Yay!

Another three pounds gone -- that's 9 in 3 weeks and I'm going strong....

Back at the Y at Five this morning

Managed 14 minutes on the treadmill, ten without pain. Today I even added intervals. If you haven't ever worked out with intervals, you should do some research on it. Apparently the way that they work means you burn 30% more calories and it your metabolism is affected for 12 hours after the workout. Not to mention the extra endorphins!

Intervals just means that you get your heart rate up to a high point and then let it go back again. The way I do it is every three minutes I spend one of those minutes going at a difficult pace and the other recovering. ideally it should be the other way around -- and I'll get to that, but for now I'm pleased I'm even able to get on the treadmill.

How's everyone else doing?

Small Slow Victories

One of my big goals over the next few weeks is to get rid of my lower back pain. It comes and goes and is triggered by lack of exercise and weighing more. When I get to a certain weight it stops hurting. I'm not at that weight right now but I really want to get there before I fly to Seattle in 3 weeks. I'm about 12 pounds off, so I might not quite get there, but already I see improvements.

Because this was my specific goal, I decided to start tracking how long I could walk without pain. The first day back on the treadmill I walked for seven minutes and the whole entire 7 minutes were horribly painful. However, today I walked 13 minutes and eleven of those were pain free. This is only my 8th day back at the gym and I've only lost 5 pounds, but it is amazing how much progress I've made!

I'm excited -- and happy to see Brenda is joining me. Anyone else?

Back at it...

Well, here we go again. Back in September I started feeling icky and stopped going to the Y altogether and of course, by mid October, I had gained all but four of the pounds back that I had lost in the first part of 2011. I was angry with myself and thus ate even more....

But the first week of November I took a plane trip and walking in the airports nearly killed me because of back pain. I didn't have another flight scheduled til the end of January, so I set a modest goal of losing 20 pounds by then. I went back to the YMCA once that next week and could barely walk back to the van after I was done. The next day it was discovered that I was in "A-fib" and even though the doctor told me that I could exercise, it made me nervous.

I tried to cut out some bad eating habits, and by last MOnday had lost two. This past week I was back at the YMCA taking very small steps. I started at only 7 minutes on the treadmill and increased a minute a day. This week I'm trying to increase my speed a bit. I lost three more pounds!

I know how to lose weight. I've done it before. There are no miracles. My Lap Band Surgery was so easy to cheat it didn't help. The bottom line is that I have to eat less, eat the right things, and exercise. it pretty much sucks that that is the only way to lose weight for me... but it is.

So, here we go again. Anybody want to join me?