Y'know, I actually missed that

[jducoeur]

Third day of the elliptical now, and it's reminding me of two major points. On the one hand, I really hate waking up the necessary extra hour in the morning so I have time to exercise. That said, starting off the day with a 45-minute workout feels remarkably good. Hopefully, with the device now on-hand so that I don't have to go out to the gym to get it, I'll be able to stay on the bandwagon this time...

Comments

[qarylla.livejournal.com]

It really is amazing what exercise can do for one's outlook on a day to day basis. It is easy to forget when you stop exercising how much lethargy lifts with a little motion (my big problem).

[new-man.livejournal.com]

As I've been saying to all my tribe who've gotten on the self-improvement wagon -- go you! Keep it up!

[new-man.livejournal.com]

(yes I know I'm replying to myself)

Also, take a look at FitDay.com; it's a series of on-line tools for tracking diet, weight loss, and activity. Free, too.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I'll give that some thought, but it may not be the tool for me. The interesting question is whether tracking is going to be helpful or harmful in my case. What I've found in the past is that explicitly tracking often just annoys and depresses me, especially because my weight plateaus *very* badly. (Based on prior experience, I expect it to be fairly easy to drop about ten pounds from where I am now, and *very* difficult to make any further headway.) What does work for me (and actually tends not to bug me as much) is sheer bloody-minded discipline. Hence the in-house elliptical, so I can simply make it an absolute daily routine.

If I decide to drop weight, it'll likely be the same way -- when I shed about 40 pounds in high school, it was entirely due to rigorous habit; the tracking was entirely incidental. For now, I'm focusing on slowly tweaking my eating habits. For instance, I'm gradually shifting my midafternoon snack to A Vegetable. I have the curious advantage that I vastly prefer vegetables raw over cooked, especially with just a dab of salad dressing, so the idea of simply noshing a broccoli crown or a handful of string beans at 3:30 works rather well for me. Eating healthier is the high priority; hopefully that will lead to slow but steady weight loss.

Very much a matter of personal taste. For most folks, tracking is useful, often even essential. But my experience is that I respond better to different techniques...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

One of the nice things about this is you can track a variety of things -- collectively or seperately. Want to track your excercise but not what you eat? Go for it.

Tracking your weight loss (or lack their of) might depress you, but I think tracking your activity so you could go back and see "Hey! I worked out 17 days in a row!" would be gratifying. YMMV, of course.

[jducoeur]

It's interesting to contemplate, and thank you for some very useful food for thought, but I think that, for me, tracking actually introduces a tension I'd prefer not to have. Tracking makes the activity somehow odd and unusual -- it says that this is something that *needs* to be tracked, unlike the rest of my life. That's not the right mindset for me: the whole point is to make the activity utterly *normal*, just part of how I do business every day. It's not something to be tracked, any more than I do the number of comics I read or when I go to bed at night.

Tracking makes a lot of sense for a more goal-focused approach, and that's what many people need. But that's not quite the point here: I'm shooting for lifestyle change instead, and I suspect that explicit tracking will just get in the way of that...

[qarylla.livejournal.com]

I'll admit that I am a tracker. It's how I lost over 45 pounds over the last year without giving up chocolate. Now that I am nearly where I want to be I mostly use the scale. Being on the high side means a little bit less in the sweets department and a little bit more exercise. I have been working on how to maintain the loss so I don't find in a year that I am right back to where I was.

In some ways I think that the easier way to track would just be a set of checkboxes for each day. Did I eat fruit, check. Did I exercise, check. More like reminders to do the good things rather than actually tracking calories or fat (or any number of other things).

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I've got a chart of checkboxes for just that sort of thing. I put general lifestyle things in there also, such as "load of laundry finished" and "glasses of water" and "art project for the kids."

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Do you get the thing where after a few days of training legs, stairs et al. seem to magically vanish beneath your feet? That's always fun...

[jducoeur]

So far, no, but I do seem to be getting subtler nice effects. My heartrate during the exercise is improving noticeably at this point -- my stride today needed to go up almost 2 RPM from yesterday in order to sustain the target heartrate. (I'm approaching 4 miles for the daily "jog", which is a barrier I'd love to break.) Which is lovely, since fitness is really the principal goal here.

I suspect it means that, within a month or two, I'll be back to being able to run up four flights of stairs without noticing it. That was actually one of the things that's been driving the urgency behind this project. When dance practice moved up to the fourth floor at MIT this spring, I discovered to my dismay that walking up the stairs to it was genuinely tiring. That really shouldn't be the case, and drove home that I was severely out of shape...

re: elliptical

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm loving the elliptical at Crow Castle. I'll be sad when it's (I'm) gone.