Chili and workout

I made the most delicious chili for dinner today, and upon calculating that it's only 71 calories per hundred grams, I had to share the recipe. It's easy peasy lemon squeazy!

CHILI

400 grams of ground beef
400 grams of canned tomatoes
410 grams of tomato beans
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
3-4 chili peppers
salt
pepper
ground cayenne pepper/chili powder (I used something called Chili Explosion, which is a mix of different kinds of chilis.)

First, you fry the ground beef, then season it with salt, pepper, and chili powder/cayenne pepper to taste. Add the tomatoes and leave it to simmer for 4-5 minutes. I left mine to simmer while I was chopping peppers and chili, which was probably much longer than 4-5 minutes. That worked out fine too.

Then you add in the red, the yellow and the chili pepper, and finally the tomato beans. The original recipe calls for chili beans, but the shop that's nearest to me doesn't stock 'em, and I'm not interested in running halfway across town for one ingredient.

Anyway. You're done. Leave it alone until it's reached the level of thickness that you desire. Then enjoy.

My roommates used to cook this for me all the time when we were still living together, and they usually served it with tortilla chips on the side, which is yummy, but you know... not all that good if you're on a diet. Or in general really.

In other news, I've finally signed up for another semester at the gym, and so far, I've been there twice. Once on Monday, which was the day I signed up, and once today. Both times, I've hit the rush hour (it's a gym primarily used by students). On Monday, I wasn't there until three-ish. Every single treadmill in the place was occupied, and the machines weren't much better. I went on the stationary bike for about ten minutes, while waiting for a treadmill and then "ran" for 45 minutes. I say "ran", because there was a lot of alternating between running and walking. I naively thought (hoped?) that I'd be able to run as much as I did back home, even though it's been nearly three weeks since I set foot inside a gym. Not happening. But I did manage nearly three miles, which isn't all that shabby.

Today, I was going to go the gym around 12:30, but it turns out, I'm lazy. Who'da thunk it? So I wasn't there until maybe 2-ish. Better than last time, and I did get a treadmill right away, but there were still too many people around for my taste. I really really dislike having to wait around for certain machines to free up, and I feel all self-conscious about people standing right there when I'm trying to work out. It's got nothing to do with my weight. I just don't like people watching me do stuff.

Despite the people, it was a good work out. I set my treadmill for miles per hour today, just for kicks. I averaged 4.5 miles per hour. I totally prefer saying that I averaged 7.3 kilometers per hour though, even though it's pretty much the same speed. The metric system is an ego boost for me!

After the running, I went through my weight program, and discovered that the machines that I've been pining for all Christmas actually aren't all that. But they work. And I guess that's all I need?

The Gym? Yeah, that didn't happen.

As the title indicates, I didn't renew my gym membership today. Probably just as well, because with the luck I'm having today, I'd probably fall off the treadmill and hurt both legs, and an arm.

However, I did get some exercize when I discovered that the store closes an hour earlier than I thought it did, and I was forced to trek all the way into the city so that I'd be able to eat tomorrow. A 15-20 minute run to the store turned into more than an hour. Great.

-snorts-

I've been positively angelic when it comes to food today though!

Accountability sucks.

It started out well. By six o'clock, I'd consumed about 8-900 calories, leaving more than enough wiggle room if I wanted to get something to eat before bed. Which I usually do. I can't sleep if I'm hungry.

And then I went and asked my best friend if she wanted to go get some candy. And let me tell you, SOME candy, was actually A LOT of candy. It was very very tasty, but I feel stupid. A perfectly good day, completely ruined. Oh well. I'll eat better tomorrow, and if my student loan is transferred, I might even go sign up for the gym. Key word being might.

In other news, I've decided to switch up my exercise program a little. Last semester, I did some running and a weight program on Mondays and Fridays, and about an hour of swimming on Wednesdays. This semester, I think I'm going to do the running and the weights every three days, and then go swimming on Sundays, so that I can use the sauna afterwards. Hopefully, that will take care of some of that pesky water that tends to screw up my weigh in, and subsequently my mood!

... This is still subject to revision though. I hate swimming when there are lots of people in the pool. Oddly enough, not because I hate having people see me in my swimsuit (although I'm not terribly excited about that aspect either), but because very few of the people who use the pool know how to swim in a straight line and that annoys the hell out of me.

Exercise and status quo

Today's exercise: shoveling approximately 5.73 tons of snow from my parents' driveway.

In other news, I stepped on the scale for the first time in over a month. Seeing as I decided to say to hell with calorie counting for the month of December, I was expecting disaster. But guess what? I haven't gained anything at all! Of course, I haven't lost anything either! Color me content!

A teeny tiny competitive streak

On Saturday, I was so proud of myself for running three and a half miles on the treadmill at the gym. Then yesterday, I talked to an online friend of mine, and I may have tried to brag about this feat to her. Only, she smacked me in the face by saying she had run four miles that very day.

...

What? I can't have that, can I? So today, I went to the gym again, and ran five miles.

Neener neener neener!In your face, online friend!

The metric system is just better, okay?

Before I went home to my parents house for Christmas, I was using one of those websites that help you keep track of your daily calorie intake and the amount of calories you burn by exercising. At my parents house, however, this is futile. I can hardly ask my mother to do the math when she's cooking. Also, I'd feel extremely funny whipping out my digital scales on Christmas Eve to find out exactly how many grams of potato I'm consuming. So it was just easier to let calories be calories for the month of December, and just try to make healthy choices more often than unhealthy ones.

I did, however, miss knowing how many calories 'extra' I could earn by exercising. It is Christmas after all, and avoiding the goodies simply isn't possible.

(Let's not dwell on the fact that I wouldn't want to avoid them either...)

So I decided that the amount of calories consumed didn't need to be accurate. If I don't know how many calories are in a dish, I'll just guess. As long as I can experience the mood boost of entering running for 30 minutes and seeing the amount of calories burned jump up by about 500.

Wait, what? 500 calories? For running a 2.5 miles in 30 minutes? When you're only 5'3"? And weigh 'only' 170 pounds?

I never really questioned that number before. But today, I realized that the treadmills at my local gym work with kilometers per hour, whereas the website operate with miles per hour. So when I've been entering 7 kilometers per hour for thirty minutes, I've actually been given the number of calories that I would have burned if I ran at 11 kilometers an hour. In thirty minutes, that translates to 2 kilometers that I didn't run.

Can you say BUMMER?!

New adventures in exercise

Today, I went spinning for the very first time ever. I've never even considered going to a spinning class before, but an old friend called me and asked if I wanted to hang after she'd been to such a class. Or maybe I wanted to join her? I thought about it, and said to myself, yeah, what the hell. It's exercise. So I went with her.

Before the lesson started, she warned me not to push it too hard too soon. Guess what was the first thing I did after class started? Push myself. Hard. In my defense, no one told me that when the instructor said 'turn up the resistance' he meant 'twist the knob in front of you a teeny tiny little bit'. So I went ahead and cranked it way up. I came very close to reacquainting myself with the salad I had for dinner. I had to stop. After the interval was over, the instructor hopped off his bike and came to ask me if I was okay, and to tell me not to crank up the resistance quite so much.

Funny thing is, I never actually considered that my exhaustion might have something to do with me turning the resistance higher than the rest of the class. I just thought to myself 'Jesus, you're in bad shape!' It wasn't until after class when my friend looked at me and said 'you're crazy!' that I realized that hey, you might not be so bad after all. Because after that one incident when my dinner nearly ended up in my backpack on the floor in front of me, I did more than okay. I sweated like a pig, but I easily kept up with the rest of the class. My friend's mother even said that I'd done really well if this was my first class.

I'll definitely look into spinning classes when I go back to the city in a few weeks' time!