Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

This postcard from PostSecret showed up yesterday. I feel that it’s the key to eating healthy and taking the time to exercise.

It reads:

To all the people I’ve tried pleasing during my lifetime:

I am finally going to please myself.

If this makes you unhappy…

GET OVER IT!

The truth is, you can’t make other people happy. Sure, there are things that you can do to please them, but their happiness depends on THEM. The ONLY person you can control on this planet is YOU. Concentrate on making yourself happy and the rest of the people around you will follow suit or struggle as they always have.

You have to take care of yourself FIRST before you can take care of anyone else.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

Exercising while I’m moving is EASY. All I have to do is haul all the boxes from the Sugarhouse house to the Daybreak house. All that lifting and carrying and climbing stairs is built in exercise and with every workout, I’m one step closer to being finished.

Eating healthy while I’m moving is a little more difficult.

Firstly, we had to move the fridge. Two weeks before the move, we stopped buying any groceries so that we could empty out the fridge. I ate up all the fresh fruit, veggies, and dairy within a couple of days. All that I was left with were condiments in the refrigerator. The freezer fed me the last week and a half, but there is only so many frozen dinners and halibut steaks I can eat before I feel like I can’t open the freezer door ever again.

Here’s what worked for me:

• Tetra-pack milk: I’ve talked about this milk before (Travel Milk). I usually use it when I’m traveling at a hotel that doesn’t have a little refrigerator in the room. I was able to buy a case of milk, keep it in a box and not worry about it spoiling while the refrigerator was sitting without its doors in the middle of my kitchen because it couldn’t fit in the space without removing molding from the wall.

• Canned veggies: Fresh veggies are always healthier, but canned do in a pinch and they don’t need to be refrigerated. Most cans have three to four servings of vegetables in each, so in a pinch, I was able to open a can and knock out three of my required veggies in one sitting. One note of caution, however, remember where you packed your can opener.

• Eating out the healthy way: After three days in the new house, we still haven’t gone grocery shopping. I have been eating out at restaurants so that we can just focus on moving, unpacking and getting the pets acclimated to the new place. Instead of cooking food, I have been doing my best to choose healthy options while I’m eating out. I found the menu and nutrition facts for a bunch of restaurants online (See Dotti’s Weight Loss Zone), so I can choose wisely no matter where I go.

Just because I’m moving, doesn’t mean I have an excuse to binge on whatever food is nearby. There are ways to eat healthy, even when I can’t find my pots and pans. Eating healthy is easy when I plan ahead and know that it is possible.

One of the biggest attractions for our move (and subsequent upending of our lives) was this trail map of Daybreak. We moved to this community so that we could live right next to a huge number of trails that go around lakes and through green areas.

Our last home was located near downtown Salt Lake City. There were lots of parks to enjoy. In fact, you can see the videos of all three of them here:

• Starling Fitness DVDS » Liberty Park
• Starling Fitness DVDS » Fairmont Park
• Starling Fitness DVDS » Sugarhouse Park

When we first moved downtown, I was so happy that I lived within walking distance of three parks. After six years of taking walks to them, I can still honestly say that they are just as wonderful now as they were when I first moved there. If Daybreak hadn’t had such accommodating trails all so close to my home (including a lake), I may have never been tempted away from the Sugarhouse area.

The truth of the matter is, no matter where you live, there is SOMETHING interesting to walk past. If you live in the heart of a big city, there are interesting restaurants, galleries and shops to peruse. If you live in the boondocks, there is wildlife, tall grasses and open skies to keep you company. The suburbs have parks and plenty of homes to walk past and compare with your own.

Stop reading my blog RIGHT NOW and go online to Google Maps to see what is near your home. Look for parks, shops, trails and back roads.

• Google Maps

Wherever you live, there is something interesting to walk and run past, I guarantee it. Explore your neighborhood right now because for all you know, your life may be packed up in boxes and you’ll be sleeping halfway across town within a month.

Mike and I are in the process of moving. Our entire life is packed up in cardboard boxes. Even my beloved computer has been broken down to it’s component parts: keyboard, mouse and monitor are all packed neatly into labeled boxes.

The bad part of this is that I’m barely able to work. I am tapping this entry out on my iPhone using an app I downloaded on a lark over a year ago. Even worse, I can’t send out any journal or DVD orders. If you want to buy anything, be forewarned that it will take an extra week to show up at your door.

The good part of all of this is that my real life is providing me with more than enough exercise. My muscles are stinging with the work of the last few days and there are many more to come. I’m ashamed at the pain I’m feeling in my legs and arms. Just when I think I’m a tough and strong bird, I find that my quads aren’t up for the challenge. I guess I need to increase my weight training when all of this is over.

My posting maybe sporatic over the next few weeks, but don’t be worried. I haven’t fallen off the wagon. I just don’t know where I packed it.

My friend, Jere, had a strange incident the other day. It was wonderful reading it:

• Blind Prophecy » Hey, good looking!

You know how sometimes you’re walking down the street casually glancing in the windows of the various shops on a sunny day.

And then you pass a shop where you see a cute guy inside the store, so you slow your pace just a bit.

And in the space of time it takes to walk one more step, you think, “He’s cute…

“But he’s probably in a relationship or out of my league…

Read the rest here: Blind Prophecy » Hey, good looking!

I don’t want to ruin the end of the story, because it’s a great one. I want to be that kind of person, too, Jere!

In Utah, the home builders periodically have The Parade of Homes, where they showcase their building skills. It allows normal people like me to tour huge mansions.

Most of the time, I don’t care at all for the homes. They are so large that I can’t even imagine keeping them clean, much less living in them. This year, however, I did fall in love with one aspect of one of the homes: The Canterbury Gym.

The house was on Canterbury Lane and their personal exercise room was gorgeous. On the wall was the following quote:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

There were treadmills and elliptical trainers, but the most interesting feature of the gym were the light fixtures. They were a combination of light and rotating fans. Here is a little video of what they looked like.

Do you need a home gym like that to keep fit? No. All you need is enough room to move around or maybe a corner of a room for a treadmill. The fanciest home gym on the planet isn’t enough to get you fit if you don’t USE it. Those rotating fans were sure nice, though. What they provide more than a normal ceiling fan or even just a cheap fan clipped to your treadmill, I don’t know, but they looked pretty.

• “Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.” – Thomas Jefferson http://tqpage.com/3020 #
• Try this oatmeal pancake recipe when I get the chance. http://tinyurl.com/lwnkug #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

This postcard from PostSecret reminded me of my high school days.

There is a weekly pill box with a tab from Monster Energy Drink in the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday sections. It reads:

I haven’t eaten since Sunday.

When I was in high school, I thought the way to lose weight was to just not eat. Back in the Eighties, they didn’t know as much about metabolism as they do now (even now, they have just scratched the surface of human physiology). I remember starting some new diet pills and I decided that I could drink as many Diet Cokes as I wanted, but I wasn’t going to eat.

That worked for three days and then I ate an entire box of discount Twinkies from the bakery thrift store.

Now I know that I have to eat OFTEN to lose weight. It doesn’t need to be a lot, but it really helps if I eat every two hours or so. I feel fuller with the same amount of calories and I feel like I’m eating all day, because face it, I am. I’ve finally found what works for me. To lose weight, I need to EAT!

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

I was browsing through Flicker the other day and I found these runner photos. I thought you’d like to see them.

A long time reader, Ernie Wallace, sent this post to me and it was so good, I’m putting it here verbatim.

Before I started running, I would pass runners on the street and silently wonder to myself: “Why is he running on the street and not the sidewalk? Why doesn’t she get out of the way, so she doesn’t get hit by a car!”

Now that I run, I understand why. And there are plenty of reasons why I run in the street – safety, a path clear of tree branches or spider webs (I live in Florida), even footing to keep from stumbling. There is one sure reason why I run on the street, however, and I realized during one morning run that was later than usual so there were more cars on the street to dodge.

When I run – I’M NOT A PEDESTRIAN!

Merriam-Webster defines the word pedestrian as “going or performed on foot”.

Pedestrians are people who are walking from somewhere to somewhere. They are walking their dog, because they have to. They are walking to a neighbor’s house to borrow a cup of sugar (do people do that?). They aren’t walking for the sake of walking.

I run for the sake of running. I am out there just to be out there. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve run TO places before – because I needed to get there and it was within my running distance. Those runs different than my “running for the sake of running” runs.

So, why do I run in the street? Because (say it with me here):

I AM NOT A PEDESTRIAN!