60 days from tomorrow I will be heading to beautiful California for the first time ever. M and I are going for the wedding of two of my law school classmates.  Several of my other classmates are making the trek as well and we are making a bit of a vacation out of the weekend. On top of that, 3 weeks later I’m taking a ladies only trip to Las Vegas. I’m really looking forward to both trips.  However, I decided that these trips are the motivations I have needed to buckle down and lose these last pounds. Seeing people I haven’t seen since last summer and some since nearly 2 years ago is great motivation for me to get in the best shape ever (not to mention that it’d be nice to be comfortable in a bathing suit). So I’ve created a little challenge for myself which I’m sure you’ve figured out by now from the title of this post.

Here are the rules of the 60 Day Challenge:

• Foods to eat: fruits, vegetables, lean meats, healthy fats
• Foods to avoid: processed anything, added sugars, white flour, and undocumented food (my dailyburn.com nutrition tracking has been lacking significantly)
• Plan meals for the week every weekend (probably Sundays)
• One meal per week will be a cheat meal. During the rest of the day I will consume between 800 – 1200 calories. That meal is free though. I’m not going to try to blow it at the meals but I want to have a bit of flexibility. I’m thinking that most weeks this meal will fall on my long run days.
• Think about each days meal the night before and do any necessary prep
• Take weekly pictures
• Take weekly weight (and no more than weekly!)
• Workout 6 days a week:
  • 3 days of running
  • 2-3 days of lifting (NROLW)
  • 2-3 days of biking
  • 2 days of swimming
• Calorie Goals
  • 1500-1800 on rest/light days
  • 1700-2000 on running/heavy days
  • Goals to be adjusted by the week depending on results
• Report weekly on my weekly goals
• Report daily on my food goals (with pictures ?!?!)
• Overall Goals:
  • Be in great shape for the wedding
  • Lose 20 pounds (2.5 pounds a week)
  • Continue to work on my fitness for the half marathon, marathon, and triathlons
  • Learn to enjoy eating clean healthy foods (this is probably the most important of the goals)

The challenge officially begins tomorrow. I’ll be taking measurements, pictures,and my starting weight in the morning, so be sure to check back in then!

But the real question is – who is going to join me?

Last Sunday, I did an indoor triathlon at the local JCC. I didn’t know what to expect and was quite nervous, but turned out I had no reason to. This indoor triathlon was 20 minutes of each exercise. A little different from a normal triathlon which is obviously biking > running > swimming in terms of time and as someone who does not enjoy the swim this was not going to be my best race.

As does every triathlon, we started out with the swim. I did 20 laps (1000 meters) in 20 minutes. I swam a large majority of this breaststroke because I’m just not confident with my freestyle stroke. The lack of confidence turns into a feeling of running out of breath in the water. This was before I started doing Total Immersion and this is exactly why I started TI. More on that later.

The bike part was done on spinning bikes equipped with bike computers. They looked at your wattage and divided it by your weight. I did well if you just look at watts, but because of my weight, I ended up 4th from last in this category. Frankly, given how I’ve done in previous triathlons, I’m not sure I buy this method of scoring, but I also don’t know how the competition in this race stacks up to a normal triathlon so I can’t really compare. If the competitors were more of top finishers in triathlons, then maybe this method is fine, but I won’t ever know.

The run went well. I finished second in my group (one guy beat me). I ended up running at about 6.6 mph. This is much better than my prior speeds in triathlons. Run Less Run Faster is paying off.

Overall, I finished 3rd from last among them women (13th from last overall). Again, given that I dont’ know how this competition stacks up compared to a real race, I’m not letting that poor showing ruin my training. Update regarding my recent training (hint: it’s going very well!).

I wish that I had good news to report, but somehow I gained 2 pounds since yesterday and a pound since last week. I had Indian for lunch yesterday which was an indulgence, but I can’t imagine it was a 7000 calorie indulgence. Oh well, I guess we’ll see what next week brings!

In other news, I redid my interval workout this morning. I did 2.5 of the 3 miles (yesterday I did 1.5). I probably could have completed the third interval but I didn’t want to push my luck.

After the run, I did Stage 2 of NROLW. I’m so glad to be on stage 2. Confession: I had a few more workouts left of Stage 1  but I feel like I’ve been doing that stage for 6 months so it was time for something new. Let me just say that I LOVED this workout. It was challenging and overall a great workout.

After lifting, I decided to try the first two skills in Total Immersion. As rudimentary as it may sound the first skill is lying on your back (in a specific way) and kicking the length of the pool. The other part of the first skill is to roll to your side and do a length.  The second skill was sticking one arm above your head for the first part and then rolling over for the second part.  I was okay with the first skill but the second was more challenging. I struggled with the breathing part. I think I’m going to retry these skills tomorrow.

And one more thing – I did a two-a-day yesterday. I ran and biked a bit in the a.m. but then I biked 10 more miles this afternoon.

That’s how I felt this morning as I attempted to do my interval workout for the week. My workout called for 3 1-mile intervals at 6.8 mph. I managed the first one just fine, but after that it was downhill.  I think I was hungry and worn out from the weekend. I decided to call it quits and try the workout again tomorrow.

I may have been running on empty for reasons other than hunger. On Saturday, I ran 9 miles in 1:33:36 which was the exact pace I was supposed to run.  This was the first long run on the treadmill that I actually managed to do the called for pace.

On Sunday, I ran an indoor triathlon. The triathlon was 20 minutes of each sport. I did 20 laps (1000 meters) swimming, biked at 155 watts (don’t have a clue what this means but with your weight they are going to calculate something using watts), and ran 26 laps (2.2 miles in 20 minutes – which was second most in my group!). The results of the triathlon aren’t out yet, but I think I did okay.

I also bought Total Immersion.  I have felt like I was just flopping along in all my swims lately and it’s been years since I’ve had swim lessons so my stroke could probably use help. I’ve considered lessons but decided that I may do that next year but this year will be a building year (including losing weight) and more importantly I need to spend the year saving some money so buying a $16.99 book seemed like a smarter idea for this year.

I wanted to try the first couple of skills this morning, but after discovering I had to go home instead of going straight to work because I left my shampoo and conditioner at home, so I’ll either be doing it tonight or tomorrow morning.

I will be reporting back tomorrow about this week’s weight loss.

Here are my current priorities in life:

• Working
• Working out
• Spending time with M
• Cooking each night
• Losing 30 pounds

The problem with those priorities is that they push the other priorities out: the thing that happens to fall out of the list the most is unfortunately this  blog. I just want to put it out there that if I have to pick a work out or blogging, I’ll always pick working out. Same with everything else on the list (some not by choice). It’s not that I don’t like blogging (because I do), or think blogging is important (hello accountability); it is just that I sometimes don’t have time. I wish I could update daily, or three times a day like some people, but unfortunately being in the business I am, I’m lucky to update the blog a few times a week. This month, in particular, has been super busy with work – in fact, I’m about to bill the most hours I’ve ever billed in one month and January was NOT a long month in terms of number of work days. Anyway, I wanted to let you know that as much as I would love to blog every day, that is just not realistic for me.

On a more positive note, Tuesdays have become my new weigh in day because that’s when I started using Daily Burn last week. Since last Tuesday, I have lost 3 pounds! I am sure it could have been more, but I’m very happy with 3 pounds. I didn’t do as well this weekend as I would have liked, but given the stuff we did, I think I did better than I have in the past. The goal this weekend is to eat at home as much as possible. We don’t really have anything going on so it shouldn’t be too hard to do that.

And an even more positive note: THE COLTS ARE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!!!! I was lucky enough to be at the AFC Championship game and can’t wait for the big game! The last time they went I lived in DC so I didn’t experience the hype in the city. I’m pretty excited to be here celebrating with the hundreds of thousands of other fans this year.

Turns out stalking people on Twitter pays off every now and then. Yesterday, I saw a conversation between two bloggers about their favorite place to track calories. One blogger was about to come over to daily plate which I have been using for a while, and the other suggested Daily Burn. Then later the one that was changing over changed her mind and said she’d be going to Daily Burn because of how great it was. I couldn’t help but look.

I can’t believe on what I’ve been missing out on. Here’s a bullet point list of features that make calorie counting websites good IMO:

• calorie counting (obviously)
• huge database of food
• good statistics
• (for bloggers) easily obtainable data
• ability to input workouts

And here’s what Daily Burn has:

• calorie counting that I can do on my iPhone by scanning the barcodes on foods. I couldn’t make that amazing feature up if I tried
• work outs that you can input and then track on  your iPhone

I promise if you don’t have an iPhone you’ll still love it:

• a database of workout suggestions
• videos of weight lifting moves
• meal and work out planning
• grocery shopping list creation if you meal plan
• challenges that you can join (e.g., lose 10 pounds, run 1000 miles, bike 1500 miles)
• the ability to take out your daily info as a CSV document (Excel compatible) meaning I can create nifty charts easily. I used to do these charts but with daily plate or fit day they were a pain to do. It was a breeze on Daily Burn. See:

• And best of all (again IMO) is that you can enter recipes item by item and it calculates the calorie content of the recipe. This is literally a dream come true to me. See the first item in the list above to see my first attempt at this.

I’m sure there are even more features that I am not including because I have yet to discover them. I’ve only been using the program for a day and this is all the stuff I’ve found in that short amount of time.

I’m not paid anything for this review. Quite the opposite in fact: I paid for Daily Burn. They have a free version but the paid one is much much more thorough and I thought worth it.

Honestly, I think I’m in love with this website.

I wish I had something catchy to say about eating pizza and twizzlers like Jen did yesterday (she’s great btw, go read now! and then come back). Unfortunately, I didn’t eat healthy versions of these (are there healthy versions of twizzlers). In fact, I ate 490 calories of twizzlers.

I ate 2042 calories total yesterday. I’m going to move on and have a good day today though.

Yesterday I got home t 8:30. I shoot to be in bed by 9, so this was pretty late for me.

However, yesterday I did have a good morning workout. I did 5 minutes on the exercise bike (and hurt myself in the process because I’m a clutz!!) and then did NROLW. I’m only 4 exercises away from being done with stage 1, finally! It didn’t help that I didn’t do any NROLW last week.

After lifting, I swam a pyramid (1 fast, 1 slow, 2 fast, 2 slow, 3 fast, 3 slow, 2 fast, 2 slow, 1 fast, 1 slow, 1 minute rest x 3) for 1350 meters/yards total. I was about a minute slower than last week, but given that I swim the slow ones … slow I don’t know how worthwhile it is to time myself. I am really trying to focus on form. I have pitiful form. I have yet to swim a triathlon doing all freestyle. That’s my goal for next weekend’s indoor. It’s 20 minutes of swimming so that will be a lot of freestyle for me! (P.S. Literally forgot about this triathlon until I typed this paragraph and was about to type “That’s my goal for my first….” and that I remembered that I have one next week).

I did make an awesome discovery though that I think (hope) will have a huge impact on my attempts to lose weight. Hope to share more tonight or tomorrow!

Whoa! A morning post from EatRunLitigate – what is going on? Well see, I’ve been getting up for morning workouts for the last few months. I would love to get up at 5 a.m. everyday because it gives me lots of time in the morning to eat breakfast at home, take my time getting ready, and update the blog if I want! But honestly, today was the first day I thought about updating in the morning (probably had something to do with waking up at 4:47 a.m.). I like posting at this time because I can reflect on a complete day (yesterday). I’ve already done my workout for today so that’s a bit weird, but I’m going to talk about yesterdays. I know I’ve talked about doing this format before but I think this time it’ll work because I’ve been pretty consistent with the early morning wake up – probably because I’ve also been consistent about getting in bed before 9.

So yesterday was a good day both workout and food wise, except for the brownie with cream cheese frosting that I had at 4 p.m. In the end, I ate 1657 calories, including the brownie. When I count calories I’m usually aiming for under 1500, but at the advice at some readers yesterday I’m going to make that a little higher, so my new range is going to be between 1500-1800. I’m going to shoot for the low end on rest days and the higher end on workout days.

I’m also jumping on the blogging bandwagon and reading The Beck Diet for Life. I started it last night. I need to pick up a few supplies (notebooks, notecards, etc.) tonight. After reading the introduction, I think this is exactly what I’ve been needing. I’m one of those people that uses every mental excuse in the book to eat whatever I want and ruin my diet.  This plan will provide exactly what I talked about yesterday – accountability. I know the book suggests getting a diet buddy but I’m going to use my blog as my diet buddy.

I woke up at 6 a.m. and worked out. My Run Less Run Faster workout for the day was a 10 minute warm-up, then intervals: 1200, 1000, 800, 600, 400, 200, and a 10 minute cool-down. The intervals got faster 6.9 for the 1200 meters and 7.3 for the 200 meters. Again, this was a rough workout. Tomorrow’s workout will be harder though – 5 mile tempo run. I did my 3 mile tempo run last week just fine, but the week before when I had to do 5 miles I only did 3. I’m confident I can do it this time though!

I know Seattlerunnergirl is reading Beck – is anyone else reading it? How’s it going for you? Do you find yourself being more accountable?

I read a lot of blogs. I often find myself yelling at bloggers when they post week after week about not succeeding. And then it hit me: I am that blogger. I post all the time about the goals I have, but, while I’m usually working well on my physical fitness goals, I’m continually failing, not talking about, or restarting my healthy eating goals.  I have posted about this before but it bears repeating. I have this terrible tendency to do well Monday through Wednesday or Thursday and then by Friday and the weekend I’ve completely let my attempt to eat well go.

This week was like that. I did well Monday and Tuesday and then was fine Wednesday night until book club, where I proceeded to eat my little heart out. The rest of the week was beyond ugly, but highlighted by Saturday. I woke up and ate a good pre-run breakfast: toast and 2 eggs. I then went and ran 10 miles! The run was fabulous because I decided to run outside. It was a bit chilly starting out but felt fine after a while. I paced faster for this run than I did for last weeks 9 miler and the week before that’s 8 and I paced faster than I was supposed to the last two weeks for Run Less, Run Faster (this week had no goal) which means I’m going to continue doing the paces I have been doing.

Back to my diet disaster. After the run, I was naturally starving, so I decided to get Chipotle.  A burrito. And to be honest if I had had a normal dinner that night I would have been fine with the burrito, but that was just the beginning. A few hours later I had fro yo – topped with more Reese’s Cups, Snickers, and Reese’s pieces than there was fro you in the container. Then for “dinner” we went to a football party (GO COLTS!!!) and I ate my weight in snack food and drank four beers.

I know I don’t often talk about the details of my bad days – and what “healthy living” blogger does? But today I was compelled to post about how disappointed I am in my inability to make healthy choices all the time. I give myself too many free passes. And you know what that’s given me? A free pass to be 7 pounds above my lowest weight and 31 to 41 pounds away from my goal weight.

I’m not going to say I’m going to start again tomorrow, because I already started today making good decisions. I’m done starting though.  I’ve started too many times. Starting means nothing anymore. Today, tomorrow, the day after that, I’m not starting, but what I am going to be doing is being accountable every single day for every single decision. No more excuses.

_________

Today has been all good decisions:

Breakfast: mini wheat bagel (100), 1 tbsp peanut butter (95), 2 clementines (80)

Lunch: spinach (30), feta (70), walnuts (95),  Newman’s Own Raspberry Walnut Vinaigrette (70)

Snack: 1/2 bag of Baked Barbecue Lays (70) & G2 (70)

Snack: 1/2 cup of pistachios with shells (190)

Dinner: Spinach and cheese stuffed chicken (350) and vegetable medley with cheese (135)

Dessert: strawberry and banana sorbet (two ingredients) (170)

Total Calories: 1465

Workout: 40 minutes (10 miles) on the bike inside

Whittle my middle 2:

straight Arm Plank: 45 sec

side planks: 30 sec/each

torso twists: 20 reps

plank ups: 8 reps (these were scary)

boat pose: 30 sec

bicycle crunches: 2 sets of 30

I have a weak core. Will be working on this three times a week, minimum.

Bedtime Friday night: 8 p.m.

Time spent sleeping Friday night: 13 hours

Miles Run Saturday morning: 9

Time spent running: 97

Goal paces met this weekend while running: 0

Calories Counted this weekend: 0

Number of hilarious comedians seen: 1

Number of antastic one year anniversary celebrations: 1

Number of hours worked on Sunday: 7.6

Number of pages in the first draft of brief: 42

Number of Jimmy Johns’ sandwiches consumed: 2

Number of writers of this blog disappointed that I did not count calories this weekend: 0

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Still trying to figure out if I need to drop my pace range down for Run Less Run Faster. Pace this weekend was 25 seconds/mile slower than it should have been. I got a really bad side stitch (which I haven’t had in a long time) during the 2nd half of the run. I almost quit several times but pushed through. Miles 4.5 – 6 were the worst and slowest. I’m proud I got it done.