Speedy shuffling
March 18th, 2009 - Posted in sustainable living, wellbeing - by Sarah|
When we got back home after our fab Christmas break in Cromwell I decided that it was time to get healthy. This lifestyle has tanned my face and bleached my hair (honestly, it’s not grey) and massively developed my upper body strength but my fitness and weight levelled off early on and were not going to magically improve without my conscious intervention.
I started off with The Food Bible by Judith Wills
This book has loads of good nutritional information about different vitamins and minerals in food and why you need a balanced diet. It has chapters covering weight control, food as medicine and for different stages in life. It also has a small selection of recipes and a really useful section of basic ingredients with their calorie, vitamin, mineral and fat content. I decided that to lose some weight I should be eating about 5,140 kilojoules per day (about 1200 calories) so I started weighing and calculating everything I ate and jotting it down in a diary. We still had the same meals we usually did as my investigations into healthy diet confirmed that we tend to eat all the right things (low meat, lots of veg and fruit, pasta, rice etc.) but our portion sizes went down drastically.
The first week of this I had still got lots of birthday chocolate left and so I incentivised myself to stick to the regime by allowing myself to make up any spare kj in my daily allowance with cubes of chocolate. While I haven’t seen this recommended anywhere I found it a very effective way to ensure that I continued to work out that I’d eaten 33kj of carrot and note it down. The transition when the chocolate had gone was a bit difficult but I switched to rice cakes as my ‘treat’ as I happen to be lucky enough to really like them. I also decided from day one not to include fresh fruit in the calculations as its lack of fat and multitude of good constituents outweighed any calorific value.
After 2 weeks I felt confident that I had formed a good understanding of what 5,000 kj looked like in meal portions so I stopped adding everything up but still stick a plate on the scales occasionally to check I’m not going too mad with things like pasta and muesli.
After another couple of weeks I was ready to start upping the exercise and this led me to another highly recommended book: The Complete Book of Running for Women by Claire Kowalchik
This a great book written in a very accessible style and covers all aspects of running from starting out to training for races. I started at the end of Feb with a fast walk for 30 minutes 4 times per week. This is recommended as a check that you’re ready to start running. Then I began the 10 week programme to go from 0 to 30 minutes running. The weeks so far have been:
Week 1 – 2 minutes running and 4 minutes walking x 5
Week 2 – 3 minutes running and 3 minutes walking x 5
Week 3 – 5 minutes running and 2.5 minutes walking x 4
The book has a good set of stretches to do after each outing including a couple particularly important for women – the shins and the iliotibial band (outer thigh). The one thing that has been a revelation to me is the recommended breathing pattern. This is to breathe in for three steps and out for two. This helps to prevent stitches (I haven’t had any) and also contributes to injury prevention as you hit the ground hardest when you start to breath out and this pattern means that the impact is shared equally between both feet. I found that it gave me something to concentrate on when I first started out instead of being left counting the seconds to go before I could walk again. This last increase to 5 minutes of running (20 minutes per outing) felt like a huge increase psychologically but again, the breathing pattern and the practise from the previous two weeks made it fairly easy. This book has also encouraged me to go as slowly as I need to in order to feel comfortable so while it may look like I am shuffling speedily in my head I am running.
I started having a look at the next book this week, the one that takes over once I can happily run for half an hour: The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer
on March 18th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Wow way to go! That’s a different topic to usual. Nice one. I am particularly interested in the three in two out breathing and will try it out. Currently I think I do two steps both (with no stitch). Will compare notes this weekend. – Miranda