Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Great Success!

I hope you heard the title of the blog post in Borat's voice, because that's totally how I'm using it.

I've got bad knees; they've dislocated several times in the past and I've broken one of them. I've got asthma. Pretty much I shouldn't be jogging. Or even thinking about jogging. Back when I used to dislocated them a lot, probably thinking about jogging would have dislocated one...

So, I started jogging. Not full on jogging, but I've been cutting up my walk with some jogging, and most of it has been down this one hill. When I first started jogging I'd have to stop after about twenty seconds, or two mailboxes. But as the weeks have gone by it's been more mailboxes and longer counts until I could almost hit the end of the street.



The top of the street is the higher gold star, by the way. So I'd jog really hard and make it to the red star before I thought I couldn't do any more.

But tonight, just as I'm getting done with my stretches at the top of the hill my iPod put on OK Go's You're so Hot, which is a pretty darn good motivational song, and I figured I'd try for the end of the street again. And I'm running and running and I get most of the way there and I'm like 'Let's see if we can get to the first house on the next street.'. And I do! So I'm thinking 'Let's see if we can get to the first house on the next street.'. And I do! So I just keep running until the end of the song, which wasn't really that much longer but by then I was huffing and puffing and the dog was staring at me like I'm evil since I drag her along on these things too.

And that was Two Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds of running! Which is the most I've done so far, or possibly ever. Asthma and knees considering. All I could think of was this I Can Has Cheezburger-esque dog I saw online.



We stayed out til I clocked 45 minutes of running and walking, not that there was that much more running. Nothing that epic, at least. And as we were coming up the street at the very end Orbital's version of the Doctor Who theme started playing, which is really thematic. And awesome.

I took a look at the Extreme Makeover guy's Two Week fitness plan a few days ago and it sort of scared/creeped me out. He promises some serious results, but he wants an hour and a half of cardio work a day, and for you to only have one meal and two protein shakes. (I explained this to Mom and watched her eyes light up like it was Christmas) What he's hoping for is for you to burn 1,500 to 2,000 calories in your workout, and consume a piece of chicken and a salad, which leaves you in a huge calorie negative. And he wants you to do this for two weeks. Granted it's two weeks only, and then you're on to something less (or more, foodwise), but still. (Mom's eyes were still lit up and she started trying to explain to me that that's the only way to lose weight. To be negative in the calorie count) (which is really, really scary). I'm amazed people don't get sick or hurt doing it.

And while we were doing the second lap I saw something really scary. One of my neighbors has these...things...on her porch. My Grandma used to have this three foot tall faceless doll that stood up on it's own and faced the wall, like it was in time out. It gave me the creeps. She thought it was really cute, though. On this porch there's two things that really look like that, only they haven't got heads. They're planters of some kind, with flowers coming out the top. I found them incredibly unnerving.

Also, I dropped 2% in body fat, but nothing in weight. That's still good, right? Not sure how much good though...

Edit: Weighed myself again (the other thing was from last night, but I was just really excited after my run, so I didn't care about the whole morning/night weighing thing) and this time it's three pounds less (than last night) same (2% drop) in body fat.

1 comment:

Jason said...

Your mom's right... sort of. The only way to burn fat is to take in less calories than you expend, but doing it the way the Extreme Makeover guy suggests is extremely unwise. Your body still needs nutrients to help it function properly, and while you can get energy from stored fat, that's all you get. You're also going to seriously shock your body's system by pretty much starving it.

I don't even want to begin on the cold start cardio. Not advisable.

What this guy's pushing is just another form of fast results crash diet. Keep in mind that the faster you loose fat, the faster you gain it back.

The best way to lose fat and keep it off isn't "dieting" but changing the way you think about eating, and from there, changing your eating habits as well. Being active helps tremendously, so keep running and walking. It's a lifestyle change, not a temporary fix.

Notice I'm saying "fat" and not "weight". that's because your focus should be on inches, not pounds. One of the best ways to keep fat off is to build lean muscle, since it will burn more calories simply by existing. Depending on your fat/muscle ratio you could end up weighing slightly more, but don't let that discourage you. A 130 lb girl who is solid muscle is waaaaay hotter than a 130 lb girl that is mostly chub. But that's being shallow ^_^. There will be no way to buld sufficient muscle using this guy's technique.

Besides, the average martial arts workout/lesson/sparring class will burn between 1500 and 2000 calories depending on how hard you train.

~J