greets, vendor rooms, and panels is the opportunity to gawk at the people in costume. Well, we have decided to wear the steampunk costumes that we wore to a friend's birthday party to the ECCC. We are working on some upgrades and additions to our costumes. There will be new clothing items (corset for me, pants and vest for Marshall) and new accessories. I am going to be making jewelry, getting a parasol or fan, and possibly some opera glasses. Marshall is getting new weapons, goggles, and a walking stick.

Yesterday we went on a great hunt for things to use and modify for our purposes in updating the costumes. We hit the Habitat for Humanity Restore, Goodwill, and a couple other local thrift stores to find old Nerf guns. We are going to take them apart, spray paint them, and put them back together. I was also looking for things that could easily be turned into medals for Marshall to wear and jewelry for me. We got a pretty good haul yesterday.

I think we spent about $8 total on the guns! On eBay the Nerf guns go for $5 and up. The Maverick on the bottom right goes upwards of $10 each! We started using this tutorial on how to paint guns to look more Steampunk. We started trying to sand off the logos and other writing with sandpaper last night, but it was going to take forever. This morning we went to Harbor Freight and bought a rotary tool. I KNEW better, but I wanted to go cheap on the rotary tool, but you get what you pay for. We spent $9 on a wannabe Dremel and it sucked. If you put the least bit of pressure on the bit while it was on, it would stop. Oh well. We got through what we needed and we will buy a real Dremel tool later.

We ended up not using the white gun, or the tiny green up in the upper right. They were water pistols and the green one was exceptionally cheap. When the former owners donated the white gun, they didn't empty the water out. I will just say that there was a very impressive and disgusting experiment growing in that gun when I opened it up. EW!

 At one of the antique/flea markets in town I was lucky enough to find this lot. They are a bunch of old stop watches. A couple of them still work, well kind of. Most of the gears have been taken from some of them, but others are still ripe for me to tear apart if I want to. I think I will leave them mostly together though. It is hard to find these bigger watch pieces at a decent price. I am planning on using some of the faces to seal some gears and other items in resin. They will make excellent focal pieces for a pendant.

As for gears, I am not too worried about that. Marshall bought me a lot of 100g of watch parts on eBay and those arrived in the mail today too. Lots of little pieces and smaller watch faces. I was ecstatic last night.

We also scored some old medals, Captains' bars, and a locket. The medals are not quite what we are wanting (one is for volleyball and the other music), but the ribbons we plan on reusing and using as a pattern to make our own medals. Marshall is building his character's back story as a former western lawman and we thought the bars would work well with the story. As for the locket, I just love lockets. I always have. It will work with my costume. If it doesn't, I have another locket! ;)

 I will update as I can when we get pieces in or completed. I am so excited to be going!

Movin' on up

I really wish I had more hours in the day. I would love to have enough time to blog everyday along with everything else I have to do. I enjoy this a lot, but alas I will just have to do it when I can.

Today I started the second week of the Couch to 5K. This is the farthest I have made it so far, and I am very proud of myself. I was really nervous starting out today. I had to run for 90 seconds and walk 2 minutes for 6 cycles or so. I don't know why I was so nervous other than not knowing if I could do all the cycles. I am happy to say that I did!! I started walking a little early on some of them, but I am ok with that. I did around 1.5 miles in 30 minutes. I still have a ways to go, but I am getting there. I have noticed that I run slower in the evenings as opposed to first thing in the morning. Not a big surprise there though.

I also got my new running pants in the mail today too. I didn't like the shorts I had for working out. They work fine for lifting weights, but not so well for running. I got them from Kohl's and I love them. I didn't feel like they were chafing or anything. I am also pleased to have found some plus-size running capris that are also kinda cute.

I also got a t-shirt to wear while running. I will have to try and get a picture of it to show. It says "I run. I am slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter, but I run!"

So with that, I am off to bed. It wasn't a great run, but I am happy with how it went and how I am progressing.

Day 2 - plugging along

Today I decided to download one of the Couch to 5K apps for my phone. I have used one of the free ones before, but I didn't quite like it. After looking around at different ones I decided to actually buy the app from Active for their C25K training. It is the first app I have bought in YEARS! I am so cheap when it comes to free that I won't download something unless it is free. Unless the ads are really bad I can deal with it. I really liked the app though. Along with an annoying female voice telling me when to run it had a GPS in it. So it ended up being a bit more accurate than using the treadmill at the gym.

Today was so nice that after work Marshall and I did today's run outside at a park not far from the house. Today went a LOT better than Monday. My legs were sore and heavy from the workout on Monday, but not bad. My knee twinged a bit at the beginning too, but it got better. Mostly my body complains at me. But today I was able to run every time I needed to even if I wasn't running much faster than I walk. I was happy with how I did though. 1.52 miles in 30 minutes. I still have several minutes to shave off my time, but it is MUCH better than I thought it would be.

I love going to the park near our house. There's a pond that people either go fishing in or rent one of those peddle boats. With the weather being nice today there was a lot of people watching opportunities. I loved that because I could focus on something other than how much my legs hurt. The funniest one was a guy sitting on a bench swing playing his guitar. As we went past he asked us if we listen to a lot of Judas Priest. I told him no and kept going. I don't listen to a lot of music like Judas Priest for a variety of reasons. Mostly it just sounds like noise to my ears and not music. Anyways, he hollered to Marshall that he looks just like the lead singer. Marshall just looked at him and said, "I do NOT look like Rob Halford!" It just made me laugh.

We came home and put together our new grill. It was a wedding gift and I love it. It is a CharBroil infrared electric grill. It is a small one that fits on our balcony perfectly. Some grilled brats and mushrooms later and we had happy bellies!

I think I am going to go read a bit before bed. I have gotten sucked into a book I bought on the clearance table at Barnes and Noble. It is a novel called Angelology. It is really quite good. Hopefully tomorrow I will have the energy to actually think of taking some pictures to share

Couch to 5K - Will Run For Chocolate!

It has been a busy year for me so far. There has been a lot going on that has kept me busy, mainly with getting married 10 days ago. :)

Now that I have a ton of free time on my hands, I have been thinking about what I want to do. A coworker/friend of mine mentioned a 5K/15K that she will be running in October. It sounded like so much fun I decided I had to try it too! The Hot Chocolate Run 5K/15K in Denver! At the finish line you get fondue instead of beer. Sounds like my kind of race!

After work today Marshall and I stopped and got some running shoes. He needed shoes, and I needed to replace mine. Sadly mine haven't been used much since the Chick-Fil-A contest ended, but they are sure worn out. We went to a running store here in town called Altitude Running. I figured it would be best to go to the pros (since the shoes cost about the same no matter where you go) and get a proper fit. I have some particular issues with my feet and needed a good fitting again. I have horribly flat feet and tend to pronate pretty badly. I figured it couldn't hurt to have Marshall properly fitted either. I have never gone to a running store before because I am always kind of intimidated. The gal was awesome though. She wanted to know what we would be using them for, if we had a training plan, and a few other questions. She put us in some neutral shoes to try and then we walked on the treadmill for a bit. She recorded how we walked and analyzed our gaits to see what we needed. It was really awesome to get to see it. I had been buying the wrong shoes for years!!! It turns out my feet don't pronate as much as I thought! The shoes I had been buying were part of the cause to my twisted ankles in high school and college!

But we both got our shoes and went to the gym tonight to start running. I got us a membership to a SnapFitness. I quit my other gym a while back. My schedule was too weird while I was on nights to ever try and make it more than once a week, and it was getting really expensive too. As much as I love a pool, the SnapFitness has the basic equipment we need right now.

The first run about killed me. It was a warm up for 5 minutes, jog 60 seconds, walk 90 seconds, repeat the walking and jogging for a total of 20 minutes, and cool down for 5 minutes. I ended up walking the last 5 minutes of the alternating sets. I had pushed myself as far as I could tonight. I knew if I went further I was either going to break down and cry or get sick. So I chose to cut back and listen to my body. Overall I feel good....wheezy as all get out, but good.

I went a mile in 25 minutes, and I have a ways to go. I need to be able to do a 15 minute mile or less for the 5k. But I can do this. :)

I think I might talk to my Dr. if I need an inhaler though. I sound awful tonight.

So ready to call it quits tonight

Back in January I started on Ideal Protein. Both of my parents started last year (dad in September and mom in November) and had some good luck on it. One of my fiance's sisters has been on it too. So I figured what the hell, I'll give it a try. The last workout I had with Sandy I was telling her about it, and she encouraged me to look into it.

To date I have lost 30 pounds and 3 pant sizes. I'm thrilled overall.

Tonight I want to quit.

IP is a fairly restrictive diet. The only carbs I get are from the IP food packets, I eat a regular evening meal of protein and veggies, and I have to eat 4 cups of veggies a day. That's a lot of stinking veggies. But I am restricted on veggies. Some I can't have at all because of natural sugar content (squash, potatoes, etc.), and some are restricted to twice a week because of the natural sugar (sugar snap peas, eggplant, etc.).

Tonight I just want to say some nasty words and quit.

I have plateaued for about the past month...and it gets harder each week. Easier to cheat more here and there. Easier to not go for a walk. It's easier for me to give up than keep trying or try harder.

I feel better, but I don't like feeling so restricted but it is what I need to do to allow my body do what it needs to.

I'm down 3 pant sizes.

I want sweet potatoes

My face has gotten thinner to the point my glasses don't like to stay on.

I don't want to spend the money I am spending on my IP foods

My blood pressure is down.

I have every reason to keep going but tonight I just don't give a damn. Some day I will be able to eat what I want again. Yes, I still want cookies, cakes, and candies. I have a horrible sweet tooth and I am a chocoholic. But more than that I want a sandwich. I want CHEESE. I want a glass of milk. God I would kill for a glass of milk right now.