Awesome things happen when you go to the gym!

A very awesome thing happened yesterday when I went to the gym.

I decided (even though I expressly said I wasn't going to weigh myself more than once a week) to weigh myself on the gym scale. I did this because it's one of those old school doctor's office type scales where you move the weights to the different numbers. These are able to be calibrated and recalibrated often to reflect the most accurate weight possible. I had been weighing on my Mom's digital scale because, well, without going to the gym it was the only thing I had. I felt like it was pretty accurate but I found out yesterday it was wrong!

Because of that, I incorrectly reported my starting weight. It is not 197, but actually 194. This means I am 3 lbs closer to my goal weight without ever having to do anything. It feels like I lost the weight, though I really didn't. I am just really happy to already be looking at a smaller number, so I'm even more motivated to do whatever I can to make that number shrink!

Thanks, Joe (the owner of Anytime Fitness), for making sure the scale is accurate! It made my day!

I also had my first test last night (it was a test for JP, too): a family birthday dinner at Red Robin. We all know Red Robin is the epitome of greasy, fattening deliciousness with their towers of onion rings, sprinkle and whipped cream topped milk shakes (sprinkles, whipped cream, and ice cream are my favorites), and burgers as big as my face.

What is a person trying to eat healthy supposed to do?

First, since I knew ahead of time we were going, I tried to manage my calories leading up to dinner. I was going to go to the gym and do cardio, so I needed to have adequate calories and nutrients leading up to that (so I didn't get sick feeling) so I really thought before putting food in my mouth and made it as high protein and low carbs as I could.

JP and I pulled up MyFitnessPal (a free Android app- I have it on my phone and Kindle Fire, so it's never too far out of reach), and entered in Red Robin. We looked for the items with the lowest calorie content. From where we had worked out yesterday, we had some extra calories to splurge with but we still needed to keep it as low as we could. JP got a turkey burger with no cheese and no mayo and a side of fries (around 930 calories) and I got the Arctic Cod Fish and Chips (883 calories). Though there was queso dip and chips AND a tower of onion rings delivered to our table, we abstained. L enjoyed the onion rings immensely, though.

To save on some calories, I picked off about 85% of the breading on the fish, and I only ate half the fries. I still entered it as the full meal on MyFitnessPal (partly because I felt like I needed to, and partly because I don't know the exact subtracted calories from what I did). I know a full side order of fries, per Red Robin's own info, is 434 calories. I ate about half so I saved probably around 200 calories there. I figure maybe around another 50 or 60 calories by not eating the breading, but I am not sure.

If you don't have the MyFitnessPal app, I strongly suggest checking it out. It's free (and I'm sure there's an iphone counterpart) and has a food database of somewhere around 600,000 foods. It also has a strength and cardio tracker. You can literally find a calorie content for every piece of food that goes in your mouth and it's extremely helpful when you're out and trying to figure out the best thing to eat at the best place.

I honestly would not have figured the fish and chips would be within my calorie range. I was also shocked (horrified, even) to discover that my favorite foods there, a Whiskey River BBQ Burger, fries, and 1/4 of a tower of onion rings is almost 2000 calories. That's not counting a milk shake, or even a full fat frappucino from Starbucks afterwards!

(Note: My daily calorie intake is targeted to be around 1200 calories. So that one meal would've been my entire day plus more than half of the next day.)

I did so well yesterday that I even got to treat myself to a Starbucks coffee, and still had some calories leftover. (A tall, skinny caramel macchiato is 100 calories, for those wondering, and a tall, skinny vanilla latte is 90 calories, for you coffee lovers out there wondering).

I have also been pleasantly surprised to see how many calories I can burn doing regular activities. For instance, you all know one of my other goals is to get our house, car, garage, and everything else thoroughly clean and organized, so I've been doing some heavy cleaning. Cleaning, with light to moderate effort (which is your normal every day stuff- dusting, vacuuming a room, sweeping a room, doing dishes, etc) for 60 minutes burns over 200 calories. Cleaning with heavy effort (lots of laundry, scrubbing floors, vacuuming the whole house, scrubbing showers-- anything that makes you work up a real sweat) burns in the upwards of 400-500 calories if you do it for an hour!

Kind of makes you want to clean more, doesn't it?

The biggest accomplishment of the day, above all else, was actually making it to the gym. I have already mentioned this, but JP and I are members at Anytime Fitness in Lebanon. We have been for a long time (since before it opened, actually). JP has gotten far more use out of our membership than I have, though that will change this year. I felt like the prodigal son from the Bible, walking in there yesterday. But it's kind of like anything else, you have to get back on the horse/bike/whatever and just do it. I did cardio yesterday, just to get back in the swing of things. It felt good to work up a sweat, and I left looking forward to today. And, I left today looking forward to tomorrow (because I'll be tossing some strength training into the mix)!

On Sundays (since I'll weigh on Mondays), my plan is to do a week-round up blog where I'll log all my work outs, and what my calorie intake for the days were. I think that will help keep these shorter, as well as give me points I can look back on to see where I may need to tweak things for the best results.

In three days, I've burned approximately 1505 calories! Yea!!