I knew I hadn’t been on here in awhile, but I hadn’t realized how long. Everytime I get involved with a new project it’s like I have tunnel-vision until I get it down. Unfortunately some projects take longer and more efforts than others. LOL.

It never ceases to amaze me how the medical community at just the drop of a hat, can turn everything you learned upside down. Of course everything we’ve learned is from the last time they turned things upside down! It’s sort of like nursing a baby. They have flip-flopped on that subject so many times, it’s no wonder new mothers don’t know which way to go.

The latest craze in exercise seems to be interval training. You can see how easily accepted it has been by just seeing how “Curves” took off. To me it makes a lot of sense, plus I’m into anything that purposes to work faster with less effort. Since coming across the “Couch to 5k” workout, I’ve been doing a little more research on some of this stuff. I’m reading an ebook right now from a doctor that came up with a workout that has the same basic idea. He says what the medical community is teaching about cardio is actually detrimental to our heart and lungs. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but a lot of doctors are proposing that we actually need 60 minutes now of cardio vs. 30 min. that it has advised for years. According to this doctor all that is doing is putting undo stress on our hearts and lungs. When he gives examples of people in perfectly good health keeling over after a long run, it makes his argument a little more plausible.

Another new finding is that our muscles actually need lactic acid. For so many years we were taught to work out under our “lactic threshold”. Now it turns out our muscles actually need to produce more lactic acid as we work out because our muscles use it for fuel. I don’t know how much of the Olympics you’ve been watching, but I like everyone else have been watching all the info coming out about Mark Phelps. One of the things I thought was interesting is they prick his earlobe to test for lactic acid after each one of his swims. They do that supposedly to tell how fatigued he is. What they’re having a hard time understanding is why his levels are lower than most athletes. It would make sense if his muscles are using the lactic acid in his muscle to fuel and energize him, that they would be depleted after a competition.

So, because it makes sense to me, because for me it seems to work fast, I will probably stick to this interval training for awhile. It also seems to provide for a longer “afterburn”. I know walking alone for me went rather slow and now that I’m heavier than I was before, I need to start out easy in whatever I do.

Brain Fitness

Somehow, starting Saturday morning while I was working at my computer, I got stuck on PBS television. The woman who was presenting caught my attention because she was talking about menopause and life after. For as intelligent as I feel I am when it comes to health and wellness issues, this is one area I know hardly anything about. Oh I know the typical stuff that every woman knows (myths and all), but I really don’t know too much about the physiology of it all. Having gone through menopause, I knew what worked for me, but the information I put to use on my own body was more accidental than scientific. She gave a lot of helpful information, a lot of warm fuzzies regarding menopause, and what I thought to be a little “way out there” stuff. One of the things that especially caught my attention was what she had to say about weightloss and exercise. It was all stuff I had sort of figured out for myself the hard way, but it was encouraging to have an authority figure back what I generally thought.

Right after her was Dr. Roizen, Oprah Winfrey’s new guru of medicine. As definitely “geeky” as this guy seems to be, I do feel like he truly loves medicine and has a lot of cutting edge info. He also has a pretty good sense of humor which makes the dry subject of health a little more enjoyable. He is really good about suggesting a lot of things can be fixed by diet and exercise. Since I don’t trust doctors at all when it comes to pills, I am glad to see this.

Between these two, I had learned a couple of good effects exercise has on us that I didn’t realize, and then came the icing on the cake. A brain doctor who believes you can “change your brain and change your life”. Most of the stuff I had ever heard was that as we age our brain cell productivity is pretty much non-existent. The best we could hope for was to just keep what we have from dieing out. According to him and the latest findings with all the new technology we have, growing our brain cells and exercising our brain is a never ending process.

I thought all I had to do to protect myself from Alzheimer’s and Dementia was to keep learning new things. I never realized what a profound effect physical exercise (or the lack there of) had on our brain activity. It was phenomenal to see the examples he had. This was enough to make me sit up and take notice. I am one of those that is always going to start my exercise program “tomorrow”.

On top of that I went shopping that nite and there in the middle at the back of my grocery store was a self help blood pressure machine. For some reason I had been wondering about my blood pressure the last few days and was actually looking for my BF’s home monitor, but hadn’t found it yet. I sat down and let the machine do it’s thing. My blood pressure has risen soooo much between the weight I’ve gained and the sedentary lifestyle that I’ve been leading for the last year, I took it twice because I couldn’t believe the numbers! My blood pressure was always around 110/64 which is excellent for my age. Now I’m walking around like a stroke waiting to happen.

Needless to say “tomorrow” has arrived and given me a swift kick in the butt. I started my exercise program Sat. nite while cooking dinner, with weight training. Yesterday I did the “couch to 5K” training in the morning, and weight training last nite. I can already feel the difference in my body. If I get to the point of needing new motivation, I’ll be looking for reruns on PBS or YouTube. LOL.

Have I told you I have practically a whole home gym set up in my kitchen made from all the exercise equipment I’ve gathered over the years? Have I told you about the great Pilates program I bought that I’ve never seen the videos for, or taken the bands out of their original wrappers? Of course all this stuff works just like they say it does on TV. Problem is you have to use it! Unfortunately there is always one reason or another for not using my exercise equipment.

1. I don’t have a routine to follow
2. I don’t have the room
3. I don’t have a VHS/DVD hooked up to the TV in the kitchen for routines

And the list of excuses goes on and on. I found the site “From Couch to 5k” which is a great way to start walking/jogging. Easy start for a sedentary person like me. I’ve done it twice since finding the site right after the AIDS WALK and I was so sore I couldn’t lift my feet. Haven’t been back since.

But now I think I’ve found my magic “exercise” bullet. I have known about Kettlebells for sometime now, but was not that impressed. They didn’t seem much better than “freeweights” and they can be pretty expensive. The other day while skipping thru channels, I fell upon an infomercial for Michelle Khai and “Kettlnetics“. It looks so fluid, fun and possible, I almost bit. “But wait, there’s more. We’ll pay your first pmt of $29.95 making all this available to you if you call right now (credit card in hand) for just 2 pmts. of $29.95 each.”

They almost had me. It looked like an exercise I might finally stick with and do. I caught myself just in time. Looking at the clips of her routine I got to thinking. I should be able to do that with my “freeweights” and try it out before spending one more dime on exercise stuff I don’t use. I still have to come up with some music (currently on CMT) and make up a routine, but I have the basics down I think. I’ll let you know if it works. God knows I need to do something to get this body going. Diet alone just isn’t cutting it!

UPDATE: I thought I would put up a picture of my weights so you can see why I thought I might be able to do this. They are really pretty easy to handle.

Am I the only one who feels 18 years old on the inside while being old on the outside? Or am I the only one dumb enough to act on it? LOL.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Aids walk was in San Francisco yesterday. My oldest daughter Tania has raised donations and walked in it for the last 11 yrs. Trust me, raising money for this still very controversial issue is not easy. (It’s not too late to donate https://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=268684&lis=1&kntae268684=631A181295BC445B81869726D87167E4&supId=809591 )

Every year she usually manages to get someone to walk with her. I forgot all about it being yesterday and when she called yesterday morning I could tell she was calling from the car, but I thought she was on her way to work. She mentioned the Aids Walk and that she was walking alone. I very stupidly say “Why didn’t you tell me? I tell you every year I would walk with you.”

Next thing I hear is “Great. I’m only in Salinas right now. I’ll swing by and pick you up!” I could not get out the excuses fast enough. Next thing I know she’s here.

Now, I have not been working in the bar or getting any other kind of exercise for over a year (which explains why my ass has grown to twice it’s normal size) and I think I am going to go walk this 10k’er. (Six miles). I must have either still been high from the couple of glasses of wine the night before or traveling under the terrible misconception that I was still in decent shape. LOL.

I made it 4 miles. I might have made it the whole six, but Tania led me to believe we only had  about a mile to go when the sideline cheerleaders hollared out there was still 2.2. That was it. My feet and legs rebelled and would not move another inch until there was a shuttlebus in sight. Thank God they have those for those of us who would otherwise have to be carried out of Golden Gate Park. By the time I was home for an hour, I could not hardly move. You would have thought I was 190. Talk about a reality check. I didn’t have any business doing a “k” anything!

So, in preparation for next year, today is kicking off my “couch to 5k exercise program”. It’s a great training program online for the San Jose 5k they have in October. As long as I got a kick start yesterday, I might as well keep it up. After all, at least I lived long enough to talk about it! (wasn’t expected. LOL)

It’s so nice this time of year when there are so many good things to choose from! I do my part to buy local (easy with Farmer’s Markets everywhere). I do my part to cut down on …

Sorry, I just got sidetracked by “The View”. I usually just ignore the TV as noise in the background, but this morning was a “Cheesecake Throwdown” where Joy baked her Aunt Rose’s (shouldn’t everyone have an Aunt Rose?) recipe, and Bobby from “The Next Great FoodNetwork Chef” baked his favorite recipe. Oh my gosh, only God himself knows how much I truly love cheesecake, so naturally it caught my attention.  I really need to come up with a good lowfat cheesecake recipe I can put under all these fresh blueberries and strawberries that are in season now!

Anyway, as I was saying. This season helps me wear so many different hats to be the “good girl” for a change. (A little old to be “girl” anything, but you get my drift). I’m environmentally more friendly as I cook more fresh food instead of processed and packaged. I’m a better “dieter” because I find it easier to find so many fresh fresh fruits and veggies to snack on instead of just grabbing something out of the cupboard. I’m doing more for my good health because it’s so easy and doesn’t require a lot of work.

How’s that for a summary of why summer foods are great?!

Just a few other quick tips as reminders.

Don’t forget to journal or track your food. I just read a new study out about how people who track the food they eat actually lose twice the weight of those who don’t just by doing that one thing. (I think we all know that if you’ve dieted for any length of time, but a reminder never hurts).

If you’re looking for motivation, just look around you. It’s easy to see what we don’t want to look like. Just kidding (partly). Really tho, take a look at the message boards on WeightWatchers.com, ediets.com, and SparkPeople.com. They are very encouraging and it does help to be in the middle of a group of people going thru the same struggles we do and know you have company.

That’s about it for the pep talk from me today. Just writing about this has almost given me enough motivation to exercise! LOL

I know I’m a spoiled brat because for the most part the weather here in California is just beautiful. This week we are going thru a hot spell…again. Trust me, for the most part fat old ladies and really hot weather are not a good combo. LOL. Thank goodness for the time of year when fresh fruit is plentiful. I’ve been cutting up honeydew, watermelon, blueberries and strawberries in kind of a fruit salad and keeping it in the fridge. I love it so much mixed in my yogurt in the morning, wrapped in fat free Cool Whip in the afternoon. I just keep forgetting to add the banana. I don’t want to do them in advance in the fruitsalad because they turn a little dark, then my kids won’t eat it. So now the bananas are turning black on the kitchen table and I’m looking for lowfat banana bread, etc. recipes.

During the hotspell, I do everything I have to do in the morning. I don’t like to cook and heat up the kitchen more in the evening, so this works out pretty good. This morning on Rachel Ray, there was a lady that made a pledge to cook in a crockpot every day for a year, so she now has 365 recipes for the crockpot. That is one way I am willing to cook in the heat since it doesn’t really throw any heat off.  If you love crockpots the way I do visit her at A Year of Crockpotting.

I also don’t see why in this weather, one cannot have a banana split for dinner. I use fatfree, no sugar added Dreyers vanilla ice cream, 2 scoops. On one of the scoops on top of the banana I use Light Hershey’s syrup, and fresh fruit, blended, on the other. It’s refreshing, not fattening, and hey, I get dessert when usually I only get dinner. LOL.

What I’ve been wanting to try is one of these “cold soups”, but I’m chicken. So if anybody has a recipe for one and you’ve made it and like it, please let me know. I think part of the reason I haven’t tried them is I don’t know what to expect. I can find a recipe, but no one is there to give me a little “inside info”.

I hope everyone’s having a great summer. I know for us, it’s definitely here.

I hope everybody had a pleasant 4th and didn’t have too much trouble sticking to whatever eating program you’re on. My new thing is I came upon a “subliminal programming” tape I’ve had for forever. It’s very interesting because it changes my self talk. I know this kind of thing works as years ago when my mother and I would go shopping, if I walked too close to a candy store or donut shop etc., she used to say “fat, fat, fat”.

It got where I would hear her in my head even when she was no where around. The problem is that thru the years, that voice has turned into barely a whisper. I turn the tape on in the kitchen while I’m cooking dinner. It lasts about 15 min. a side, and I can already tell it’s taking affect. When I walk into the bakery at the grocery store, I hear “I only like health giving foods. I eat only fruits, vegetables, lean meat, and whole grains. I abhor junk food. I turn away sugary and salty snacks.”  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now for a little fun item for today. The other day I was blogging and mentioned how what I needed was a pasta diet. Like I said “be careful what you wish for”. This is what I found in my email box this morning.

I just thought I might post this morning about little snippets of news regarding weightloss. I see and read a lot of stuff and thought I might share here. First on the agenda tho, is a nice blog I found for women over on blogger, thanks to Anita stopping by here. It’s called “Cool News For Women” and it’s very informative. Not only that, but there’s a lot of stuff concerning menopause, etc. that concerns women my age instead of the “teeny bopper” set. LOL.

Now, onto the rest of the stuff! There’s a lot of articles in the news lately about how gastric bypass cuts cancer risk. It seems after following 50 subjects for 2 yrs. there was a marked difference in health after only losing just 50% of the weight they had to lose. That’s the upside. The downside is…

It seems that’s not the only proceedure that improves health. The lapband we’re hearing so much about seems to possibly reverse, or at least get under control, Type II diabetes, plus lowering the risk of cancer, etc.

I’ll bet these guys are really happy to have some good news. I have often thought about these two as a way of losing “without having to work at it”. For the gastric bypass surgery, I’m not obese enough. The lapband I find intriguing until they give you all those little warnings about “slippage” at the end of the commercial. Of course the main time we really hear about this stuff is when someone died from it. Another case where I’m not sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease. LOL

They’re working on a new way to drug our obese children now. A new drug they’re working on called Metformin is supposed to help insulin resistant children. They say this new drug, along with a controlled diet, helped insulin resistant children lose weight. I have to tell you, based on the numbers I read, it wasn’t enough weight for me to drug my kid, and then doesn’t anyone who sticks to a controlled diet lose weight usually? Why don’t they just put these kids on a low glycemic index diet, which is made for insulin resistance? Sounds like more “Big Pharma” money to me.

This little jewel I love. They found that fat, sedentary women (of which I am one)who eat a “Big” breakfast which included milk, 3 ounces of lean meat, two slices of cheese, two whole grain servings, one fat serving and one ounce of milk chocolate or candy, lost 40lbs. after 8 months. The control group that ate low carb for 8 months lost only 9lbs. To me, the 9lbs. seems low, but if you figure in the “lose only a lb. or 2 a month for good health” theory, I guess it could be accurate. Either that or in that average, somebody cheated. LOL. This is really a pretty good article on how your body works, cravings, etc over on Forbes if you’d like to read it.

I think that’s enough for today. As usual, I’m starting to get a little longwinded. Just wanted to share.

Yesterday while watching “The View” (I don’t really watch. I have it on while I’m working) a guest of theirs was a guy who specializes in tea. It caught my attention because he was calling what he was talking about “The Tea Diet”. At first I thought “yeah, yeah”, but he started talking about teas and was actually saying some things I hadn’t known.

He says all tea is tea. It’s supposedly just a matter of processing what color it is. White tea is the least processed with the least caffeine, then green, etc.  That in itself was interesting to me, because I thought all those teas came from different plants.

Here’s the good part. He had flavored teas on the show that were named “Candy Bar” “Chocolate Chip Cookie” etc. The girls were going along behind him tasting them and actually gave good reactions. What he was saying was

1. Drink tea instead of coffee in the morning for added benefits (I’ve tried this one. Can’t do it).
2. When you have a craving for a candy bar or a cookie, reach for the flavored tea instead.

You’re getting the taste you’re craving without the calories plus the added benefit of all the antioxidants that are so good for you. I think this is a great idea, and I can see how this could work. I know I have switched to diet green tea with ginseng and it is sweet, which for me has taken some getting used to. I drink my tea and coffee both without any sweetener at all.

My problem with this would be my need to actually chew. They say that gum can cure that, but I’m not sure I would want to chew gum while I’m drinking a flavored tea. Sometimes I just feel the need to “pick”. I usually keep a portion of honeynut cheerios or something like that handy so I don’t chomp on chips or something like that.

I’m thinking I might try a couple of these teas and see just how good of an idea it is. Maybe if I’m getting the flavor, I won’t need to have something chewy. If it works, it could be very beneficial. I’ll have to let you know after my “experiment”.

I was going to write about something else today, but came across this in my inbox. I don’t know who wrote it, I wish I did. I would gladly give her credit for expressing so well how I feel.

When I was a child in the 1960s the bathing suit for the mature figure was boned, trussed and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered. They were built to hold back and uplift and they did a good job.

Today’s stretch fabrics are designed for the prepubescent girl with a figure carved from a potato chip.

The mature woman has a choice-she can either go up front to the maternity department and try on a floral suit with a skirt, coming away looking like a hippopotamus who escaped from Disney’s Fantasia or she can wander around every run of the mill department store trying to make a sensible choice from what amounts to a designer range of florescent rubber bands.

What choice did I have? I wandered around, made my sensible choice and entered the chamber of horrors known as the fitting room.

The first thing I noticed was the extraordinary tensile strength of the stretch material. The Lycra used in bathing costumes was developed, I believe, by NASA to launch small rockets from a slingshot, which give the added bonus that if you manage to actually lever yourself into one, you are protected from shark attacks as any shark taking a swipe at your passing midriff would immediately suffer whiplash. I fought my way into the bathing suit, but as I twanged the shoulder strap in place, I gasped in horror - my boobs had disappeared!

Eventually, I found one boob cowering under my left armpit. It took a while to find the other. At last I located it flattened beside my seventh rib.

The problem is that modern bathing suits have no bra cups. The mature woman is meant to wear her boobs spread across her chest like a speed bump. I realigned my speed bump and lurched toward the mirror to take a full view assessment.

The bathing suit fit all right, but unfortunately it only fit those bits of me willing to stay inside it. The rest of me oozed out rebelliously from top, bottom, and sides. I looked like a lump of play dough wearing undersized cling wrap.

As I tried to work out where all those extra bits had come from, the prepubescent sales girl popped her head through the curtain, ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, admiring the bathing suit.

I replied that I wasn’t so sure and asked what else she had to show me. I tried on a cream crinkled one that made me look like a lump of masking tape, and a floral two piece which gave the appearance of an over sized napkin in a serving ring.

I struggled into a pair of leopard skin bathers with ragged frills and came out looking like Tarzan’s Jane, pregnant with triplets and having a rough day.

I tried on a black number with a midriff and looked like a jellyfish in mourning.

I tried on a bright pink pair with such a high cut leg I thought I would have to wax my eyebrows to wear them.

Finally, I found a suit that fit…a two-piece affair with a shorts style bottom and a loose blouse-type top.

It was cheap, comfortable, and bulge-friendly, so I bought it. My ridiculous search had a successful outcome, I figured. When I got home, I found a label which read — ‘Material might become transparent in water.’

So, if you happen to be on the beach or near any other body of water this year and I’m there too I’ll be the one in cut off jeans and a t-shirt!