December 2016 Healthy Heart Goals & Updates

• Duration – 10/12 weeks
• Weight lost – 8.6 lbs.
• Heart rate change – went from average ambient of 90 to 76
• Distance – have increased from 1.0-1.5 miles to 2.25+ 5 days/week
• Diet – continued struggles with sugar, but I’m eating much less of it!  My body is learning to compensate.

Time for an update on my healthy heart goals.  My ‘why’ was in early September and by Oct. 4 I was tracking my walk/runs so that is why my start date is not firm.

The weight lost is less than 1 lb./week – but it is in the right direction!  I’ve always dreamed of quick weight loss, but it’s just not reality for me and that’s OK.  There are so many non-scale victories: clothing is starting to feel less snug, my face seems to be losing a little pudge.

Heart Rate change is my proudest accomplishment!  The ambient heart rate is your normal working (but not pushing) heart rate.  For me it is when I’m driving or doing non-stressful chores: dish washing, folding laundry, etc.  My resting heart rate, the one you take when you are just awake or actually resting, has been as low as 58 now.  When I began I didn’t really know the difference between ambient and resting so didn’t notice it.  When I run, I used hang out  in the 150s (with a high of even 170) now I’m generally in the 120s (with a high of 154 – which is right at my 85% of maximum).  I know my heart is becoming more efficient!

Here's more info. on finding your target Heart Rate from the AHA

Distance – I’m proud to be able to do a 3 mile walk/run without hyper-ventilating or tiring myself out.  I’ve experienced sore legs, sore knees, and have altered as I go to prevent injury.  This means I’m not running as much as I would like.  I achieved a point of 75% running (at 2 miles) but found that to continue increasing stamina I needed to fall back to walking more and running about 30%.  I hope to increase this as I lose weight (which will reduce knee stress).

Diet – when I’m off the sugar I feel much better!  But it is so, so hard.  I’ve had 2 relapses.  The first one lasted about 10 days.  Although I was picking up a few sweets, I never went hog-wild.  The second time is right now and I’m about 4 days into it – trying to regain control every day.  Again – no binging has occurred.  This is a milestone for me.  In the years of dieting I’ve endured I would always binge once I broke a diet.  My body is learning to compensate.  Which means, when I eat more at one point in the day, I naturally don’t eat as much later to compensate for the calories I consumed.  This is the way our bodies are born to handle calories! My system has been so off, for so many years, that it feels wonderful to finally be achieving a type of balance. I've also stopped adding salt when cooking, whether it's in the recipe or not!

Goals for the next month:

• ·         Continue to elevate my heart rate at least 5x/week.  
• ·         Continue to reduce sugar.
• ·         Record my food at least 3 days a week.  I’ve not been recording so baby steps are needed (calorie max should be 1850)
• ·         13,000 steps daily are a minimum (including my run)
• ·         Find a new 5K or Heart Health event to join in Spring.

Send the Verbal Vulgarity to the Vomitory

One of my best friends refers to me as her “classy friend” because I don’t swear.  I’ll take the compliment and admit that it’s true: I don’t swear.  But I’m pretty sure my standard wardrobe of jeans and sweatshirts disqualifies me from the Classy Clique.

As a teenager I tried swearing.  It was fun; it was exciting to keep my private language away from my mother; it was a rite of passage that made me feel included in the group.  It also ate away at my naturally positive thoughts.  Using curses aloud eventually crept into my self-talk.  I realized within a couple of years the negative effect these words had on my psyche and decided one year to stop. It was one my few New Year’s Resolutions that stuck.

Years later, I’m well into middle age and have noticed a rising use of swearing among adults in general that just wasn’t heard 10 years ago.  Do these adults think they are teenagers and need to rebel by using a secret language?  More likely they seem to use swears as a way to flaunt their adulthood. “I’m an adult and can do what I want!” – but, that actually sounds exactly like an 18 or 19 year old.

In my opinion, swearing is crass and vulgar.  Almost every swear I can think of connotes something negative.  For example, “asshole” connotes someone’s rectum. Not a pleasant visual.  If instead of using asshole, I say “the DMV worker was such a jolt headed bum-bailey” it insults the worker, gets my point across but doesn’t create an unflattering visual. It’s actually fun to say: bum-bailey, bum bailey, bum bailey!  The more negative words you use, the more negative attitude you create for yourself.  But substitutes can actually be fun: Oh fiddlesticks! Don’t be a nincompoop! Gee-whillikers that was fun.

Alas, in the era of easy offense, I mean absolutely no denigration to those who swear.  Language is used to communicate and if you get your point across, then your language is successful despite word selection or pronunciation.

I personally choose to avoid cursing myself and the proliferation of making swear words acceptable.  When you share a post on Facebook from a page called “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” – I hit ‘hide post’ followed by ‘see less from You Can’t Make This Shit Up’ and finally ‘hide all from You Can’t Make This Shit Up.”  I realize I’m incredibly literal, but do you get that using the term “Food Porn” is normalizing “porn” (pornography) as something acceptable?  Yes, I’ve digressed but that little tidbit won’t fit into a blog on another topic either.

Shakespeare offers some great alternatives to curses:

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet

… a most toad spotted traitor

…brazen faced varlet

You egg, you fry of treachery

Why, thou clay brained guts, thou knotty pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow catch

Choices abound when looking for a substitute.  Turn to the Old Bard, make something up … fitzdookie!  Or, maybe there IS a word in English that will work, expand your vocablulary!  This actually has the exact opposite effect of swearing.  You LEARN a new word and force your brain to create a new synapse – pop!

Cantankerous ~ bamboozle ~ cockamamie ~ discombobulate ~ flummox ~ gobbledygook ~ mollycoddle ~ shenanigan ~ snollygoster ~ widdershins