Putting the "Balance" & "Health" back into my Lifestyle

Halloween left me feeling poisoned. My body felt off, bloated, toxic from all the candy and unhealthy things I put into it. It's amazing that one day of extreme excess can do that to a body.

So today I decided to make 2 changes: track my food and exercise more. I exercise a lot already , but the body adjusts to whatever it gets consistently, so it needed a shake up. I wrote a blog topic about that once:
http://sweetlifeweekly.blogspot.com/2008/06/challenge-body.html

So I'm keeping track of my food intake using Lose It!, which I use from time to time. I just ate the most delicious snack: 1/2 cup cottage cheese w/ 12 pretzels dipped into it. Yum! It tastes sinfully rich and creamy and crunchy, but it's low fat and has a lot of calcium and protein in it, for only 150 calories! So far, I've eaten 1002 calories, but I haven't had dinner yet. My budget is 1386. 

Lose it! will add in any calories burned in exercise as extra calories to eat.  Today, I burned 1000 calories in exercise (see below), so Lose It! would say that I could eat 2386 calories. But I'd never lose weight if I ate that many calories in a day! So I add my exercise into Lose It! at the end of the day so that the exercise calories are subtracted from the calories I actually ate.

I can't believe I burned 1000 calories in exercise, except that 30 min. ago I was starving, which I wouldn't usually be in the afternoon. I taught my usual GO Fitness class this morning, which my body is completely used to. Then I ran some errands on my bike. What fun! It was a beautiful day, the wind was in my hair (well, under my helmet), it was flat, easy riding . . . why don't I do this more often?! 5 miles later, I hooked up the trailer and rode to pick up Zoe from preschool. Whoa! Immediately, I could feel the difference in dragging a trailer behind the bike. Oh, yeah, that's why I don't bike around that much; it's not nearly as fun while dragging a trailer behind. The 100+ lb. of trailer, kids and stuff in the back completely change the workout from total cardio to cardio+strength training.

Anyway, it was really good to take a shower after feeling so sticky, stinky and sweaty! And it was really good to feel really hungry afterwards and feel I deserved to EAT!