Photos

I've stored up some good photos but lack the desire to write a legitimate post. I think I can manage captions though:

Ups and Downs

As the title of this post suggests, it's been a week of ups and downs for me. Monday was an especially tough day mentally. I had a headache all day and I was feeling anxious about the food I planned for the week. I had hoped that switching to a plant based diet would let me ease up on counting calories, but my body is so sensitive to food intake that I don't feel like it's possible right now. I gained some weight after my trip to NY when I wasn't paying as much attention to calories, and I can't let myself ease up on counting right now. I hate when I start to get obsessive about it. I can literally spend an hour on My Fitness Pal trying to get things just right. Unfortunately, the beginning of the week for me was one of those obsessive anxiety filled times. I thought I'd planned a decent menu, but I had trouble making it work.

Monday I had planned to make my own refried beans to put in a quesadilla (instead of cheese) with sauteed fajita style veggies. All day Monday I was worrying about the calories and carbs, and the stress of actually making the meal. I knew somewhere in my brain that things would be fine, and I didn't need to stress so much, but I couldn't stop myself. My headache lasted into my gym time, and it's not fun doing cardio with a headache but I pushed through it and put in just under 30 minutes on the arc trainer with 8 minutes total of sprinting. While I was there I decided to make a salad with the veggies and to saute the pinto beans in with them instead of making refried beans. Actually making a decision was a huge relief but the whole day left me in a funk.

Information Overload

It's interesting when things I read for personal interest intersect with my job. I read a blog post this morning about information overload, a concept discussed often in library circles, applied to researching information about health and fitness. It resonated with me because it related to work, but also because I've struggled with sorting through information during my own quest for finding the ideal plan for myself. I will often pull up two articles about fitness plans or healthy eating that have completely opposite advice. It's hard to know what's right, and there are times when I've felt totally overwhelmed by information to the point where it's almost paralyzing. I still struggle with wondering if I'm doing the right things to get myself in shape.

My schedule is going back to "normal" this week as our Fall semester classes start on Thursday. This is good because it lets me plan out my ideal workout week. Right now, I'm planning on:

Honesty

I've made a point in this blog to be honest, even when it makes me uncomfortable or I know it may make someone reading it uncomfortable. Life isn't always comfortable, so I suppose this makes sense. That being said, in this post I'm going to discuss my period. Anyone who feels weird about that can stop reading now!

I'm on birth control that allows me the joy of only having my period 4 times each year. I've always limited my physical activity during the week of my period (except in high school when sports teams dictated my activity schedule). I've been really good about exercising 5-6 times per week for awhile now, and I didn't want to break that pattern this week especially since I didn't work out like I wanted to in NY. I also knew I'd have to take yesterday off from exercise since I had to be at work from 7:30-6. Tuesday I went to the gym and did a short elliptical warm up followed by a really good, long strength session. Wednesday I really wanted to just go to the mountain. It's good cardio without having to run/simulate running on a machine. I drove to the mountain, got out of my car, and heard thunder followed by lightning in the distance.

Playing catch up

I don't know how to write this post without it becoming obnoxiously long! The remainder of my trip to NY was busy and I haven't had time since I got home Saturday afternoon to do any picture uploading or blogging. I'll start by suggesting a blog post on sedentary lifestyles and how to combat them. This is something I've been working on in my own life. I take a 15 minute walk every day at work, I try to do it about half way through my day. I also take stretch breaks if I haven't been moving a lot, and will do squats or standing cross crunches to get my blood flowing. Even though I exercise for 30-45 minutes five to six days a week, I still try to work movement into the rest of my time. Back to trip recap:

Traveling

I'm safely in NY, writing from my Mom's computer. Traveling is certainly a challenge for living a healthy lifestyle! I was so focused on lunch at the airport that I didn't think much about breakfast. I never know what you'll be able to bring through security, and in hindsight I should have made my usual almond butter toast into a sandwich and brought it with me. Instead I chose to make the best of what was in the little section of airport near my gate (6AM is too early for exploring, especially when you've been up since 4:30!). That ended up being a plain bagel. No one had peanut butter. I only ate half because I also wanted to eat banana and didn't want to overload on carbs. I had some almonds too...not very satisfying. I usually keep a pretty regular eating schedule, and the whole t hing got shifted yesterday. That really threw me off!

I snacked on one Biscoff cookie on the plane and some more almonds. I got to the Detroit airport around 9:30AM and had 3 hours until my next flight. I was at the end of the C gates and realized from the map that all my best food choices were at the end of the A gates. I did a lot of walking in the airport yesterday! Detroit's A terminal is the second longest in the world, it's 1 mile from end to end. I walked that 1 mile plus about 1 more mile getting to and from A. I'm glad I was able to get some light exercise in. I treated myself to half a protein bar and a soy latte when I got to the A terminal while I scoped my food choices. I went with Asian because I knew I was low on protein and could get tofu.