Losing Weight Vs. Being Healthy

So, this has been the latest ongoing battle within my life: Losing weight vs. being healthy. It would make sense for these two things to go hand in hand with each other, but I've been finding out by experience that that's not necessarily true.

I made a New Year's resolution to lose weight and get healthy. I've done this a few times before. I had the same resolution for 2008 and I actually stuck with it and lost about 45 to 50 pounds. I kept most of it off up until I enrolled at Wright State again, and just like my freshman year all over, I put on about 20 pounds. Fail. To be honest, it would have been extremely hard to avoid that while still keeping my sanity last quarter. It was my first quarter as a full time student while working full time and it took a lot of adjusting. Now, however, is a different story. I've adjusted, I've found ways to eat healthy even with little time, and I've made a point to find time in my schedule to work out. Unfortunately, it's not working out like I want it to. I've lost about 10 pounds, yay, but it's getting increasingly difficult to keep going. Why? I can't sleep for crap lately with the exception of Friday and Saturday nights. Even when I manage to get to the pool and swim 20 laps on 4 hours of sleep, I still can't sleep. Due to the fact that I don't want to die before I see my 26th birthday, I've had to skip a few workouts because I wake up having barely slept and already feeling exhausted before I get out of bed. As much as it sucks to get up in the morning to workout, it sucks even more when you legitimately want to work out but know that you can't do so while still maintaining your health.

So that's how this battle plays out. My brain wants to exercise and drop the pounds because I'm tired of being fat, but my body is telling me that I can't. If I go try to workout without appropriate rest, I'm only going to cause far worse problems for myself later on. In the grand scheme of things, I do realize this is a relatively good problem to have. It's a lot better than considering buying velcro shoes because I can't reach my feet to tie shoelaces over my fat rolls. I don't think I would ever let myself get that far, but then again, Oreos are delicious. It is still quite frustrating though.

Anyway, since I'm on the subject of personal health and all that, I thought I'd share some awesome things I've discovered in this go-around.

1.) www.livestrong.com/myplate



Normally, I don't buy into the Livestrong trend, but this thing is quite useful. It's a calorie tracker, but it doesn't just track your calories. You enter your info, height weight, etc. and it tells you what your daily caloric intake should be if you want to lose X number of pounds per week. Not only does it do that, but it also has the general nutritional info for over 100,000 foods. Stuff like fiber content, protein, carbs, etc. So it really does help you track to see if you have a balanced diet.

2.) Sandwich Thins

How awesome are these? I love sandwiches...this will further be addressed in #3. But I hate the calorie count for bread. Even healthy multi-grain bread has anywhere from 150-250 calories in two slices. These nifty things have 100 calories and a decently high fiber content, but still give you something to put sandwich things between.

3.) Castlewood Oven Roasted Turkey (Available at Sam's Club)


Ok, so...I've always liked turkey, and I've had a lot of turkey in the form of deli meat, but this is BY FAR the BEST turkey I've ever had. It legitimately tastes like thin slices of Thanksgiving turkey. MMMMMMMmmmmmmmm. It comes in a 22 ounce plastic tub, and I can go through the entire 22 ounces in just a shade over a week.

4. ) Spring Mix (and other dark leafy lettuces)



Salads are fairly important to a healthy diet. There's just one problem for me, I've come to despise iceberg lettuce. Unless it is VERY fresh (which rarely happens) it just tastes like crap to me. So I've switched to stuff like the Spring Mix which has very dark, leafy greens. The down side is that they have a bitterness to them, but the upside is that I can deal with it more easily than the crap taste of iceberg and it has a lot more nutrients.

5.) Water Aerobics


Seriously. I've never had so much fun working out...except for maybe playing softball. A little known fact: resistance in water is 12 times greater than it is on land, so just about any motion you do in the water is going to be 12 times more difficult than it would be on land, but it's in the water, so it's more fun. It's also no-impact so it's great if you have bad joints. If you can get into a water aerobics class somewhere, do it. I mean, look at how much fun the old fogies in the picture are having.


So there you have it, 5 awesome things I've discovered in my current health adventures. Unfortunately, sleep hasn't really been one of them. :(

Also, Chuck is on tonight, so watch it.

And if I hear the dingy noise from Grib's computer one more time, I am going to shoot her with my pellet gun.