Day 30

My legs are still jello. Thank goodness this afternoon's workout consisted of only upper body and cardio, otherwise I'd be in trouble! It takes about 48 hours of rest between working your muscles so they have adequate time to recover and repair before putting them to hard work again. Based on this principle, my workouts have consisted of daily cardio, and then alternating days of upper body, and lower body workouts. Some days I don't feel muscle fatigue as much as others. These days that I do, it's because I've increased the weight I'm lifting, pulling, pushing, because my muscles were used to the lower weights, so in order to gain that long lean muscle, you need to increase your intensity or duration. For now, I'm increasing the intensity. For body builders, which I have no knowledge of really, they push for intensity--increased weights, lifting, pulling, pushing as much as possible. For long lean muscular tone, rather than bulk, you keep your intensity such that you can still lift, and you go for increased number of reps, or duration.
In a typical workout, I'll say bicep curls for an example exercise, I'll lift 8 pound dumbbells for 15 reps, 10 pounds for 12 reps, and 12 pounds for 10 reps. So I'm increasing my weights for each set, but decreasing the amount I'm able to do. At the last set, I should be fatigued and barely able to finish all 10 reps. If I can finish all 10 reps easily, I know to increase the weight. I'll continue in this fashion until I see a good musculature tone, then I will likely change it to about 2 sets of 8-12 reps each, for the same amount of weight. This will just keep me toned at the set curve I like--so far away from achieving that though! It's difficult to watch myself in the mirror, lifting. I see my muscles contract under all that flabby fat. My arms and belly mainly are starting to feel very flabby now. I've lost 10 pounds and I don't doubt that's all fat loss because I'm eating properly for the most part (i.e. not starving myself) and I'm exercising, and it's been well over the first week (where there's typically dramatic weight loss for dieters, unfortunately it's mostly water weight).

I know I'm doomed to have flabby skin after more weight loss and by the time I'm done. I've already come to terms with myself that cosmetic surgery may be an option that I feel I'll want to proceed with entertaining. I'm 29 years old so I'm getting older and my skin isn't as elastic as it once was, and I've been this weight for about 7 years now. I must have a 7 year itch attitude; first smoking and quitting, now being super obese and quitting. I suppose my marriage has about 1.5 years left! Just kidding, honey. :)

I do want children though and I haven't put a definite cap on the number. If I did do cosmetic surgery, if my skin wasn't impeding on my life, I'll wait until I've had all my children. Then I'll at least get my 40's as my best years. Sigh, away with my 20's already, I'll be pregnant through my 30's, so maybe my 40's I'll get to be smokin' hot. I hope Andrew like the cougar look. lol Sorry, okay, cute hockey mom. I can live with that. I suppose it's premature to be thinking about cosmetic surgery so soon, but it's a thought regardless, so I thought I'd share.

Fun point of interest for today: I finally updated my iPhone to 3.0 and it's so cool. Notepad finally has a copy, cut, and paste option which will come in very handy when making grocery lists and all my other types of lists. There's also picture messaging which we didn't have before and that is awesome! (No, I don't jail brake my iPhone. I'm too scared it will be broken forever despite my computer genius husband's attempts at conning me otherwise.)

Meals
1 sub sandwich (l/o)
2 tbsp sour cream onion soup mix dip
12 potato chips
2 cups of water

1 bowl of peaches and cream instant oatmeal
1 cup of skim milk
1 banana

3 cups of water

6 0z roast beef (l/o)
2 cups of roasted vegetables (l/o)
2 cups of water

2 cups of water

Exercise
41 minutes interval hill treadmill
30 minutes upper body workout
20 minutes stretching

Notes:
-Like the food? It's nearly identical to yesterday. Way to eat those left overs!
-Okay, so I wanted over 50 minutes of cardio but I have a real excuse and I was only 9 minutes shy. A rain storm tore through the city late in the afternoon just as I needed to start getting ready for the gym and I heard this dripping from the utility closet. I went in there and sure enough, a few itty bitty drops were coming down the vent. So I had to call a roofer (who hasn't returned my call yet which annoys me) and get a bucket to collect what turned out to be a huge tablespoon full of rain water. It was an emergency priority so that's alright, plus 41 minutes minus warm up of hill climbing sweat is pretty good too.