Apologies for my absence. The kids and are on the road! I will figure out some mobile blogging ideas soon…

The packers are here! The packers are here!

I’m a basketcase.

Onward in the battle to banish the blubber!

Step 3: Taking it up a notch. What the huh?? Yeah, exactly.

Whatever you are already doing in terms of exercise — give it the Emeril treatment. BAM! If you’re walking, add one minute intervals of fast (and I mean, hip-swinging, arm-pumping, gasping for breath FAST) walking. If you’re already jogging, add one minute sprints. If you’re already doing squats, add some squat jumps. Pushups? (Good for you, by the way – for some reason, most women seem to believe that they cannot do pushups…) Try a decline pushup (feet up on a box or curb). See where I’m headed with this?

When you don’t have much time to exercise, you need to make the most of the time you DO devote to it. That means BIG movements that use LOTS of muscles because that will burn LOTS more calories. Don’t do a single arm bicep curl. Do a reverse lunge with a double bicep curl as you lower to the bottom of your lunge. Add an overhead press as you come up and switch legs, and you’re pretty much incorporating every muscle in your body. If you do it right, you’ll be out of breath and sweating for the duration of any 20 minute workout you do. If you’re out for a walk, add curb jumps, walking lunges, tricep dips… strength training is critical because it builds muscle, and muscle burns calories much more efficiently than fat. Ready? GO!

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.

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!