Category Archives: Be your own coach

Make it Fun

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So running is just about non existent these days with the heat at 95 degrees and the humidity high many of those days too. I am as I mentioned on several occasions, heat intolerant these days. I hate it, I hate struggling to breathe and I hate sweating standing still. So I know I need to keep moving and I do walk as much as I can which is great but recently the heat keeps me inside like a prisoner after morning. I do the stationary bike downstairs in the AC and some Les Mills stuff down there too. That’s good and movement is key so something is better than nothing but I have found a little trick that has made me ride that stationary bike more often than I would otherwise.

I have found that if I bring my headphones and my iPad down with me, I can pull up a video of a group riding in Italy or a spin class or even just a solo trip through Germany and it makes the stationary bike fun all of a sudden. I find that when I do the iPad thing, I ride harder and actually longer on many days that I do if I’m just watching a movie while I ride. I’ll tell you this, I am reluctant to turn up the resistance when watching a movie or TV and riding than I am if I put a cycle-related video on. There’s something about a guided tour of another country where they tell you how high to turn your resistance or how fast to pedal that changes my motivation. Not to mention my Husband’s office is down there so I can’t look like a wimp on the lowest resistance now can I? 😀   Now do you really need a Peloton if you’re armed with an iPad and a bike?  

It’s all in how you look at it that determines how you go about it. You know: Your attitude, not your aptitude determines your altitude. Whatever it takes these days to keep me active is what I’ll do. Weight just hangs around now that I’ve reached 50 and although I’m not bogusly obese, I feel like I can do better for myself. Go Me!

Be Your Own …

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I’m always thinking about what I didn’t do, didn’t eat, didn’t achieve.  Something that we need to remember when we get down on ourselves is that we may not have done everything we want but we certainly have done plenty!  Fitness is not only a choice, but it’s also a way of life.  It’s a journey that takes more than a month, more than four months to see the results we want.  There will be down days, bloated days, cheat days and additional and unexpected rest days but that is part of the journey.  Our job is to make it the best journey for ourselves and to try.  Try every day to do even just something.  Movement of some kind.  Some days we work hard and others we do some and call it a day.  That’s ok!  What we should not be doing is looking in the mirror in one bad moment and shaming ourselves.

We aren’t machines except in the fact that if you don’t oil a machine it won’t go.   As I found out nearly to a disastrous ending (but not), put too much oil in and it’s just as bad.  A story for another time.  If we don’t feed our bodies the right stuff in the right quantities, it won’t perform the way we want it to.  PERIOD!

Part of our journey is how we eat.  It’s part of the process of being a better person inside and out.  There are a million fad diets out there and it could take forever to read about all of them.  My suggestion is to do your homework and identify what you want out of your diet then pick a few and read about them then decide what works best for you.  It won’t be right the first time but you’ll tweak it until it is.  It’s all one big experiment and we are the guinea pigs! Don’t give up when at first you don’t succeed, get up and go again and again and again.  I’m tossing around the idea of cutting down on the meats and looking into adding some plant-based foods to my diet.  Not sure where it will lead but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and there’s some merit in the correlation that we as a society are as sickly and obese as we are because we consume too much sugar, too much meat and animal products that are chock full of chemicals and preservatives.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good cheeseburger, I’m just saying perhaps I can cut down and improve and see what happens.  Jury is out for now.