Author: callsignmommy2

The Five Pronged Approach, Step Two: Move it Around

Continuing on our journey towards fitness, lack of flab and increased mental fortitude (I’ll take one out of three, actually) — here’s number two: Move it Around!

Lots of new moms are hampered by our previous pre-mom notions of what a workout consisted of. We recall the days where we put on our workout clothes, drove to the gym, put in 45 minutes on the elliptical or treadmill and then spent another half hour in the weight room. The total evolution often took at least ninety minutes. And guess what. We don’t have ninety minutes anymore. I’m lucky if I can eek out a half hour to myself in the course of a normal day between work, the kids, the hubby, dinner, groceries, Dragon Tales and everything else!! I know I’m not alone on this. And it’s easy to look at all that and let the idea of exercise slip away to live in the land of “wouldn’t it be nice” right next door to long quiet baths and backrubs with no expectation of sex. However, there is a way to fit exercise into a schedule with no room for anything, but your mindset about what constitutes exercise must change a bit.

It doesn’t take ninety minutes — not all at once, at least. If you can find thirty minutes throughout the day, you’re doing pretty well. And I don’t mean that you have to change your clothes and get all sweaty for ten minutes and then change back, and do this three times a day. Just move more. Ideas:

1. When you walk to the the bathroom at the office/school/house, make the walk longer on purpose. Get up and move as often as possible, even if you’re just taking a longer route from your car to the drug store.
2. Stand up while doing common tasks — laundry, talking on the phone, watching TV. You burn more standing than you do sitting.
3. Fit strength training into empty minutes — a set up pushups can happen using the kitchen counter while you wait for the hot chocolate to heat up in the microwave. Standing squats don’t have to happen in a gym — you’ve got 30 seconds while you wait for your kid to put his shoes on to get out the door.
4. Commit to using the blocks of free time you have to getting healthier — if you do have a free half hour, go for a walk — it clears your mind, boosts your energy and your metabolism.
5. Enlist the kids. Instead of sitting in front of the TV right after school, make a habit of a family walk. So dinner is a half hour later, who cares?

Are you smelling what I’m selling? You’ve got to get creative. And you don’t have to get all Jane Fonda’d* up to make it happen.

* I use this reference only as a widely-recognized aerobicizing symbol. I recognize that she is also a filthy traitor.

Speaking the Truth

I am going to tell you the truth. It’s going to make me look bad, but it needs to be said because I think if I don’t say it, I might lose my freakin’ mind pretty darned soon. Sometimes I don’t enjoy being a mommy. Like, pretty often actually.

Now don’t get all high and mighty and suggest that I should’ve thought of that a long time ago, blah blah blah. I already tell myself that every day, but really — before you had kids could anyone tell you anything that measured up in the teesniest little bit to the crapstorm that actually IS having kids? No. Now keep in mind that I didn’t say — and I will never say — that I don’t like my kids. In fact, I love them and I would never ever give them back, even knowing everything that I know now. So quit eyeballing them. They’re MINE.

What I’m saying is that there are times, a lot of times, more times than I’d like to admit, that I am sitting in the midst of pillows flying, the baby screaming and Turbo shrieking and hurling himself off furniture, and I’m thinking, “I wish this would stop.” The times that I most often disenjoy (yes, it’s a word. I just made it up, so there.) being a mommy are the morning and the evening. The in between part (when I’m usually at work) is pretty okay. Does that make me a bad mommy?

In the mornings, Turbo hops out of bed promptly at the asscrack of dawn and refuses to give me three minutes to shower, put on makeup and get ready for work before he begins telling me all the things he wants. (Hot chocolate, a snack, a movie, not to go to school, not to get dressed, etc.) We have a bunny clock — the bunny is in bed, Turbo stays in bed; the bunny gets up, Turbo gets up! (seems so simple), and it’s set for 6:45am. THAT is what time the bunny gets up, my friends. But Turbo? No. Asscrack. And when I suggest that he goes back to bed until the bunny gets up? Mayhem. Screaming, pounding on walls. More screaming. It is horrible. And it’s not a great way for a non-morning person type to begin her day before she’s even had coffee. And this is most mornings.

In the evenings, the screaming usually begins on the way home from school/daycare. The boys poke each other and Turbo pretty much does everything he can to ensure that Lunchbox will begin screaming. Then we get to listen to it all the way home. Fun. That sets the mood just right for the rest of the night, doesn’t it? I honestly think that having a baby screaming in the backseat should take the same kind of traffic precedence that a wailing siren does. I should get to blow through stoplights and swerve through traffic just to get home as fast as possible to MAKE. IT. STOP. If a cop pulled me over while that was going on, I’m pretty sure he’d let me go just so he didn’t have to listen to it while he wrote the ticket. Anyway, that’s just the car ride home. Then there’s the wailing baby attached to my leg while I try to cook dinner while Turbo demands a snack and a drink within three seconds of opening the front door. He has also become frightfully accustomed to watching “Dragon Tales” or “Scooby Doo” or whatever his Netflix video of preference is at any given point in time AS SOON as he gets home. I know that I am a bad mommy for letting him watch TV right when he gets home instead of encouraging creative play, yada yada yada. I KNOW.

Then there’s dinner. Dinner time is a special kind of hell evidently reserved for people like me who are being paid back for having wonderful fun during our younger more independent days. There is food everywhere. No one of the testosterone-fueled variety will stay in his chair for more than three seconds. There is bribing involved. I am usually told at least once that whatever I’ve prepared “looks yukky” or that Turbo doesn’t like it (whether he’s tasted it or not). It’s just an absolute DELIGHT.

By bath time, The Major is usually home, and I’m pretty close to cooked. I often let him handle it and sometimes bedtime too because I fear that I might snap and send a child flying through the air.

And all of this leaves me with a mess to clean up, a headache, and a crapload of GUILT. For being a bad mommy. For not loving my kids enough. For having so little patience with them. For getting so aggravated. For… everything.

But there are those flashes of brilliance at our house, too. The times when a tiny face looks up at me with sheer love and little arms come up around my neck, and I know that I can try again tomorrow to be the mommy I want to be — the mommy they deserve. At those times I know that I’m doing okay somehow because even though I’m impatient and close to the edge, they aren’t. They’re always ready for a hug or a snuggle. They’re always ready for me to try again. Somehow, despite the bad mommying that I feel they get so often, they’re turning into sweet and loving little people, full of joy for life. As long as I don’t do anything to break that, I think we’ll do okay.

The Five Pronged Approach: Step 1 – Write it Down

The last post promised five steps to help us on our journey to fitness. (And inner peace, right?) Here’s step one. This is harder than it sounds: Write down everything you eat.

It doesn’t matter what method you use. I personally like to log food into one of a variety of software programs that can make me pretty charts and graphs to demonstrate how most of my meals are comprised of fat and sugar, thus demonstrating graphically why my pants no longer fit. You may not be such a technophile and might prefer the old pen and paper method. That’s fine, as long as you’re accurate. (A couple to try — www.dietorganizer.com, or www.bodymedia.com — this one is part of a “system” that I use — the BodyMedia GoWearFit. It’s the “body bug” that the contestants on The Biggest Loser wear, and it IS. AWESOME. But only if you’re a gadget geek and don’t mind wearing a somewhat unattractive device on your arm all the time. It clocks how many calories you burn based on like 3,000 calculations per minute. It counts steps, logs sleep time (versus time spent just laying down), and calculates your sleep efficiency. If you use the web based calorie logger, too, it can calculate the crucial “calories in versus calories out” equation, telling you how you’re doing. But expensive gadgets are not critical to success — as I have demonstrated in the past by being enormously unsuccessful despite having this gadget!)

The key is to track every calorie that you put in your mouth. Whether you lick the knife after you make your kids’ peanut butter sandwiches or just grab a few crumbs from the bottom of the doughnut box at the office — it counts. And you need to know what you’re taking in to understand what you need to put out to account for it. This is where most people fall woefully short by radically underestimating what they eat. Things that many people forget to log:

1. Drinks (creamer in your coffee? Milk in your tea?)
2. Condiments (ketchup, mayo, salad dressing?)
3. “non-meal” foods. One french fry here, a cookie or three cheerios there. It adds up. Log it.

Commit to logging your food for a week and see where you end up. If you aren’t sure how to account for calories, useful sites like www.calorieking.com can help. There is no one number that works for everyone, but for your average 145-165 pound woman, a healthy calorie range would be somewhere between 1800 and 2200 calories a day, depending on activity level. For me (at 5’9″ and 150), to drop fat, I need to keep calories below 1800 at my current activity level. We’ll talk more about activity in step 2 — Moving it Around.

Have questions about this? Feel free to ask!

The Five Pronged Approach

Even if you’re not battling a creeping waistline and struggling to tuck  your kidneys back into your pants after bending down, you might be looking for some health and fitness guidance from a personal trainer. No? Well, suck it up, I’m offering it anyway. Mostly, writing down my strategies for success in the fitness arena is a way for me to remind myself of what needs to be done. And if it benefits you too, then that’s gravy.

So over the next few days, I’ll offer a five pronged attack plan for getting on top of my eating and exercise, paving the way for a somewhat better looking Mommy at reunion time (end of June, peeps.)

The Five Pronged Plan:

1. Writing it Down
2. Moving it Around
3. Taking it up a Notch
4. Making it Mental
5. Keeping it Up (get your mind of out the gutter)

Not Winning

“No tiger blood in YOUR veins.”

I wrote recently about my renewed vigor in the fight against fat. Since then, I have demonstrated my dedication to this fight by baking excessively (must get rid of all the flour, sugar and chocolate chips that we can’t move, right??) and by trying to prove to Ben and Jerry’s that I am, indeed, their most loyal customer. The Major has not helped in my efforts (at least not the efforts to LOSE weight, but he’s a big help in my efforts to weigh more than I have since I was pregnant. Thanks, man.) Twice a day, like clockwork, he works his way around the kitchen, opening every drawer and cabinet, and then comes to me and asks, “Where are the treats?” He does it as soon as he gets home from work, and again after the kids go to bed. And when I’m fighting a fight — a friggin’ WAR — over here, I do NOT need to be reminded about TREATS all the time! Nor do I need to feel like it is my job to be in charge of these treats or to create them for YOU, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, the point was to tell on myself, I guess. I haven’t been doing the things I need to do if I actually don’t want to be flabby mom at my upcoming high school reunion. And it isn’t like I really care SO much what the people I knew in high school think of me (maybe lying just a teensy bit here…) but having an event to work towards has helped with these types of efforts in the past.
 
SO. It begins anew. TODAY. I have my gym bag with me at work. And since Turbo hates it when I pick him up early, I will go to the actual gym before I pick up the kids. (I used to work out in our garage, which was better equipped than many base gyms, but it’s been packed into a PODS container.) And I will NOT. EAT. CRAP. AAAGH!
 
Why is this so hard? I’m a friggin’ personal trainer, for crap’s sake! (Okay, not practicing, but certified!!) It isn’t like I am clueless about how people gain and lose fat!! (In case you ARE clueless, I can give you the basics. As The Major says, “It’s Physics, Homes.” Calories in, calories out. If the IN is bigger than the OUT, then you get bigger. If the IN is littler than the OUT, you get smaller. [Though there are still people who will say, “Oh, no, that doesn’t work for ME.” I will put my trainer hat on for one second to tell you, sure as shoeshine, that is absolute crap. YOU do not have a special metabolism designed by an alien race to DEFY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. If you did, you would be the subject of many scientific studies. But you don’t. And neither do I.])
 
So we start again today. Coming with me?