Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Every week, I’ll be giving you some direction for how to actually KEEP your New Year’s Resolution to lose weight or get more active. If you’re short on time, scroll down to the end and read “The Short Version” to get your weekly tips.

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Last week I asked you, no begged you, to take it easy on yourself. I know you have a New Year’s Resolution to finish, but honestly you can’t finish it in a week. You had three options last week: Take it easy, overdo it or give up. Let’s figure out what to do this week based on your performance last week.

I Overdid It

If you jumped into your New Year’s Resolution to lose weight and get active, you might have overdid it. Your muscles are sore and you feel like you’re STARVING. If that’s the case, STOP IT! Seriously, right now, throw whatever plan you had to lose weight out the freakin’ window. I’m not asking you to give up on your resolution, I’m just asking you to stop abusing yourself and move on to the “I Gave Up” section.

I Gave Up

I can’t tell you how many January firsts started with a strict New Year’s Resolution plan that ended up with a Twinkie binge by January third. Okay, that’s a lie. It was one year. The other years, I binged on something else.

If you find yourself in the position of giving up, that’s completely fine. Seriously, you don’t have to kill yourself to get healthy. All you have to do is pick yourself back up, time after time. Instead of going back to your old ways, try my New Year’s Resolution plan. You’ll be one week behind, but that’s just fine. Start from here and move on:

• Starling Fitness » New Year’s Resolutions: Week One

Evelyn Underhill said,

“Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.”

I’m not saying that eating poorly is evil, but if you use this idea for every time you eat poorly, you WILL succeed at weight loss.

I Took It Easy, Just Like You Said

The first thing I want to say is, “Good Job!” It is SO hard to take it easy, despite how it sounds. Here is your plan for Week 2:

Learn Serving Sizes and Calorie Counts

If you followed last week’s plan, you wrote down everything you ate. Excellent work. I want you to do that again this week, but this time, I want you to put the calorie counts next to all the food you ate. That means you need to measure and you need to start learning the calorie amounts for all of your favorite foods.

This is a week for education. You need to train yourself what a cup of rice looks like. You need to train yourself to know how many calories are in a Big Mac.

This is NOT a week of deprivation. You still need to eat just like you would eat before. All I’m asking you to do is to WRITE DOWN everything you eat and its caloric amount.

Eat Your Veggies and Fruits

This week, I’m going to recommend that you add two or three servings of vegetables to your diet every day. There are little check boxes on the forms for you to check off vegetable servings. You need to check off at least two servings a day. According to the USDA, you should have between 3 and 5 cups of vegetables a day. One cup is a mighty big bite to swallow, so I divide servings into half cups. Here’s a good list of veggies to try:

• MyPyramid.gov – Inside The Pyramid – What foods are in the vegetable group?

All I’m asking is that you make sure you eat 1 or 1 and 1/2 cups of vegetables or fruit every day.

Increase Your Exercise

I’m still telling you to go slow and easy. When I did this, the second week was actually HARDER than the first week, not because I increased my mileage, but because I wanted to increase it MORE. It was so frustrating, I complained about it on Twitter:

• Twitter / Laura Moncur: Workout finished. 1 mile doesn’t seem enough, even though I’m running fast. It’s hard to take it slow.

Here’s the run I was talking about:

• LauraMoncur’s run log for Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 10:32 AM – RUNNER+

And I was pushing myself too much that week. This week, I want you to increase your walking mileage to 0.75 miles five days a week. I want you to do it at the same time every day. If you want, you can increase your speed to really get yourself sweating, but if you end up sore the next day, you MUST slow down. It’s more important to exercise every day than to push yourself. Consistency is key. You need to learn the habit of exercising every day and that is WAY more important than going fast or covering a lot of miles.

Give Yourself Kudos

If you are still working toward your New Year’s Resolution, then you need to give yourself kudos. There are little boxes on the forms every day to give yourself a shiny sticker. Each day that you stay on the program, you need to acknowledge yourself and how good you are doing.

See you next week!

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The Short Version:

• DO NOT change your eating regime at all, but write down EVERYTHING you eat, including the measurements (i.e. 1 cup of rice) and calories.

• You are allowed to ADD two or three servings of vegetables every day, but you are not allowed to restrict anything in your diet.

• Increase your mileage. Walk 0.75 miles five days this week. You are allowed to increase your speed to the point of sweating, but if you are sore the next day you MUST go slow again.

• Give yourself kudos for coming this far.