Saturday, September 15, 2007

The Health Account

"I weighed in at the gym yesterday, Aug. 13th at 166 pounds. I'll weigh in again in one month, around Sept. 15th. If I keep swimming everyday until then, and eat smaller portions, I should shed some pounds."

Okay. So I went back to the exact same scale today, on 9/15 and I weight 164.5! Now that is only a loss of 1.5 pounds but I am starting to feel some success in other areas as well. The past two weeks I've gotten up and to the gym by 6:30am where I have either swam or circuit trained or run on the elliptical for 30 minutes. So the 1.5 pounds I lost was definitely just in the last two weeks. Another big up is that I found a massage therapist who can make my heel feel better by rubbing my calf muscles really hard, like so hard I cry. He did this on Thursday and the next morning I got up and ran 2 miles and felt great. I guess all along my heel was really related to my calf muscles being all bound up. Now it will take some regular massage and I should be healed!

So I feel hopeful, energized and jazzed about my fitness right now. And I really think I can make it back into the 150s by Christmas. Which would be wonderful. After that I'll have the 140s in sight.

I'm also reading a really good book I got at the library about health called: "50 Simple Ways to Life a Longer Life." I like reading stuff like this about how to really make my life a healthy one. Some tips I've picked up are: eat a low-calorie diet, eat fish, drink tea (black, green, and white hot tea specifically), exercise and eat fruits and veggies, volunteer, and let go of stress.

One paragraph really go me jazzed as it listed all the benefits of regular exercise:
1) it strengthens the heart
2) reduces risk of heart attacks and strokes
3) lowers blood pressure
4) prevents arterial plaque buildup
5) strengthens bones
6) lessens your changes for osteoporosis
7) lessens chance for Type 2 diabetes
8) reduces your changes of getting breast, prostate, and colon cancer
9) fights stress and anxiety
10) lessens depression
11) gives you superior memory and thinking skills
12) lowers your risk for Alzheimer's disease
13) improves self-esteem
14) helps you get a good night's sleep
15) helps you maintain an ideal body weight

All these benefits and the "American College of Sports Medicine reports that" only "3 to 5 workouts weekly, of 30 to 60 minutes each, deliver the vast majority of health benefits." Even just walking that amount delivers some of the benefits above. And the more you put into it the more of the benefits you get.

One fitness nut for 90 years has been Jack La Lanne and he puts it this way, "Your health account is like your bank account. The more you put in, the more you can take out. The only way you can hurt the body is don't use it." listen to some of his inspiration videos...http://www.jacklalanne.com/multimed.html

Thanks Jack! I think I will invest in that account. It pays good dividends.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Hey Sis!

Great Blog Action, I love it Sis! Sounds like you are getting over the hump with your heel injury, or at least you have found a solution that is working....Is this the foot that you broke twice too? Or the other one....

I just got back from tennis a couple minutes ago. I played 3 hours worth, packing in 3 sets of doubles and 1 set of singles against John, one of my new tennis buds. He humbled me greatly...with a 1-6 score. He is very good. He ran me around a lot which is what I like, so it was a win for me to in that way :-)

I ran on Wednesday with Ned since the weather here has been steller, in the low 80s with a breeze. We did a 5k jog with 4:1s in just under 40 minutes. We really took our time. It was great. I felt great afterwards and have been stretching out my hammys the past couple of days that were a bit tight from the run...I am planning to run this distance on Mondays and Wednesdays, with tennis on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

I have (like you) been eating smaller portions with my meals and bringing in closer to 1200-1500 calories as apposed to 2000. I have those hunger pains again leading up to a meal that I almost forgot what they felt like. I will get on the scale this next week at Mom's to see my progress from 245.2 (my last weigh in)

Lots of love Sis, I wish you all the best....
Eddie