Countdown to TTC: Week 40

Walk It Off

With the holidays here, I am finding myself getting hopelessly behind on my challenges!  I suppose it's just one of those life things I'll have to get over--I'm sure there will be more and more distractions and interruptions when kids are in the picture anyway.  But sometime a few weeks ago my weekly challenge was to add more walking to my daily routine and I've really made headway with that goal.

I live a 15-20 minute walk from my academic building which I go to approximately 2 days a week, but I normally get dropped off by my husband to save time.  Since adding this challenge to my routine, I have been able to walk to school at least once a week and sometime even more than once (it's usually later when I leave and I take the bus home).  I have noticed several time in recent months that walking any significant distance has caused me to have hip pain, but stretching my hips before I leave the house and walking for briefer periods seems to have helped.  Hopefully I am also building up my muscles for future longer walks. 

In addition, I've found lots of other opportunities to walk more, like walking to meetings in other buildings, shopping, walking the family dog while visiting for Thanksgiving, etc.  So far I have had no trouble adding an extra 30-60 minutes of walking to my weekly routine.  In the coming months, I will try to keep this up despite the increasingly wintry weather and plan to increase my walking intensity as I approach the TTC date.

Here's hoping I can keep up my motivation for this habit, because I think it's a good one.  I already added a pedometer to my Christmas list to give me a little mid-winter boost in enthusiasm.

How about you?  What's your favorite weight-bearing exercise to do outdoors?  Is walking your thing or do you find it boring?  How do you add more steps to your daily activity for good health?

For more in this countdown series, see last week's challenge about Strength Training.

Countdown to TTC: Week 41

Strength Training

Last week it dawned on me that maybe my plan of eating less and exercising the same amount as I have been for the past year or so wasn't going to result in the kind of change in fitness that I am hoping to achieve.  I do want to weigh less, ideally, but I really want to be physically ready for the challenges of pregnancy.  Even during the times when I lost a substantial amount of weight, I never really felt that I had increased in strength, flexibility, or endurance.  Usually, I felt weaker but also thinner and lighter.  As I've mentioned before, that won't do for this year's goals.  

But as obvious as it sounds that I need to add strength and flexibility training to my routine, I was really reluctant to do so.  I don't want to reduce the amount of cardio I've been doing substantially--partly because that might actually cause me to gain weight instead of maintaining the status quo and partly because it's the kind of exercise I find most tolerable (at least I can watch my shows).  And there are only so many hours in the day.  So, I have started to add strength and flexibility training in small, tolerable ways with minimal equipment.  My workout gear consists of (1) tennis shoes, (2) three and five pound weights (I like the kind with the non-slip coating that don't leave your hands smelling like metal), (3) a sturdy wall, (4) a sturdy chair, and (5) an inexpensive thigh workout device.  I think someone can make a perfectly good strength and flexibility routine out of these few items, but there are a couple of additional things on my wish list, such as a plush yoga mat, an exercise/stability ball, wrist weights for walking, and maybe some resistance bands.  As a person with very minimal upper body and core strength, here's what I have been trying so far:

1. Twenty wall pushups and a few squats any time I go into the restroom at work and there is no one else in the room.  The handicap stall has a fairly sturdy wall and enough room to do these moves while locked into the stall, so in case someone comes in they won't see my mini-workout.  If you have your own office instead of a cubicle or are at home most of the day, this would be even more doable.
2. A few minutes of stretching after my cardio workout.  This is the time when my muscles are most warmed up and I am at my most flexible.  I can even bend over and touch the floor sometimes if I stretch enough.  Eventually, I plan to build this up to a 15 or 20 minute yoga or Pilates video a couple times a week.
3. Brief but challenging core training.  My core strength is pretty weak, so I will feel the burn the next day if I do a few arms-up full situps and about 10 Pilates criss-cross exercises.  This is enough usually to wear me out, but if I have any strength left I will do some crunches or leg lifts.  Hopefully, my stamina will improve over time.  I am working up to the 12 minute seated core workout video that's available for free on SparkPeople.
4. Extra weight lifting and gravity-based leg workouts when I have time.  I will usually do 10 or 20 dumbbell curls, another 20 two-arm tricep extensions (where you hold the weight behind your head and lift up), and then just spend some time doing leg lifts and balancing my weight.  Unlike my cardio workout, I don't have a particular routine.  I just pull something from memory from the various strength training workouts I have done that targets an area I want to strengthen, and then I keep doing it until I feel the muscle getting tired.  Eventually, I would like to work up to a more specific, measurable plan.  

What about you?  Do you have a favorite strength or flexibility training routine that works for you?  Any suggestions on where to find a strength training plan that starts with the lowest level of ability and keeps you feeling motivated and continuing to see improvements?  How do you know when to increase the weight or try something different?  What has been the greatest fitness milestone you've passed?  I'd love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts below.

For more in this countdown series, see last week's challenge about Tracking My Eating.

Countdown to TTC: Week 43

See a Nutritionist

Normally, I avoid seeing medical or health professionals unecessarily.  I believe preventative care is important, but the U.S. healthcare system really isn't set up for people to visit their doctors and other care providers just to check in.  Plus, as a graduate student I really don't like to do anything that increases my medical expenses.  However, a flyer in the office recently reminded me that my university provides several free services to employees and students to help them stay healthy or get healthier.  One of these services is an initial consultation and several follow-ups with a nutritionist.  Given my ongoing goal of getting ready for pregnancy over the course of this year, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.  So, this past week I added consult a nutritionist about preconception planning and weight loss to my list.  

In preparation for the visit, I had to track my food for several days.  Since I am a veteran user of SparkPeople, the only difficult parts about that were (1) being more self-conscious about my food choices knowing they would be scrutinized by a dietitian and (2) having to simplify my tracking to fit onto the form I was asked to use (since I usually make my food, I am often tracking a dozen ingredients per meal).  In the end, I brought both a filled-out form that was impossible to read and a super long printout of my food from the same days taken directly from SparkPeople.  The dietitian didn't seem to mind and actually looked more at my long, detailed printout.  

I really wasn't sure what to expect from my appointment, since I didn't have any choice over the dietitian and her philosophy--I was just visiting the person who works for my school health center.  The only time I've ever known someone to visit a nutritionist was if they had to lose a substantial amount of weight for medical reasons, which is pretty different than my situation.  Plus, a university is unlikely to employ someone to work with undergrads whose expertise is in chronic medical conditions.  So I shouldn't have been surprised when I came to the appointment explaining that I was frustrated with my current weight loss efforts because I am not losing pounds despite having recently reduced my caloric intake and tracking my food vigorously and her first question was "What would you say if I told you that you should stop trying to lose weight?"  

I don't think she particularly believes I am at an ideal weight, but she is a person who subscribes to a philosophy of being healthy at any size.  Throughout our conversation, she encouraged me to focus on healthy behaviors rather than fixating on the number on the scale.  She also pointed out that I may be making physical changes in preparation for weight loss right now (don't see any evidence of that, but who know maybe I'm stealthily gaining some muscle mass).  She also discussed some flaws with BMI as an indicator of health risk (click here for some alternative measures of ideal weight and here for an article about a new way of calculating BMI that may be more accurate for adults).  I have not yet found any research on the subject, but she suggested that even the "common knowledge" that BMI is directly linked to negative health outcomes may be flawed.  According to the nutritionist, studies which are able to include health-related behaviors directly in their analyses along with BMI typically find that body mass has not additional impact on health outcomes above and beyond healthy behaviors like exercise and eating right.  I don't claim to endorse this opinion, but it certainly gave me something to think about and I will want to research this more.

Although I have made a lot of improvements in my healthy lifestyle and the nutritionist was very positive about my health indicators like cholesterol levels, I still couldn't quite get on board with the idea that I should stop caring about my weight.   But I agreed with her that I am focusing too much on the scale and too little on the positive health changes I am making.  In the end, I didn't have a great answer to her question about my weight.  Honestly, if someone told me I don't need to lose another pound to be maximally healthy and ready for pregnancy, I just wouldn't believe them.  I'm sure I am at a weight that would make it possible for me to get pregnant and probably have an uncomplicated pregnancy, but I know I could have more energy and a fitter body to deal with the stress of growing a new life and then caring for a small child.  Perhaps getting on the scale every day and agonizing over the number isn't the right way to do that, though.  Based on my appointment, we agreed I would cut back to weighing in twice a week and pay attention to my hunger cues.  At my next meeting, we'll discuss making some changes to my eating habits that focus more on hunger levels than on how many calories I think I have "left" for the day.  It's a good start.  Hopefully the scale and my healthy improvements will match up soon, but if not I will try to focus on getting healthy with weight being a secondary component rather than my main indicator.  

For more in this countdown series, see last week's challenge about Planning with Pinterest.  

Countdown to TTC: Week 46

Get Active, Have Fun

 Once I commit to a certain activity or behavior, I am pretty good at following through on it.  So taking the stairs more or drinking more water are doable as long as I am able to remember they are on my to-do list.  But something I don't really do well is add spontaneous healthy behaviors to my day.  Even if I have an opportunity, I won't spontaneously add extra walking or play outside with friends or go out dancing.  For me, health-related activities are a necessary chore that you have to plan for but that you wouldn't want to do for fun.  So my goal this week was to work on changing my perspective about being active and to move toward having a healthy lifestyle, rather than a set of specific healthy behaviors.    

Step one of this effort was to register for and participate in a Color Run.  These events are popping up all over the United States and are pitched as "The Happiest 5k on the Planet".  Participants register in advance to take part in a 5 kilometer walk/run and show up on race day with thousands of other people to travel on a single track.  People of all shapes, sizes, and ages come to take part (including many families with infants and small children).  Runners/walkers are released in small waves, and there are several stations set up along the track representing a single color.  At each station, participants are sprayed by enthusiastic volunteers with dyed corn starch that starts to cover their clothing and bodies in bursts of bright colors.  When you complete the race, you toss a final color packet that you received at the start of the race along with hundreds of other participants, creating a rainbow cloud (pictured above).  

I am usually the type of person who avoids such events when possible, but since I started counting down to trying to conceive I have been thinking about my goals a little differently.  Usually I pass because I don't like waking up early on the weekends, which is almost always mandatory for walks/runs, and also I worry that I will get too tired or sore by the end of the race and look foolish.  Now, though, I am thinking more long-term.  Why avoid something fun like the Color Run just in case I might get tired?  I should instead look at it as a challenge and a goal for self-improvement.  Plus, it could be fun and maybe I would even want to be one of those mommies out there in a future race pushing my baby in a stroller or one of the fit pregnant ladies strutting along with a prominent belly bump.  

The next step will be a bit more difficult, because there is no specific plan or list to follow.  I will just need to start saying yes more often to opportunities to get active. I don't want to make a rule to always say yes, because there are some things I don't like to do or that are beyond my current abilities.  But having a yes attitude will be a good start.  Also, keeping an eye open for opportunities I might otherwise miss is a good idea.  I see lots of information about free events in my community, but usually I skip right to the ones about food or theater/movies and don't even look at active ones.  Even though most of them might not be my thing (I loathe most organized sports, for example), I might find the occasional gem like the Color Run - within my ability level, active, fun.  

What about you?  Is routine exercise the only way you get active, or are you able to find ways to get moving that aren't part of your exercise schedule?  How do you have fun while staying or getting fit?  What are some calorie-burning activities that you actually enjoy?   

For more in this countdown series, see last week's challenge about Eating More Produce. 

Countdown to TTC: Week 48

Getting Fit:  Stairs!

Now that the first month of prep has passed and I have gotten myself into the right mindset and set the backdrop, it is time to get serious about getting healthy for a potential pregnancy in 11 months.  Over the last couple of years I've made significant improvements to the kinds of foods that are in my diet and have increased my physical activity substantially, but I could still benefit from fairly substantial weight loss and fitness training.  I am not obsessed with getting to a specific weight or strength level before I get pregnant, but the healthier I can be the better.  So my plan is to continue the good things I've been doing but also add on some additional strategies throughout the year to boost my wellness.  

Although I intend to slowly build up to new goals like target amounts of weekly strength training, it's important to me to begin with stuff I can stick with and add to throughout the remaining months.  I already boosted my water intake to try to meet the target 8 glasses a day (I am still struggling with that but tend to hover closer to 7 now, rather than 6), and this week I added another challenge that takes advantage of my natural environment and activities:  stairs.  Every time I have to go somewhere on a different floor, I am now challenging myself to walk up at least one flight, if not all of them.  

Why not commit to taking advantage of all the stairs I come across?  Admittedly, it is a combination of my lack of fitness and embarrassment.  One of the buildings I spend a lot of time in has 5 floors, and for my current fitness level it is a bit challenging to walk up more than 2 flights of stairs at once, so I think I'm more likely to stick with it if I say I at least have to do one floor and then just plan to add on if it's not too daunting.  Also, I get pretty winded after 2 or more flights and often other people I know will see me and talk to me in the stairwell.  I find it embarrassing to have this happen and then be unable to keep up talking because I am out of breath, so I will get off at a different floor just to avoid that situation.  Hopefully, once I commit to going up more stairs every day and week, I will have more endurance for climbing and won't have this motive to avoid stairs anymore.  

I started the challenge this week and already the first day I found myself cheating and using the elevator, although admittedly it was because I was carrying a bunch of things that I was at risk of dropping.  But I think it will be a good challenge to keep my mind set on the idea of fitness and a healthy lifestyle.  I also think it would be even more motivating if I could see exactly how many steps I'm adding to my day and how many more calories I'm burning, so I think sometime in the near future I will buy a simple pedometer to start taking with me (I'm considering the Omron HJ-112 Digital Pocket Pedometer, which gets very positive reviews).  A handy, inexpensive gadget seems like a good way to add a sense of accomplishment to what might otherwise be a fairly thankless process.  Although maybe just being able to walk up a couple flights of stairs without getting winded will be reward enough!

What about you?  What steps are you (or did you) take to get fit before pregnancy?  What do you wish you were doing (or had done) more of?  How do you stay motivated, especially if you aren't the type of person who easily loses weight or develops lean muscle?   

For more in this countdown series, see last week's challenge about Meeting Parents.