Whew - back into the routine!

Photo courtesy Shelly Munkberg, licensed CC-BY-NC-ND

I managed to eke out a workout last night after working late-ish and going to the grocery store for the usual mid-week provisions (fresh fruit, vanilla non-fat yogurt, cheese, olive oil).

After all the sturm und drang of yesterday's blown schedule, I decided to change my workout to a simple fat burning program just using the music on my iPod.  In trying this I discovered that the BeatBurn Elliptical Training app really does make workouts go much quicker.  Last night I spent the entire time on the machine looking at the countdown, and waiting until I could get off.  Time seemed to stretch forever, which I know is just not scientifically possible (at the speed I was going, at any rate).

This morning, working out for 40 minutes felt long, but the time was no real problem using the BeatBurn app.  I like that the app constantly mixes up the intensity, speed and songs with different time intervals so that it is almost impossible to get bored with the workout.  Don't like something?  Wait a minute or two - - it will be different soon.  Straight pedalling, in contrast, is tedious as hell.  I don't know how my mother does 60 minutes twice a day, I honestly don't.

It took me what felt like forever to get out of the house this morning.  I did sleep in to 6.30 am (from my usual 5-5.30 am), but it was putting together the lunch and dinner to take to work that killed me.  Sure, the main courses were all pre-packed, but I still had to cut stawberries, measure yogurt, measure peas and corn, measure sunflower seeds and salad dressing, and get everything together.  I am glad that I planned everything out last night, so I had a plan of attack this morning.

But you know what really slowed me down?  Ants. On. A. Log.  Those suckers take some craftsmanship to make, that's for sure.  Craftsmanship that I do not possess.  I ended up looking like a small child on her first birthday, with peanut butter all over the counter, the spoon, my suit, in my hair ... everywhere, in fact, but on the damn celery, where it was supposed to go.  It turns out that wet celery does not hold peanut butter.  A marvel of physics under our very nose.  Lesson learned - - I will leave the Nerd to make Ants on a Log from now on.  He has the patience of Job!

Perhaps in the spirit of learning from my mistakes I will try and prep my lunch/dinner tonight, rather than in the morning.  The tricky thing about that is that I need a lot more tupperware to pull it off - - I am pretty much using all the tupperware I have each day for lunch, and it doesn't work to put food into wet containers, fresh from the wash.  At least based on my learnings from the celery this morning. 

My weight bottomed out this week on Tuesday, and has now started to come back up.  I am strangely reassured by this because I was actually concerned that my weight was too low.  I know, it sounds crazy when I say it like that (!).  But the new program of 40 minutes on the elliptical was, I think, causing me to shed more water than before, and the weight I reached was not a true weight.  I just am keeping my fingers crossed that I don't go too far back up - - let's hope equilibrium is 2 pounds down versus last week.  Fingers crossed!