For 236 days now, I've been carefully paying attention to how much exercise I do and tracking my weight. I'm doing okay with it, but seem to have hit this wall that I hit from time to time-- about a week ago I hit the lowest weight I'd tracked since I started doing all this tracking and have been steadily shooting up since. It's like, no matter what I do, I suddenly can't seem to lose any more weight.
I know this is temporary, but I have to figure it out because it's pissing me off. I've still lost 20-24 lbs since I started tracking, which is not bad but I find that unless I can get a day with over 25,000 steps in it at least once in a week, I just don't seem to lose weight.
The funny thing is that I was doing this routinely when I had a full-time job but now that I'm back to working at home (long story: got fired a month ago. Hmm. Maybe not that long a story) and being self-employed I'm finding it harder to get as much exercise in.
I think it's because at the full-time job I made a point of doing serious walks every day: 15 minutes each at morning and afternoon break and at least a half hour at lunch-- I did this in pretty miserable weather, too-- all winter long.
Working from home, being on my own schedule, I don't grab those times the way I did at the full time job, and I need to push myself to do it. I now have the flexibility to do longer morning workouts, which I sometimes do, but not as often as I'd like (yesterday I had 20,000 steps before lunchtime, which was a nice change and something I hadn't done in a long time).
I also don't make as much time for it now because I don't feel like I need to make time, so I have to figure out how to get that right.
So I'm looking for thoughts, ideas, on self-discipline. That seems funny coming from me. When I didn't have the time to workout seriously, I made it, and did it very well and consistently. Now that I've got it, I'm not finding the discipline to do it as much as I need to.
Okay, so-- I also want to talk about what I do to work out and ask you guys what you do. I've started getting back into bicycling, which is a lot of fun, but my primary vehicle is still the treadmill, I used to bike a lot. When I lived in Providence, there was a 29 mile round trip bike path from Providence down to Bristol that I would do 2-3 times/week. Since I've picked up the bike again, I haven't gone more than ten miles on it, but I am working towards getting up there again.
In the meantime: walking: I can't just walk on the treadmill. I get bored. I get distracted. I need something to keep my attention. I usually hook my laptop up to the tv (I have an iPod app that lets me control my computer from the iPod) and watch tv shows or sometimes movies off of Netflix instant play or stuff I download off of iTunes.
The biggest things for me to keep me going are comedies and sci-fi/adventure, but I also like to start with music videos. For whatever reason, I think I need that energy of the music sometimes to let go. I have very tight muscles, and even warm-up stretches are painful, but if I start slow and do good music to start off, it helps me loosen up.
Here's a playlist which includes some of the videos that I'll watch as part of my warm-up routine:
I'll come back to follow up on comments in a bit-- I'm off to the treadmill as soon as I've posted this, but I want to make a personal plug. I've decided my photos are good enough to start selling seriously so I've produced a line of note cards, such as:
If you're interested in purchasing any cards or have any feedback about them, please visit chickadeecards.com. The site is still fairly new and I've done my best to create different versions intended to work on different browsers, but if anything works or doesn't work on it, I'm glad to take whatever feedback y'all have. I'm very new to the radical differences across different browsers so even if you're not interested in purchasing one, I'd love to hear if the page works for you (and if not, what system you're using).