077. February Goals + More Kashi Goodness

As promised I've worked out my February goals. Yesterday, I spent some time thinking more about my goal-setting (why I stopped, how to make it better), and I’ve come to a couple conclusions.

First, I think part of the reason I stopped was because it was getting to the point where I was setting too many goals for myself. It’s hard to manage 15 goals in a month! A lot of them were simple things I was doing anyway. This made them less than meaningful and tedious to track. I drink water like the earth is going dry so it’s silly for me to set a goal to get my 8 glasses of water. Second, my goals, while not completely arbitrary, weren’t really working towards anything long term or any greater goal outside of “lose weight.”

So what does this mean for my February (and future) goals? First, I’m keeping it simple. I’m going to have 5 goals for February (though one of those five does have “mini-goals”). Second, most of them directly correlate with and help me achieve items on my 10 in 2010 list.

So without further ado…my February goals.

• 5lbs lost. – I want to finally reach my goal weight of 135lbs. (This is really still flexible for me. I’m not sure what my ideal weight is, but this seemed like a good starting point.) Ideally I’d like to do it by June so that I’ve lost all my weight prior to ordering my bridesmaid dress for my brother’s wedding. I don’t want to worry about losing weight once it’s been ordered and having to have additional alterations made. This means I need to lose 5 – 6 pounds a month. This is totally doable; I just need to frickin’ focus already!


• Track daily – I’ve been really terrible about tracking my food lately. I’m not even talking calorie counting (though that is my actual goal); I’ve been bad just documenting what I’m eating. How many foodie posts have you seen around herelately? Exactly my point. Obviously this is going to help me achieve the reaching my goal weight goal.


• Cardio 5 days a week
  a. Swim 2 days
  b. Spin 1 day
  c. Run 2 days
  d. Yoga 2 days
  Obviously, this is the goal with mini-goals. I found a sprint distance triathlon on June 27th that I would like to do. Final details don’t become available until March (I believe it’s a small park district run event.), but right now I’m planning to sign up. The mini-goals provide me a skeleton for triathlon training and will help me reach my 10 in 2010 goal of competing in a sprint distance triathlon. And of course, we all know cardio is good for us anyway.


• Strength training 3 days a week – This is the one goal that doesn’t directly correlate with any particular 10 in 2010 goal, but it’s one that will improve me over all. I always slack off when it comes to strength training. I need to work-out a more concrete plan, but I will make it happen.


• Create weekly meal plans and go grocery shopping weekly – Like tracking, this is something I used to be really good about doing and then it sort of fell by the wayside. Creating weekly meal plans will help keep me organized, help keep me on track to meeting my goal weight and properly fueling my body for my work-outs and triathlon training, and help me save money (10 in 2010 #10).
  

So, in keeping with my goal to track everything. It's time for today's morning snackies and my lunch!

My morning snack was two mandarin oranges. I took a photo, but it's stuck in my iPhone right now. I'll post that when I get home.

Lunch was a new adventure. When I was at Jewel last night, they had a display of Kashi frozen entrees complete with coupons. I've been wanting to try some of the Kashi frozen entrees. I don't eat a whole lot of frozen meals, but I do think they're nice to have on hand just in case. I grabbed the Black Bean Mango entree, and brought it for lunch today.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I've yet to find a Kashi product I don't like. There's a few things I haven't LOVED, but everything I've tried so far I've liked enough to finish eating. For example I wasn't horribly impressed with the Dark Chocolate Coconut bars, but I liked them enough to finish the box.

I really enjoyed this lunch. As far as frozen meals go, Kashi does a top-notch job. This tasted more like reheated leftovers than a frozen entree.

I'd heard it was spicy so I was a bit scared (my spicy tolerance maxes out around mild salsa.) It wasn't as bad as I expected at all. There was definitely a kick to it, but it was balanced out by the sweetness of the mango and the rice.

It was also a perfect, filling portion. I ate it all without feeling stuffed or starved. Usually, I need to add something frozen entrees (e.g. Lean Cuisine), but this was plenty. It's been nearly two hours and I'm still feeling satisfied.

Overall, two thumbs up to Kashi on making a great frozen entry. I will definitely be keeping my eye our for coupons and sale so I can buy a couple more of these.

075. At the Risk of Sounding Like a Broken Record...

...I'm sorry for being a blogging lame. I swear. This week it is on like Donkey Kong. Starting right now!

I've had some major realization in the last week in regard to my weight loss and healthy living journey. I guess you could call this my "getting back on track post" even though I haven't been "off-track" per se; I've been maintaining my weight, eating healthy, and getting a couple work-outs in each week. I'm just not giving it 100% which would explain why the weight loss is going no where.

I started reading The Spark last week, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm pretty much only reading it during my commute though so I'm moving through it at a pretty slow pace. Anyway, even with just the two chapters I've read so far, I've had a major revelation.

From the beginning, there were two things that attracted me to SparkPeople. I love the proactive, goal-oriented nature of the site and the emphasis on planning. Setting my health and fitness goals, striving for them, and achieving them creates such a drive in me. It spreads to other areas of my life. Planning my meals and my fitness helps me keep other area of my life more organized. (If I know I'm going running after work then I have to structure the rest of my activities for the day accordingly so I can fit everything in.) I find myself more motivated in all areas of my life.

So given this, why the heck did I stop setting goals and making plans for myself?! I used to do monthly goal blogs and the occasional weekly goal blog; I had a weekly meal plan and fitness routine blogs then I just stopped. I have no idea why. Maybe got bored of setting the same goals. Maybe I got lazy. In any case, the time has come to change that.

So, starting February 1st*, I am back on the goal-setting wagon. I'm going to be writing them down in my planner. I'm going to make meal plans and fitness plans. I'm going to blog about these goals and plans to keep myself accountable. I'm getting back on the wagon!

I plan to have my February goals blog posted by Thursday at the latest. Keep an eye out for it.


*I am actually starting today and making meal and fitness plans for the remainder of the week, but my "official" start is going to be February 1st.

I took some time this evening to plan out the rest of the week's meals and make my grocery list. I really don't know why I stopped doing this. I makes life so much easier on so many levels! I also followed some of the advise of Tina over Trading Up Downtown and took stock of what I had in my pantry before choosing my meals to limit how much I needed to buy. This was especially important since I was going shopping at Jewel tonight. I hate going to Jewel because I always leave feeling ripped off. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go all the way out to Trader Joe's tonight, and there aren't a lot of grocery store options in my immediate area. Anyway, here we go with the meal plans!

1/27
B: Oats with peanut butter and banana
L: Some Kashi frozen black bean mango thing I has a coupon for so I decided to try it.
D: Southwest Chicken Stew

1/28
B: Oats with banana, cinnamon, and brown sugar
L: Southwest Chicken Stew leftovers
D: Homemade BBQ Chicken Pizza

1/29
B: Chocolate oats with peanut butter and banana
L: BBQ Chicken pizza leftovers
D: Burrito Bowls

1/30
B: Homemade Whole Wheat Waffles
L: Mac n Cheese (with tuna and veggies added)
D: Ginger Orange Tofu with brown rice

1/31
B: omelets with roasted red potatoes
L: Chick'n nuggets and tater tots
D: TBD (My goal is to go grocery shopping for next week on Sunday so I left this as a free-be)

Give-Away Alert! There are some really great blogger give-aways going on right now. You should go check 'em out!
Shannon at The Daily Balance has two give-aways going right now: a Manduka yoga mat sling and a Gaiam yoga mat.
Tina at Trading Up Downtown is giving away some chocolate inspired goodies. She's also got a 24-class pass at Healthworks up for grabs over on Carrots n Cake.

041. 10 in 2010

I just love Angela's 10 in 2010 so I decided it was high time I did my own. I've always been really terrible about setting goals and making lists and not following through, but this is a new year and a new me. This is a healthier, more driven me.

So here we go...10 things I want to accomplish in 2010.

1. Run a half marathon
   I'm thinking this will happen in September. My best friend's little sister has run a half in September the last two years. When I started running she suggested I run with her. I laughed at the idea, but I'm actually really interested now. It's definitely something I'd like to do.
2. Complete a sprint distance triathlon
   I used to swim competitively, and I've always loved biking recreationally. I don't foresee ever putting myself through the training for a half or full ironman, but I could definitely handle training for a sprint, or maybe even olympic, distance triathlon.
3. Get back in school
   I've wanted to go back to school pretty much since I graduated. The problem has been I didn't know what I wanted to go back for. Since I began my personal journey to a healthy lifestyle, I've become very passionate about sharing my knowledge. I want to go back to school for health science. I've still got some things to consider (like how I'm going to pay for it and what I want the end result to be), but I'd really like to be back in school by the end of the year.
4. Reach my goal weight of 135lbs.
5. Set a new PR for my 5K time (sub 29:30)
6. Really get my blog going
   I want to be posting regularly with meals, work-outs, and daily life stuff as well as posting "feature articles"
7. Find a volunteer organization that's a good fit and volunteer.
   I did steal this directly from Julie's 10 in 2010; however, it's something I've been wanting to do for a while now. I used to volunteer all the time in high school. I'd really like to get back to volunteering at least a couple times a month.
8. Do a 30 Day Vegetarian Challenge
   I think I've mentioned here before that I want to really reduce my meat consumption and do a 7 day vegetarian challenge. I'll probably do this sometime in January as a jumping off point. I'd like to do a full month challenge too though. This will really give me an idea of what living a vegetarian lifestyle is like, and it will force me to get creative.
9. Be the best maid of honor I can be
   Nicki asked me to be her main of honor in her and my brother's wedding. I don't really know what a maid of honor is supposed to do exactly, but I'm really honored she asked me.
10. Save Money!
    I think this is pretty high on everyone's list of things to do. I really want to start saving so that I can renovate my kitchen and bathrooms. I also want to get rid of my carpet because it's super ugly and I hate carpet. I'd like to replace it with wood laminate.

020. Financial Health is Important Too!

I’m pretty sure Caitlin is a mind reader. This afternoon she posted her Responsible Spending Challenge, and the post couldn’t have been more timely.

I’m not bad with money, but recently my spending has been out of control. I actually saw a “negative number”* in my checking account for the first time ever!

I know the two primary reasons I’ve been spending so much lately, but it really needs to stop. The first reason I’ve been spending so much is my condo. I’ve bought a lot of stuff for the condo in the last two month. A lot of that spending was a one time thing. Now that we’re getting settled things should start to taper off. The second reason I’ve been spending a lot is my weight loss. In the last two months I’ve bought a TON of clothes – way more clothing that I would ever buy in the same time period – because I’ve really needed them. My work clothes were starting to look really sloppy because they were just too big. I’ve got enough clothes now, and I shouldn’t need to buy more for a while.

So what are the goals of my responsible spending challenge?

- Limit eating out to once a week. – I/ We really don’t eat out that often, but this is a quick and easy way to cut costs.
- Find a plan for splitting grocery costs with Chris – for the most part I’ve been footing the grocery bill because I make more money. I really don’t mind this; however, after seeing how much we actually DO spend on groceries in a month, I realize we need to come up with a set split for the bill.
- Set up a mint.com account to analyze spending.
- Create a monthly budget. – I am horrible at budgeting. Seriously. I’m awful at it. Hopefully after my analysis, I can create something.
- Figure out a workable amount to put into savings each pay period and set up my direct deposit to automatically deposit that amount into my savings. - I spent about 75% of my savings on condo stuff (paint, a drier, etc.), and I haven't put anything back into it. Luckily, my savings account has a minimum balance of $2,500 so I do always have that cushion if I get into a pinch.

I may add goals after I do my spending analysis and create my budget.

*As a side note, I deduct my bills from my check register really far in advance. Most of the time I have my bills subtracted so far in advance, I get at least one pay check before the bills actually clear. Because of this, the balance in my check register is always significantly lower than the amount of money actually in my account; so while my check register showed a negative number, I actually had plenty of money in my account.

017. Back in the Groove for Real

So, recently I’ve been eating WAY too much processed junk-foods. I’m really starting to feel gross. I’ve also started to notice a pattern over the last couple months. I start the month really strong with a lot of ambitious goals. Near the middle of the month, I fall into a funk where I start slipping on my work-outs and not eating as well. After a week – week and a half, I get my act together again and finish the month off strong. Even my blogging has suffered this month which rarely happens because I really enjoy blogging! Of course, I do manage to do a lot of damage in the week – week and a half. So, in attempt to remedy this, I’m going to stop focusing on monthly goals try to set goals for a longer period of time.

I haven’t talked a lot in this blog about my specific weight loss goals or goals I’ve been setting to get to my goal weight. There are two reasons for this. First, this is more about getting healthy than loosing weight. I’m really not in much of a hurry to loose the weight. I’ll get there when I get there. Second, I started this blog after I set my November goals and I just never posted about it. I want to start monitoring my goals more actively on this blog.

As a way of managing these three things here are my goals for the next 6 weeks (until the end of the year.)

1. End the year at 150lbs (This is about -6lbs.)
2. Track all meals here and track calories over at SparkPeople
   2 a. Limit eating out to once per week
   2 b. Stick with weekly meal plans
3. Track all Work-Outs here.
   3 a. Work on including more cross training (spin class and swimming)
   3 b. Strength training (including 30 Day Shred) at least 3 days a week.
   3 c. Keep up with Whittle my Middle Challenge
4. Log 75 miles between now and the end of the year (I still have a couple left in the Pile on the Miles challenge!)
   4 a. Run 10 miles at least once.
   

So there you have it. My goals for the next 6 weeks. I tried to keep them simple and not too overly ambitious. I figured I should ease myself in to this.

There is one other challenge I want to do for myself and that is going vegetarian for a week. At this point, I have no intention of ever going totally vegetarian, but recently I have found myself wanting to reduce the amount of meat I consume and find more creative ways to integrate protien. I've been wanting to follow a more "flexitarian" model over eating - especially after Laura posted about it last month. I'm going to wait until after Thanksgiving to start that challenge though. We're going to Chris' counsin's house for T-Day, and since a) I love turkey and b) I have no control over the food, it seems like a bad day to be experimenting with vegetarianism.