She's a Maniac

She's a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she's dancing like she never danced before
She's a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she's dancing like she never danced before
by Hall And Oates (I had to verify was who really sang it because I was corrected in one of my previous posts.)

Anywho, I've been feeling maniac-like lately with my workouts. Instead of dancing though, I've been exercising. I guess sometimes I am dancing during some of my classes like step. Currently, I have three things motivating me:

1. My Iphone "Lose It" app
2. Training for the half marathon in April
3. Fitness challenge at Gold's Gym.

I talked about this Iphone app called "Lose It" that I'm real hyped up about. I even talked about this app on my status message on Facebook. Being able to see how many calories you consume has really regulated my eating. Before there was no holding me back when I ate. Now it's like, dang how many calories are in that tiny sorry piece of cake. The true test, however, is the weekend. I messed up last weekend when I went to a baby shower, out to a club and then the next day was the Super Bowl. I finally stopped counting calories those days after I reached my allowable calorie intake but, I'm sure I went way over, like 1000 calories. Then this past Monday, I really started sticking to my recommended daily intake of 1512 calories. I've been doing pretty good with not going over my target.















As you can see I don't always eat the healthiest of food (note the ice cream cake, spinach dip, hawaiian bread, and fried chicken) so I usually end up hungry because what I eat isn't satisfying. Kind of like splurging on makeup when I should be paying the electric bill. On the left hand screen capture, where it says shells, those were actually these mini-shells that you put chicken salad in. I haven't gotten desperate enough to eat seashells if that's what you were thinking.

If it wasn't for my workouts after work, I would have been over on my calories everyday this week. With the half marathon training, I'm running on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. For this past week, I've been running 3 miles on those days so that's about 300 calories lost for each of those days. Plus I'm doing the Gold's Gym fitness challenge. It's basically a punch card and you get a punch for every class you attend. Once you get 10 punches on your card, your name goes into a drawing and you can win a variety of prizes including a heart rate monitor. During those classes I usually burn between 400-500 calories.

I'm actually glad I have the half marathon and fitness challenge to motivate me. All those calories give me flexibility during dinner. On Tuesday, I went to the gym to "earn" more calories so we could eat at Panchero's, this Mexican restaurant we wanted to try and Skinny Dip, a low-fat frozen yogurt place.

I'm hoping I can keep this up without getting burnt out or frustrated enough to quit. I haven't weighed myself because they took the scale out of the women's locker room at Gold's. I'm thinking about buying a scale tonight.

I also purchased the Garmin Forerunner 50 bundle so that I know exactly how far I've run. It comes with:

• USB ANT stick
• Heart rate monitor
• Foot pod
• Owner's Manual
  

I was excited about it because when I was researching it, I found the watch retailed for $99 by itself and the foot pod was about $119. I was able to find this bundle for $80 at Costco.

If you're interested in purchasing one, I got it here. I was hoping I'd get it by this Saturday when I plan on running outside. According to the tracking number, though, I won't be getting it until Monday.

I'll be running a relay called Virginia is for Lovers with my coworker on Valentine's Day Morning. It's a 14K so one of us will run 4.1 miles and the other person will run 4 miles.