Day 28: 4 kg lighter and off to Amsterdam!

Wish me luck.

I hope I can maintain with the away-from-home eating and fitness plan!

Pics to come.

Day 26: Completely Manic Mondays

6am wake up, decide not to workout

7am finish breakfast & leave for work

teach until 1:15

1:30 arrive back home, get suited up

Do my PCP workout!!!

3:00 shower and return to school (clean, but still sweating)

4-5 tutoring

5:10 snarf pre-packed dinner

5:30-7:30 go to German class (forgetting registration info, book and room number)

7:45 go to Capoeira

9:45 leave Capoeira

10:30 post on blog

Mondays are going to kill me.

I still can't do the pull-ups. I get in position and the exhale and constrict every muscle I can think of and nothing happens. I don't move. Totally frustrating.

The push-ups are okay, but I know I'm not getting down as far as I should be (i.e. as Patrick is in the pictures).

The creep makes me think I am going to bust something in my knees.

Hopefully Tuesday will be better.

Day 25: Indulgence!

I lingered over the question all morning: beer or cake?

Since Patrick advised against the ill effects of having a bubble-filled beer after many weeks without, I went with the cake.

Could I wait until some day later this week? Of course not!

Besides, going out for coffee and cake is an excellent thing to do in Germany on Sundays... when everything besides cafes are shut and people walk down the main street window-shopping or play with their kids in the park. After many months, I'm finally seeing the charm in the you-must-relax-Sunday mentality.

The cake I chose was from a delightful coffee shop that always has homemade desserts. I was craving chocolate, but this being Germany, chocolate is inevitably linked to hazelnuts when cake is involved, which I am allergic to. Anyway, I went with the apricot cheesecake.

It looked delicious. It was fluffy and smelled great.

I'd heard all the hype about tasty pre-PCP treats not tasting all that great after a few weeks of no-salt, no-sugar, only good, healthy foods, but I didn't believe it.

I was sure that I would find the cake just as delicious as always and that I would not be convinced of the necessity to cut the extra junk out of my diet.

But...

at the first bite, the flavor was so strong.

The second bite was so sweet... too sweet.

The whole thing just tasted wrong.

I was assured by my taste-tester that it was, indeed, a delicious cheesecake... but not to me!

I'll admit the crust was good, but the cheesy part was far too heavy and just felt like a blobby sugar/dairy lump in my stomach.

I'm a little sad for the lost love of good cake.

Perhaps this will help.

Day 23: Uneven Eating Makes Me Grumpy!

Today sucked.

I was tired and feeling kind of on autopilot.

I've been having trouble getting to sleep early (as I type this at 11pm) and with my morning up and out by 7am routine, going to sleep late just doesn't jive.

Of course it was a jammed-packed day of teaching, riding fast to my tutoring session, shopping, and going over to a friend's place for a party.

With cookies.

Delicious homemade cookies.

That I wasn't going to eat.

Because I can do the self-talk... you can eat those cookies for the rest of your life, but for these 90 days you are NOT eating the cookies.

But damn, I wanted those home-baked M&M cookies!

It probably didn't help that I stayed a little too long, then biked home and then didn't start my workout until 9pm, then ate the protein part of my way-too-extended dinner around 9:45. I was feeling pretty down during the workout... hungry, tired, overwhelmed... and cried through several sets of my leg-ups! Not easy to do. This probably means I should be doing more if I can both work my abs and cry, clearly I'm not focused enough!

I guess it's good that I can push myself through the workout, even when I'm feeling completely unenthused about doing so. 67 more days seems very, very far away today.

Day 19: Carrying the Pig

If you read Kid's Lit, as I frequently do for work, then you may know what I'm talking about. If not, you may want to read Louis Sachar's Holes.

In the story the main character's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather is cursed because he doesn't fulfill a promise to the local, magical, wise woman. She tells him how to win the woman he loves, by impressing her father with the best and biggest pig in the village. She gives him a scrawny runt of a pig and lays down the rules: every day you must carry the pig to the top of the mountain and let him drink from the magical spring. When the boy complains that he won't be strong enough to carry the pig when it is fattened, she explains that each day as the boy carries the increasingly larger pig up the mountain, he too will be getting bigger and stronger.

So I'm carrying the pig.

At times it feels kind of like this.

But slowly I am seeing improvement.

My pants are fitting better. I did my workout when I got home from work. 900 with trips, but no stops! I would not have believed I could do this 19 days ago.

Then I ran off to capoeira:

two hours of playing, singing, working on my handstand and no-hand cartwheel and my feet ache and my ankles feel tight, but I'm not nearly as tired as I would expect my body to feel.

And at long last my pull-up bar came, so hopefully I can tackle those incline or real pull-ups without cursing out the underside of my table.

My no-hand cartwheel could look like this someday!

So my fellow peakers, here's to carrying the pig!

Day 18: A Peaceful Sunday

A good day.

850 jumps with trips, but without breaks: medium then slow speed as needed to keep jumping.

It felt good to push through without stopping.

Then a delicious dinner: steamed, mashed kohlrabi with broiled yogurt chicken and pears, bulgur and white radish. No pictures because I ate it all. Yum!

Day 17: I hate you, Incline Pull-up!

I'm still waiting for my pull-up bar to come.

In the mean time I curse as I try to do incline pull-ups under the kitchen table. I do four and then I just can't move up anymore.

I did an extra set to try to even things out, but still 4 at a time. I can do everything else mostly-- the no-pause lunges are KILLER!-- but damn you, incline pull-up!