JJanet

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?p=184616351#post184616351

Check out this contest!! As far as I’m concerned, they’re ALL winners for making and posting a video clip of themselves like that! But I am rooting for one meanie in particular.

Yesterday as I was eating dinner (chicken breast and green beans. Mmmmmmm), I decided that today would be the day that I would stop being so bummed about my family. It has been over a week since it started, and while I was not down the entire time, I have been soooooooo blue since mid-last week that it was just ridiculous! SERIOUSLY. My only sibling and I USED to be so close, and while I told myself we were drifting apart because we lived in different countries, I knew deep down there were other issues at hand. Last week I had to acknowledge them and I won’t lie - I was crushed. But I decided to stop being so damn hurt. My brother in law is SUCH A PIG. I have a few saying about pigs (they don’t all apply here, but). Here they are:

1) For every pig, there’s a pig f*cker. (Crass, I know. LMAO!!!)

2) Never argue with a pig - it’ll only frustrate you and annoy the pig.

3) Never wrestle with a pig - you’ll get dirty and the pig likes it.

Most (all?) of us probably have to deal with ‘pigs’ in our lives. And it’s okay to be sad/angry/hurt about the presence of those pigs.

LMAO! (Not too sure what I was thinking in this picture!) But Life’s so much more enjoyable when you smile. And if you don’t feel like smiling, fake it til you make it.

I’m still ‘faking it’ this morning, but as it always happens when I put my heart on getting out of my funk, I make it before I know it. Perhaps I’m already there.

Minus 1.5 horrible days of emotional, I-could-care-less-about-what-I’m-eating, I have been right on the mark! I missed 5 scheduled workouts, but that streak ends today! Today’s going to be AMAZING. I claimed it! Hope your day’s just as terrific.

Okay, I’m a big cheater. :p I don’t want to take a full progress shot! And I don’t think I want to take it in a week, either! I look pretty much like that last bikini shot I took in April. I cannot BEAR to call it ‘progress’ when it is more of a ‘regress’! LOL!!!! So I cheated. Here’s my quad.

My forearm is getting that tell-tale hollowed out look when I am leaning out. Yay? I wish it would take the fat off of my STOMACH instead of my already skinny forearms. LOL! I am only a few pounds away from when I was my leanest in early April, but it definitely looks different this time around. I thought I added some muscle to my frame so I was anticipating looking more musclar at a slightly higher weight, but for some reason, it looks like I have even LESS than I did that first time! I see this particularly in my abs. Eh. I’m not going to worry too much about it because I know I am eating right, I geared my workouts towards leaning out, and all other areas of fitness are in line with my goals, so onwards I go! No room for hesitations or second guessing now!

I did something really tough yesterday. I wrote an email to my sister and brother in law, and aired out some of my grievances with them that I had been keeping in for a few years. It was sooooo hard to press the send button. But send it, I did. And I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. That is, until I saw their reply this morning. It was something along the lines of, "We got your email. We are thinking of how to respond to you. Later."

Ugggh. That was SO not the response I was hoping for. This is my first real confrontation with my family, and I feel SO much anxiety over it, it’s not even funny!!! I am crossing my fingers that a week from now, I will look back on this and think of how awesome it was for me to do something that is so out of my comfort zone. I wish it was next week already, and I could be away from all this tension…

I have one cleeeeeeeeean week of eating behind me, complete with a solid week of brutal circuit training/lengthy cardio sessions! I am definitely on my way to leaning out, although I will not be taking any form of measurement until June 19th. To help encourage a friend who is very new to clean eating, I challenged her to a little competition to see who could lose the biggest percentage of inches off the waistline. Even though my workouts are pretty brutal and my diet couldn’t be cleaner, I am anticipating losing this round, and I think I’m okay with that. But I’m still giving her a run for her money. The loser has to send the winner a care package filled with goodies (she’s in Alberta), so we’ll see how that goes!

Thanks to those of you who resisted the urge to give me advice on how to deal with Mr. Umbrella. LOL!! I know how hard it can be to listen to someone vent without trying to ‘help’ them. I am fighting this very urge with my new gym buddy I met a few weeks ago. Since meeting her, we have been to lunch several times, and spending a decent chunk of time together. We really clicked and I think we’re going to be good friends. Here’s us at a country club luncheon last week.

She is a special person. I am drawn to her sweetness, her utter transparency, and her ability to talk frankly about subjects that most people don’t discuss with near strangers! She is … like… my opposite twin. With almost everybody, I (think I) am a bit distant, hesitent to share my true thoughts, and extremely reluctant to share matters of the heart. I am quite certain that I met her because I need to learn from her. And I think there are some things that she is currently struggling with where I may be able to help. She is a busy little butterfly when it comes to her social life, and in her own words, she is a pushover. A doormat. After listening to some stories about how some men have treated her, I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. Like many of the uninvited problem solvers in my life, I burst in with my well-intentioned advice and told her what to do. LMAO!

(I am just venting right now). She tolerates men treating her poorly. I just cannot bear to even listen to these stories, and know that the behavior is likely to continue. It kills me to hear them. I know that there are lessons we need to learn the hard way, and that no matter how adamantly someone tells you to do something, I know experience might be the only way to learn. I just … have never been in this situation before, to tell you the truth. I have never had the honor of having a friend who is able to be THIS honest with me EVER. I have so much to learn from her. And I hope that I can show her that she definitely deserves a guy who can treat her the way she should be treated.

Isn’t life a blessing? I am so thankful to have met her. I can tell great things are going to come from this friendship.

I took my first ‘booty’ shot yesterday, and posted it for a few minutes in my progress pictures, but took it down because I was too self-concious of it. But, I am too DAMN PROUD of this shot, so I am going to post it here! From a formerly booty-less gal, I looked at myself in the mirror, and realized that all of my squatting, leg pressing, lunges and hamstring curls earned me a booty. Damn right I’m proud!

I’ve been taking a lot of classes at the gym lately to help with the cardio minutes (so that I can smoke bull-dogz in our cardio contest! hehehe!), and I’ve really been enjoying the spinning classes. It’s a fun way to make 60 minutes pass by in a flash, and forces me to work in intervals instead of my usual steady state sessions. But damn, sitting on that seat makes for a sore tush. At the end of today’s class, there were a few women standing by their bikes, discussing how wearing biking shorts alleviates a bit of the discomfort, and I asked one of them where she got the bike shorts she had on…

… and it turned out that she was not wearing any bike shorts.

She was really offended at my assumption. Yes, yes, ass, u, me.

Oops.

She hissed out, "I’m NOT wearing biking shorts. This", while gesturing towards her butt, "is EXACTLY why I’m GOING to these classes!". She sent me a glare that had me wishing I could blend into the walls, and she and her friend sent me one last withering glance before they left.

LOL. I felt SUPER horrible. But LMAO!! Why do I say the dumbest things to people?

I’m so bummed! My beautiful little laptop gave out on me. It was only a little over a year old!! Piece of garbage. HMPH! Yuck. I had sooooooooooooooooooooo many files on there that I am so SAD to be losing! I could just KICK myself for not copying them over to my external harddrive! UGH. So now I am stuck with my desktop. Which I hate. I hate vista. *rants*.

 Okay. Enough venting. I am grateful for my desktop, vista and all!

I have made my butt over to 10 of my workouts this month, so I am in line with the first half of my May goal! The clean diet part… well. I am eating cleanly, but something’s come over me in April and it’s carried over to May. I am just not willing to sacrifice the foods as much any more! I guess what it comes down to is lately, I would rather eat the dirty foods than see progress. On the plus side, I am doing enough cardio and lifting that it’s not doing much damage, but I am not progressing, either. A part of me feels like I’m just spinning my wheels and I feel frustrated that the desire to eat junk is stronger than my desire to see progress. A fairly simple problem with an easy solution, really. I guess I will have to find some way to want a tight and toned body more than being a social leper with my eating.

All right. So bring it! C’mon, you guys. Please remind me why I want the bod more than I want the foods! Shame me!!

So do you remember umbrella dude? Since I wrote about him last week, I have seen him almost EVERY time I’ve been at the gym! And I’ve seen him at Whole Foods as well, which is just down the street from the gym. LOL. Do you ever run into someone at the market, go your separate ways in opposite directions, and keep running into each other in the next aisles? And then it’s super awkward because you’ve done the small talk thing already and you have nothing else to talk about. So you move on, go to the next aisle, and then you keep running into them? So you get the bright idea to skip an aisle or two… which is GREAT… but they did the same thing as well, so you keep running into each other? No? Just me? LOL. A few days after he walked me to my car, we finished our workouts at about the same time, and we were both walking to the changeroom, and he asked if I wanted to grab a coffee. I declined, and since then, he is still really friendly… bordering on flirtatious. Like… giving me lots of compliments and such. Today, I saw him and he had noticed I wasn’t there yesterday. I was wearing this clip in my hair to keep my bangs out of my face, and he commented on how cute it was, and then he reached in and tucked some of my hair behind my ear, and goes, “There! And now you’re perfect!”. LOL. I laughed uncomfortably, and mumbled something about needing to leave. I changed reaaaaaaally slowly, and we still finished at the same time, and he walked me out to my car again.

Eh. It’s sort of an uncomfortable situation (I don’t need any assistance in solving it. I am just airing out some of my thoughts) that I got myself into. I am capable of getting myself out of it, too! I just… don’t like confrontations. I (am) contemplat(ing/ed) switching around my whole workout schedule just so I wouldn’t have to see him anymore. LOL. The old Janet would probably join another gym so she wouldn’t have to deal with it. LMAO. How funny that I am not even joking a little bit with that last statement. Old habits die hard, I guess. It’s strange being raised to value other people’s feelings and considerations more than your own, and making the transition to go the other way. Although… I can’t place the blame entirely on the way that I was raised because my sister is nothing like me, and we were treated pretty much the same way. So I guess it’s both nature and nurture showing its wicked passive head in me! All right, then. I’ve claimed it, I’ll solve it.

And just for giggles. I got some pictures back from when I traveled last winter. I went to Amsterdam and had some pot for the first time. Here’s a picture of me incredibly high. LMAO!!!!!

My fellow bloggers! I can’t believe May is already here! My goal for this month is to make a combined total of 40 workouts with this Bloke’s help! I tracked the exact number of days I was at the gym for the past few months and decided I needed the numbers to be higher and more consistent! So we’ll see how this goes! My diet has been sorta kinda clean. But not really. Okay, it’s sucked the big turd since I got back from Vegas. ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, if I must be completely honest. It sucked for ALL of April. *cringes*. Hehehehehe. But that’s changing now! May WILL be a month of GREAT nutrition.

Maybe.

I was talking to one of my closest friends. She lives abroad so our phone conversations are far and few in between because of the time difference. But anyway, we were gabbing like girls do, and I was marveling to her how NICE I think people are! For example, it was raining earlier, and I didn’t bring an umbrella (I never do - it doesn’t really bother me when I get a bit wet!), but this guy who was in the front area of the gym went out of his way to walk me to my car covering me with his umbrella. HOW NICE is that? So I was telling her that sometimes it amazes me how kind people are.

She rolled her eyes at me. (I COULD TELL!!!) And she was like, “Don’t be so intentionally stupid, Janet. He probably had NO kind intentions whatsoever, and was probably using it as an opportunity to talk to you and get to know you better.”

EH. So I ROLLED my eyes right back at her (And I know SHE could tell, too! Hehehe!), and said that I wasn’t about to assume that any time a guy did something kind for me, it was because he found me attractive. How stuck on myself would I be to assume that? It reminded me of fair Pixi’s entry about the dude and the email and stuff. I mean, I’m not a complete idiot, and sometimes they make it clear that they are interested in me, but other times when it’s just kind gestures like that, to me, that’s just human kindness.

It makes me wonder how hesitent people must be to do something kind for somebody else because their intentions will be misunderstood. For instance, I have taken to smiling at people all the time these days. Men, women, children. Men almost always smile back. Women seem to smile back about half the time, and the other half of the time, they turn away and avoid me. Children always smile back or glance away shyly, but I notice their mothers often seem to think I have other intentions or something! Sheesh, people! It’s just a smile!

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A kind gesture is JUST a kind gesture. I would prefer to think people are good and kind rather than think they are interested in me. Does that make me intentionally stupid? Who knows. I’m just going to keep smiling.

I am a Whole Foods Junkie. There is little I enjoy more than heading into this wonderful little market and getting lost in the beautiful and vast array of organic and wholesome products. I have come across three products in the last week that are worth mentioning.

My first one: Z Sweet

It is an artificial sweetner called Erythritol that is in the sugar alcohol family. If you ever indulged in a cup or two of some ice cream sweetened with sugar alcohols like sorbitol or maltitol, you’re probably already familiar with the effects of such a seemingly carefree treat! That’s right. Gas. Horrible. Wretched. Putrid. Gas. And if you took a third helping… God help you. Not that I would know anything about this or anything.

*Darts eyes*.

Yes, my friends! Sugar alcohols are the only sweetners that I have ever tasted that mimic the taste of sugar closely enough for me to be fooled! But they also contain a decent calorie punch, and the gastronomical effects it had on me was definitely NOT worth the sweet treat. But Erythritol is different! It is one of the few sugar alcohols that do not carry those horrible side effects as it digests in a different way than its other relatives. Better than that, it TASTES like sugar!! It completely ROCKS in the few things I have put it in… the one exception to this being hot chocolate. It tasted really foul in there, for some reason. So if you ever on the lookout for a new ingredient to bring some sweetness into your food, I highly recommend Zsweet!

 My next product: Xanthan Gum

I completely adore all of Bob’s Red Mill’s product line! But this one was a new one for me! Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide (a multi-stranded sugar unit) that is used to thicken liquids. I LOVE this one because it has 35 calories per spoon, and all of it’s calories come from dietary fibre! YAY!! No more corn starch or flours for me! I have been successful with using it in a few soups and shakes, but be careful! A little goes a LONG way! Definitely a buy-again in my books!

The third one was something I thought would replace the salt in my diet: Nu-Salt.

It has the flavor of salt, the texture of salt, all without the SODIUM of salt! It is a Potassium Chloride instead of a Sodium Chloride. Sounds too good to be true, yes??!!

Umm. YESSSS!!!!

It is vile. VILE I SAY. I had to throw out all the chicken that I made that I trustingly sprinkled with my new best friend. HORRIBLE. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. In a salt survey, it is the only salt (or salt substitute) that scored a negative 1.02 out of a possible 10 points.

LOL!!

Soooo… I know I don’t have the best track record with recommending good recipes. LOL! But I made some low-carb waffles that were just delicious to a carb-deprived person like myself! I am not a HUGE chocolate person, but  I had a zazzle for it and came up with:

Chocolate Raspberry Waffles

- 1 scoop of ON Vanilla Casein, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of Ghiradelli unsweetened ground cocoa, 4 egg whites, and enough water to make it the appropriate waffle-like batter.

It made 12 mini-waffles, and 6 was enough for me! I mixed 1/4 cup of sugar free syrup with some raspeberries, drizzled it over it, and YUM! I sneakingly fed it to an unknowing friend to get their unbiased opinion. It got a resounding "YUM!" from them. They had no idea it had no flour in it!

The macros for 12 mini waffles comes out to: 250 calories, 3.5 grams of fat, 9 grams of carbs, and 49 grams of protein!! If you make the raspberry syrup, throw in another 50 cals.

And a picture of my masterpiece.