2022 Healthy Living (February 27 – March 5)

[DahliaDoll]

My week ... February 27 – March 5:

Exercise:

• Sunday ~ Classical stretch
• Monday ~ DJ’s Exercises (3 sets) + a few minutes of YouTube Spanish dance cardio
• Tuesday ~ 2.6 mi. walk (home from Costco)
• Wednesday ~ Total Body workout
• Thursday ~ Classical Stretch
• Friday ~ Dance Step
• Saturday ~ 2.3 mi. neighborhood walk

Healthy eating: Fair. Still need to cut more empty carbs, mostly in the form of sweets; but I have such low willpower.

Week’s weight: up/down/maintain: -.20 (BMI=23.6)

Mental/Emotional: What did you do for yourself this week? Tuesday/Mardi Gras Kaffee und Kuchen with friends; Wednesday/video chat with girlfriend; Thursday/Stitched Together, trip with Kathy to Issaquah stitching shop; Friday/Play Date with DH, visit friends in Mount Vernon for lunch; a couple of neighborhood walks to get me outdoors (feels so invigorating). In addition, I made a couple phone calls other friends to touch base.

 

[AnnieClaus]

Food: I was on vacation and I promised myself I would not obsess about making sure I ate the right things.
I especially like to enjoy whatever local foods are at the place I'm visiting. That meant shaved ice with ice cream a couple of times. We actually made a lot of food ourselves. We got a condo with a kitchen. I would consider the food we ate, convenience, packaged type food (there were no real grocery stores near us) that I would not typically make. But it served it' s purpose and I am ready to get back to eating fresh, "whole" foods.
Water was not as good as usual but I did try to be mindful of getting some in.

Exercise: We walked every day about 5 miles. Plus swimming in the ocean almost every day.

Mental: My mind got to take a break from every day life. Which is so refreshing and exactly why we all need to break out of our every day routines and do something different for a week or so at least a couple of times a year.

 

[DahliaDoll]

Annie ~ I find planning food for trips is a challenge, but sometimes one that I enjoy. I definitely do not like to eat out all the time. Our last trip, we planned to eat out on our travel days, since it was a car trip. We were able to take other meals that I had frozen and were great just to heat up. Many meals are actually better left over. Most of our travelling is conducive to us being able to do much of our own cooking, or eating with the family we are visiting (usually DDs). It would be pretty challenging with no good food stores available, even if you do have a kitchen.

 

[Holiday_Mom]

Exercise - Last week was a surprise week for me. I got in 5 days of walking 5 miles for a total of 6 hours and 40 minutes. Somedays walking was indoors and some days walking was outdoors. Having something to listen to or something to watch helped motivate me to walk.

Healthy Eating - One thing that I discovered last week is that I need to eat carbs for breakfast and not only protein. I was doing protein only for a couple of weeks and feeling lousy mid-morning until lunch when I ate carbs. In the afternoon, I'd perk up.

On Monday I started back to making smoothies. I had a kale and oatmeal smoothie for breakfast and then a kale and flax seed smoothie for lunch. I felt great all day. The next day I reversed the order I had the smoothies. I felt lousy. Wednesday I went back to the carbs at breakfast and the protein at lunch and felt great. I did that the rest of the week and felt terrific. So I am sticking to that.

Mental - After 9/11, dh and I basically stopped watching the news. Every now and then, we'll put the news on when big world events happen like Russia invading Ukraine. We are careful not to watch too long. We find that daily news consumption affects us negatively. It is our way of coping with the suffering. We are better off reading where we don't see and hear the suffering so acutely.

Adding on to the food and vacation conversation, when we do road trips we try to bring as much food for meals as possible. On early morning departures for our destination and return trip home, we will typically microwave a frozen breakfast sandwich and bring our own coffee for the road. We'll stop for a late lunch/early dinner. We more or less have a vacation menu that has worked for our family. I do a lot of pre-cooked meats that make it easy to put together after a long day of hiking.

We did a trip like Annie's a few years back where we flew to the destination and then had to shop locally. It was like shopping at glorified mini-mart. It was an enjoyable challenge to find the foods that we were hoping to get and coming up with alternatives when necessary.

 

[AnnieClaus]

DJ and Mary-
I was actually surprised with how much my brother brought in his suitcase for meals!
Packs of rice, noodles, coffee, pancake mix, syrup, refried beans, olive oil, mayo, salt and pepper.
He had asked me to bring packs of chicken for chicken salad and some tortillas. I then decided to throw in a box of half and half (the little mini-cups). I thought they may open up but they didn't!

I have never in my life packed such things in my suitcase!

We did what Mary said- found a couple of salads, eggs, bread, and cheese at a glorified convenience store.

I do have to say, it was pretty genius! And did save us a lot of $$.

Annie