Well, if you’re a person trying to lose weight, this’ll sure wake you the hell up:
Holy shit. Clearly last week’s “low-carb” experiment was a total fail.
OK, to be fair, I probably could not have picked a worse week to attempt to lower my carb intake. It started out with fair entry day. If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you know that every year I enter items in our county fair. (I used to enter the state fair, but they ended that some years ago, and the current reboot is really just a shell of what it used to be.) JJ and I entered pictures, as we’ve done the last several years. Below are this year’s entries. Mine first:
Now JJ’s:
Scenic
.Animal
Once again, thank you to those who responded to my previous post asking for opinions on the best scenic shot. As you probably could’ve guessed by the fact that my blog background changed right afterwards, I picked the one with all the purples and pinks. 🙂
I also entered my jams and salsa, of course, but in addition, JJ and I decided to branch out and try entering some baked goods. I made the banana cake with caramel frosting.* It’s a recipe I got from Yammie’s Noshery, slightly altered with the addition of cinnamon. I’m not going to lie, it is amazingly good. Here’s what it looked like as the entry:
Sorry, I know it’s not the most exciting picture, but I was in a hurry.
Besides the cake, JJ also made an entry in the youth section, specifically in the brownie class. I went through my recipes to pick one that I thought might be “different” enough to possibly win, and I found one called tri-level brownies. They turned out to be very intense to make, but my sweet JJ was not deterred.
He made all three layers all by himself, with the exception of a couple of things that I thought it best for me to help him with, like melting the unsweetened chocolate. But he mixed and folded and baked all on his own, without my help. I was so proud of his determination and dedication, and when they were done, they were AMAZING!!
Seriously, that picture just doesn’t do them justice, but again, I was in a hurry. When I have more time, I’m going to have him make them again so I can take some nice pictures. They were seriously delicious.
The problem with all this, is that we had to make an entire cake, along with an entire pan full of brownies, but we only had to enter a small portion in the fair. And, as you can probably imagine, I could not help myself from snacking on the leftovers. I don’t even think “snacking” is an apt description; “devouring” probably covers it more appropriately. Yeah, so much for watching my carbs. *eyeroll*
Then, as if that wasn’t enough, this past weekend was my big family reunion on my dad’s side. I hosted a small gathering of my immediate family on Friday night, and of course we had to have plenty of food. I did try to go easy on the carbs. I had lots of vegetables, and I had two hamburgers without buns. Blasphemy! There weren’t a lot of non-carb options available, unfortunately, so I did have to partake of some pasta salad, but not much! But then of course, there were still brownies…and cake… 😮 But boy we sure had a lot of fun at the gettogether:
Yeah, my family is nuts.
Saturday morning, I had a 90-minute run on the schedule, so I was out before 7 AM to get it done.
Not a good picture, but if you look close, you can see the birds all over the road–they were kind of freaky! But at least they weren’t attacking me! 😮
That last picture of me is right after I finished my second “interval” at the end. I’ve been using Katie’s heart rate training plan, and this particular run had me running in Zone 4 in the last five minutes. (In case you don’t know, there are five zones, and they increase in intensity as you go up.) That is surprisingly hard to do when you just ran 80 minutes before that! But, at the same time, after all that slow running, it felt good to push myself a little.
After that, we had the big family reunion. I didn’t drink at all Friday night, of course, because I never drink the night before a long run. I, uh, kinda made up for it Saturday night. *blush* On the bright side, I was well below my calories, and I did go fairly easy on the carbs, but a lot of my calories were consumed in alcohol. 😮 What can I say, my Canadian family knows how to imbibe. And I am proud of my French Canadian heritage. 😉
So, yeah, even though I actually managed to stay within my calorie AND carb goals on Sunday, the reality is that I went way over my macro percentages on carbs all week long. So, like I said, not the best week to try to curb my carb intake. Honestly, though, the scale reading you see above was not the worst of it. That reading was actually taken on Tuesday. Want to see what Monday’s scale reading look like?
Like I said, reality check. (Sidenote: that’s a lot of damn water weight!!)
This week, I’m trying to stay within my carb goals, but it’s just hard. I have two different carb goals: the first is to stay within the amount of carbs that are suggested for me overall in the day based on my 1300-calorie goal (plus any added exercise calories I earn). The second is to try to keep my carb intake to no more than 40% of my total calories for the day. What I’m finding is that even if I can manage to keep my carb intake below the daily numerical goal, I end up having to eat less calories to do it, which of course just means that I’m not hitting the second goal, which is 40% of my overall calorie intake. And that tells me that I eat a lot of damn carbs! Here’s last week’s breakdown.
Bwahaha, total macro fail. Ah, well. At first I was pretty bummed, but then I figured it doesn’t do me any good to lament. So I shall pick myself up, dust myself off, and try again. I won’t say this week is going swimmingly so far, but I’m not ready to give up just yet. 🙂
So let’s end on a positive note. What’s pretty positive in my life right now is my half-marathon training. It’s not that I’m killing it or anything, but it’s just the fact that I’m still doing it. These last five weeks have been the most humid I can remember in a single summer in a long time. I could get all weather geeky on you and talk about average dew points over the course of the last four summers that I’ve been running, but you don’t want to hear that. 😉 Let’s just say it’s been pretty much nonstop fucking humidity since I started training for this half marathon at the end of June. :/ But I have not missed a training run in 5 1/2 weeks, and that includes Katie’s intense interval training. This past Tuesday was another long one, and by the time I was done, I had 6 miles completed before 6 AM.
It was hard work in the humidity, and my pool never felt so good afterwards.
And the sunrise was beautiful!
So there’s that. Also, I decided on a whim today to register for a 10K on Saturday! It’s the Allen Park 10K, and it’s actually the race where I have my current PR, set two years ago. I also ran it the year before with my brother, finishing first in my age group! I was going to skip it this year, because I really do hate racing in the humidity, but they sent me a coupon for 10% off yesterday morning, and I decided, why not? Katie has been telling me that it would be a good idea to do a race right now, to help gauge my current level after so many months of slow heart rate training. So I registered at 11 AM and was excited to be able to pick up my packet on the way home. As a bonus, the shirt, which was described as a “tech” shirt on the website, is actually pretty cute!
It’s more fitted than the traditional race shirt, and I don’t think it’s a tech shirt at all (which is great, because I don’t actually like tech shirts). This one is cute enough that I’ll actually wear it around, and probably never actually run in it, ha ha!
I’m not overly concerned about this race, although I know myself well enough to say that I am going to push myself hard, which is not exactly something I look forward to. 😛 But when you consider I haven’t run a race hard in almost a year, it’s probably not a bad idea to get out there and put forth some real effort. While I might not PR (I’d have to beat 1:00:53, and I’m not sure I have that in me), I’m sure it will feel good to work hard for a change. Well, it’ll feel good after I’m done, that is. 😉
Thanks for reading!
*It seems I’ve neglected to post this recipe–for shame! I’ll post it soon, but for now, here’s a picture of it in all its true glory. 😉
