Mitigating the damage...

This weekend was a study in excess.  I spent Friday at the Relay for Life, and there were lots of great foods available for purchase.  I enjoyed pizza, pulled pork, cookies, pastries, and some chips.  I also walked ten miles.  I figure it was a good trade-off, and I drank plenty of water.  We do the Relay for Life every year in memory of our friend Lisa, who was our manager at Bath & Body Works.  She passed away a little over three years ago, at the age of 30, from metastatic breast cancer.

I spent Saturday at work, and we ordered out for lunch.  I had an enormous and yummy taco salad.  And my sister was in town to celebrate Fathers' Day, so we had dinner at my parents'...steamers, YUMMY prime rib, mashed potatoes, and asparagus, all cooked by my dad, who is a great cook.  Weird that he had to cook his own Fathers' Day dinner, right?  It happens that way every year, so he's used to it by now.  We also had some cookies for dessert.  Sunday, I got back on track with my eating, for the most part, but I did enjoy both breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria at work, and it is so much harder to keep track of what I am eating that way.  All three days involved a lack of vegetables and fruits, which is something I have been doing much better on.

As often happens when I have a weekend like that, when I got on the scale yesterday, I was showing a weight gain!  The scale showed a four pound weight gain, but since I didn't eat 14,000 extra calories over the weekend, I was well aware that it wasn't true weight gain.  A weekend of excess often ends with a weight gain that is only temporary, as the body recovers from the treats that were given to it over the weekend.  I got right back on track yesterday with eating and spent 45 minutes on the elliptical and then went to yoga, and this morning I was back down to within 0.4 pounds of what I weighed on Friday morning.  And as much as I expected that to happen, I was really relieved!

I know that some people who are reading this are visiting my blog because my sister Alissa pointed you my way, and I want to thank you for stopping by!  I know that a lot of her readers are users of the P90X system, and my fitness pursuits certainly do not add up to that, but I hope that you enjoy hearing about my efforts.  Perhaps I will one day check out P90X as well, but for now, the gym and yoga are doing it for me!  I have set as a long-term goal on my "Bucket List" the running of a half marathon.  However, my goal is to do that by the time I am 40, and I turned 34 this year.  Therefore, I have some time to work on that.

My efforts in the coming weeks are going to be to get fully back up into the saddle.  I have once again hit a bit  of a plateau, in that I have been playing with the same two pounds for the past two weeks, but I know that some of that is because I have been a little lax in the eating department.  I also have ramped up my workouts considerably now that I have discovered my love of the elliptical, so I am expecting that my body is having to get used to the extra workouts.  I have plenty of great, fresh, clean, whole foods, a plan to hit the gym the four days each week that I am not working, and the resolve to get that scale heading back down.  I can't wait to celebrate the resuls!

I am thinking about adding some running back into my regimen in the next couple of weeks.  I have started exploring some of the programs available on the elliptical, and this week I have been doing an interval program on it that varies the intensity of the workout.  I noticed today that my heart rate was getting up to the same level as it was when I was jogging and that I was sustaining that heart rate, and while I was winded, I was able to do it.  Next week, I might hit the treadmill one day to see what kind of effect the elliptical workouts have had on my running ability.  As much as I am enjoying the elliptical, I do eventually want to work toward being a runner, so I will continue to test myself out on occasion to see what I can do.

Make it a great day, everyone!