Monthly Archives: March 2010

Recharge Your Fitness Goals: Get Swimsuit Ready With a New Fitness Routine

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jogger
Bathing suit season is around the corner and it’s time to shed that layer of cold-weather chub. My chub will continue to grow until this baby is born, but I will live vicariously through all you hot studs and studettes. Spring is the perfect time to start a new fitness routine or revamp your old one, so make Mama proud.

I’m pasty after a long winter of working out in a gym and I am dying to get outside into the sunshine. It’s time to plan some exercise that will allow me to enjoy the newly fabulous weather. Plus my fitness goals are different now that I’m preggo, so I need to shake things up.

Here are four steps we can take to create a new fitness habit:

1. Set your fitness goals. Is your goal to lose fat? Gain muscle? Improve your cardio or run a race? Burn off steam and have fun?

My goals are to get stronger and to gain more endurance. Carrying around extra weight means my back and legs get tired faster than they used to. I would like to have energy that takes me all the way to bedtime every day. As a bonus, my doctor told me that women who exercise during pregnancy gain less excess weight, have smaller babies and therefore tend to have fewer complications during delivery. Sweet.

Think about how fitness can improve your life to help form your aspirations, whether that means more confidence on the pool deck, feeling good in your shorts and knowing your lawn chair will survive another summer, or having more energy, better sleep and improved moods.

2. Choose your activities. Based on your goals, it’s time to choose your activities.

Fat Loss: If you want to lose fat, consider a combination of cardio and strength activities. Cardio combined with dieting can cause a loss of muscle tissue, which results in a slower metabolism. What does this mean? If you blow your diet for a night and hit up the all-you-can-eat-and-drink-margarita-and-nacho-madness happy hour, you’ll store more fat from your transgression than if you had some muscles to burn through the excess food.

Preserve muscle and boost your calorie-burning by adding some strengthening moves to your work-out. Lunges and squats are compound exercises, meaning they work many muscle groups at once for greater strength gains. Squats and lunges also work the largest muscles in your body (your booty!) making these exercises an efficient way to build muscle and amp your fat loss.

Gain Muscle: Obviously weight training is the way to go. Remember that to show off those muscles, you need to have a fairly low body-fat percentage. Many bodybuilders swear by high intensity interval training (HIIT) for their cardio. You can do this in a quick 20-minute cardio workout that alternates a heart-pumping, wind-sucking pace with a recovery pace.

Improve Your Cardio: If you’re bored by the treadmill, then find a race to train for and a running club to join at Running in the USA (apologies to my non-USA readers). If you can’t handle the high-impact of running, then swimming and water aerobics are a relaxing alternative. Search for a pool near you — anywhere in the world — using Swimmers Guide.

Blow off Steam and Have Fun: If you prefer to get your exercise in a social environment, then find a group with Meet Up. Find friends to hike or walk with. If you enjoy team sports, find groups that play kickball or softball. From bootcamp to badminton, Meet Up has you covered.

As for my own workout, I’ve hung up my running shoes for the foreseeable future as I’m soon to be a champion waddler. I’m taking up walking and swimming instead, and I’ll continue weight training.

3. Decide when you will exercise. How many days per week do you want to exercise? What time of day works best for you? This seems like a “duh” kind of step to add, but if you don’t look at your calendar and schedule an appointment with yourself to workout, there isn’t a huge likelihood of it happening. Deciding when signals true commitment.

An important note about this step: do not fall prey to an “all or nothing” attitude. If you look at your schedule and you can only comfortably commit to a day or two per week for now, then that’s great! It’s a day or two of exercise you weren’t getting before. Enjoy the activity that you get, and don’t let the guilties bug you.

A second important note about this step: most people favor either cardio or strength training, but it’s rare to find somebody who loves them both equally. If you find yourself thinking in terms of “should” do this or that, there is a possibility that you won’t do anything at all when it comes time to choking down the “should” part of your workout. Commit to what you love doing for as many days as you can realistically handle, and don’t look back. Get out there and do it.

4. Follow through. Each day, think ahead to what you will need and when. If I’m serious about taking a brisk walk on my lunch break, then I should put my sneakers by the door with my work bag so I don’t have an excuse to bail. Look at the weather. Is rain forecast? What alternate plans do you need to make? I might decide to walk the halls at work or the nearby mall. Or maybe I just want to suck it up and make sure I wear a rain jacket and bring an umbrella and take my walk outside anyway. Ask what you need to do to get it done, and don’t get tripped up by the unexpected.

Before you know it, you’ll be sucking in your nicely toned gut when that cutie walks by and you’ll be happy you can. Trust me, this comes from someone who is sucking-it-in impaired.

5 Ways to Stop Overeating at Night

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Nacho Chips

As a ravenous pregnant person, I spend more time than the average eater daydreaming about food. Dinner is my favorite meal of the day. It’s a time to relax and unwind, forget the worries of the workday and spend some quality time with the husband. Unfortunately, it’s also the time during the day that I love pigging out.

I’m aware of all those typical tricks and tips out there to prevent overeating: fill up on wholesome foods like protein and fiber, eat an apple before your meal, use a low-cal soup as a starter, yadda yadda yadda and snore.

Why Do You Overeat?
Overeating for me has very little to do with hunger. My issue is not solved by filling up on low-calorie foods, or paying attention to satiety or hunger cues. My issue, and I’m sure a lot of peoples’ overeating issues, have more to do with enjoying the act of eating and not wanting to stop — regardless of how one’s tummy feels. Now that I’m knocked up, I don’t have much of a satiety signal anyway.

In fact, I would venture a guess that for 90-something-percent of people out there, overeating is pretty much unrelated to hunger and means that you are eating to the point of OVER fullness; hunger is long gone, and yet you’re still packing it in. There are probably as many reasons for overeating as there are people, but a lot of people overeat because the food in front of them is delicious, or they had a bad day, or they are procrastinating getting up from the table and ending an enjoyable meal time.

Yeah, sure this can mean eating too fast and too much before satiety kicks in, but the point is, when one overeats, one is cramming their gullet with food they don’t need. If eating slower were the end-all-be-all, there’d be a lot fewer chubby people out there.

Notice What Happens When You Are Overeating
Have you ever noticed that when you have the urge to overeat, you are mentally consumed by food? Your mental focus keenly becomes about the act of eating. You might not even taste the food at this point, but your brain is telling you, “Keep eating, don’t let this moment of pleasure come to an end.”

But when you do pull yourself away and rinse your plate before putting it in the dishwasher, you often feel satisfied and like you don’t need any more food. As soon as you turn your focus away from the food at hand, it loses control over you and you’ve snapped out of the spell. But how do we consistently control the experience so that we are reminded that meal time is over?

How to Pleasantly End Meal Time
Instead of looking at the end of dinner like it’s the end of the best part of the night, let’s look at ways to distract ourselves from food when it’s time to stop eating in a fun way. What else could grab our attention and be an appealing diversion?

I’m ready to revisit some tricks that have worked for me in the past, along with a handful of new ideas.

1.    Cup of Tea. Choose an end-of-meal signal to place in front of you when you sit down to dinner. A cup of chamomile tea usually works for me, but I have to brew it before I sit down to dinner and actually have it cooling and ready to drink when I’m done with my meal. That way the signal to stop eating is right in front of me. I don’t need to tear myself away and walk into the kitchen for my tea, which could tempt me to go for seconds.

2.    Sweet Tooth. Do you enjoy something sweet at the end of the meal? What about a popsicle? If I put a frozen treat in front of me that I can eat when I’m done with dinner, the fact that the pop is going to melt if I linger too long over extra food is an incentive to move on to the sweet ending.

3.    Minty Fresh. There’s nothing like the taste of mint in your mouth to destroy the urge to stuff a Dorito in there. Keep a pack of mints or gum in front of you and pop one right after your last bite so that there’s no time for second thoughts. Or keep your toothbrush on the table, and head to the powder room for a vigorous tooth-brushing as soon as you put your fork down. Do it before you even clear the table.

4.    Get Outside. Now that our days are becoming longer and it might still actually be light out when I’m finished eating, a lovely evening stroll can help me break my focus on food. If walks aren’t your thing, what if you set up a comfy outdoor seating area for your balcony, patio or yard? Getting out there after dinner to watch the sunset or to enjoy a few moments of outdoor evening conversation could be a great new spring and summertime tradition.

5. Use a Timer and have a planned activity. I know, I’m a bit crazy with the timer, but if you have a plan for your evening activity or routine, then you can time your dinner. They say it takes 20 minutes for satiety to kick in, so that could be the perfect amount of time to enjoy your meal. At the end of 20 minutes, know what comes next: your favorite show, a bubblebath or a great novel perhaps.

If you like to overeat at dinner, what are some tips that have helped you stop eating in the past? Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

Create a Simple and Relaxing Morning Routine

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soothing cup of tea

I used to be chronically late. I say “used to be” because I am now learning to break that habit. This is one of those habits that’s always been a problem for me and I’ve tried many tricks over the years to overcome it. Setting my clocks fast has been a long-time favorite, but that only works until I do the math to figure out what time it actually is.

I’ve tried setting up a morning routine with start and end times for each activity, but my mistake was making the routine way too detailed. Since the schedule was too complicated for morning brain, I never learned to follow it.

Steve made a comment recently that made me laugh, but it was entirely true. I will paraphrase, but it went something like this,  “I’ll be in charge of teaching our child how to be on time because obviously you can’t.”

Born to Be Late
Steve’s comment brought to mind some childhood memories of mornings in my parents’ household: the frenzied pace we all kept from waking up to fighting each other for shower time, to scarfing down a home-cooked breakfast. Then at the sound of the school bus rounding the corner, we would run wildly out the door. The bus had to stop in front of our yard as we ran screaming from the house because we were never waiting patiently at the bus stop with the rest of the prompt neighborhood kids. I have wonderful parents, but punctual is not a word that comes to mind when I describe them.

Mike over at Refocuser says, “…some of us just weren’t born with an ability to gauge elapsed or remaining time.  We consistently think we have more time than we actually do…” He calls it “time denial,” a state when one is caught up in the moment rather than moving on to the next thing.

Although he says time denial happens to everyone sometimes, holy crap, that is me most of the time. Mike has some great tips so I won’t duplicate his list, but I have a couple to add. If you don’t struggle with punctuality, but you are looking for a way to make your mornings simple and stress-free, then this is also a good exercise for you.

1. Create a morning routine on paper. Look at it with a critical eye and see what you can move to the night before or the weekend. Can you prep your lunches on Sunday? Load the coffee pot the night before and set a timer? Pack your bag and set it by the door? Edit your list accordingly once you have these other activities moved off your morning agenda.

2. Add realistic times next to each item. Once you have your routine pared down to the bare essentials it should be a pretty short list, certainly fewer than 10 items. [People who already have children: feel free to laugh at me and offer guidance.] Add what time you need to start each activity to keep your morning on schedule.

My morning routine looks like this:

7:10  Empty the dishwasher while you cook breakfast.

7:20  Eat.

7:30  Clean up and load the dishwasher.

7:35  Shower.

7:45  Dress, make-up, hair.

8:15  To the automobile!

3. Adjust your routine so that it works for you, not so that you are working for it. I had to experiment with my routine to pare it down. After a few practice runs, I adjusted the timings so that they are reasonable and easier to achieve. I had to remind myself that this ritual isn’t called “The Morning How Fast Can You Get Ready Challenge.” Try to include an activity in your routine that makes you happy. For example, I like to enjoy a cup of coffee while I cook and eat breakfast. You might have to change your routine a few times until you’re comfortable and feel good about it.

4. Try using a timer. I used a timer and kept the list in front of me and crossed off items as I went while I learned what time I should be doing which item. Aside from the geeky satisfaction I get while checking items off a list, the beep of the timer would keep me moving towards the next task so I didn’t get trapped in time denial. Sometimes when I’m in the mood for a more involved breakfast or a longer shower I bust out the timer so that I can be flexible, but I don’t completely lose the plot and fall back into old habits.

Voila! After taking these steps, you should have a predictable and relaxing flow to your morning.

Now if I can just master my evening routine… I’m working on it.

Find Your Motivation

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gold stars

The Threat
Picture it: the holiday season, the year 2006. I had just moved from New York City to the DC suburbs to live with my boyfriend Steve six months prior. A dear friend of mine, a married person with a few rug rats, came to pick me up and bring me to a party.

As I climbed into her minivan, I was confronted with an alien landscape. An explosion of crayons, toys, baby books, sanitizing hand wipes, plus plenty of objects of childhood and parenting I couldn’t identify, covered every square inch of the ample interior of this family truckster.

I saw my future flash before my eyes. The scene presented itself as a very real threat. If I kept going the way I was going – never cleaning out my car, always feeling off-schedule, never getting into rituals and routines, this was going to happen to me, but way worse. Imagine the kids’ stuff, plus my own empty Red Bull cans, gym bag, work papers, and all the other random garbage I was collecting in my car jumbled in there together.

The Seed Is Planted
It was almost (but not really) cute as a single person to fly by the seat of my pants. I could see that this would be a hideous scene for me once I advanced down the road of my life towards marriage and parenthood. If I didn’t get my crap in order, I might as well make a carbon copy of that minivan, throw a whole lot more junk in there, and move into it.

Thus, the seed was planted. After Steve and I were engaged, that image popped into my head a few times. I told myself the jig is up. Time was ticking, and it was time to pull it together. Get up earlier. Start cooking. And I would, for periods of time, before lapsing into old habits. How would I make the change last?

The Window of Opportunity Gets Tiny
The answer is Urgency. Here I am, on the eve of parenthood. A bun in the oven and the minivan image looms large. I’m suddenly getting to work earlier, getting more done, cooking more often and becoming neater. The motivation is palpable.

What is it you want to change and where have you found your motivation? My motivation came fitfully, born of two separate events – riding in a minivan as a single person, combined with eventually getting pregnant years later. It just goes to show that motivation can drop out of the sky and smack you in the forehead when you least expect it, but you have to be looking for it.

I already knew that I wasn’t punctual. I knew my car was a mess. I knew I just plain didn’t have my act together, and that’s not to say that I do now – it just means that now I am working harder than ever to change.

Keep Looking
Unfortunately, a single motivation doesn’t last forever. Eventually old reminders get lost in the scenery, we find ourselves slipping and we need to find a new way to motivate ourselves. All this to say, keep your eyes peeled. You never know when your next bout of motivation could strike.

What do you want to change — and have you found your motivation? A mental image of minivan horror? A book? A web site? A friend who is a shining example of awesome? Or are you still looking? Let me know in the comments.