I gots a "pink" mood for my walk...and if you're in E2E, remember your movement goals....(another VLOG...much shorter this time)

I gots a "pink" mood for my walk...and if you're in E2E, remember your movement goals....(another VLOG...much shorter this time)

When I didn't Feel Like Exercising...This song got me UP ON MY FEET!!!

I played it over and over and just danced and did some isometrics to it!  Made me feel good.

They're gonna be in a local peace festival. I wanna go!!!!

Reasons I Want To Lose Weight: To Take Aikido Classes

Watch this video: Stephanie Yap Sensei
And this: Saito Morihiro Sensei in a demonstration

I always thought aikido was pretty cool (Steven Seagal notwithstanding), and I am a bit of a Japanophile (or Nipponphile or whatever), but I either was too fat or, back when I wasn't too fat, too poor.

Now I am TOO FAT and with CRAP KNEES and ANKLES from, yes, carrying the TOO FAT part of me around for decades.

But a very high quality aikido dojo is about 20 minutes from me (in good traffic) and I've got the yen. I saw their summer kids program and thought I'd love to see a similar one for adults. I mean, aikido, calligraphy, Japanese language classes--how ubercool is that? Or would that be uber kakkoii?

The video link above is to a brief clip on YouTube with the female sensei from that local dojo. (I so dig women who can take down a big guy!) The second video shows Saito Sensei, under whom the local sensei trained as a live-in apprentice (which is heavy-duty committed training). You can see other videos of the pretty darn impressive Morihiro Saito Sensei if you do a youtube search.

I did try some daiko/taiko (Japanese drumming) as some regular readers may remember as I mentioned it in a blog post from fall 2007. We did it again this past February.
I have heat intolerance issues, so we couldn't do the daiko class as regulars (though, man, that was some workout AND FUN!) The dojo was open-air-garagey and had old carpeting. My whack immune system impedes here. The day they have an a/c non-carpeted dojo for daiko (like wooden, non-allergenic floors), we'll sign up for it! Both times we went, such loud, happy, energetic fun. And the first time, I was sore for a week and thought my arms were gonna fall off. (They didn't). The second time--no problem other than some forearm and thumb soreness and one wee blister. But it was a shorter class than the marathon that was the first.

So, there it is. I wanna be slim enough to get weight off my lower extremities' joints and maybe heal enough to be able to do aikido side by side with hubby, who also would enjoy it. (He's done jiu jitsu).

What is one uber kakkoi reason you wanna lose weight? (No ordinary stuff like look good in clothes or fit into restaurant booths, something REALLY cool.)

Bad sleep, salt bender, and more depressing research on how women's bodies hold onto fat....

Well, I've been struggling to stay on a normal schedule, and my nite owl body is resisting like mad. I was so happy when I was up early and to bed early, but that only lasted like 2.5 weeks and then I started having sleep issues as my body wants to be a vampire again.

When I don't sleep well, I am hungrier and more prone to want those fast food baddies. Don't know why, but it's true. If I sleep well and deeply and at least 8 to 9 hours, I do better with my eating and exercising. When I sleep poorly, I crave salt and I crave sugar and I can barely get through a training session. Yesterday's Pilates class was a struggle punctuated by cramps and having to stop and start several times, whereas the ones when I was getting up earlier were hard, but doable. And I've been practically sucking on the salt shaker.

Disgusting.

So, today, I'm gonna go get some veggie and fruit smoothies and try to mitigate some of the damage from all the sodium. I feel bloated and I have dark circles under my eyes. Not nice.

Of course, to add insult to bloaty injury, I read this: Weighing the Evidence on Exercise.  This is a really interesting article, and I recommend any of you who are struggling with diet AND exercise to read it. It's not the happiest news for us ladies, though, because, as we already knew, when it comes to weight loss, biology favors the gents and royally screws us. The article highlights how, especially in women, exercise increases ghrelin which increases appetite. (I can attest to this. I'm always FAMISHED after a hard workout and hit Starbucks for a sugarfree latte posthaste.)

But it's not all grim news in the article, though it is still grim for those of use with BMIs higher than 25 (and if you're obese, yeah, your BMI is way over 25). (see page 2 of article).

If you plan to lose the weight and keep it off, you (and I) better learn to either love to exercise A LOT or just buck up and do the exercise, love it or hate it. Why? Cause exercise isn't just about calories out. It seems to do something to your very physiology:

Scientists are “not really sure yet” just how and why exercise is so important in maintaining weight loss in people, Braun says. But in animal experiments, exercise seems to remodel the metabolic pathways that determine how the body stores and utilizes food. For a study published last summer, scientists at the University of Colorado at Denver fattened a group of male rats. The animals already had an inbred propensity to gain weight and, thanks to a high-fat diet laid out for them, they fulfilled that genetic destiny. After 16 weeks of eating as much as they wanted and lolling around in their cages, all were rotund. The scientists then switched them to a calorie-controlled, low-fat diet. The animals shed weight, dropping an average of about 14 percent of their corpulence.

Afterward the animals were put on a weight-maintenance diet. At the same time, half of them were required to run on a treadmill for about 30 minutes most days. The other half remained sedentary. For eight weeks, the rats were kept at their lower weights in order to establish a new base-line weight.
Then the fun began. For the final eight weeks of the experiment, the rats were allowed to relapse, to eat as much food as they wanted. The rats that had not been running on the treadmill fell upon the food eagerly. Most regained the weight they lost and then some.

But the exercising rats metabolized calories differently. They tended to burn fat immediately after their meals, while the sedentary rats’ bodies preferentially burned carbohydrates and sent the fat off to be stored in fat cells. The running rats’ bodies, meanwhile, also produced signals suggesting that they were satiated and didn’t need more kibble. Although the treadmill exercisers regained some weight, their relapses were not as extreme. Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less.

As someone whose fat is primarily that dangerous abdominal adiposity, this is actually something that offers a bit of comfort. I may really hate aerobic exercising (though I enjoy Pilates), but the fact that it might have an effect on my worst fat issue--that deadly abdominal fat--is something of a spur.

I'm gonna go check Netflix and On Demand for doable aerobic exercise for big me. I hate to sweat, but I hate this huge, deadly belly more.

It's not good news. Good news would be, "NewsFlash: We've found the magic bullet and you can all be trim with one daily pill with no bad side effects that also happens to make you look younger." :D

Until then--we know, we know--eat wholesome food and move, move, move.

So, let me finish watching THE DOCTORS (they have the Eat This, Not That dude on today, and he's kinda cool), finish my second cup of java, and then do a shopping list for debloating and defatting this week.

Later...from the bloated Princess...


ETA: Well, I found this on sleep and weight loss in a Washington Post article:

What do we know? Scientists have an idea for how lack of sleep might contribute to obesity. In two studies, lack of sleep was found to influence two hormones that help control hunger. Leptin, made by fat tissue, tells your brain when it's time to stop eating, while grhelin, which is made in the stomach, signals that you ought to eat more. Both studies -- one involving 11 subjects, the other more than a thousand -- found that restricted sleep led to suppression of leptin and increased grhelin activity, two states that could make you want to eat more.

At least one doctor is willing to take the leap and recommend that people who want to lose weight should get a handle on their sleep. Michael Aziz, author of "The Perfect 10 Diet" (Sourcebooks, 2010), writes, "Getting enough sleep is the cheapest and simplest advice I can give for losing weight."

A New Week Battling an Old Problem

Well, something is off in my body.

I'm glad I have an appointment with the endocrinologist in 3 weeks, just in case it's that. But who knows. When one has multiple chronic issues, it can be an assortment of causes for fatigue.

And I've been really fatigued. I've been sleeping between 12 and 14 hours. I haven't washed my hair in 8 days cause blow-drying it feels beyond me. Always a sign that, whether a temporary hitch in the chemicals or time for a reassessment of meds, something's up. Or down. I normally don't have dark circles under my eyes (ie, no more than normal coloration), but I look ashen and my circles are purpley-grey. I have no pep.

I feel like it's work to keep myself upright.

I had promised my trainer I'd do at least 10 minutes of aerobic activity per week. I totally never got into it last week. I decided to push myself through the 10 minutes before today's session. I put on my heart monitor (to make sure I was in range) and I just marched/walked in place until I could keep my heart in the 130's bpm.

It's pathetic that it took so much self-talk and mental prep to do TEN FRICKEN MINUTES of THR aerobic activity.

But, fine, it's done.

In a couple hours, I have my Pilates. And it's been hard getting through that since I got sick. I just have to push mentally and physically. I so want to get the vim and joy back, ya know?

Because I felt so lethargic, no, I didn't do my shopping or my cooking. I did make better choices for dinner and lunch a couple times, less ideal others. In the end, though, even with two binge days last week (Wednesday and Thursday, and yes, it was BAD), I ended up being able to change the weight stat and finally be lower again than January 1. (I had been running HIGHER than my year-start weight.)

I so envy people who have lovely energy and good health and wake up feeling that revving engine. I'm sputtering. Hate that.

Whether it's the Metabolic Syndrome, the hormonal issues of middle-age, the Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, or something else, it truly sucks feeling tired all the time and having no interest in enjoying the beautiful Miami winter weather. Sucks.

But, one hour at a time. I made it through the 10 minutes of marching, I'll make it through Pilates, and, with enough mental rah-rahing, I may make it to the grocery store before I doze off.

Hope liveth in my pooped body.

~