I am closing in on my goal of taking a vitamin every day for 100 days - this morning was day 89! (I can't say I feel any better or different for having taking them, but I don't feel any worse, and maybe I am doing some good to myself!)
I am going to continue with the vitamins after the 100 days are over, but in the meantime, on Friday, I am starting a new goal! And that goal is ...
... to follow the "Smart Girls Do Dumbbells" program (from the book) for 100 days, and to participate in the support community I've set up for it: smartgirlsdo. (All are welcome to join in!)
I'm also thinking about a new goal for breakfasts - now that the weather is getting warmer, maybe I should start the day with a tasty (and healthy?) fruit smoothie! Does anyone have any smoothie advice? (Recipes, tips, etc.?)
Hi! Since foliageofluna and starfishchick reminded me that this community existed (I had almost completely forgotten, shamefully), I've been considering doing... something. Finally, after flailing around for a while, I think I've settled on doing 10,000 steps a day for at least 100 days. The whole 10,000 steps a day concept is an import from Japan, and it comes out to roughly five miles a day of walking total (usually 2-3 of that you have to do on top of your normal routine). Mostly, it's just a nice round number that falls within a healthy level of exercise.
I'm going to wait until I get my pedometer (ordered today) to start, and I may start out by just seeing how much I already walk, but I thought I'd go ahead and mention it now so you can get a pedometer and join me if you want. Anybody up for it?
Wow, starfishchick is right! This community hasn't been active in a good long while.
Here's my challenges:
4 days of staying on plan with Weight Watchers 4 days of no soda
I can't quite figure out how to do my workout challenge. I did the elliptical trainer for 3 days in a row, then this morning I spiked a fever so I didn't exercise. Would that mean just 3 days of staying on exercise plan? Hrm.
My last hundred days goal was nutrition-related, so I thought I might try workout goal this time around. However, after careful consideration, I have to be honest with myself and admit that I am not the kind of person who enjoys repeating the same activity every day.
Instead, my new goal will be to drink at least 2 litres of water every day for the next 100 days. I need to cultivate this habit, since I frequently forget to drink anything at all. Not sure why, but my thirst mechanism is seriously broken. I've gone whole days on nothing but a glass of morning juice or a cup of tea. I almost never drink straight water, since I find it impossibly bland. Now that they make awesome flavoured water, I can't use lack of taste as an excuse. I'm going to make some sort of chart, so that I can monitor my consumption every day.
I did 10 crunches this morning before I got up! My plan is to do at least 10 per day for 100 days, but if I do more than 10, then whatever number I do will be the new minimum. (Crunches that are forced upon me as a part of my weekly kickboxing class do not count toward that number!)
I finally finished my 100 days of abs, months and months later.
Obviously I'm very bad at remembering to do something regularly, so this time around I'm going to mark off 100 days, and aim for hitting every day, but not losing my count if I don't.
So my new goal is to walk for 30 minutes every day. Given the horrible state of the air, this will probably include a lot of lunchtime mall-walking, but it's still walking.
You know how I started walking 3 miles a day a few weeks back? That was great for about a week and a half, and then it started getting really difficult. Because it's so difficult, I've been going through a lot of struggle every single day to get myself out and walk. I do walk almost every day, but some days I don't get all three miles in.
As a result of that, I've been dealing with a whole truckload of guilt and self-recrimination and have finally decided that I need to just chill out. If I can't do 3 miles a day, then I'll reset the goal to 1.5 miles a day and consider anything over that as a bonus.
So that's what I'm doing. I don't know if I'll change this after a week or two; what I need right now is a chain of successful days, and we'll see how I feel about things after I get that.
Yesterday was day 50 of walking! Today I start walking 3 miles a day, and I've got my route mapped out.
I'm not really sure how I'm going to do this on days when I have class at night and can't walk after work, but I'll figure it out. I can potentially walk in the gym after class, and there's also the morning before work to consider (if I can ever manage to get up that early). Walking at lunch is a little problematic, because if I walk 3 miles at lunch that's a little over an hour and a whooole lot of sweat. I still might do it, though. It doesn't seem as difficult to pack extra clothes as it once did, after all, and work is laid back enough that I can eat at my desk outside of my lunch break.
It might be 38. I don't have my little sheet with tick-marks here at work.
Today I walked around the west campus quad four times, and that ought to be a little over 1.5 miles.
One nice thing about walking as opposed to lifting weights is that I don't build up tiredness and need a break. In fact, with time I think I'm getting less tired each day.
After day 50, I'm going to start walking 3 miles a day.
That's it, really. I haven't updated here in a long time. Neither have y'all! How are things going?
I didn't manage to get up and walk this morning, but I did walk during lunch. I'm not sure of the exact distance, but I bet I got at least 1.5 miles in. Someone from employee health is going to send me a spreadsheet with various distances between places on campus later today, and maybe I can get a good estimate from that (my pedometer is both dead and missing).
That was really nice, in fact, and I might just do that instead of walking in the morning. We'll see how I feel on Thursday morning.
I'm still enjoying it, and my knees have even started hurting less. This doesn't wear on the body like lifting weights does.
I am starting a class tomorrow that will meet every Tuesday and Thursday for quite a while, so I'm either going to walk in the mornings or at lunch. I am going to set my alarm to get up tomorrow and walk super early, but if I can't manage it I'll walk at lunch. That'll probably be the sum of it.
As of right now, I still plan to double my walking to 3 miles a day after I hit 50 days. While the walking I'm doing right now does make me tired by the end of it, I find myself wanting more of a challenge. We'll see, though.
I joined a bit ago, but was lurking until I hit a reference point (May 1).
Yesterday, I began my 100 days ritual; my "plan" is two-fold.
1. Eat breakfast, daily, for 100 days. 2. 30 minutes of devoted exercise (by this I mean something, daily, that is done purely to meet this goal. Yesterday, I rode my bike to a local high school with a friend. Today, I will go to the gym and complete 30 minutes on the elliptical racer.)
If the breakfast one sounds hoaky, it is, but it is also a shortcoming I have that, leads to my incredible overeating while making dinner. I do not like food in the a.m., but I am making a dedicated effort to eat healthily, because it helps enable me to make healthy choices throughout the day. Plain and simple, I suck at eating breakfast, and then go hog wild later. I afford myself a higher protein and fat breakfast, then I eat well the rest of the day because I've "hit my mark" early.
Yesterday, 3 medium eggs with 1 tbs. neuchatel cheese in them. Today, a slice of bread with peanut butter and an instant coffee drink.
--- Which brings me to my next point; I need help finding breakfast foods! I'm an ovo-lacto-pesca-vegetarian (basically, no pork or beef, for digestive reasons) and I must watch carbohydrate/sugar consumption because of insulin resistance related to PCOS. What do YOU all like for breakfast?
Sorry, chicas but I'm outta here. I'm glad that you are all doing the 100 days projects but it doesn't work too well for me. I shall continue, at my own pace. Thanks for having me!
I have nothing brilliant to say about all of the walking except that I'm enjoying it quite a bit, sometimes it's hard to get started but I've managed every day for ten days, and I'm grateful that a couple of my friends walk with me on most days. I talk about enjoying solitude, but having someone walking with me speeds a walk up by a factor of about two billion, or at the very least makes me unaware of things like inclines and how much further I have to go.
Today I walked through neighborhoods rather than on campus, as I don't have a working car for the weekend and pretty much trust my pedometer to be mostly accurate at this point.
I've managed to lift weights once since I stopped the 100 days. I plan on improving that, but I'm not going to guilt trip myself about it just yet.
I feel like I get to just post that because it would've been incredibly easy to not walk, let me tell you. It's cold, I'm grouchy, and I had no comfortable clean clothes. I walked, though, and the pay off was just as big as the difficulty, and I guess that makes sense.
Right back to the beginning! Aie! It would be disheartening if I wasn't so excited about the change.
I walked today with sugar_stack and kristinkay and we beat the storms that are probably going to start any minute now and it was really good. One nice thing about walking is definitely going to be the social element, and when it's not the socializing it'll be the quality time spent with my Shuffle.
I think that it was a nicely auspicious start to this set of 100 days, what with the pretty day and the breeze and the missing the rain.
--
I've kept the same sheet for marking off days up on my door. I drew a line below the weights days and have switched Sharpie color to a pretty blue (as opposed to black).
-
I'm so excited about this that it's dorky, but isn't that great?
I just did the last set of bicep curls of my 100 days of weightlifting! Tomorrow I will start 100 days of walking with a stroll around east campus of the university where I work.
Things I Have Learned
1. That stuff they tell you about taking time off when you're lifting is 100% true. I don't think that I'd need to take every other day off, but every third or fourth day would probably be ideal. I suspect that I didn't gain half as much muscle as I could've, as that rest time is crucial for building muscle.
2. I really can build muscle! I have rather nice arm and shoulder muscles, if I do say so myself, and my quads aren't all that bad, either. I also learned that no matter how much muscle I gain, it's not going to be noticeable while it's still covered with fat. I look pretty much the same.
3. Some days suck and I think I never, ever want to lift weights again. Some days are marvelous and all I want to do is lift weights. This does not happen in a linear fashion, by which I mean I haven't reached the end of this hating it all thoroughly. It may happen in little spurts of similar days, if there's any pattern at all. This will, I suspect, be true for all exercise.
4. I am capable of exercising consistently for many, many days in a row. This is what I wanted to learn. Learning otherwise sure would've been disappointing.
That's about it, really. It's funny how I reach the end of my 100 day projects and feel like there ought to be some sort of fanfare, but I rarely feel like producing that fanfare. I just kind of want to get on to the next thing.
I think I mentioned this already, but as far as the walking goes, here are the rules:
1. I walk 1.5 miles a day, if I do it outside or on the indoor track. This only takes into account time set aside for walking, and not time travelling to and from work or walking around in the building or whatever. 2. If it's raining or I'm just dreading being outside, I can walk on a treadmill for 2.0 miles instead. 3. After 50 days, I will up this to 3.0 miles and 4.0 miles on the treadmill if I feel like that's a reasonable shift at that point.
Yesterday marked my 50th day of crunches. And it only took 3 months! Yeesh. Still, now that I'm back on track with the gym-going it should go faster, since I'm better about remembering to do them when I'm already working out.
optimistic
