Take a moment to set your intention

It’s been so peaceful and calm over here.

I’m sorry if that silence has been uncomfortable for you. I was just having a moment of meditation. During my (2+ weeklong) meditation I have come to the following conclusion: I love yoga. I really really love it. I am really really bad at it. But, being the competitive person that I am (competitive yoga? Why not!) I am embracing the challenge and practicing at least 3 or 4 times a week (often more!). This has lead to very sore arms but no rock hard abs (yet!). I’m not giving up hope. Give me a couple more weeks (months) and I’ll post pictures of my chiseled physique!

Speaking of weeks: what else has happened in my absence?

1) I got engaged

2) E and I moved

3) I went up to family camp

Are you noticing a trend (besides the: Emily is having a really kick-a$$, fabulous summer trend)?

Over the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot more posting on my other blog

This is something else I have been thinking intently about during my meditation. What is the purpose of life (er… for this blog)?

I originally conceived it as a sister-blog to Emily’s Weblog. But I’m just not witty/motivated enough to keep 2 blogs going, full swing. In the past couple months, I’ve noticed that whenever I focus on one blog the other suffers.

So: I am taking a moment to set my intention for this blog. I will not give it up completely. I like having a place to talk about food and fitness, and I don’t think my other blog is that place. But I won’t be posting here nearly as frequently. Maybe when I learn a new yoga move and have a fun pic. to share, or when I try a new chocolate recipe that is deliciousoso. Or when I am sick of the other blog. But for those of you who have only been reading this blog and who feel like I don’t post enough (this may only apply to one or two people in the world, but if that is you, then HURRAH–> read on), please consider bookmarking my other blog: http://lairdea.wordpress.com.

I plan to update that more regularly.

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Follow Through

First, a practical note: Thanks for all the money saving tips, you savy shoppers. I’m contemplating working on integrating them into my weekly grocery shopping adventures!

But please don’t hesitate to comment (or email/write/call) if YOU have other healthy shopping tips to share. Like websites with good coupons, or just extra copies of books like “How to Recover From a Whole Foods Addiction”  (if you wrote that book, I bet it would make a lot of money… which is kind of ironic  I guess. But what better way to make money than by preying upon those with shopping addictions? Actually come to think of it, don’t write it. I’m going to figure it out and write it myself).

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I have been promising to do yoga for REAL for a while. And while wii fit yoga is fun… it isn’t quite real. In fact, it is virtual.

SO, when my friend Krystyna begged me to come to a yoga class with her at her yoga studio (green monkey) and told me it was going to be FREE (she had a free pass), I couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to (actually I just ran out. She’d invited me before, and I’d already used all my good “I have to bake and gain weight” excuses up). So I went to a real yoga class with Krystyna.

And, it was hard.

Like really, really hard.

And even though it was at 7am (that should have been an excuse in itself) there were loads of yoga people there, so I felt like a fool. It was hard, and I was just sweating everywhere even though all I had to do was bend over and stand on one leg (who knew I couldn’t do that? You learn something new every day.). And at the end, you just lie on the floor and let the (in some people’s opinion) sexy instructor put lavender smelling stuff on your forehead. So what’s my problem?

Turns out, I have zero muscles. I would say negative muscles, but I think that would mean something weird that I can’t wrap my head around, so let’s stick with 0.

And now, all my muscles hurt. Which for zero, is a surprisingly large amount of hurt.

And yet… 6 hours later, I had forgotten the pain, (and my vow to start saving money) and suddenly found myself paying for a 6 month unlimited pass to the studio.

Um WHAT?

Yes. A very expensive (and what I’m sure will be very PAINFUL) six-month membership to Green Monkey.  The only thing I can think is, there must have been drugs in the smelly forehead stuff. I mean look at that monkey, and tell me he isn’t on something!

So what am I doing?

I am… unsure. But since my new diet (let’s not even GO there) only allows me to eat a little chocolate every day, I think this blog might be a nice place to showcase my yoga practice, or yoga intention, as the yogis say. Instead of chocolate I will document my unique struggle, my aches, pains and maybe someday my rock hard abs?

Personally, I think it is going to be a cinch. I’ve already gone to the yoga studio twice! I might even really follow through on this. Like maybe I’ll  go 4 whole times (that’s enough to get rock hard abs, right?)!

I’m a STAR!

And now for something Canadian and therefore cultured.

Puppy in Poncho = CUTE

Chocopathology

First off: I know that E and I aren’t the only people who do this, but we’re huge fans of compound word creation. For example, today’s title: chocopathology is a combination of chocolate and psychopathology.  Drizza and Draking stands for drunk pizza and drunk baking. I think you get the point.

Anyway, so I’ve always known I was a chocoholic (it’s genetic), but the rest of my chocopathology has only recently been revealing itself (maybe it is just all the time I spend in a psych department that is making the symptoms more salient). In addition to my addiction, I appear to also be a cocoarder (cocoa-hoarder). I went to the movies this afternoon and stopped by sugar heaven (products–> heaven, their prices–> hell!) for um… chocolate. But the store requires a $10+ purchase to use credit, and I had no cash, so I bought more chocolate!
When I got home, I went to my our pantry to put the chocolate away, but couldn’t find space on my chocolate shelf. Being the good CBT therapist-to-be that I am, I immediately engaged in problem solving. Here are the solutions I generated:

1) Make more room for chocolate in the pantry (by throwing away useless things like tuna, peanut butter, pasta and E’s fruit snacks).

2) Eat lots of chocolate right now to make room for more

3) Stop buying chocolate.

Of all these steps #3 was the least appealing, so I ate some chocolate and forced some other things into corners to make space for my chocostash, but as I snacked and reorganized, it just became to obvious to me how much chocolate we really have. And by obvious I mean ridiculous.

Let me show you what I mean.

here is a sample of  what I found in our pantry

And then just the bars, without the extra candy

If you look closely, you can see that these bars of chocolate are hardly gathering dust.

I munch on them all the time! I just had no idea there were so many.

Organizing my chocolate lifted the veil of denial I had about living a healthy lifestyle.

So, I did some wii fit Yoga to get in shape!

(I told you I was going to start doing Yoga!)

In other news, I’ve baked a bunch more recipes from my little book including:

1)those A+ cookies for a crowd (the kiddies agreed)

2) A cinnamon-apple bundt cake that I adapted to become a banana cake (A/A+, best banana cake I have ever had, maybe I’ll post the recipe next time)

3) Overnight Pizza Dough from Bon Appetit. E and I usually just use a Betty Crocker mix for home made pizzas, and it comes out ok. But we had company so I made this dough and it was phenomenal! Like way better than most pizza dough from a restaurant. The best part is that the recipe makes 8 servings of dough, so we’ve frozen some away. When we use it, I’ll let you know how well it keeps (and try to take a picture of the pizza before I gobble it up too fast!)

Alright, Enuf boring updates already. Time for So You Think You Can Dance! (I think Randi and Evan will be sent home… we’ll find out soon!)

UPDATE to add: I was totally wrong about Randi and Evan, they weren’t even in the bottom 3 couples. Shows what I know. Still, I had not strong feelings for Max or Ashley, so that’s fine. But I’m predicting it right now: next week we’ll say goodbye to Vitolio and Asuka.

LURVEY!

Attrition

What do you think of when you hear the word attrition?

Usually it reminds me of all the participants I have worked so hard to recruit who drop out of our studies at work (have I even mentioned what I do for a living? Hmm, I’ll go update my About Me page, and you can check it out).

But recently, attrition has had additional significance in my life. This time, with regard to my muscles.

My attitude towards exercise has always been: yah, meh.

Growing up I played sports half-heartedly and stayed in decent shape. In college, I ran occasionally, but it hurt my knee. For about 10 months after college, I went to the gym everyday to justify eating whatever I wanted (and I gained weight, supresa supresa).

So after all this I kind of said, yah, meh! I don’t enjoy exercise, it doesn’t particularly like me- we’re both a bit relieved when we’re just left alone. And, for the past year or so, that has been my motto. And it has worked out well enough. I’ve maintained weight (in case you were curious) despite my sloth, by not believing my hallucinations that fad diets will work.

But honestly, (and by admitting this, I am just inviting my mother to say “I told you so”) I think I’m less happy. This is a radical statement, but I think something about exercise makes me feel good. Do I enjoy working out? NO. Do I enjoy feeling strong and sweaty and like I am not wasting my life sitting on a couch watching So You Think You Can Dance while they are on the screen living their dreams? Yes, thank you.

The problem is, I have difficulty finding a type of exercise that suits me. I love the solitude of running, but my knee is no good. I have strong legs and a great bike and really enjoy biking but it rains here everyday (and when it’s not raining it is 1000 degrees). I think what I need to do is hop on the blogging band wagon and get into yoga. I love the concept of meditation, and we even practice it with the kiddies at work occasionally. I love solitude, I have strong legs, I am working on being more mindful: I really think I could fall in love with yoga. But I don’t know where to start!

Blogis (hehe like Yogis, but for blogging): I am seeking your help!!

Chocolate can only take me so far towards self-actualization. Please, how should a wanna-be yogite start?

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