Happy Halloween – The Saturday Six

Happy Halloween!

I had this post all roughed out Thursday night in my notebook, and then just never got around to writing it yesterday.  I spent Friday afternoon at the mall (more on that later), hit the 4:30 CrossFit class, and then went out for chicken wings with friends for dinner, so getting this post done just didn’t happen.  That’s okay.  I will write it today and instead of a Friday Five, I’ll go with a Saturday Six!

1.  We carved our pumpkins today.  Nick and Rory took the easy way out and drilled a bunch of holes in their pumpkins, but Jacko and I took our pumpkin carving duties seriously.  I went poop emoji and Jacko went Minion.  We were both pretty pleased at how they turned out.

2.  October is coming to an end and so are my challenges.  The plank challenge just did not happen 😦  but my mobility challenge was awesome  🙂  I spent at least 20 minutes just about every day either foam rolling or using a lacrosse ball.  It was awesome.  It feels so good and I’m really hoping that I can keep this up even though the challenge is over.  Most nights I roll before I get into bed and read while I roll out my back and legs.  After a month of rolling I am surprised at how much my back still cracks when I roll it out.  I would have thought by now the creaks would have been rolled away!

3.  November Member Challenge has been announced.  Now that October is over its time for a new Monthly Member Challenge at CFNC.  November’s challenge is to log everything you eat into My Fitness Pal every day.  This will be a piece of cake for me as I just hit a 400 day streak on MFP.  The powers that be at the gym know there are a number of us that already log daily and track macros, so for us, the challenge has been kicked up a notch.  For this group, the challenge it to come within 2g for each macro (carbs, protein and fat) every day and to actually have perfect macros 2 days a week.  This will definitely make it a much tougher challenge.  I’ve been paying more attention to what I’ve been eating and sticking to clean choices most of the time, but I haven’t been all that close on my macros for quite a while.  I tend to go over on fat and fall short with carbs and protein.  This should be an interesting month as I try to come within 2g every day and getting 2 perfect days a week will certainly keep things interesting.  If any of you out there are on MFP and would like to follow along, feel free to “friend” me, I’m CathyO13 on MFP.

4.  I’ve lined up some good eats for next week.  Knowing I will need to eat pretty healthy for the next month for MMC, I’ve got a few tasty meals lined up:
Guy Fieri’s Stuffed Acorn Squash with Turkey Sausage from Clean Eating Magazine.  I have made this before and it is delicious.  It is currently lined up for dinner Monday night.  I can’t wait!

I also found a recipe online that looks yummy and is on the menu for Wednesday night.  Paleo Pumpkin Curry by Fed and Fit.  (photo from Fedandfit.com)
I’m already looking forward to dinners next week!

5.  They say “Go big, or stay home”…so I went BIG!  I mentioned earlier that I spent Friday afternoon in the mall…well, I was at the Apple Store getting a new phone!  I went big and got the 128GB iPhone 6s Plus in Rose Gold.  It’s big, it’s beautiful, and I’m loving it.  It is significantly bigger than my old iPhone 5, but I can actually see things on it.  My old eyes were struggling with small stuff on my old phone.  Not the best picture since I took it with my ancient iPad, but here’s my new beauty on the left and my old 5 on the right.
6.  I haven’t had any Halloween treats yet!  Hubs bought a ton of Halloween candy last weekend.  Not usually a good thing for that much candy around this place as it usually all gets eaten before Halloween if we get it early.  To try to make sure that didn’t happen, I hid it all before the kids saw it and Rory didn’t know where I put it either.  Today I got it out just before the little trick or treaters started knocking at the door.  I had told myself that I could have 5 pieces of candy tonight, but I would need to do 10 burpees before each piece. So far, it’s 11pm, and I haven’t had a single piece!  I even have room for a piece or two in my macros, but I just don’t feel like it. But I really should find something else to eat.  I have 30g protein, and 14g of fat left for the day.  I guess as soon as I hit Publish, I’m off to the fridge to eat some strange combination of food to try to hit those targets!

Well, that’s about it.

Hope you had a good Halloween….and did something more exciting tonight than writing a blob post!  🙂

Things From The Web

I don’t seem to be doing so well with my 3 times a week posting 😦  Oh well.  Here’s a quickie post with some of the funny things I’ve seen on the web lately.

Did you see this about a guy, Steve Bergstrom, that ran the Chicago Marathon using his body as a personal ad?  Click the picture to see the full story, or click here or here…but basically, he was single, wrote his deets on his back, and ran 26.6 miles.  It seems to have worked and he’s been on a few dates so far!

 

It seems like this is one is a few years old, but I just saw it this week…and it’s adorable!

Happy Thursday, everyone.

Hope to see you tomorrow for a Friday Five!

The Friday Five

For a short week, this week seemed to go on forever!  TGIF!  Time for a Friday Five!

1.  I am 100% on the Toronto Blue Jays bandwagon!  I will admit, for the most part, I am not a big baseball fan.  I watched the Jays back in their glory days when they won back to back world series in ’92 and ’93, but haven’t kept up much since then. That is until recently.  These guys are on fire and since I started watching more in September, I can’t get enough of them.  And then Wednesday night happened.  HOLY COW!  That was the most exciting baseball game I have ever seen.  It had everything…for an excellent and humorous summary of the game check out this article from NBC Sports.  Jose Bautista ROCKS!

TORONTO, ON – OCTOBER 14: Jose Bautista #19 of the Toronto Blue Jays throws his bat up in the air after he hits a three-run home run in the seventh inning against the Texas Rangers in game five of the American League Division Series at Rogers Centre on October 14, 2015 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 583944595 ORIG FILE ID: 492684094

I will be glued to my TV tonight at 8:07 for Game 1 of the ALCS vs Kansas City Royals.  Let’s go, Blue Jays!!!  #cometogether

2.  I am doing horribly with my plank challenge.  It pretty much isn’t happening.  I lasted maybe 5 days and then haven’t done it since 😦  not good, but oh well.  I know I really should work on this skill, since I suck at it, and getting a stronger core would help me in the gym, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to do it daily.  I thought maybe a plank challenge would get me to do it, but apparently it wasn’t the right motivation and didn’t have enough accountability for me to stick with it.

3.  I am doing amazing with my mobility challenge!  I signed up for the 5 day a week version of the monthly member challenge at my CrossFit gym.  We are 2 weeks in and I have met my goal for both weeks.  This challenge differs from the plank one in that there is a google doc that we go in and fill in each day when we complete our 20 minutes of mobility.  This seems to be enough accountability to keep me going.  Plus, stretching and mobility feel so good that I don’t mind doing it.  I’ve even brought a lacrosse ball to work and roll my feet while I work.  I’m actually rolling as I type this post!

4.  I’m creeping slowly towards my goal of 30 books read in 2015.  I’ve finished 24 books, so only 6 left.  I’ve read some good ones…see here for the full list.

5.  I had a rough class at CrossFit.  I went to the 4:30 class and all was good.  We worked on Power Snatch for strength and they felt good.  Coach said I had good bar path and the lifts felt good.  The MetCon was 2 separate EMOMs:
I used 55# for the snatches and they felt good.  Really worked on keeping a nice straight bar path.  Still lots of room for improvement, but was pretty happy with them today.  For the second EMOM I did 5 pull-ups a round, since I still can’t link together more than 3 at a time and my coach wanted me to still get a bit of rest each round.  They were feeling pretty good and then on the 4th set of pull-ups, this happened:
OUCH!  When it happened I could tell it was a bad one.  It is deep and it bled quite a bit.  That was the end of my pull-ups, so I just did air squats for the last round.  Let me tell you, washing it up after class stung like a mofo!  I’ve loaded it up with antibiotic ointment and covered it with a big band-aid, but I can still feel it.  Hopefully it heals up quickly, but I’m pretty sure Toes To Bar in tomorrow’s WOD won’t be happening for me.  I will give it a shot, but I’m thinking candlesticks might be in my future instead.  The rest of tomorrow’s WOD shouldn’t bother it – back squats for strength and then row, burpees and double-unders for the MetCon.  Time will tell 🙂

I’m off to watch the Jays kick Kansas City’s ass.  Go Jays, Go!

Happy weekend, everyone!

Yowza!

if you read yesterday’s post, you know I was very excited about doing some planning last week to help me get through this week.

Hubs picked up my Eat Savage lunches from the gym fridge on his way home from work yesterday, and Grocery Gateway was at our front door at 6am on the dot this morning.  I had food for the week and all was good in the world.

I had egg whites, English muffins, light cream cheese and ham slices to take to work to cook a yummy breakfast each day:

and I had my Eat Savage meals to work to enjoy as lunches for the week.  Today I had the butter chicken with Paleo naan bread:

This was delicious!  The naan bread is so good.  Every time I eat it, I’m amazed it’s Paleo.

After lunch I went into MyFitnessPal to log my meal.  I typed in Eat Savage into the search line, hoping by some chance it would have already been entered into the MFP database.  I was lucky.  It was there.  But I was shocked when I saw the nutritional info:

That’s 1010 calories and 67 grams of fat for the meal.  That’s actually more calories and fat than in a Big Mac Combo!

My lunch did have more protein (49g vs 30g in the Big Mac Meal) and less carbs (48g vs 94g), which likely makes it a better choice.  But that fat!  I was stunned.  This meal alone has put me over my fat macros for the day.  I’m only allowed 40 for the whole day!  This is going to make sticking within all of my targets for the day a bit of a challenge.  Here’s what my macro breakdown looks like so far today:

I’ve only got 133 calories left, but still need 111g carbs and 29g protein.  I don’t see that happening.  I’m not 100% sure what’s for dinner tonight, but I can guarantee it’s going to put me over my calories, make my fat consumption even worse and probably not hit my carb or protein targets.  I actually think I should probably skip dinner and just have my post workout shake and dates to try to salvage the situation.

This will still put me over for calories, but only add minimal fat.

This was an eye-opener.  I ordered the meals thinking they would be better than going out for lunch.  Guess I should have checked the nutritional info before I ordered.  All the ingredients in the dish are good, it was just a little more calories and way more fat than I was expecting.  After discovering this, I looked up the other meals I ordered and they are all around what I was expecting (about half of this meal), so they should be okay.  I did order 2 of the butter chicken since it’s so good, so have to figure out when I can eat that without sabotaging my day.  Likely Thursday, when I have a killer CrossFit WOD and hockey on the same night, and don’t really have time to eat before I go to the gym.  That could work.  It will still be too much fat for the day, but I will need the calories since dinner will probably be a protein bar after my WOD on my drive to hockey.

So, seems like a bit of my planning has come back to bite me in the ass.  Oh well…I tried!  And I really do like the butter chicken meal.  I will think twice about ordering it again, though.

Has any of your planning ever come back to bite you in the ass?

Motivational Monday: Planning For Chaos

Happy Monday!

I was searching online for some sort of quote or image that I could use in my post and found this one that was perfect for today’s topic:

Most days, my life does feel like organized chaos!  Each week we juggle school, work, CrossFit 3 times a week for hubs and 4 times a week for me, hockey twice a week for each kid and once a week for hubs and me.  That’s a lot to fit in. Some days I’m amazed we pull it off!  I rely on the calendar in my iPhone to keep track of things, plus we have a family calendar in the kitchen that we fill in as well.  It has a column for each family member so we can keep track of who needs to be where when.

In general, I think we do a pretty good job of fitting everything in.  Although, when things get hectic, the one thing that tends to fall through the cracks at our house is food.  When our weekends get busy, or we are away, I often don’t menu plan or grocery shop.  This makes the week following a bit of a challenge.  Lunches and dinners get a bit sketchy.

We finally got smart last week.  I knew I was going to be away and not likely back Sunday in time to menu plan or grocery shop before we needed to head out to two rinks on opposite sides of town for hockey with the boys. So, hubs had the genius idea to do a Grocery Gateway order.  Grocery Gateway is an online grocery store that delivers to the GTA (Greater Toronto Area).  You go online, fill your “grocery cart” with whatever groceries you need, pick a delivery time, check out and the groceries will be delivered to your home during the delivery window you choose.   He started our order Thursday night and I went in and topped up the cart with things I would need for meals this week.  The first delivery option available was tomorrow…so tomorrow between 6 and 7:30am (before we go to work) our groceries will be delivered and dropped off right in our kitchen.  All we have to do is put them away before we head to work.  You have no idea how excited I am about this.  I am going to have a fridge full of groceries without having to step foot in the grocery store or take an hour to shop.  YAY!!!

I also had a feeling last week that this week might be crazy so on Friday, before I went away,  I made an Eat Savage order for my lunches this week.  Eat Savage is a Paleo meal delivery service.  You order what meals you want by Friday, and they deliver them the following Monday to the drop off/pick up location of your choice.  I get them to deliver to my CrossFit gym and just pick them up when I go to class Monday night.  Tonight one of the boys plays hockey at 7:20 which means I can’t get to class, but I will swing by and pick up my lunches on my way home from work.

So despite having had a busy weekend and not being able to get to the grocery store, I have lunches for the week and all the groceries i need to cook tasty, clean meals – well, tomorrow after the groceries get delivered I will have everything I need 🙂  All this means that I have no excuse not to eat healthy this week…and that makes me happy.

I don’t have an exact menu plan for the week, but with what we’ve ordered, I know we will eat well.  I’m excited to get cooking!  I think I will try one of the casseroles that I mentioned here.

How do you plan for chaos?

Roughing It In The Woods

Happy weekend, everyone!

I’m so looking forward to this weekend!  I’m heading up north to a cottage for the weekend to scrapbook with a bunch of girlfriends.  I can’t wait!  We went up last year around this time and had a ton of fun.

Leslie, Joanne, Karen, Erin and me. Laughin’ and scrappin’!

I actually don’t have anything to scrap, since last time we were up I finished all my pictures that I had printed, and sadly haven’t done anything since then 😦   I’m only packing my laptop and portable hard drive and I’m going to use my time to go through all my pictures.  Digital cameras are great, but they lead to thousands of pictures, many not worth printing or scrapping.  And then there are all the pics I took on my iPhone…I’m dreading going through those!

I am about 5 years behind in my scrapping, which means 5 years worth of pictures to go through.  UGH!!!  My plan is to go through them all and pick the ones worth printing and get those organized into another folder, so I can send them to Costco and get them printed before we go on another scrap weekend up in Collingwood with a bigger group in November.

Nancy, our “hostess with the mostest”, has a ton of movies for us to watch, we are all bringing our phones loaded with music – there will be heavy debate whether we let Leslie play her Frank Sinatra 🙂 –  and I’m pretty sure a few beverages of the alcoholic variety may be consumed.  We are doing pot luck for the food. I’m on lunch duty tomorrow and making my favourite African Peanut Stew.  It is delicious and seems like the perfect meal given the cooler fall temperatures we’re having these days.
Can’t wait for the fun to begin!

The girls: Erin, Joanne, Karen, Me, Nancy, and Leslie. Our friend Bonnie is joining us this year too!

How do you deal with all the digital pics you take?

October Goals

September just flew by and here we are at October 1st!

This seems like the perfect time to take a look back and see how I did with my September goals.  If you don’t want to read that whole post, here’s quick summary:

1. Blog 3 times a week
2. Eat well, get back to macro tracking
3. Get 7 hours of sleep a night

So, here’s how I did:

1. Blog:  I didn’t quite hit my goal of 3 times a week, but I did mange to post 9 times in September, which is way better than I was doing in the summer.  I also think this was pretty good since I was away for 5 days on my golf trip in there and didn’t even think about blogging then.
2. Food/macros:  I did eat somewhat better in September than I had been eating over the summer, but it was still not quite as clean/healthy as I would have liked.  There were too many weekends away or with events that I let get in the way of my meal planning and grocery shopping, which I seem to need to stay on track food-wise.
3. Sleep:  Looking at my FitBit sleep record over the month of September, I was in bed for at least 7 hours for 26/30 days.  However, I only managed at least 7 hours of sleep on 12 of those days, due to restless/awake periods during the night.

If I had to give myself a score on my September goals, I would probably give myself a 7/10.  I was very mindful of each goal, tried my best, but still could have done better.

For October, I am going to keep these 3 things as goals for the month and add 2 more to the list.  Both of my new additions are fitness related.  One is driven by the monthly member challenge (MMC) at my gym, and the other comes from a friend doing another challenge.

1.  20 minutes of mobility each day:  This is the MMC for October at my CrossFit gym – CFNAC.  Last month it was miles on the Assault Bike (I did not participate in that, but one member actually rode 600 miles in September – you are a machine Perry Doody!).  This month’s mobility challenge seems more my speed, plus who can’t benefit from more mobility.  I have signed up for the Intermediate 5 days a week option, but will try to do it every day if I can.
   
2. Plank challenge:  I saw this challenge this morning on my friend Marina’s Facebook page.  She is a very good planker (is that even a word?).  I am a very bad planker.  This seems like a fairly quick and easy way to improve.  It starts with a 20 second plank today and by the end of the month, will get us up to 5 minutes.  Since I am horrible at planks, I figured it was worth a try.
   

My plan is to plank in the morning, first thing when I get out of bed, and do 10 minutes of mobility before I go to bed each night.  The other 10 minutes of mobility I need will either be at the gym before/after class, or at work with a golf ball rolling my feet while I work at my desk.  My feet have been getting crampy during WODs lately, so hopefully this will help stretch the out a bit and work out some of the kinks. (BTW, I have been rolling my feet out as I type out this post and it feels fantastic!)

Anyone else setting goals for October?  

Anyone want to join in on the plank challenge?