Friday, September 25, 2009

Must See Fit TV

For some reason Blogger does not like pictures from my computer this morning, so today's entry will have to be without pictures.

Yesterday I asked myself what could I do to make this life changing project better . For a lot of reasons, through these two plus years of weight loss certain things have become clear to me. One, it has to be affordable in time and finances because our life is not one dimensional. Meaning we are not three people living in a vacuum called weight loss. We are a family who lives with one wage earner, one car, ministry involvement, alternative healing work, homeschooling and autism. Like it or not, all of those factors are JUST as important to focus on as what the scale is or is not doing. All of these factors require time, effort and attention on our part - and often in greater proportions than weight loss. Second thing is that it must be sustainable. It must involve things that can be done no matter how tight our income becomes, how busy our schedule gets and so forth. This is a lifestyle change after all, and life does not always flow in perfection. It is a guarantee that our income will be cut in the summer months, time will be at a premium from the months of September through January and so forth.

It occurred to me that one really helpful thing would be to create a working schedual of exercise. I am very good about following set schedules - it comes from years of my husband's music ministry commitments and homeschooling I guess. If it is written down I will follow it, and if I start doing something the other two follow. So I started looking at assorted exercises that could be done with the equipment and such that we have at home( beyond walking) , and it dawned on me that all I may need to to is schedual Exercise TV on Demand. We have cable , and our package includes On Demand, and under sports I belive is exercise and a multitude of work outs to choose from. So I flipped to it durning our gym portion of the day and we picked a workout to try. Actually three of them. One was a line dance that my son thought would be fun , and it was till we started crashing into wach other and I gave him a bloody nose. I am not a dancer, but I know blood on the dance floor is not a good thing. So next we switched to a Jillian Micheals upper body work out, which was short and felt really affective. We felt so good that we finished that and moved on to a 10 minute lower body work out, and this is where it got interesting. It began innocently enough, and then moved into something involving squats. Now my knee and squats have never gotten along - it puts way too much pressure on the joint and can leave me unable to walk for a time due to the pain. However, i am a mom and this weird part of me knows that the best teacher is example, so I tried my very best to modify the exercise enough to not injure my knee and be effective so that both son and I could finish the work out. I did it ! My knee survived, but my thigh muscles ....

Grocery shopping with thighs of jello is not a good thing. Carrying groceries with thighs of jello is even worse. On the way there and back I was not talking much because I was mentally willing my thighs to preform the tricky action of walking and standing up. Hubby thought I was mad at him till I told him I had simply found a new way to destroy myself that day. All the while I was silently chastising myself. Before I injured my knee as a teen, I had incredibly muscular thighs that could press 400 pounds. Now, a few minutes of squats acts like kryptonite ! However, I think using exercise TV a couple times a week will be a good thing for us. If nothing else son and I can get a giggle watching each other challenge themselves in new and painful ways. And in the process we will become even healthier people who may make the scale be a bit more cooperative.

Calorie count for the day was 1850- hopefully tomorrow blogger will like my pictures !

2 comments:

Diane, Fit to the Finish said...

Great job on finding some exercise that you can do right in your living room! You're right - blood while dancing is not a good thing!

I hear you on the squats and the knee. Last night I was shopping for some fabric and squatted down to check out something on the lowest shelf, and felt my knee way too much!

Good for you on how you are analyzing everything. Have a great weekend.

Di said...

Squatting to get to low shelves is indeed brutal ! I keep finding that to be a problem every week I need to do a serious library run, and ask myself why must every book I want to use need to be shelved on the bottom shelf !

Hope your weekend is also a great one !