Crazy Day

Today has been a crazy kind of day for me. For some reason, I kept thinking all day that it was Wednesday......but it's only Tuesday. :-/

The day was a great day on the health and fitness front though :-) And I successfully stayed off Pinterest, lol! Well, I didn't Pin anything....so that still counts! (I just needed a little motivation to kick my butt in gear when I got home)

I did 20 minutes on the elliptical:

(Side note: not totally sure why the picture always turns out super dark)

Then after cardio, I did 3 sets of my current strength training circuit. It's a whole body workout that I partially got from a pre-made routine and partially made up on my own. It's currently hand written, so I'll try to get it into some sort of table format to be able to post.

Tonight was bath night for the little man so I got him all cleaned up and ready for bed, then did a short yoga sequence. I use an app on my iPad that has music and vocal instructions that makes it really nice. The routine I used today was about 14 minutes long.

I think I did pretty good eating healthy today too.
Breakfast: Cinnamon Life cereal
Morning snack: grapes and cheese
Lunch: leftover smoked pork and quinoa, and edamame
Afternoon snack: black cherry Greek yogurt with 2 packets of Splenda and a handful of Cheerios. Oh, and um...2 Hershey Kisses. :-) A girl's gotta have a chocolate fix okay?! Don't judge me..... :-)
Dinner: Lasagna (leftover from dinner Saturday!)

My hip flexor is doing better, it doesn't hurt hardly at all now except when I'm doing something that puts a strain on it. For example, in my strength circuit I'm supposed to do side lunges but those hurt the muscle so I go easy on those....gotta make sure I heal and don't injure myself worse than I already have!

How are your workouts going this week? Any new or exciting exercises you've tried?

Motivation Monday

I love Monday's.......(or not)!

But regardless of how I feel about Monday's in general, I do love one thing about Monday. It's a chance to start over and get motivated for a whole new week!

I frequently turn to Pinterest for fitness motivation and healthy ideas. I may or may not have gone Pinterest-crazy today trying to find as much motivation as I could for this week. (Hi my name is Erin and I'm a Pinterest-holic.....)

:-)

Feel free to pop over to my Erin's Fit Life board and follow me!!

I don't know about anyone else, but I was not feeling the whole working out thing today. In fact, I seriously considered skipping. I had all the standard arguments in my head....

• I ate really mostly healthy today so I could stand to skip and just be lazy.....
• I'll work out extra hard tomorrow.....
• I am SO tired.....
• It's only Monday so I'll have plenty of time to make up for it later in the week.....

.....and so on. After my Pinterest-perusing, I decided to get over it and just DO IT! So I went upstairs and got on the elliptical for 20 minutes (because by the time I got done arguing with myself, that's all the time I had....).

Since I wasted my time down to only 20 minutes, I pushed myself extra hard and burned 330 calories (or so)! I'm also going to do some yoga in a bit after little man goes to bed to loosen up and get some low key stretching.

Back to an earlier point (that I made while arguing with myself, :-) ), I did eat pretty well today.
Breakfast: Fiber One Nutty Clusters & Almonds - which is one of my favorite cereals right now.
Midmorning snack: Grapes and cheese.
Lunch: A Healthy Choice frozen meal and some Edamame - super yum!
Afternoon snack: 2 cookies (oops....).
Dinner: Pork that the hubby smoked yesterday for us, and Quinoa. It was my first time having Quinoa, so I was a little nervous. But it was really good! I'll be taking the leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

I think that my week has gotten off to a good start and I'm glad I gave in and exercised :-)

How has your week started? How do you find motivation to get going on another healthy week?

A Day of Rest

Is it really the end of the weekend again?!?!?! Every week I wonder how this day arrives so fast. Oh well, such is life...

Today has been a very low key day. I haven't done any planned exercise (so far), but I did go outside and walk around with the little man while he played and ran around like the wild thing he is :-). My hip flexor muscle was SO TIGHT after my run yesterday, so I soaked it last night in epsom salts and then used the heating pad. I also ended up taking some anti-inflammatories to help lessen the pain enough to get to sleep. Fortunately I woke up this morning and it feels decent. Still tight and hurting a little, but decent enough to be able to hang out around the house and get some stuff done.

I probably should get out and exercise in a bit since we'll be having birthday cake with the fam tonight.....maybe I'll do those 2 miles that I skipped yesterday.

 



I'm looking forward to a healthy week of eating well and exercising my butt off (Literally? Maybe.....hehehe). Leave me a comment here or on Facebook, and tell me what you plan on doing this week to be healthy!

4 miler

My goal for today's run was to go 6 miles. Turns out, I was shooting a bit too high :-). To explain, let me go back a little while.

About a month or two ago, I pulled my hip flexor muscle. I have had a lot of trouble recuperating it. I went almost 2 weeks with no running and then as soon as I ran again, it hurt again. I researched some ways to help and found lots of suggestions. I first bought some KT Tape, which worked pretty well for the short-term. This is what all the Olympic athletes were wearing, so I felt all professional. Plus it was bright pink and pretty :-P. I have also been using a heating pad on it that helps to loosen it up. I also started doing yoga to help stretch it out, which seems to have helped the most.

Once I felt like I was good and recovered, I started running again. I seemed to be able to do about 3 miles and then it felt like I was hitting a brick wall because the muscle would just tighten up so bad I could hardly move my leg forward!

So I've been taking it light, only running about once or twice a week since then. Before being sidelined, I had gotten up to 5.5 miles at a time. Since the injury, the most I've done at one time was 3.2 miles, and right around 2.75-3.0 miles is when my muscle starts getting really tight.

Considering the injury and the fact that since getting hurt I have gone no farther than 3.2 miles at once, I should have known that 6 miles was too much to shoot for.

Back to the present, once I got out and starting running today, I began to realize that 6 was going to be too much. I decided to just go and see how much farther than 3.2 miles I could get. At about 3.5 miles I knew I couldn't get much farther before I couldn't move my leg at all. So I headed back to the house, and made it home right at 4.0 miles.

Here's the stats from the run:

I feel like that is pretty good considering I had to stop a couple of times to stretch out my hip flexor, plus my warm up and cool down.

I'll probably get in some yoga time later to stretch out and help recuperate my muscles.

How are your weekend plans going? Are you dealing with any injuries?

Snack Day

Hi and Happy Friday! I don't know about you, but I am GLAD it is finally the weekend.

Today was a rough day in the fitness department. I did start out the day in a great way by doing some yoga first thing this morning. However, it was a Snack Day at work and folks brought in everything from donuts to chips to pizza! It was yummy.....and super duper bad for me!! I felt terrible after eating snacks all day and pizza for lunch. Luckily, I also was able to go for a walk on my lunch break with a friend so that helped me feel less like a cow :-)

Once I got home and got little man settled down, I did 30 minutes on the elliptical and then did a strength training circuit 3 times. I think I made up for some of the bad eating I did, but definitely not all of it.

I have learned my lesson though: next time indulge in just a little and maybe contribute something healthy like crackers and hummus so that there is something better for me, and others, to snack on. And only 1 piece of pizza....

Tomorrow should be a big day for me. I plan on trying to go for a mileage record run.....I'm shooting for 6 miles! The longest I have run before is 5.5 miles as one time so I know it'll be hard!! I recently got a Garmin running watch that has significantly helped to keep track of how I'm running, while I'm running. It is much more accurate than the run tracker app I was using on my phone. I'll post after my run so we can see how I did!!

What are your fitness plans for the weekend?

Hi Friends!!!!

I have been taking a break from blogging lately, but I'm back :-)

My computer was actually broken and I was procrastinating getting a new one. My new laptop arrived yesterday so here I am!!

Hope you guys have been well and healthy; I'm excited to be back to share my fitness journey with you.

My most recent posts stated that my main goal was to lose 30 lbs. So far this year I have lost 15!!

I'll post more details soon, just wanted to do a brief check in today and a quick update....so more to come really soon, I promise! :-)

Have a great night everyone!

2012 FitGoals - Weeks 1 & 2 Recap

We are wrapping up the second week of 2012, and the second week of my 2012 FitGoals. As promised in my last post, I wanted to give a brief recap of what I have done so far.

(source)

Eating:
Breakfast - I have replaced all breakfasts with a protein shake. So far, I have tried SlimFast and Special K shakes. I'll be doing a comparison of these later this week. I think that one morning last weekend I did break down and have some cereal, but overall I didn't do bad at all, and I was less hungry than I expected.

Lunch - Most lunches so far have either been Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice or leftovers. If whatever my chosen lunch may be is on the lower calorie side, I will add on one of those Lean Cuisine snack things. (My fave so far is the Broccoli-n-Cheese dip with pita bread. SO GOOD!)

Dinner - I have cooked the majority of nights so far, which by the way I am super proud of myself for doing :-P (I have never claimed to be a good cook....or even a cook at all...). I have tried to have a healthy protein with a (fairly) healthy carb, and added on a veggie.

Snacks - Snacks have consists of protein bars, cheese with sliced turkey, Greek yogurt, or a Lean Cuisine snack I talked about above just by itself.

Exercising:

My goal was to exercise 1 time in week 1, and 2 times in week 2. I did accomplish that.

On 1/2/12 I did my first run of the year. I ran 2.1 miles in 25:26 which equates to a 12:10 minute mile. I of course did some walking as well, but I definitely ran for at least 3/4 of it.

On 1/12/12 I did an elliptical workout. I used it for 30 minutes, burning 425 calories, 74.3 carbs and a distance of 1812.

On 1/15/12 I actually ended up doing 2 (!!) workouts! I went for a run earlier in the day, and then after realizing how badly I had eaten, I did an elliptical workout too. My run was 2.3 miles in 27:37 which is a 12:06 minute mile (improvement!). According to my favorite calorie burn calculator, I burned 250 calories doing this. :-) My elliptical workout was for 30 minutes, I burned 357 calories, 62.3 carbs with a distance of 1710. That's a total of 607 calories burned!! Yay!

Today was not a typical day, so I don't expect to burn that many calories on a normal day, and I definitely don't expect to get 2 workouts in on a normal day. However, it just so happened that I was able to do it today, so I took advantage of the opportunity.
That's how my first 2 weeks of FitGoals have gone. How have yours been? Have you achieved any big goals yet?