This weekend my husband and I went out of town to visit my family. I love seeing them and I often wish they didn’t live 200 miles away, but such is life.
My family loves to play games. In the Winter, it’s usually board games and bowling; in the Summer, it’s outdoor activities like volleyball and swimming. For this trip – in addition to the volleyball and swimming – we were even planning a hiking trip out to a waterfall where you could go cliff diving (!). Unfortunately, Mother Nature put a very literal damper on these plans as it rained most of the weekend. Freakin’ Mother Nature…
So, instead of going hiking, we went bowling for some indoor fun. Attached to the bowling alley was a restaurant from which everyone ordered some delicious looking and smelling food – pizza, fries, barbeque sauce-soaked chicken finger subs. I’m happy to report that I don’t know how any of it tasted: I had a turkey sandwich and a bowl of fresh fruit shortly before we left so I wasn’t actually hungry (not that that ever stopped me before…). I chewed an obscene amount of gum while they were eating and made sure to chase after everyone when it seemed they were done eating to throw out anything that may have been left on their plates. I’m sure I looked obsessive compulsive, but it was effective!
Other bad stuff I successfully avoided this weekend: Blueberry pancakes with sugary maple syrup, honey dijon potato chips (except for one – take that Lays!), Mint Milano cookies, strawberry shortcake, salted peanuts, beer, Smirnoff Ice.
Indulgences: One teeny piece of my brother’s birthday cake, a bit of my mom’s famous macaroni salad, one donut hole from Tim Horton’s.
Overall, I think this is the best I’ve ever done food-wise while visiting my family. It’s very difficult to eat well when you’re at someone else’s house surrounded by unhealthy food – especially when you love that stuff like I do.
Besides making wise food choices this weekend, I got two hardcore workouts in. On Friday, my sister and I went to the gym for some circuit training: 10 minutes on the treadmill, “supersets” on 2 weight machines, then ab work. We planned on doing three full circuits but time restraints forced us to stop after the second. Even with only doing the circuit twice, it was very intense, particularly the running portions: We ran the entire time, doing faster and faster sprints for 20 seconds a pop every few minutes. I’ve heard this will help build up both my speed and endurance (I’ll let you know!).
On Saturday morning, I met my sister-in-law at the gym for a spin class. I’ve only taken one other spin class, and that one was terrible – there were only two other people in the class, and the instructor – who knew them both – was in a bad mood and spent the entire hour ranting to them about her day. Very disappointing.
This class, though, was just what I was expecting and hoping for from a spin class: It was a very difficult workout, complete with an instructor who actually cared about the fact that she was teaching a class. We hung in there for all 60 minutes and we’re no worse for the wear! Incidentally, this class seemed to be full of people who didn’t talk to each other at all – completely on the other side of the spectrum I’ve experienced at my own gym.
Those were the two big workouts. I also spent a lot of time on my parents new huge trampoline, which I recently learned I love. Man, I gotta get one of those for myself!
All in all, I think I did reasonably well this weekend. Not perfect, but pretty darn well. I’ll keep up the logging and exercising the rest of the week and should be right on track to break into the 170s on Friday as planned.
Weekends are the toughest since you’re not on your normal schedule. How was everyone else’s weekend?
