Rock Star

Guess what I did tonight?

After months of being fairly inactive, aside from dance classes, occasional walks, and being on my feet all day at work, I took a 30 minute core class. And a 60-minute Piloxing (Pilates + kickboxing) class.

I also joined the Rock Star Challenge at You Rock Fitness, a fitness center run by a friend of mine. We were divided into two teams of 9(ish), and I love my teammates already. They were so fun! We all set our goals and, over the next 10 weeks, we hope to lose 98 pounds between the 9 of us.

My personal goal was not related to pounds or the number on the scale. I'm currently between a size 16 and a size 18. My goal is to be a size 12/14 by the end of March. Totally doable.

We also had our first challenge tonight. We'll have one each week. This week, we had a deck of playing cards, all mixed up, and a corresponding list with each card in a random order. We had to trot through a rope ladder on the floor, run across the dance floor, do 10 jumping jacks, look through the deck and find our card, run back, do 10 more jumping jacks, and trot through the ladder again. We had to do this enough times to get through the entire deck of cards, and they had to be in the order they were listed on the paper we were given. My team won! Granted, there was some (okay, a lot) of cheating by both teams, which obviously doesn't benefit our physical health in any way, but it was super-fun for everyone, and it was good for team-building. :-)

Ch-ch-ch-changes

A few notes...

I've been doing pretty well with not eating the food at work. All I've had is a bagel yesterday and another today (both multi-grain), and while that's more than I wanted, I'll own it and accept it. A couple months ago, I would have told myself, "Oh, I'm getting a bagel, I might as well get (insert-dessert-here) and (insert-drink-here)...'just to put our sales up.'" I didn't get any add-ons with these bagels--not even cream cheese. Go, me.

On that note, I have tomorrow off and will be putting together a couple meals to take to work to avoid the need for bagels.

On another work-related note, I've gotten a "temporary promotion" and will be the cafe manager for the next 4-6 weeks or so. While this will pretty much eliminate my financial stress (yay!) it may increase my work-related stress (boo!). It hasn't been bad so far, except for my first attempt at making an employee schedule for next week, and I'm thinking that it won't be terribly nerve-wracking. At least, I'm trying to tell myself that. I'm trying to be laid-back and not worry about it. At the same time, I AM keeping in mind some healthy ways that I'll relieve any additional stress, so I don't revert to bad habits.

I have some new goals. Not really measureable ones, but goals nonetheless:

1. I have a weekend of bellydance workshops coming up in April. As my schedule stands, I'll be taking 4 classes over 2 days, so about 4 hours of dancing each day. However, I would like to add 1 or 2 more classes to that weekend, which will mean there's a possibility that I'll be doing up to 6 hours of dancing in one day. My stamina is, of course, nowhere NEAR that level. I need to fix that, and I have about 3.5 months to do it.

2. I'm going to Pennsic this summer (http://www.pennsicwar.org) and I want to look good if, by some stroke of craziness, I end up dancing around a fire or something.

Restart

I've got a renewed motivation, I'm revising my plan, I've revamped my blog, and now it's time for my upgrade.

Why a blog, again? Because it helps. When I was blogging, I weighed less (for various reasons, of course), and I was more mindful of what was going into my mouth, as well as how much activity I was doing.

I'm not one to make New Year's resolutions. January 1st is just another day, to me, and while I know others see a new year as a fresh start, I just think it's silly to wait until a particular day to start to change my life. If something is worth doing, it's worth starting now. (You'd never be able to tell, just by that statement, that I'm actually a horrible procrastinator.)

I wasn't sure if I should get a new blog all together or just redecorate this one and delete my old entries, etc. My decision came down to this: I didn't care to open another account or get another log-in name or URL to remember. So here you have it.

I'm at the end of my second day off of three in a row, and I'm quite thankful that I decided to take my paid holiday off, rather than just have the extra paid hours added onto the 5 days I would normally work this week.

Tonight will be spent writing out a plan of attack. Good stuff.