When it comes to exercise I seem to have only two speeds.  I’m either entirely lazy or I’m working out as hard as I can.  I have to admit, I don’t really like to exercise, I’ve never been a fan of sweat and, if I’m going to be breathing hard, I’d much prefer there was an orgasm at the end of the road.  Still, I know exercise is good for me, and I know that I need to get in better shape, and the best way to do that is to move my body.  So I force myself to work out.

The problem is that I can’t seem to find a happy medium when I work out.  Either I poke along and exercise half heartedly, or I go at full speed and pay for it the next day.  My body aches, I’m tired, and I don’t feel up to exercising again for a few days.  While I know that some fatigue and aches are good,  I have to wonder if what I’m doing to myself is beneficial.  I’m really not sure.

I also have an issue with finding time to exercise.  I think that’s why I push myself so hard when I do exercise, I’m trying to cram the most I can into the smallest amount of time.  For a while I contemplated exercising in the morning, but I really don’t want to get up.  So, I mostly try to fit exercise in after I get home from working a 10 1/2 to 11 hour day.  That doesn’t always work so well.  I’m tired, I’m hungry and I just want to relax, but I know I need to exercise.  So I hurry to work up a sweat and probably torture my body in ways I most likely shouldn’t. 

I know that exercise is good for me.  I know I should find things I like to do that involve moving my body and getting cardiovascular and muscular exercise.  I know that the best way for me to lose weight and be healthy is to start moving more and continue to move more.  I just have a hard time doing those things without either injuring myself in some way or finding the whole thing too much of a bore and deciding to play on the Internet instead.

I’ve thought of getting a Wii Fit or whatever they are.  I’ve tried exercise DVDs and videos.  I’ve worked at instituting a schedule of interesting hikes around my area.  If I had to take a guess, I would say that the answer to my dilemma is to make exercise a priority and schedule it into my day and then stick to the schedule.  If I’m exercising so regularly, I shouldn’t feel like I have to push myself so far.  My body should also be in better shape and so able to tolerate the exercise more easily.

It sounds like a plan.  Now we’ll just have to see if I can put it into practice.

Tonight I had popcorn for dinner. 

That may sound like an odd thing to eat while on a low-sodium diet, but I’ve found that there are several brands of popcorn that can be eaten on such a diet, if you read the labels carefully.  This particular popcorn happened to be Paul Newman’s low fat popcorn and it was great.  

Since I’ve started this new way of eating I’ve tried to be a lot more conscious of what goes into my mouth.  I watch fat and calories and sodium content, and I’m working to learn to eat in new ways.  I eat a lot more vegetables and fruit.  I eat a lot less cheese.  I cook a lot more meals for myself, and I’m trying a lot of new recipes.  Last week I roasted my first chicken, and it turned out pretty well, if a bit overdone. 

Most of the time I ignore or subdue the cravings I have for cheesy nachos and pizza and deep fried chicken strips.  I know those things are bad for my health and that the temporary pleasure I may have while I eat them will quickly be subdued by the guilt I’ll feel when I’m done.   I try to keep to a fairly strict diet, and I’m working to expand the list of foods that are on it.  Trying new recipes helps.  Reading labels on food packaging closely helps.  Sometimes, having popcorn for dinner helps.

One thing I’ve learned is that some cravings must be allowed.  I’d been craving popcorn all weekend, but couldn’t see where in my sodium allowance I’d have enough room for it.  So, I didn’t eat any.  Tonight, when I got home, I realized I’d had a low sodium lunch and a low sodium breakfast.  I could, if I wished, have popcorn for dinner and still have room in my sodium allowance to spare.  So, I indulged myself a little, and it was great.

Would I recommend popcorn, or whatever your particular treat of choice is, every night?  Of course not.  Once in a while, however, isn’t out of line.  If you deny yourself all the time, eventually you’ll explode and end up eating far more than is good for you or healthy.  This way, I indulged a craving without totally blowing my diet off the rails.  I got to enjoy myself without feeling guilty. 

I’ve got to say, popcorn never tasted so good.

I don’t like dieting.  I don’t much like exercise either, until after I’ve done it and then I don’t mind it so much.  Mostly, thinking about my weight depresses me.  Maybe that’s because my weight defined me for so long.  Maybe it is because I seem to have to fight for every pound I lose, but can gain two just by looking at a picture of chocolate cake. 

I am trying to have a new attitude about all this.  I bought a scale and told myself that monitoring my weight was simply the best way to know if my heart issues were acting up.  At first, when I was losing all the water weight, stepping on the scale in the morning was a joy.  Now, it’s torture.  If I’ve lost a pound, things are great.  If I’ve gained a pound, things are awful.  There is also the added fun of wondering if the weight gain is just a normal fluctuation in body weight or if it signals something more dire.  The first moments of my morning really don’t need to be that full of drama.

 The really sad thing is that I do want to be thin, I just want to be thin because someone waved a magic wand and made me that way.  Even though I will be the first to say that fad diets don’t work and that the only way to safely and effectively lose weight is to eat right and exercise daily, I want to add a secret caveat that says that such things don’t apply to me.  I want a weight loss fairy godmother, one who will fly in and make all the excess pounds disappear.

I know it doesn’t work that way.  I know being thinner would be much healthier for me.  I know all the right things to say and the right things to do.  I also am, for the most part, doing those things.  I’m exercising more.  I’m eating a lot better.  I’m much more aware of fat and calories and sodium.  I guess I’m just looking at where I am and how much I want to lose and seeing how far apart those two numbers seem. 

I suppose what I need to do is simply go day to day.  If I just focus on my behavior on a daily basis it is possible things won’t seem so overwhelming.  I’m hoping that’s what happens anyway.  There’s a lot of fighting the pounds ahead of me if I’m to get to where I want to be.  Hopefully taking it on day at a time will get me there in the end.

I’m the original meat and potatoes girl.  I like deep fried, cheesy dishes.  I could live on chicken strips and french fries.  My ideal breakfast is an omelet stuffed with cheese and smoked turkey.  I like food that has taste and texture and pop.  If it is also creamy and cheesy and deep fried, so much the better.

Since my heart issues, I’ve been working on eating better.  One of the things I need to do is reduce my sodium intake, which would on the surface seem pretty easy.  The problem is that there is more sodium in most foods than you might expect.  A low sodium diet is one that includes less than 2000 mg of sodium per day.  2000 mg sounds like a lot, until you realize that two slices of bread, depending on which bread you chose can have 250 and that before adding any fillings.

The other problem with a low sodium diet, or at least I’ve found it to be a problem so far, is that the food tastes far different than the food I really like.  I know that part of the problem may be that I’m still learning how to cook this way, and I just haven’t found the recipes that appeal to my particular tastes yet.  I also know that learning to eat this way is a journey and it will require retraining my tastes in some respects.  Let’s face it, except for a very occasional indulgence, pizza, chicken strips and potato chips have pretty much disappeared from my life.  I need to eat better to be healthier, and I want to be healthier.  I also want the food to taste good.

Over the next few months I am going to be testing a lot of recipes.  Hopefully I’ll find some I really like.  When I do, I’ll share them here.  I also will share my strategies for sticking to this diet.  I’m hoping, if I search hard enough, I’ll find recipes that both taste good and are good for me. 

I had a bit of a stomach virus today.  Nothing horrible enough to keep me home from work and nothing violent enough to make me not want to eat.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t hungry, it was just that everything I ate took the downtown express route (so to speak).  I spent a lot of time today in my office bathroom, and on one of the my trips I had the following unsettling thought.  Hey, I thought, I should have a great weigh in tomorrow after failing to keep any food in my stomach today.

I haven’t talked about it much, but I used to have rather an obsession with weight.  Throughout most of my teens I was told that I should weigh less than I did.  I do believe that my parents genuinely believed they were doing the right thing for me, but years of being on forced diets and watched like a hawk while I ate led to me having an obsession with how much I weighed.  Or rather, having an obsession with how to weigh less without having to stop eating or exercise. 

Once I grew up and went out on my own, I banished scales and diets and ate what I wanted.  Up until my recent heart problem, that’s pretty much how I lived.  I did try to eat better, I did try to exercise more, but I still weighed far more than I wanted to weigh, and I mostly tried to ignore that fact.  I didn’t want my weight to start defining me again.  I wanted to be more than the number I saw on the scale.

Since my heart issues, I now have a scale back in my home for the first time in years.  One of the reliable indicators of heart problems like mine is a large gain in weight in a short time.  Obviously you can feel the weight gain in your body after some time, but the earliest way to catch it is to weigh yourself every day, so I do that.  At first, when I was losing massive amounts of water weight doing the morning weigh in was fun.  Now, when I have to work for every ounce I lose, it isn’t as much fun.

One thing I do know is that I won’t be going back to the old patterns that have caused me problems in the past. I do want to get thinner and healthier.  I don’t want my self worth to be determined by a number on the scale.  I really don’t want to do damaging things to my body in the name of losing a pound.  So, I need to remember that this isn’t the past, and I’m not the same person, and that what I’m doing now I’m doing to live longer and be healthier, not because I think how much I weigh has bearing on how valuable I am as a person.  

It never fails.  I lose a few pounds and I suddenly feel like I’m a size two.  I know that isn’t the case.  I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, most of it water, and most of it as a result of getting my heart working normally again.  So, in reality, I have lost about 33 pounds but, also in reality, I’m down to the weight I was at before I got sick, which is still far too much for my height.  So, in my head, I know I’m still fat.  I haven’t lost 100 pounds overnight through some sort of benevolent magic. Still, in my heart, I’m preparing for my close up and waiting for heads to turn.

I know part of what I’m feeling right now is just the joy of being healthy.  At the worst of being ill, before I knew what was going on, all I knew is that my body and joints were swollen to bursting.  Bending my knee hurt.  I had no clothes that would fit me.  I couldn’t breathe and walking was an effort and I felt like a hotdog that had been stuffed into a casing that was much too small. 

Now I put my clothes on and they hang.  I can move with ease and walk without becoming breathless.  I’ve come to realize what a valuable thing being healthy is, and I won’t take it for granted again.  I’m going to do everything I can, including losing weight and exercising more consistently, so I can keep feeling like this.  Hospital stays and chronic illness don’t do it for me.  I want to feel this good for a long time to come.

So, I will keep doing what I’m doing, because I know that is working.  I am exercising more, and thinking about what I eat a lot more.  That is certainly leading me to make better choices and, as I see the benefits of those choices, it reinforces the need to keep making those kind of decisions.  I am finally learning to value myself and my health.  I’m also learning to see the beauty in who I am, both physically and mentally. 

And I have to say, that feels just fine!

In my last post I talked about the problem of dining out when you’re on a low sodium diet.  On a lot of restaurant menus, even the stuff that is labelled diet or healthy can contain a lot more sodium than is allowed.  Trying to make good choices that allow you to still enjoy your meal can be very difficult.  Even if the restaurant does give nutrition information, they may not include sodium counts.  If they do include sodium counts, they are often very high. 

Tonight I went out to dinner at Outback Steakhouse.  I was apprehensive, since this is a chain restaurant, and often a lot of the food at these restaurants is very high in sodium.  It is also often hard to tell what might be a good choice if you are on any kind of restricted diet.   Outback Steakhouse was a nice surprise.

As it turns out, their website features suggestions for people on a variety of restricted diets.  I was able to make selections that fit in with my Heart Healthy and Low Sodium meal plans.  Also, when I mentioned to the waitress that I was on a restricted diet, she immediately made suggestions about how my food should be prepared, and recommended things I might want to ask be left off my meal.   I felt very comfortable mentioning my restricted diet, and fairly comfortable that what I ate was at least reasonably within the bounds of what I should be eating.

When so many restaurants don’t seem to be getting the message, it is nice to see one that does, and one that expresses a willingness to accommodate people who may have special dietary needs.  After all, when you’re dealing with an illness, or need to watch what you eat, dining out can be a torment, not a treat.  Thanks to Outback Steakhouse, my meal tonight was enjoyable and guilt free, and was a very nice treat for me.

I must confess I don’t eat out a lot.  Even before my recent heart issues, I was trying to limit fat and salt in what I ate.  Cooking at home, using fresh ingredients, seemed to be the best way to do that.  

Since I’ve had my latest heart issues, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research.  All the weight from retaining all the fluid I did while my heart was working poorly is now gone.  It amounted to about 30 pounds when all was said and done.  I don’t want that fluid to come back and I don’t want to strain my heart.  One of the best ways to avoid either of those things is to make sure I monitor and limit the my sodium intake.  When I’m at home, cooking for myself, that’s relatively easy.  When I go out, however rarely that might be, easy is the last word that could be used to describe the experience.

One thing that is good is that many restaurants now provide nutrition information and a lot of that information includes sodium counts.  The bad news is that the sodium counts are uniformly high, in some cases 3 and 4 times the recommended daily allowance of sodium, and that’s just for one meal.  If you do eat out, you’ll probably fare better at a local, higher end restaurant, where things are individually prepared and fresh ingredients are used.  Where you’ll really run into trouble is the chain restaurants, when even their healthy meals may contain far too much sodium.

 If you are going to eat out, make sure you do as much research in advance as possible.  Keep in mind that ordering the healthy or Weight Watchers meals may not mean those meals are any less loaded with sodium.  If you research the place where you will dine before you go, hopefully you can zero in on entrees which will be relatively within your low sodium diet.  Also, ask for things to be prepared without salt, if possible.  I’m betting, if you explain why you’re asking, most restaurants will be happy to comply.

Well, it appears that the free weight loss train is gliding to a stop.  I knew, as I’ve said in previous posts that it would have to end some time.  I appears that time is now. 

I’m a little discouraged today, mostly because the thankfulness that I came through everything all right is starting to wear off a bit.  I’m still grateful that the consequences of my a-fib weren’t worse.  I’m incredibly lucky and I know that.  It is just that now I start the hard part, where I have to stay motivated to eat right and exercise.  Where, perhaps more importantly, I have to believe I can accomplish my goals.

When it comes to anything work related, or accomplishing things for other people, I’m a dynamo.  When it comes to accomplishing things that would make my life better, putting myself first, I guess, I’m don’t do so well.  I have so much emotion and feeling and past experience wrapped up in my weight, that it just seems too simple to say I have to get thin or I’m going to stay unhealthy.

I do want to be thin.  I can’t remember a time when I was thin, when I felt thin.  I guess my concern is that wanting isn’t the same as doing and I’ve been saying I wanted to be thin for more years than I can count.  Now that I’m facing a situation where it is vital that I get thinner, I guess my worry is more that somehow I’ll still think I’m not worth it, or that I won’t be able to find other coping mechanisms besides food.

I know being thin will make my life better.  I’ll certainly be healthier.  I think feeling better about my appearance will give me more self confidence and it will certainly make accomplishing things easier.  I guess I just need to have confidence that I will value myself enough to do what I need to do to get healthy and thin.   I think I also need to concentrate less on the process and more on the end result.  Being thinner certainly won’t solve all my problems, but it will make certain things better and that’s a good thing.