Thursday, July 5, 2012

Blog Catch-up Challenge

Once a day I come down to the computer and write up a blog post.  But more than once a day, typically, I have an idea for a blog post.  Schedules and general lack of time and I don't have the chance to get to everything I've considered writing about written.  I have a file I keep the ideas in and if there's a day I'm not sure what to write about, I grab a topic from there.  

But the topics file gets more pruning than posting.  So I'm going to try and write only one paragraph about some topics today and see how far I get.

One meal can not make you fat.  It's true.  If you have to eat 3500 calories less in a week than what you burn, you would have to overeat by 3500 calories in a day to put on a pound of fat.  And that's assuming your body would know what to do with a massive influx of calories and could efficiently turn it all into fat in a day.   But thinking it's okay to overeat on this one meal can be dangerous if you continue to talk yourself into overeating regularly.

Don't confuse weight loss with water loss.  Go running in the heat.  Then take a nice shower.  Then weigh yourself.  I can easily lose over two pounds from sweating and exercising.  And while that number on the scale looks very favorable, I have to remind myself that weight loss is an entirely different thing from water loss.  Running hard, for over an hour, is only about 1/7th a pound in fat burned from a calorie standpoint.  So don't be fooled.  But don't stop exercising.

Zumba calorie crazyness.  My sister-in-law said her Zumba teacher told them she burned over 1400 calories in a Zumba hour-long workout.  I was skeptical.  Go look  at metabolic equivalent tables for how vigorous an activity must be and how much oxygen you need to be consuming in order to burn specific amounts of calories.  I waited until I had done the hour's class because maybe this Zumba exercise was just crazy difficult.  At the end though, I would compare it to a very easy run.  Great workout, but if my hour of running nets me 450 calories and I'm drenched and breathless, Zumba wasn't going to double or tripple the workout value.  Then I came home and did a Zumba workout on the XBox for over an hour.  At the end, it reported I had burned 1388 calories.  I suppose I dislike this because I believe it to be misinformation that doesn't give people an accurate value on what they've accomplished.  Hopefully people aren't out eating cheeseburgers to celebrate their massive caloric burn and get discouraged because they don't lose weight.

Farsighted/Nearsighted and Thermostats.  Why is it so common that we can't remember if farsighted means you can see far or if that's what you can't see?  My husband and I were talking about that the other day and it just seems like something people commonly know, forget, try and remember and then get confused with the terminology.  We compared it to "Turn the AC up please" and how that means two things, turn it up as in more cooling power or turn it up as in a higher temperature so less cooling power.  For a language with so many words, we still manage to get ourselves confused using English sometimes.

I feel the pain.  When my son started walking he was unstable as all babies are initially.  I would cringe as I saw him lunge forward, destined to fall every next step and smear his face all over the concrete.  As a parent, I've experienced every injury my children have had physically, via an adrenaline jolt.  When he would fall I'd feel the pain via tingles in my arms as I was bracing for the fall or hit or smash but I had no control over it.  I think it's getting better now.  Am I becoming used to the falls and injuries?

"Fool!  Don't you know women can make themselves look thin through fashion?"  This was a line I read a while back, while dieting, and it not only made me laugh, I realized it was true.  I have clothes now that make me look very thin and I have other clothes that make me look just normal.  It's lots of fun to wear something that matches your mood.  While I was dieting, I was looking forward to finding some "fashion" that I'd look thin in.

Belief if not a binary state.  That was a quote in the book I'm currently reading.  My initial reaction was that this statement is completely wrong.   But as the author went on, I understood what he meant.  There are degrees of believing something.  For example, I believe cake to be delicious.  But feed me nothing but cake for the next month and I might reflect that I believe cake to be delicious in the right situations, and the right quantity.  Some beliefs can be absolute, sure.  But I'm going to think a little more in-depth now when I say "I believe..." something.


Dinner on the fourth, thanks  Daddy.  My husband makes a great dinner.  And he's always ready to have more over.  Yesterday, on the fourth of July, he had planned to make a nice steak dinner for his parents, the children and us.  My friend wanted to come get rocks and I asked him if I could invite her to dinner.  "Sure" he says.  "We have enough."  Then our best friend, Uncle Jonathan, texted that he might leave the pool party early and were we doing anything?  I asked my husband and family again and they said, "tell him to come for dinner!"  We had a great meal, because my husband always makes it work.  This time, he gets a special thanks because he had to make dinner completely, without power as the thunderstorm left us in the steamy, sweltering July heat for hours.  Go daddy!

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