Week 4 - Discipline!

Control. Discipline. The ability to make sure you do the things that need to be done to reach your goals - even when you really don’t want to.

You need discipline to put in the training needed to complete long races, especially if you want to run them well. You also need control and discipline to make the changes in your life to effectively lose weight. And these are two goals that I have right now (race well & lose weight). However, control and discipline is what I sometimes lack and need to work on. This is especially true when it comes to desserts and alcohol. Hmmm – may have to rewrite that last sentence – it makes me look like I might be an alcoholic! But I think most of you know what I am talking about. You are out hanging with friends, having a good time, and the beer or wine (or whatever your drink of choice is) is flowing. And despite telling yourself you won’t have more than 2 beers you end up having 4, or sometimes more. And lately this has been happening on Saturday evening for the past three weekends! And now the holidays are just around the corner so I really need to focus on that control and discipline!

Despite the amount of drinking and dessert eating I did on Saturday, the rest of the week was better: 5 days of beer, 4 days of dessert, and 4 days of fruit. The previous week it was 6, 6, and 2. So this week I need to stop having a beer in the evening during the week and try to up the fruit intake more. The veggie portions weren’t great for week 4 either as dinner was Tuscan garlic chicken (http://www.food.com/recipe/tuscan-garlic-chicken-pasta-362590). I make sure to use whole wheat pasta but you can see that the only vegetable is the arugula. Next time I should have some steamed broccoli to go with this meal. I did work out 6 days this week, which included some speed work on Friday and a long run on Sunday; so the intensity of the workouts was a little higher than last week.

Start of week (Monday) weight: 153.8#

Average weight this week: 153.3# which is a 0.6# loss from last week’s average.

But I ran 8.1 miles on Sunday and was hoping to make-up for the extra stuff on Saturday but alas that didn’t work as the following Monday’s weight was 155.2#.  I wonder what I would have weighed if I hadn’t had as many beers or desserts on Saturday! And with it being Thanksgiving this week, I’ll have to more focused on the diet for the next couple of days.

Thanksgiving Day is always a struggle for many of us. I’ve been following a blog of a personal trainer and he posted some helpful hints for Thanksgiving: http://www.fit2fat2fit.com/2011/11/thanksgiving-day-rules/

Specifically:

            Rule #1:  This is Thanksgiving dinner, not Thanksgiving Week, Month, and Year .

Rule #2: You don’t get bonus points for only having one meal. Drew is advocating the

6 small meals a day type of diet. The key thing here is to eat sensibly the morning of Thanksgiving and the rest of the days of the week. If you have only one meal on Thursday and skimp too much the rest of the week, your body adapts by decreasing its metabolism because it thinks its not going to be getting enough calories and nutrients and you end up storing more than if you just ate normally.

Rule #3:  Stick to a realistic definition of a “portion”.

Rule #4: One dessert.  Wait let me be more specific.  One portion of one dessert! Yeah this will be a tough one for me. This year I won’t be spending Thanksgiving with my family so I don’t know what dessert will be available – and how many different kinds there will be. Typically my family has apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies, and brownies. And I usually have at least one of each, except the pumpkin pie, and probably 2-3 cookies. And this year will be just as tempting as my friend Jessi is baking a chocolate cake and I heard there will be carrot cake – two of my favorites!

Rule #5: Enjoy yourself! This is NOT a fad diet. This is a lifestyle.

Hopefully I’ll be able to go for a run Thursday morning. I need to start the day right before all the food and wine that will be consumed later that day! But still keeping in mind portion control!