The weight loss lessons I have to learn every time I want to lose weight.

Today I did Cathe's Total Body Giant Sets, and finally got a chance to use my beloved barbell this week.  Please excuse my laundry hamper in the background; for once it was not guarded against large dog's pilfering because I have been home all week.  And I was too lazy to take a different picture.

Barbell: DEEElicious!

While you don't use the barbell for upper body in this particular Cathe workout (she has others where you do), the upper body portion of this workout is nice because it gives you a set of these:

kerBLAM kerBLAM

Large dog was very surprised to see those guns, because they've been hidden since fall began.

He's not really surprised.  He just wants treats.

Female cat, as usual, was unimpressed.

Hyooman. Take your guns and leave.  Sleeping here.

What you should be impressed with is my eating today; it was good all around and I didn't succumb to any of the crap in the hubbs' junk food stash today.  That's because I was too busy working on work stuff today to even go downstairs near it or even think (fantasize) about what chocolately or salty goodness was in there.  And that's a lesson I've learned--and had to re-learn--over and over again concerning weight loss: if it's in the house, I'll eat it.  So what are some other lessons I've learned, you ask?  Well, below are a few of my favorite weight-loss lessons I have to learn every time I realize my pants aren't fitting anymore:

• If I stop weighing myself, my weight loss stops too.  I know they say you shouldn't weigh yourself every day, but if I don't get that daily feedback (with an understanding that it's the trend over time you need to look at, not the day-to-day fluctuations) I tend to be all, "Hey! I lost weight!  I'm good!" and then slowly begin adding back junky food bit by sneaky bit.
• For me, "I can eat out all I want as long as I watch my calorie counts" is a complete and total lie.  Most of the take-out stuff is junk, and I eat too much of it, and then the weight creeps back on.
• Eating 30 health bars a day doesn't mean you'll lose weight.  I have a tendency to overdo it on the health bars, especially now that I'm in a more sedentary job.  I have to switch out "health" bars for carrot sticks (VEGGIES BUH) so I can mindlessly snack the day away without guilt.  
• "I can eat what I want as long as I work out every day" is another complete and total lie.  I worked out every single day for 45 minutes for an entire year, didn't change my eating habits, and consequently didn't lose a single damn pound.  Only when I started eating right did the pounds start coming off.  Exercise makes me feel good; eating right makes me look good.
• If you have a bad eating day, just start again tomorrow.  If you don't give yourself another chance, you'll start spiraling down into the vortex of "I CAN'T DO THIS" and then, you know, you won't because you've told yourself you can't.  And then you will lose no weight whatsoever due to mental self-sabotage.
• View food as fuel, not a reward.  About every 3 nanoseconds I have to remind myself that I eat food to fuel my workouts (and, you know, live), not to give myself a nice hit of sugary crack to make myself feel good every hour.
• Know that your weight doesn't define you.  I grew up with a very warped "if you're skinny you're happy and liked and accepted" idea.  Now that I'm in my 40s and have tons more life experience that the teenager that used to think that, I realize that skinny is nice, having awesome guns and muscles is even better, and knowing who you are no matter what you weigh is literally the best.  Oh, and winning the women's race at an Olympic distance duathlon a full 30 pounds heavier than you were at a size 2 helps you remember that, too.

OK, before this post gets way too serious, here are today's learnings:

• Man did I miss using my barbell.  If I start talking about how much I missed it this post is gonna get way too weird.  Well, weirder than it already is, at least.
• Another lesson I learned today is to keep my hands busy with work (ugh) so they will not reach for food.  
• Or at least check my email a few times a day, because that always makes me want to pull my hair out and my hands will be busy doing that rather than picking up bad things to eat.
• As long as you chart your daily weight over time and see a downward sloping best-fit line, it's all good to weight yourself every day.  If you obsess over normal day-to-day fluctuations, you should weigh yourself once a week to retain your sanity.
• Nothing tastes as good as lifting a heavy barbell feels.
• kerBLAM....whoops.  One of my guns must have misfired.  Sorry.

Tomorrow's workout: 13 mile run.  Seeing as it's going to be a high of 7, looks like the treadmill for me.

Trying to uncrank myself.

A lot of work craziness, a lot of crankiness, and a lot of running have been the rule for the last half of this week.

This was me this week.  Hell, this has been me since September.

The running, however, helped deal with most of the crankiness, so there was a net craziness gain of zero this week.  I like it when it all balances out, don't you?

Wednesday was an easy run on the treadmill, and when I say easy, I mean easy.  Easy like a Sunday morning easy.  However, I still like to start slow and kick it up a little towards the end, just to get used to running faster at the end of my runs.

It's the "tempo run" I did on Thursday that I am the most disappointed with this week.  While it was 8 miles of much needed stress relief (meaning 8 miles of not thinking about work and focusing on the run), it was a tempo run that I once again ran too slowly because of my fear of doing these types of runs on the treadmill.  And now for the splits:

Yeah, it pretty much bit the big one.  A 9:30 pace thereabouts; pretty sad, considering I usually like to run these at my 10K pace when I'm outside, which is anywhere between 8:15 and 8:30.  But the treadmill has mentally shackled me for some reason.  A 9:30 was all I could handle before my brain started to panic, telling me I would never, ever make it all the way to 6 miles oh God that's so long to run fast on the treadmill I'll never ever make it.

The treadmill and I have to come to an understanding, it seems.  I have to stop thinking "I can't" while I'm on there and just remember that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.  I'm there to run, so I need to get it done.

And my brain just needs to shut the hell up while I'm on the treadmill.  Maybe I'll just turn up the TV to drown myself out.

On a brighter note, I got to use my barbell for an entire workout this morning.  Continuing my Cathextravaganza, I did her Power Hour workout, which is a high-rep weight training workout that will give you a little workout with your barbell.  I like this workout because:

a) I get to use a barbell in almost every exercise
b) Cathe tells you what weight she has on her barbell every single time
c) It makes my biceps beg for mercy
d) Mmmmm deadlifts and dead rows (I love back work)
e) The late '90s set cracks my shit up
f) I get to use a barbell in almost every exercise

I thought it was a little light on the tricep work at the end, but maybe because in every other workout I own by Cathe it seems like she works the triceps until you can feel them trying to flee from your body.  Although I can tell you that I scared the crap out of my husband when he came down the stairs this morning and saw me doing tricep extensions while laying down on my step--the hubbs thought I was going to drop the thing on my forehead and tried to "save" me by grabbing the bar.  I can tell you that's not a safe thing to do when your wife has been cranked up on crankiness all week and just wants to do some tricep extensions with 35 pounds on her barbell without being bothered.

Speaking of bothered, tomorrow I see I have an 18-mile pace run on the training schedule, where I have to negative split my run and end up at my marathon goal pace.  It is also slated to be 12 degrees with 12 mph winds at the time I want to go out and do this run.  Looks like tomorrow I'll be blogging about that run while wiping the icicles from my eyelashes.

I can't wait until spring gets here.

Cranky guy photo credit: massdistraction via photopin cc

Any excuse to pull out the barbell.

Since the weather outside looked like this when I wanted to go for a run:

I decided that this was a fantastic excuse to use my new barbell again.  So I pulled that sucker out and decided to do Cathe's Muscle Max workout, which I haven't done in quite some time and thus forgetting just how barbell-involved it was.  I don't really know why I stop doing workouts; I think it may be because the new ones come in all shinier and newer and hold my attention until I get injured and then I notice the older ones again.  Also, for some reason I always think my older workouts are easier, therefore I don't do them.  This is a lie my brain tells myself all the time, that pathological liar.

The workout was tough but easy at the same time.  Using the barbell definitely increased the intensity--I was busting out weights on exercises like barbell curls and barbell pullovers that I had never used before with just dumbbells.  I was breathing like a woman in labor during those barbell curls, just trying to get through them with 30 pounds on the bar. (Cathe was using 45!  I'm such a wimp.) And those pullovers...now I know how people die horrible deaths involving barbells because I was almost one of them; I barely made it through the last rep without dropping the bar on my head and/or chest.  I also grunted a lot, making the dogs bark "shut the hell up!" at me in their crazy barking dog language.

On a more positive not-thinking-about-death-involving-barbells note, I did notice that I could use the same dumbbell weights as Cathe during this go-around without feeling like any limbs were going to fall off or like my muscles would burst into flame after a few reps (yes, I'm talking about you, plie squats with a 15-lb dumbbell).  It's nice to see that I have made some strength gains since doing this workout.  I also noticed I was getting faster at changing out the weight plates on my barbell.  I'm going to start timing myself lit pit crews do in NASCAR.

However, lest I feel a little too good about my workout accomplishments, this was the face that supervised me as I cleaned up my living room of all the scattered-about weights:

Emma is clearly not impressed.  Or right-side up.  Going to have to work harder next time.

Lessons my barbell taught me.

In the name of trying to keep my little Achilles injury a little one, I continued my low-impact restriction on my nonrunning days by doing Cathe Friedrich's Low Max workout as the cardio portion of today's fitness regimen.  It's a step workout with seven intervals, each of which concludes with what Cathe calls "intensity blasts" and what I call "butt and leg melters."  I only did intervals 1-4 because I just wanted a little taste of cardio today, with the main entree being weight lifting.  This is because I love me some straight-up weight work because I believe it helps your endurance as a runner, especially when you are in a trail race and you are fighting desperately to pass the woman trying desperately to pass you but you have stronger quads so you get up the damn hill first and leave her ass in the dust.  Not that I'm competitive or anything.

Plus, I needed an excuse to whip out the new barbell I got for Christmas yesterday.  The 25 mph winds today combined with the cold temps (it's like it's winter or something) also convinced me I needed to stay inside and pump a bit o' the iron.

So, after my cardio with Cathe, I did some weights with Cathe.  (I am Cathe obsessed.  Don't judge me until you've seen how many other DVDs I've tried and thought were crap.  Cathe puts out quality stuff.)  Specifically, I did her High Reps workout because a barbell was involved and I haven't done this workout very often.  It's not my ultimate favorite weight workout of hers (is there really a need to do tricep dips after you've done standing tricep extensions, kickbacks, and lying extensions?), but there's a lot of variety in the exercises that decreases the boredom factor greatly.  Plus, have I mentioned she uses a barbell during the workout?

And now, an artist's rendering of what I looked like with my barbell:

I had a shirt on.  Really.

Today's word was definitely strength.  Along with a lot of other words that this child shouldn't learn until he is much, much older and can use them in proper context and with appropriate vigor.

Now, I have never even lifted a barbell until this morning, so I'm surprised that I didn't drop it on any of my body parts during the workout to give myself a large injury to go along with the little one in my Achilles.  I found that I actually prefer it for some exercises, especially back rows and upright rows, because it was easier on my shoulders. But I realized that, as far as working out with a barbell goes, I am pretty much clueless as to what weights I should use.  And since the workout only told me what poundage of dumbbells I needed for exercises involving dumbbells and NEVER ONCE stated the weights they used on the barbell exercises, I was in trial-and-error land with a heaping side of error. Here are some of those lessons I learned from my errors:

• While doing bicep curls visions of hernias were dancing through my head so furiously that I put down the barbell and picked up some lighter dumbbells out of concern for my own safety and maintaining the integrity of my lumbar intervertebral discs.  
• I astutely ascertained that 30 lbs is (currently) too heavy to be doing all sorts of partial bicep curl reps unless I enjoy the sound of my elbows bending in the direction opposite of which they should be bending.  
• It is very easy to knock your ceiling fan out of balance with a barbell, much to the consternation of a husband who is responsible for fixing said ceiling fan while giving you the stink-eye.
• It is very easy to knock myself over with the barbell when I do not balance it on my shoulders correctly during leg exercises.
• It takes me a long time to change out weight plates.  Like, a really long time.  I have never paused a video so much in my life just to prep for the next set of exercises.  If I were scoring myself in my own classroom on this skill, I would send myself to the after school help sessions we have for mandatory remediation.
• I felt like a total badass doing lat rows.
• If I kill myself while using this barbell (highly probable), my obituary will be a hilarious read.  

Looking over the list, I am aware that this list is nothing compared to what happened the first time I tried to use a step in a workout (a post that has yet to be written but needs to be written for the greater good).  I'm sure I'll get better with my barbell as I use it with more of my workouts.  Until then, any lessons you've learned or near-death experiences from when you tried out a new piece of workout equipment?


photo credit: theloushe via photopin cc