Well, I’m back, none the worse for wear.

I started my new job in Huntsville last week. I’m pretty homesick and missing my family, and yes, there has been some emotional eating. Luckily, this has been offset by a huge increase in physical activity due simply to the size of the plant. The walk from the parking lot to my office takes about 6 minutes, around a 1/4 mile. The cafeteria is on the opposite side of the plant and takes about 5 minutes to reach. Along with normal pit stops and chasing people down for face time, it has all added up to some pretty sore legs and feet. I’m going to need to evaluate getting some new shoes for work soon.

I actually put my gps on some of these walks to get some accurate measurements, and it looks like I get between two and three miles of walking in each day at work. One of my coworkers estimates she gets in 4-5 miles a day. That will probably increase and be more consistent as I ramp up my responsibilities.

I’m also exercising when I get back to my hotel each night. It’s a cheap-o extended-stay place so there’s no fitness center, unless you count holding your breath and sprinting in the hallways to reduce your exposure to the fumes from the meth labs.

Ahem. I keed, I keed..

But, I found a nice pond with a sidewalk circling it, nearby. And I’m doing my core exercises a couple times per week. Unfotunately, I left the scale at home, so it will be a few weeks before I get an update on the weight.

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So, with this move to Huntsville, AL coming up, I’ve been giving the diet and exercise a good hard thought. As opposed to a soft thought, I guess.

Anyway, I’m going up about 4 months before my family so the kids can finish school. Sucks for me. But for my diet and exercise, it could be the best thing to happen in a long time, or the worst. It’s been mroe than 10 years since I lived on my own, and I did a decent job of maintaining my weight back then, but things change. Here’s where I see my opportunities and my challenges:

Pros:

• No competition for my time when I get home from work.
• No one asking to go out to a “bad” restaurant.
• No one bringing food into the house that will tempt me.

Cons:

• No one there to hold me accountable.
• No support, no one to cheer the good days.
• No one to remind me about my diet when I try to eat ribs instead of a tomato and mozzarella cheese, dipped in a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

So, yeah, this can swing either way. I’m being honest with myself and acknowledging that there WILL be a change, but it is going to be up to me to work it out.

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So what was stressing me out earlier this week?

A frustrating negotiation around the terms of a relocation agreement. But, it’s all wrapped up now, better than I expected, and we’ll be moving. We’re in Jacksonville, Florida, home of the Jaguars, and we’re moving to Huntsville, AL, home of… something, I’m sure.

So, it will be a different kind of stress in the coming months, along with personal and professional opportunities. On the personal front, my family will not join me until school gets out this summer. But, there’s an opportunity in this arrangement that will allow me to spend my alone-time getting plenty of exercise without the competition for time from my family, to whom I can never say “No” when it comes to my time.

I feel pretty good about how I handled yesterday. I didn’t eat enough calories, again (less than 1200), but I only had two and a half hours sleep the night before. Normally, I’d load up on caffeine and sugar, but I listened to my stomach and not my tired brain.

I’m working towards eating smaller meals more often. What I really like about the food diary at MyFitnessPal is that there are 6 “buckets” for entering meals, rather than just a single list or a breakfast-lunch-dinner breakdown. This is helping me think in 3-hour blocks of time, making sure I get a couple hundred calories every couple hours. I’m also working toward getting my carbs in prior to 6 pm, so this tool is helping me with the mental shift required.

Between the exhaustion and a rainstorm, there was no walking yesterday. I had to pick up the little one from dance on my way home from work, so I stopped at the grocery store and picked up a ready-made chicken caesar salad, swapped the creamy dressing for a fat-free balsamic vinaigrette, and grabbed a pack of protein drinks. Ate in the car while waiting for the class to end. Then it was home and in bed by 8 p.m.

Stacey sent my daughter and me a link to a great article at CNN (which I believe is republishing it from Oprah.com) titled Squash self-doubt, find your confidence.

For those of you that are not my cousin, Stacey is my wife.

Despite my seeming extroversion on the internet, I am actually quite introverted in real life. Almost paralyzingly so in social situations, but I can sometimes set it aside enough to participate in business situations. Unfortunately, my daughter is showing similar tendencies at school. She wasn’t always like this, but she was subjected in the past to some cruel children that taunted her about her weight - she is not fat, but she is always one of the biggest kids - and about her intellect (gifted). So, she withdraws in school situations.

For me, I’ve always been shy, but my weight has been a big factor in how I approach social situations as an adult, and I know I am not alone. Some have no problem with this, regardless of their size; a brother of mine is an extrovert and always the center of attention in every room in a positive way, even when he was 360 lbs.

The article I mentioned earlier is about the “spotlight effect” many people feel. In a recent study, it was determined that people typically feel about twice as much attention as they were actually receiving.

So, if you already feel insignificant, you can continue to do so knowing it is a fact.

For me, I am always uncomfortable exercising in public. I believe there is someone behind every curtain in every house laughing at the way my fat jiggles. I handle walking just fine, but when I get in decent-enough shape to start jogging, I typically wait until after sundown or find out-of-the-way, deserted roads to start. I hate gyms for the same reason, and this is one big reason why I don’t go regularly.

And public swimming? Fuhgeddaboutit.

So the task in front me is to get over myself. People I see in passing cars are as blind to me as I am to others when I’m driving. People in their homes are watching TV, not their windows. People passing me on the sidewalk are exercising also, and are worried about how THEY look, not how I look.

My cousin promised to post a “before” picture, so I’m posting this to hold her accountable. She has her family lined up to support her with eating and exercise. That’s such a huge part of any diet, because your family are the people that will be most likely to sabotage you.

That’s right, I said it. Does this sound familiar?

“Let’s go to McDonald’s”

“Pizza! I want pizza!”

“But, it’s a special occasion!”

Don’t tell my I’m a cynic - I’ve been hearing those same things for years, and I’m betting you have also.

Don’t let the bastards get you down - make ‘em prop you up!

I’m still out of commission, but I came across a solid article from Dr. Sheri about exercise for kids. It mirrors my own thoughts on getting my kids moving throughout the week. Here’s an excerpt of her suggestions:

Additional suggestions to get your kids moving more:
# Whenever your kids have ten free minutes, encourage them to walk around instead of sitting down.
# Get your kids more involved in helping doing physical chores around the house, like cleaning, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, and washing dishes.
# Make a game out of raking the leaves in the yard.
# Take your kids with you when shopping for groceries (as an added bonus, use the time to teach them about which foods are healthier to eat).
# Put on some music and have an impromptu family dance.
# Send your kids outside to kick or hit a ball around or throw a Frisbee.
# Get a basketball hoop to set up in your driveway and send your kids outside to play regularly, or walk to the nearest neighborhood school and use theirs.
# On nice days, take your kids to the nearest park to walk or play.
# Encourage your kids to take the dog out for a daily walk (it needs exercise, too!).
# Always have your kids walk around the house while talking on the telephone.
# Have your kids walk in place, dance, or simply move while watching TV – at least during the commercial breaks.

To these I’ll add a couple of the things I’ve been doing:

1. Races. My daughters LOVE to race in the yard and around the house. I time them with the stopwatch function on my cell phone and they enjoy hearing that they are getting faster. Timing helps by letting me know when they’ve done enough - if the times start getting longer, they’re tired or hot. Time to stop. In effect, this serves as an interval workout.
2. My oldest daughter likes jump-rope, and can jump for 15-20 minutes at a stretch.
3. Playgrounds! I’m a believer that there is no better workout for a kid. It’s a full-body workout done for an extended period of time at a variety of speeds and levels of effort.
4. We live in Florida, so swimming is big. We don’t have a pool, unfortunately, but we take advantage of every offer to have the girls swim with friends or family. We also have the beach.

It’s summer. Can you challenge your kids to do something physical every day until school (and PE and fall sports!) starts? Can you challenge yourself to make it fun for them? What are your ideas?

Now that the walking is out for the next 3 to 6 weeks, I need to come up with other hundred day head start challenges. Because that’s the POINT of all this, isn’t it? Not waiting until after some event or date to get started improving my health?

There are still things I can do. For one, I can pay MUCH closer attention to what goes into my mouth. I popped over to myfitnesspal.com, a website I wrote about on myother diet blog a few weeks ago. After plugging in my height, weight, goals, etc, it gave a recommendation of 1890 calories/day to reach my weight loss goal of 2 lbs/week, along with exercising every day for at least 20 minutes.

So, here are the new challenges:

1. For the next 100 days, I will not eat more than 2,000 calories/day, and will average below 1,890 by the 100th day.

2. I will exercise every day for 20 minutes, minimum, for the next 100 days.

How will I exercise? Obviously, for the first couple of weeks I will be limited to exercises that don’t require me to bear weight on my right foot. That leaves a whole bunch of upper body and core strength exercises. Here’s a starter list, to which I will be adding:

- Chick-pushups (on my knees - I know it’s a sexist name, but my gym teacher used a much more graphic term, so live with it)
- Crunches - a whole variety of standard and raised-leg crunches.
- Block-hauling - tie a rope to a cinder block, then sit down and drag it in to you. I can also spin around and pull it over my shoulders.
- Supermans
- Leg lifts - variety of 6-inch and scissors
- Leg extensions - on back and on all fours
- Bridge form knees
- Chair March
- Balanced twist - site on but with legs in the air and back at 45 degree angle, then swing arms from side to side slowly.

Alot of stuff comes from my past experience, but some of it also comes from Ron Jones bodyweight exercise site. If you are a beginner, or have physical modifications, this is a great resource. Tons of exercises, and many can be modified around limitations.

I’m going to try to keep track of what I do and how long I do it and post the results here for accountability.

Day 4/100: I did my 20 crunches and walked 1.5 miles very hard.

What did you do?

Today - I don’t know if the kids will join me today or not. They played at the beach all morning yesterday, so they weren’t “made” to exercise with me. My deal is that as long as they’re active and moving and playing during the day, like swimming at the beach, that’s good enough for me. Variety is the most important thing for kids, in my opinion. Plus, I get to use these days as days when I can really push myself, so it works out for all of us.

My core exercise of the day is Mountain Climber, taken from RonJones’ Bodyweight Exercise website. It’s not the mountain climber’s you remember from gym class. This version works the lower back and glutes a lot, and is scalable to your ability by increasing or decreasing the angle of your body. So there’s no excuse not to try.

Start YOUR hundred day head start today!

My progress on the hundred day head start challenge was interrupted this weekend, but a trip to see my father, who is in the hospital following emergency surgery for diverticulitis, which followed another emergency surgery for appendicitis the previous week.

Yeah, he’s not a happy camper.

But, he’s only 64 and has been in great health, so he should recover well. Plus, he’ll be losing alot of weight (the hard way, of course) due to the nature of the surgery. I won’t go into details out of respect for him, but I suspect you all know how to google it if you really want to know.

So, the beautiful thing about the hundred day head start is that it starts today; think about it. Then do it.