What I've Learned About...

I've never been a super-intense person about eating healthy or working out, but in the last year I've gotten more serious about it, and am feeling more energetic and healthy and loving it! So naturally, I thought I'd share just a few things I've discovered work for me:

1. Cut out most sugar. Especially sugary drinks. Seriously guys, this is a huge one. You all know I'm no scientist and therefore can't tell you how this all works, but I know that your body somehow stores sugar as fat, blah blah blah, liquid with sugar in it goes to fat stores faster, blah blah blah. Something like that. The point is, I've seen a noticeable difference since switching over to Splenda with some occasional natural sugars. Goodbye sugary coffees and sodas! Also candy.
2. Use all time for exercise. When I'm sitting on the BART I put my feet flat on the floor and squeeze my knees together the whole time, with 30 second rests between. The result is that my inner thighs have really toned up! When I'm sitting at my desk, I engage my lower abs and take turns lifting one leg slowly using only ab power, and then the other leg. 30 second rest in between sets of doing this, and I've got sore abs and visible results.
3. Do strength-training often! Muscle is the secret to your metabolism. If you're just doing cardio, you may keep your heart tuned up, but you won't necessarily keep your body looking fit. You need to do both. Muscle use burns fat, and the more you have, the more active your metabolism will be also!
4. Get plenty of sleep and help your body de-stress in some way (yoga is mine!). Stress and lack of sleep are common reasons for weight gain. Your body needs to recharge in order to function properly!
5. Vary your workouts. Don't do the same thing every day. I see a lot of overweight people on the elliptical at the gym, and I've been seeing them for over 2 years and they haven't changed a bit. My guess is they either are not eating healthy and having other good habits in their lives, or they don't understand that you can't just do cardio (see above) and you have to switch up your workouts. Intersperse strength-training (see above) to build up that muscle, and then use that muscle to burn off the fat and keep your heart pumping! Your body will get used to the workouts you do if you always do the same thing, and it will stop being effective.
6. Stretch! Stretching prevents injury, and keeps the lactic acid from settling in and causing aches. Aches keep me from wanting to work out, so I never stop dead in my tracks after a workout, but go straight to a long stretch session and sometimes roll out my muscles on a foam roller.
7. Exercise frequently. I exercise 7 days a week. Now, it's important that you give your body a rest and your muscles too, so I often do yoga workouts on the days that I need a "rest" or I go for a nice long walk. Those are low-impact, low intensity workouts that allow your body to recover while still keeping your muscles nice and warm.
8. Eat your protein! I always eat some kind of protein after a workout to make sure that it goes straight to my muscles to help repair them after using them. If you don't, you can risk muscle mass being eaten up by your body after a workout instead of fat.
9. Drink plenty of water! Water will help flush out harmful toxins from your body and keep you feeling hydrated and energetic.
10. Don't become obsessive. I used to track my calories and it caused me SO much anxiety. Some people weigh themselves to a fault. Whatever it is, don't worry about it! What's important is not how much you weigh but how healthy and fit and strong you are. Besides, your body weight can fluctuate so much each day anyway based on water retention, food, and muscle gain/loss.

My week usually follows this schedule:
Sunday - beachbody insanity plyometric workout
Monday - elliptical interval training for 45 minutes
Tuesday - yoga
Wednesday - pilates
Thursday - beachbody insanity plyometric workout
Friday - elliptical interval training for 45 minutes
Saturday - yoga and target area workouts (lower body/abs/etc.)

Since I can't run or swim, I have to be creative with my workouts, but I LOVE doing home workouts on downloadable videos. Today was a Pilates day, and after work I'm meeting up with some friends to walk The Dish in Palo Alto. Killing 2 birds with 1 stone! I know it seems like a lot of work to work out every day, but it's one of the things I've come to really look forward to each day! I feel fantastic afterwards, and my mood is much cheerier with all those endorphins pumping through me :)

Have any good tips or tricks that you've learned? Let me know! I'll leave you guys with this hilarious picture I found while browsing twitter:

May the odds be ever in your favor!

My friend Erin was featured as a guest-blogger recently, so I thought I'd just share the link here to her post about, what else, love triangles! For any of you who know how much I love/hate a certain series, you'll find this post to be AWESOME...but if you haven't read The Hunger Games, be warned that there are some major spoilers. As for Twilight, I couldn't care less if you read them or not, so I won't bother with the spoiler-warnings there.

Tonight we're hosting a Settler's night with some friends down here we've gotten to know. Nolan got 2 hours of sleep last night, so I'm either going to annihilate him, or feel so bad that he can't keep his eyes open that I make a truce with him. Let the trading begin! My challenge is to NOT eat the entire cheeseball that I'm making, or continuously stuff the Lu's cookies in my mouth, per usuale. Generally I do fine not eating the pie or cake or big cookies, because all those things LOOK like a lot of food. It's the dips and tiny cookies and little bite-size things that do me in slowly, and then by the end of the night I discover that the dip is almost gone and I ate 3/4 of it. Boo.

My brother was supposed to fly out to Israel on Saturday, but due to Hurricane Irene, his flight was of course cancelled and moved back a week. So he'll be down again NEXT weekend for me to take to the airport. Another sweet week of rafting, In N Out, and sweet California-ness? I'd take it!

We've been hesitantly and slowly trying out new foods in our new 'hood. Finding good places to eat was a concern, let me just tell you, because after living in San Francisco (read: city of ALL GOOD AND MIND-BLOWING FOOD) for 4 years, we've gotten a little spoiled. The first Thai place we went to in the Peninsula: amazing. The first Indian: disgusting (in fact, tasted JUST like the boxed Indian food we tried from Target, which was equally disgusting). But the second Indian we tried this weekend: fantastic! And Nolan tried yet another Indian place with a friend last night: fabulous! And we've had some pretty great American food too, so there's hope. Suggestions for interesting/tasty places?

Thankful ThFriday

A day late is better than never, right? I left my house at 6am yesterday to prepare for an all-day meeting, didn't leave the room the meeting was in until about 4pm, went home and relaxed for about an hour (which involved sitting at a fro-yo place near our house with Nolan and just shooting the breeze. probably the most relaxing thing I can think of!), and then hosted a hangout night for a bunch of girls from our small group that we go to on Sunday mornings. Some of the husbands went to the Dutch Goose for beers while we girls were chatting and snacking over wine at home, and they returned around 10 only to collect their wives and eat our cheesecake. Nolan also was on doctor duty, as one of the husbands came over with a deeply-sliced finger that needed stitches, so Nolan bandaged him up temporarily, and then actually stitched him up AFTER they got back from the Dutch Goose. Hah!

All this to say: forgive me for missing my thankful post on it's actual day. I don't think my thankfulness counts less on a Friday than a Thursday, anyway :)

So this week, among MANY MANY other things:
1. I'm thankful for relaxing times at home with Nolan. This is one way I really de-stress, and I think we've both needed some downtime after our busy days. We CANNOT WAIT until our week off! Which brings me to:
2. I'm thankful for only 5 more work days until our week off! I'm winding some projects down, and starting to prepare myself for vacation-mode. Which will hopefully REMAIN relaxing, and not resemble our old friend, the vacation/stress plot. Remember this?

I'm currently resisting the urge to bring my work computer with me on vacation.
3. I'm thankful for family. Some exciting things are happening that I'll mention later on. But also just generally, very grateful that we have such wonderful family around us that we genuinely enjoy spending time with.
4. I'm thankful that I get to sleep past 5:30am tomorrow. I know it's not THAT early, but I need my 8 hours! And that's just hard to do when you'd have to go to sleep every night at 9:30 to do so. I've been very sluggish and sleep-deprived this week.
5. I'm thankful for fun things! Tomorrow afternoon we're going to a 49'ers game with my parents, complete with field passes! Okay, to be honest I don't quite understand the allure of the field pass, but Nolan seemed to be excited about it, so that makes me excited!
6. I'm thankful for dinner tonight: just to be honest, dinner is one of my favourite times of day, because it means I'm (usually) home from work and ready to relax for a few hours. Friday night dinners are even better because they're often dinners out, and I know I can have wine and stay out late if I want, because I don't have to get up early the next day! Tonight's will be even better since my parents and little brother will be here with me! We're shipping him off to Israel for a semester on Saturday morning, so that's happening too, but I'm not thankful he's leaving us, so...that didn't make its own item on the list, hah!

Happy weekend to all!

Grimm

I saw an ad yesterday for a new tv show that starts in the Fall, called "Grimm", and it's basically a police procedural about how our police force deals with fairy tale characters who have escaped into our world and committed crimes. If you know how much I loved The Tenth Kingdom, you know that I read that article and immediately blocked my calendar for those nights it will be on. BOO YA. Note: there is also another Fairy Tale show starting that I MIGHT consider watching, but it sounded a little more hokey and has something to do with fairy tale characters living a double-life here in our world too, somewhere in new england. Yawn (but secretly I'll watch a couple episodes and then give you my verdict). I just also learned that it comes from the writers of "Lost", so we'll see.

On an unrelated note, but not less interesting: I read that a recent poll found that during movies when people get teary, women most commonly try to hide their crying by claiming they have something in their eye (yep), and men most commonly try to hide their crying by hiding under a blanket. TRUE STORY. Though when I put my analytical hat on, I'm not really sure how they would actually get a valid statistic on something like that. Aren't 75% of quoted statistics made up anyway? Pun intended.

So...I love technology (a dieu, Steve Jobs). Yesterday I decided I was going to treat myself to lunch instead of heating up what I brought from home, just because I've worked hard this week and needed a little reward. Besides the coffees I'm having on Wednesday and Thursday (but that's only because I have early, long meetings and need something to keep my hands busy). I digress; the lunch I got was from Specialty's, as it generally is. I ADORE their spicy thai peanut salad, which is indeed VERY spicy. I was in a meeting a month ago eating that salad, and right as it was my turn to say something, I feel 2 drops of sweat rolling down my forehead. YES. And everyone's looking at me and I know it would be SO GROSS to wipe the sweat from my forehead as I'm speaking. So I just let it sit there. Of course looking back, that actually may have been more disgusting. I literally sweat because of the spicy-factor. I think my family should be proud that I keep going back for more! ANYWAY (sorry), I usually order my salad online, because my credit card is stored on there, and so is my password and login, and my previous orders show up there on the home page with a link that says "reorder". So all I have to do is go to that homepage, click "reorder" and then walk downstairs 15 minutes later to get my salad, which is waiting on the counter with my name written on it (yes really, and YES REALLY it is in our basement, so I don't have to go outside - the peak of laziness). So the other day I saw that they added a text feature to the ordering, so I entered and saved my cell number, and BOOM:
They immediately texted me that my order was ready. Between that and the text alerts telling me my amazon package was just delivered to my house, I'm in love.

Thankful Thursday

2 weeks of reading War and Peace and I'm still slogging through it at only about 35-40% done. I cannot believe how slow this book is going, and I'm a fast reader! On the positive side, I've become ensnared by some of the plot lines, so I actually look forward to cracking it open on each BART ride and at the gym.

And I'm thankful for that, because I need me a good book like I need water. On to more gratefulness, yes?

1. I'm thankful for my job. I like coming in to work, I like my coworkers, and love what I do! And I've been praised and rewarded (I got a raise this week!) so that I feel appreciated and needed, and that's always a good thing.
2. I'm thankful for Nolan's day off today! I love it when he's home when I get home! And I love spending time with him <3
3. I'm thankful for coffee.
4. I'm thankful for my commute. Apparently the BART has been a rough ride for a lot of folks recently, impacted by protests, etc. I haven't been affected by this so far, and I'm still liking the commute alright.
5. I'm thankful for our new fridge. FINALLY. It's about the same size (boo) but it's a nice one, and most importantly: it works! Monday morning I opened our old crappy one that had broken already twice, and the door...fell off! And almost crushed my foot and then pinned me against the wall! THAT WAS IT. So I put in a "firm" call to our landlord with a couple demands. Heh.

I'm thankful for so many other things, and feeling particularly thankful this week to boot, but I also want to get on that "spending time with Nolan" thing! So happy weekend to all!

Thankful Thursday

Today is going to be a busy day. It's going to be a 12-hour workday, not to mention the hour commute on each end. Needless to say, there is no gym time scheduled in there, so I got up at 5am to do some yoga before I had to leave for work, and started my day out just right. The only downside to doing yoga at home is when Milo darts between my legs and bites my arms trying to get me to play, or when I switch postures and my elbow comes down on his little skull as he's running through my hands. Poor thing. I found him hiding under the bed this morning after I conked him with my elbow. But! It's his own fault! And he got some treats out of the ordeal, so overall it's a win for him.

So I thought I'd start the day off with my thankfulness, before I'm worn out from my commute and long day and can't remember what to be thankful about except for bed and cuddling with Nolan. Speaking of which:

1. I'm thankful for even just the few minutes a day I get with Nolan to catch up and just sit together. Sometimes that's all we really need (and all we get!), to feel connected until we have a longer amount of time together. I know it's only going to get harder, but that makes me appreciate the present more!
2. I'm thankful for my 5am yoga option. It's a nice way to start the day, and a good way to work out some stress before a busy day. Plus it's great to know I can fit in some sort of physical activity, even when I have a packed schedule on some days. It's no Beach Body Insanity workout, but it'll do!
3. I'm thankful for Milo, even though he's a twit sometimes. It's so nice to have a little friend following me around at night and in the mornings when Nolan isn't home.
4. I'm thankful for our upcoming vacation for a week in September! We're not going far - just the foothills, but a mini-summer sounds SO GOOD right now. Gives us something to look forward to.
5. I'm thankful for a home with carpet. It's so nice to get up and not be freezing cold. You think I'm insane for saying that in the summer, but you don't know San Francisco summers. We were at a bonfire at Ocean Beach near our old apartment on Sunday, and I had 3-4 layers on and was still freezing, even during the daytime. I don't miss that at all. Even the tile floor in our new bathroom is warm, because the vent is stealthily positioned under the sink, but right above the floor, so that when you stand in front of the sink to brush your teeth, there's lovely warm air rolling over your feet and warming the tiles.
6. I'm thankful for the weekend! Watching Harry Potter with a friend on Friday (in the comfort of our home so we don't have to endure screaming teens), getting together on Saturday with a much-missed friend who is visiting from DC, sleeping in, baking, church, finishing a scrapbook, working out...it's gonna be good.

Happy (almost) Weekend!

Journey

Today I travelled. I travelled in my car to the BART station, then on the BART to work, then at lunch I took BART to my eye appointment and back again, then after work I took the muni (asdkfkajsdf!!) to Stonestown Galleria to have the saleswoman at a store I went to yesterday, remove the security ink tag from a leather jacket I had bought (and which they had forgotten to remove - annoying!)...and then I got back on the Muni, took it to the BART station at Balboa Park, hopped on the train to the airport (because the Millbrae train was 12 minutes away), got off at San Bruno, hopped on the Millbrae train, rode that 1 stop to Millbrae, where I got in my car and drove to Safeway to get groceries, then got back in my car and drove home. All that on top of a super busy day. Like, the kind of busy in which I worked on Saturday in preparation for today. And the kind in which I thought to myself while driving to work this morning, "I wonder how I'll feel 10 hours from now when the workday is over". Needless to say, I'm now in my jammies, watching Milo lick out my salad bowl, and contemplating having a giant helping of frozen blueberries for dessert. I'm wiped.

Thankful Thursday

Once again, I surface once a week on Thursday, and even then, a feeble attempt. No wonder my blog traffic is failing. I also have a raging headache because I'm weaning myself back down to 1 cup of coffee/day. I was consistently having one in the afternoon each day, now that we have a k-cup machine at work, but I'm trying to stop and my body is rebelling. Speaking of rebelling: I just finished the Hunger Games this week, and still HIGHLY recommend them. Though I will say that the ending left me feeling a little bit stupefied. If you're up for a slightly gory, dystopian adventure novel, these books are for you!

My plan was to read The Help next, followed by Shadow of the Wind...but somehow this morning I found myself buried in War and Peace again, and this time it's sticking. Must be the kindle's wicked influence to make me adore everything I read on it. Also the fact that I didn't have The Help on my kindle yet, and needed something to read on the BART and at the gym...and War and Peace was there from when I downloaded it before. Huzzah!

On to the gratefulness:
1. I'm thankful for our home, and it's capability to host 20+ people for a MASSIVE game night/party. We discovered this last night, when we did just that. Between the heat and discovering Milo cowering outside by the recycle bin and the huge amount of food leftover and severe lack of space, it was EPIC! And probably not happening again for a long time.
2. I'm so very thankful that Nolan and I have 2 nights to catch our breaths. We counted backward last night and can't remember our last night of just relaxing.
3. I'm thankful we're getting a new fridge! Oh, didn't I mention? Ours broke AGAIN this past week and we had to get rid of our food again. Second time in a month. Of course, this isn't exactly surprising considering the fridge is older than we are. Hooray for a new one!
4. I'm thankful for presents! Nolan knows one of my love languages is gifts (the other main one is physical touch), and so I felt extra-loved when he took me out last weekend and had me pick out 2 super fancy, gorgeous watches!
5. I'm thankful for lots of free lunches at work during the summer. It's a fun treat, and makes my life easier when I don't have to worry about what to pack for lunch.
6. I'm thankful for the amazing, clean air where we live. I love waking up in the morning and smelling the fresh, damp air through our window. It's infinitely better than the city air, which alternates between smelling like urine mixed with kibble and vomit-laced sewers. I highly prefer my air scented with jasmine and honeysuckle and not wondering what diseases I'm sniffing.

...and that's gotta be the best way to end this post. Happy weekend!