Wake up call

Last week I went to the doctor for a physical. I hadn't been to the doctor for a general check-up in nearly 5 years, so it was time, especially since I knew my blood pressure is out of control right now. I've also had a few "in your face" moments in the past year where I became aware on some level that I'm a grown woman now, not a child - it's time to take responsibility for my own health. I think some of that comes from having friends diagnosed with cancer, a parent with declining health, and a 35th bday right around the corner. Don't get me wrong, I generally feel like a young pup, but if I don't get my act together where my health is concerned, I think I'll be feeling old before my time.

I'm fat/overweight - whatever you want to call it - but I'm losing weight (down 15 lbs. so far *yay*). It's a long slow road to losing 80+ pounds. I had stopped taking my bp meds, but started up again after recurring headaches that prompted me to check my bp. We're still trying to tweak my meds to get it under control. These things I knew I was dealing with. Now I get a call from the nurse telling me my cholesterol is high, and the doctor wants me to start right away on cholesterol meds and a daily baby aspirin. Okay, really - isn't that for old people? People who have had massive coronaries, or a stroke or something? Is this really necessary? I really don't want to go on more drugs. I'm 34, for pete's sake! I really wanted to handle this all through diet and exercise, but it seems that the doctor feels that we can't wait around that long. And the other issue is that the other recommendations they gave (sodium restricted diet (ie. no additional post-cooking salt), low-fat, low-cholesterol diet) we've already been following for years. I need to lose weight and exercise more, plain and simple. If I choose not to lose weight and not exercise, then I am choosing to damage my body, killing myself, shortening my life. The longer I sit around waiting to get healthy, the shorter I can expect my life to be. The motivation of fear....

Checking in.

Just a little update:

The planning for the coming school year is coming along nicely. I've got lesson plans entered into HS Tracker up through the middle of October, with notes left to enter that take us through the end of that month. That's as far as I want to go with this at this point - in mid-September I'll see how we're progressing, and then proceed from there.

This morning was my SparkPeople weigh-in (link located on the right), and I've lost 12 pounds so far (since July 8). Yay, me! And that was with me falling off the wagon with my food tracking this week. I guess my intake was okay. Phew!

We had a great parent meeting this month with our hs group. Janice Hedin was our speaker - I just love her! She was such a help to me when we were fighting our local district on changes they were making to their Alt-ed/Parent-Partnership program. We didn't get the results we were after on that, but at least now I know I'm not the only one who thinks this system is completely screwed up. Anyway, Janice is a veteran hs'er whose children are now grown and off in successful careers. Her enthusiasm for homeschooling is contagious, and hearing her speak about the benefits of hsing, and even singing the praises of our hsing law, was really inspiring. Perfect way to start out the homeschooling year!

My term as president of our group begins September 1st. I've got meeting topics planned through at least November, and three others in mind for future months. That leaves me only four more to plan! I'll be glad when that's done. I HATE planning stuff like this. Fortunately it's coming together much faster and easier than I had expected. I'm tapping into our members, both as speakers, and for ideas, and they are really coming through for me. Thank goodness. I had let them all know that I am just fine getting up in front of the group and running meetings, but if they wanted anything decent to be there to talk about, they were going to have to help me out. I guess they heard me, LOL!

N. goes to Girl Scout day camp next week! She's super excited. We've got most of her stuff ready, but I still need to put her name on a few things, and find her a water bottle to take along. One concern I've been having is that the kids are going to be completely exhausted and impossible to wake in time to have her at the bus stop. They haven't been going to sleep until 10:30 most nights, and have been sleeping in until 9-9:30, which just isn't going to work for camp week (or from there on out, since we'll be starting in on our homeschooling the following week). So to get things moving in that direction, I had them in bed by 8:30 last night. You know that saying "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink"? Well, they were still awake at 9:30. But they didn't get out of bed during that time! My threats must have worked, LOL! I'm going to wake them up earlier this morning, and hopefully shift their internal clocks a bit.

Water, water everywhere

Yesterday was the first day of the second session of swimming lessons for the kids. In the last session, the old teacher had refused to let kids where goggles during class. This meant that my girl, who prior to the session would swim all over underwater, suddenly would do almost nothing without total fear. So yesterday, new teacher: N. is doing her usual, trying to do the stroke, yet keep her face out of the water as much as possible. What does this new teacher tell me? "Hey, if she has goggles at home, make sure she wears them so she can put her face in the water." Oy. N. is ecstatic, of course. A. got to lose another float yesterday, and will be down another half float for tomorrow's class. She said he's not having to work hard enough to really swim, so she wants his body a little lower in the water - makes sense to me, but won't he be surprised! LOL!

Last night was our annual family picnic with our homeschool group. It was held from 4-8pm so that working parents could attend, and there were quite a few families there. This was the park near our house with the lake, so the kids spent a couple hours in the water, playing with all their friends. At 6:00 the moms were debating amongst themselves whether or not we should sunscreen our kids, given the fact that it wouldn't be dark for another 4 hours. :P It was a bbq potluck, and I brought the yummy broccoli salad that is becoming one of my "signature" potluck dishes. I also made a fruit salad - along with about 6 other people!

I've been doing good with getting all my water in. It's one of my first sparkpeople goals. In the past, I was a terrible water drinker. A month or so ago, I decided to cut out diet sodas, in an effort to force myself to drink water. You'd think if there was nothing else to drink, then I'd just go with water, right? Wrong. I think I just stopped drinking altogether - with the exception of my two cups of coffee each day. But now, I am a Good water drinker! In fact, I'm better at it then I thought I was. I've been drinking 4 16-oz. glasses of water a day! And going to the bathroom every 30 minutes, though I'm told my body will get over that. And just when I was busy patting myself on the back, hubby decides to actually measure how much the cups were holding - turns out they're actually 20+ ounce glasses, so I've been drinking at least 80oz./day. I so rock. LOL! I've also been getting all my strength, cardio, and stretching in. Yay for me!

Catch the Spark

I keep seeing all these people talking about SparkPeople in their blogs, and I had to know what all they hype is about. I registered with them a few days ago, and I'm really impressed with what I see there, especially considering that the service is completely free!

SparkPeople is a collection of online tools and resources designed to help you get healthy. For most of us that means losing weight. The site works very similar to Weight Watchers online (which helped me shed 30lbs about three years ago, which I have gradually gained back, and then some). You track your meals and snacks online, as well as your daily exercise, but rather than keeping a tally of Points (like WW), it actually keeps track of key components of your diet - calories, fat, carbs, sodium, protein, calcium, etc. It has a great report function that allows you to print out a nifty pie chart that shows what percentage of your nutrition each day is coming from carbs, proteins, and fat, and shows you what to aim for. You can choose to receive daily emails with motivational, nutritional, and/or exercise tips, and they have a whole library of videos that demonstrate different stretches and exercises. They also have recipes online, and you can enter your own so you can track the nutritional info. You can either use the menus they have online, or just journal your own food choices.

Another cool thing about SparkPeople (different from WW online) is that you set other specific goals that are not directly tied to how many pounds are coming off. These are goals which lead to habit change, which is so important in maintaining weight loss. My nutritional goal is to drink my 8 8oz-glasses of water each day; my exercise goal is to stretch for 10 minutes/day (this is in addition to any cardio/strength training done during the week); and my motivational goal is to journal once/day. All these little micro-goals that aren't focused on weight are awesome for those of us who get discouraged when the rest of our diet isn't going well - you can see that you are still taking positive, healthy steps.

And the last fun part of SparkPeople is earning points! You can do all kinds of things around the website to earn points each day - track your food, reach your mini-goals each day, post on the message boards, etc. And you earn "trophies". I just earned my first one today (I'll try to post it later). If you're curious about SparkPeople, you can go there via my link on the sidebar!
First trophy earned...