Two Great Mysteries Solved by the Summer Cold Virus

I have now officially been sick, and I mean down and OUT sick, not Oh-is-it-Friday-Yet-I-Want-a-Day-Off-to-Lounge-on-the-Couch-Guilt-Free-Sick, for ten days. I'm not whining, exactly, but I need to express the intensity of this malevolent virus.

 The first sign was a sore throat, which soon matured from "My, that's irritating, no acidic drinks for me," to "Swallowing or speaking feels like gargling razor blades." Not bloody pleasant.

The next sign was body aches. Not the self aware, satisfying soreness of having had a great workout, but the from-your-marrow-outwards deep strength-obliterating foreboding that was accompanied by teeth-chattering chills that felt like frostbite in summer.

Predictably, these symptoms were followed by the stuffy head, nasal drip, and rattly lungs that are the music of mucus. Nose trumpeting, baritone guttural speech, and staccato coughing drumline are the music of this virus, to the point I swear when I spoke I sounded like Linda Blair, and the power of Christ apparently does NOT compel this virus away.

There's a headache too, but compared to the rest of the symptoms, that's just sprinkles on the suffering-sundae I am enduring. These symptoms have progressed and gone on for ten days. TEN DAYS.

Ten days of no training. Not even light cardio.
Ten days of eating what I can choke down because I can't really taste anything anyway, and feeling full means feeling sicker.
Ten days of being housebound, because going outside makes me woozy.

 Yes, I've seen a doctor, went in to Urgent Care after 7 days like the labels on all my over-the-counter-might-as-well-be-placebos-for-all-the-good-they're-doing meds said to do, and that wonderful waste of 3 hours gave me only codeine cough syrup (in whose face my cough not only ignores, but actively scoffs, mocks barkingly as it hacks out of my overtired throat) and the assertion that my virus will go away on its own in time. Thanks, modern medicine, you're doing GREAT. We can offer erectile potency to geriatric gentlemen, but we can't cure the common FREAKING cold.
Incidentally, this is the FIRST year I've gotten the flu shot, and have gotten nasty bugs much like this one three time since.

Point is, I'm TRYING to keep in shape, and have been champing at the bit to start on an official cutting plan with the intent of getting on a stage in the not too unimaginable future, but before I even get going, I have hit what is most definitely a setback. In this time, I have grown bored of binge-watching even the best Hulu has to offer. I've seen what feels like every B horror movie released in the past decade. I'm OVER the couch like I'm over my first boyfriend from umpteen (ew I'm old) years ago. . . and in the wee hours of the morning, when my body keeps me awake with coughing, my brain itself to solving life's great mysteries. I have, at long last, learned the answer to two of life's questions, hitherto unanswered by theory or science.

.
.
.

I know why cats stare at the walls for no apparent reason, sometimes yowling, sometimes just transfixed.

I also know what happens to ALL those socks that mysteriously leave their partner somewhere between having been purchased, and being worn more than twice.

There are invisible, wall-dwelling Sock Gremlins that are in cahoots with our housecats. Only cats can see them, and they can understand their language. The cats watch these gremlins, which steal our socks for initial use as hammocks, then as food for their young. Our beloved cuddly pets yowl and blink in gremlin semaphore to relay when the humans will next be gone, so the gremlin expeditions may take place, procuring their supply of single socks unnoticed by humans. In return for their assistance, the Sock Gremlins reward our cats by letting bugs into the home, for the cats' amusement and hunting practice.
These gremlins also, for reasons I have yet to discern, to take workout gloves both singly and in pairs, only to return them after a new pair of gloves has been purchased.

You're welcome. You now have the answer to two of life's little first-world mysteries. You no longer need to ponder these questions. Hopefully I'll soon return to some semblance of health, or my underworked brain will offer up more plausible suggestions as the answer to great ridiculous riddles, and you'll waste your own time reading them. As I like to offer at least some kind of advice in these ramblings, let me offer the following:

Avoid the sick. They're spreaders of this plague and must be avoided.
Wash your hands. Like, all the time. Carry purell if you think that'll help, but wash your hands too.
Cover your mouth, when coughing. Coughing into your elbow or shoulder is best, because then you won't spread germs with your hands as much as if you'd coughed directly into those.
Eat nutritious food. Drink lots of water. Take vitamins. Exercise.
Good luck.

Pumpkin Spice Pancakes Recipe

For some reason, any time I make a healthy pancake for my husband, it comes out round, perfect, and fluffy. Any time I make one for myself, it barely holds its shape, or sticks to the pan, or remains too dense. I can only attribute this failure to cooking when I'm hungry, and I don't take the time for my own food that I do for my husband's. Today I remedied this failure, and kept making smaller and smaller pancakes until they came out right. YAY pancake breakfast!

They were delicious, by the way. I'm gonna share my recipe here, because everyone deserves to enjoy light, healthy, delicious breakfasts all through fall, without turning to the sugar laden atrocities that emerge from Starbucks. (Maybe I'm just bitter they don't have a "skinny" pumpkin latte.)

The following recipe has approximately 290 calories (plus 10 for the chocolate sauce), and 24 grams of protein, and 25 grams of carbs.

Pumpkin Spice Protein Pancakes with Ginger Chocolate Sauce

1/2 cup canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling, just the pumpkin)
3 egg whites
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup water
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 - 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice (to taste)
Pinch ground clove
1/3 cup oatmeal (ground fine to flour texture)
1/2 Scoop Syntha6 Isolate vanilla protein powder
Pam cooking spray

1. Blend together dry ingredients
2. Blend together wet ingredients
3. Blend together wet and dry ingredients
4. Heat a nonstick (if you have one) pan, or a nonstick griddle, or generously coat a cooking pan with Pam.
5. Pour pancake batter, flip pancakes after they begin to bubble, remove from heat after each side has browned and crisped.

To make ginger chocolate sauce, combine:
2/3 cup water
3 packets stevia
1 tablespoon Hershey's unsweetened chocolate powder
Two dashes dried ground ginger

Allow to boil, then lower heat and continue to reduce liquid as you cook the pancakes. After pancakes are finished, pour chocolate sauce over pancakes and enjoy!

Halloween: Slutty ain't Sexy

An Open Letter to Females This Halloween,

      Pumpkin Spice Lattes, the smell of fireplaces starting up, and the inevitable billboards featuring a hooded skeleton have arrived. It’s the time of year when Halloween approaches, and we wonder if we’ve dieted enough to fit into that half-sized mini-costume we believe is what we should wear on a day which USUALLY winds up cold enough to want a sweater by the end of the night. You know the costume.

     You buy it at that Halloween Store that cropped up mid-September; it has a mini-dress, and a headpiece to identify you as the Sexy-Whatever. You may have gone all out and bought the matching thigh-high tights (which you already doubt will stay up right) and/or 6-inch let’s-be-honest-they’re-for-strippers heels to accompany the look. All of your friends coordinated which Sexy-Whatever they were going to be, so at least in YOUR group, there are no repeats. Maybe you did the same last year, and saw your costume repeated in at LEAST six other girls before the night was over. Remember that? Remember not being individual on the one night where you can really break out of the box (or the cheap plastic bag-costume?!) and be something unique?

     Did you watch Miley Cyrus this year, when her performance sparked a HUGE internet blow-up about her performance, her costume, and her choices? Where with one unanimous voice, the internet screamed, “Yeah, you CAN, but maybe you SHOULDN’T. Learn, little girl, the difference between “skanky” and “sexy”.

            There is a huge discrepancy between what you CAN wear, and maybe what you SHOULD wear. Before buying the $19.95 polyester costume that 800 other girls have already bought from that Halloween Store, think for a moment about two things.

One – was this what I would have wanted for myself when I was five? And Two – Will I even be comfortable in this? If your wide-eyed, still-believes-in-magic self at 5 would think you actually look like a lady bug, chances are you’re not in a skintight spotted mini-dress with hooker heels.  Let’s face it, walking or dancing in those heels is gonna hurt within 10 minutes. Let’s not pretend that’s comfortable.

     Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for corsets, thigh-highs, and stripper heels. It’s called the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and happens with just such costumes frequently around Halloween. Go. Dress up, enjoy. But maybe, after you do that, give some more thought to what you can be for Halloween, beyond a trying-to-hard near-stripper outfit.

       Frankly, it’s boring. The Mean Girls quote, “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it” is from 2004. 2004 is almost ten years ago. Ten years of stripper-bees and stripper-firemen is enough, don’t you think? 

     Let’s stop glorifying “looking like a total slut” and instead get creative. Get unique. Break out of your complacent comfort zone of plastic bag costume, and create something that could actually place in a contest. Learn a new makeup technique. Create a contest with your friends that excludes bag-buying. “Trick or Treat” shouldn’t refer to your outfit. Rebel this year, and be something your five-year-old-self would have been proud of. Take pictures that you’ll be proud to show to your own children. Be creative. Be unique. Exhibit your costume skills this year, not your ability to, like every other person, buy a bag for $19.95. I dare you.

Summer Restart!

Hmm, it says a lot that I haven't blogged since my 12 week program ended. That's probably because when it ended, I not only fell off the wagon, I crashed it hardcore into a 6 foot wall of rebound eating.
I took a couple week off training hard at the gym too, my mind and body had achieved a level of burnout I'd never previously known.

Burn out, for me, basically meant I didn't want to go to the gym. I didn't want to lift weights, I didn't want to do cardio. I wanted to eat junk and be indulgent and REST. So I did. And I advocate doing that, if you're the type of person who's able to say after a day or two, "OK, did that. Now it's time to restart, and get back on track." I am not, apparently, that readily able to self-motivate.

Over the past several weeks, I've recommitted several times to eating on-plan, and exercising as prescribed by my 12 week plan. I've made the gym habit these past two weeks, and I'm proud of that. Hitherto, I was being more active in other ways, horse back riding, and even going on a mini surf-trip to Southern CA, which I'll blog about more in the future.

So this is the blog post where I have already reached the conclusion that I need outside accountability and motivation to continue on my fitness journey, at this point in my life. Finding what motivates me, and keeps me going, is absolutely key to my ongoing success. I'm excited to continue my journey, and proud that I've learned more about myself even if doing so made a physical setback in the short run.

I have some new goals!

1. Consistently run 1.5 miles in 13 minutes and under. (Let's start w/twice this week!)
2. Learn some yoga moves, including (by the end of October) The Scorpion.
3. Be able to complete 40 push ups without stopping.
4. Cook one new, healthy recipe a week.

Finding Me!

Forgot to mention, I'm becoming find-able online.

Wanna hear my tweets? @Sarah4Fitness

Want more updates? I'm on Facebook! Sarah4Fitness

I have a website-in-progress, www.sweatnottears.com which mostly links to the above and here.

And of course, you can always message me here or write a response, and I'll try to reply as soon as I can. I'm a social creature, and I welcome feedback!

Headspace; Keeping it Straight

     On May 18, 2013 I completed my first intense 12 week diet and exercise program (that I actually stuck to the whole time!) and as a belated birthday celebration, my husband and I went to Carmel for three days. I thoroughly enjoyed myself the whole time, and that included eating whatever came in range, drinking a few cocktails and wine, (though I avoided beer) and giving my body the break from workouts it's been begging for since the end of April.

      Some disturbing things happened as my diet went bezerk. Rich food, sugar, and alcohol sapped my desire to do even the fun active things I'd planned on, like running on the beach, or going paddleboarding. Instead, I lounged around, cruised from one meal to the next, and snacked on actual candy as I got a magnificent sunburn by the pool. After a candy-binge, loaded with artificial colors, (TMI WARNING, BLUE TEXT AHEAD MAY BE TMI FOR SOME) my poop (EW!) turned blue and then GREEN for two days. Not natural. Not right. Disturbing. And a clear sign that humans are NOT made to consume that artificially colored grossness. Tastes great, but LOOK what happens to your body! That's foul, dude. Foul. I'm a bloated mess after my off-plan time, and it scares me. Incidentally, I won't be weighing myself until NEXT Saturday, to keep my head in a healthy space and not see such an increase that my brain goes, "F&*K it, might as well NOM."

     Tuesday I swam with dolphins, which was my birthday gift to myself. AMAZING experience, and I was pleased that squiggling into a wetsuit wasn't difficult at all. I was reassured that my photos IN said wetsuit looked shapely and not as cetacean-like as I'd felt all day. . . see awesome below!

    Fast forward to Wednesday, when I ate my on-plan breakfast, took my vitamins, and hit leg day HARD at the gym. Still, I decided to skip my customary cardio in favor of a long stretch session. Having "forgotten" my pre and post workout meals, I then ate whatever was handy as I grocery shopped. By now, I should remember NOT TO GROCERY SHOP WHEN HUNGRY. I then came home and ate a bag of Trader Joe's Spicy Mango. Then an old college friend stopped by and we went out to dinner, where I again made questionable choices that were higher in fat than they should have been.

     This is what I'm going to define as A Slippery Slope. Once I put a foot over the edge, even for a predetermined limited time of indulgence, it is SO easy to continue to slide back into bad habits, continuing to eat sugar, and now it feels like I'm starting all over again to rid my body of the cravings and inability to make the RIGHT choices. Why is it now so hard to get back on track? Where did my intense dedication and ability to stick 100% to my mealplan go? What happened to my BRAIN in those several days of break?

     I don't have the scientific evidence to be sure, but I think the moment my body realized it was being offered more food, it went into some kind of post-hibernation binge mode. My challenge, now, is to bring myself back on track, and follow what I'd originally planned, which was to maintain the diet I'd been set by my coach, and only have ONE or maybe TWO cheat meals a week, if social obligations made two easier than just the one. 

I did not plan to have a cheat meal a day.

I did not plan to go entirely off course.

I did NOT plan to skip workouts, or taper off cardio, or set myself back in that way. 

     Waking this morning with the determination born of a new day, I immediately drank 16oz of water, and ate my on-plan breakfast. YAY me. I then put on my gym clothes, so I'd have NO EXCUSE not to  hit the gym for my on-plan workout. YAY GYM. I then made a KILLER vegetable soup, loaded with spinach and other healthy veggies, so I'd have NO EXCUSE not to bang down my veggie servings for the remainder of the week. Getting creative with those meals, now that I have a little more leeway in what I consume, but keeping to my macros and calorie-allowances. I also got rid of the tempt-y foods in the house, that I would have snacked on if the urge hit and my brain wanted to make excuses. Just having that damn mango in the house is too much for my resistance. I can buy it the day OF a cheat meal, then toss the rest, but I CANNOT HAVE temptation in the house.

     Now I feel great! I have chicken breast ready to nom, I have my veggie soup all ready, and I have rekindled my motivation to be who I want to be, which is healthy and strong. Getting back on track for me is all about making it easier on myself, and taking it each step at a time, each meal at a time, each day at a time. If I find my motivation flagging again, I just need to remember how it felt physically after 4 days of indulgence. I don't need that. I don't need BLUE. I'm moving forward, not back, and I'm glad.

12 Week Progress

This is a long-awaited post, at least, I've waited 12 weeks to post it.

In those twelve weeks, I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot about fat loss, about things that work and do not work. I've learned and actually internalized the truth, that gimmicks are snake oil, and fat loss is achieved by what you do and do not put in your mouth, in combination with hard work at the gym. (But mostly what you do or do not put in your mouth!)

I have watched friends and family enjoying wine and cocktails at special events. I have danced sober at a wedding. I have sprinted up countless hills, wallowed in soreness as my hamstrings ached, and repeatedly been reduced to tears over my emotional addiction to some foods.

     I have also watched with pride and wonder as my jeans got baggier, and baggier. I have happily snuggled into jeans which were tight on my body in my fittest college days. I have watched my muscles emerging in the mirror as I do rows and deadlifts. I now deadlift more than my own weight.
I have giggled to myself as I curl more (and with better form, yo!) than the guy next to me at the gym. I have had my world ROCKED when I *effortlessly* did a complete pull up from hanging dead weight. . . and then did another two.

     What has happened in this 12 week transformation plan with my coach Robin Romero from Prissy Sassy Fitness? I have regained control over my own body, and have taken myself to a new level of fitness and health I have never hitherto achieved. I have already outlined the basics of how I did it in my previous posts, but this one is for pictures.

BEFORE:
February 24, 2013
Weight: 153.5 lbs
22.3% Body fat

AFTER:
May 18, 2013
Weight:
17.2% Body Fat

PICTURES
(Before on left, After on right)

The feelings of excitement and pride are so rewarding. I don't remember ever being this weight since junior high, and I know I am more muscular and stronger than I have ever been in my life, as is evidenced here, as I do pull ups.

That was a moment that rocked my world. From no pull ups in my life, to almost ten in one evening. 

This is not the end of my journey, just a really nice scenic viewpoint to pause, reflect, and reaffirm my commitment to a fit lifestyle.