Consistency

An Encouragement about Habits

by
A goose doing his daily leg lifts. (I’m sure that’s what he’s doing!) Image by Alexandra ❤️A life without animals is not worth living❤️ from Pixabay

Not a food-related post today, but something I’ve found to be encouraging over the past couple of weeks as I’ve stuck to two habits:

  1. Doing my floor exercises, including the core ones, three times a week. As I write this on Wednesday morning I haven’t yet done the set for today, and I should probably start telling myself that I can’t have my coffee in the morning without doing the exercises first. Remember, the whole set takes only 10 minutes or so. Here’s that video I made about the abdominal ones–it’s a little on the amateurish side as far as production values go, but the exercises are genius. (I didn’t come up with

    Read more

Super-Simple Habits for the New Year

by
Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Didja watch the video from yesterday? We worked pretty hard on it but hope to do better as time goes on. Just like the Zoom choral pieces I just about tore my hair out over for my choir’s online Christmas concert—I almost gave up on those but persevered. Now I’m looking forward to our spring concert and its new challenges. Same with videos for this site, which will include some v-e-r-y  s-i-m-p-l-e demos from the upcoming cookbook. So stick around!

Anyway, I emphasized in the video how important it is to form permanent, longstanding habits that have no finish line. Doing a short-term “challenge” is pretty useless. You go on some extreme, short-term diet and lose a lot of weight, but then you just go back to eating the way you did to cause the need for weight loss in the first place. So what was the point? You’re probably worse off than before, since you would have lost muscle mass but regained fat tissue.

Read more

My First Exercise Video!

by

Hi folks–While this isn’t a fitness blog, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to include some exercise ideas as we head into 2021. My own goals are to do my floor exercises three times a week, plus a walk at least four times a week. Nothing extreme or extravagant! But I explain my whole “forming habits with no finish line” philosophy in the video. So here it is:

Some random health and fitness thoughts

by
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

Last week I needed to get keep a doctor’s appointment in order to refill an expired prescription, so even though it was pretty snowy I got myself out the door and to the office. (My husband did yeoman duty shoveling the driveway multiple times over the course of the storm.) Since it had been over six months since my last A1C test at their office I had them do that, too, and it was:

6.0

Read more

Thoughts on Keeping Up With Exercise Routines and Other Good Habits

by

I wrote last week about my accidental weight loss of 2-3 pounds and how I’m trying to hang onto it. So far, so good. Yesterday was 115.5. I have my A1C reading on Friday, so we’ll hope that’s okay, too. But, just to show that life is always throwing a curve ball, that very same Wednesday I started getting sick, which doesn’t happen too often. Once in a while, though, maybe every other year or so, my chronic allergies and my chronic sinus problems combine to give me an actual infection. Nothing serious, and I’m not going to share any gross details about nose blowing or anything, but I was laid low through Monday after caving in and going to a doctor last Friday. Once I started in on antibiotics there was a definite improvement, but the process took several days. No floor exercises or walks took place during that time, and then we started in with snow and cold as of Tuesday. I wasn’t going to get out on the trail with those conditions, so the dreaded treadmill was in the cards. I wimped out yesterday but finally got myself upstairs today, putting in 45 minutes at a fairly slow pace and also doing a full round of the floor thingies. (I should do a post sometime about what I do, but it would have to involve a video. Have to think about that one. Let me just say here that I’m a firm believer in doing something simple and short, qualities that make the routine much easier to stick with.) In theory I’m back in the saddle.

Read more

The Daniel Diet, Part 3–What Does the Bible Actually Say?

by
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

The whole idea of the Old Testament prophet’s being a health and wellness guru was given a bit of juice in January of this year when the superstar actor Chris Pratt announced on Instagram that he was going on a 21-day “Daniel Fast” (which is only slightly different from the original 40-day Daniel Diet Plan). Today I want to take a look at the initial Scripture passage that has given rise to this whole craze. First, though, some historical background:

Although some Bible scholars want to give the writing of this prophetic book a later date, according to the actual events described it dates to sometime around 600 BC and takes place beginning with Nebuchadnezzar’s successful siege of Jerusalem in which he captures the city, burning much of it down, and carries off both inhabitants and sacred vessels from Solomon’s temple, which he destroys. During the siege the inhabitants of Jerusalem run out of food, and then perhaps ten thousand of them are taken into exile by being marched off to Susa, the capital of Babylon, a distance of almost 850 miles. So believe me when I say that Daniel and his friends had no need of a weight-loss diet! They were probably skin and bones by the time they finally arrived in Babylon. (There are actually multiple sieges of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army, but I’m not getting into all those details here.)

Read more

Sometimes It’s Better to Abandon a Project

by
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

I made valances for our patio door and office window back a year ago, with the window valance still needing to be installed. These added (or will add) a nice finished look to the space. But I had way overbought the material for the valances and had several yards left over. (I don’t think it was very expensive.) So I planned to make throw pillows from the remaining fabric and bought some coordinating stuff to use for trim. I’d come up with a complicated method for making the pillow covers, with mitered, contrasting flanges. One pillow hadn’t come out very well, which was discouraging, but then I decided that

Read more

How Do I Balance the Day?

by
Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Since I’ve been writing so much about various fad diets that you should just blithely ignore (with more to come), I thought it might be a good idea to write something about how a person should eat, and how well my own diet stacks up.

So first, for breakfast, Jim and I typically alternate between an egg-and-meat meal and a grain-based meal. If we had an omelet with veggies, cheese and perhaps some meat one morning then I might make whole-grain muffins the next day. Or we might have bagels bought

Read more

My Weight History–What’s Yours?

by

Well, the post that was going to be written on Christmas Eve is being written today. What with cooking, and running around madly, and game playing, and movie watching, all with our guests in the house, my beloved sister-in-law and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law), not a whole lot of blog posting has taken place. I have some time this morning, though, and want to get some more material down before the start of the new year.

I may be re-plowing old ground here, but I’m not going to go back through all 500+ articles on this site to find out. My point here is to encourage you to do what I’m doing today: go back and look at your weight history. Let me emphasize again: this blog has not transitioned into some rivulet of Weight Watchers. But your weight is an indicator of how you’re eating, and I am obsessed with the subject of eating well and healthfully. The more we can see our weight as an end result of behavior that can be changed, the better off we’ll be.

Read more

A Stunning Not-So-New Insight into my Personality

by

Maybe you can relate to this scenario:

You’re ready to start on a rather tedious job, such as sanding the trim around a patio door. This trim had to be added on the spot by the installer because the door ended up being the wrong size and he had to fill in the sides with whatever wood was at hand, which was some extremely rough and knotty stuff. It’s not that big of a job, and you know in your heart of hearts that you just

Read more