The elliptical is here!!

I did it. I made a decision. It was pretty funny because when Waylon got to PIAS he thought I had made a decision, but, I hadn't. Decisions really stump me. They are so final! Once we get it home and put it together there is no "take it back" without a terrible amount of effort. So, here it is, my Horizon EX-79 elliptical!

It is pretty awesome. After much, much research I picked this model because it had a lot of the same features as the Livestrong LS 13.0e but with a price tag about $300 less. The other deciding factor was the place I bought it. The Play it Again Sports has a great owner who is very helpful. Every time I went into his store (all 3 times) he answered every question I had and tried very hard to help me come to a decision. When I went to Dick's Sporting goods (3 times) to look at their ellipticals not ONCE did ANYONE approach me with help or information. So, the customer service won. Plus, I really like the elliptical! The only feature I am not 100% sure about is the Ipod/Nike interface. In order to save my data and view it I have to use an Ipod. It does have an MP3 jack so I can listen to my phone or MP3 player and the speakers actually sound pretty darn good! Almost in stereo LOL. Even with the fan running and using the machine, I can hear the music very nicely. I used it today for just 20 minutes and it was awesome. Very smooth, extremely quiet and I got one heck of a workout! Another plus, it has a great warranty! One thing that I thought was funny, the same company makes both the Horizon and LiveStrong ellipticals as well as a high end model used in gyms.

Here's to a firmer, sexier physique!!! He, he, he!

I forgot to mention, I used my "bargaining" skills too! The elliptical was priced $999. He left me to make my "decision" and I said, ok, if I take the 79 will you throw in a floor mat? He said sure! Ha ha ha! It felt great. I got a $30 floor mat to protect my floor LOL.

Egg Coupon!

We don't buy eggs (thanks to the lovely "ladies" of the "Million dollar chicken coop!" LOL BUT this is a good deal for those that do! BTW, locals, save your egg cartons for us please! Also, we may have too many eggs around once Goldie realizes that there really aren't any eggs under her, bless her heart. Anyone who is interested in awesome, nutrient rich, organic, free range as it gets chicken eggs let me know!

If you have any issues, you can use area code 33615 to get it.

Thanks Jenny at Southern Savers!

Water, water, everywhere....except inside of me!

Ha ha ha. I must say that I feel so much better. I started drinking water a big part of my day again and what a HUGE difference it has made! When I weighed in on Tuesday I was 237.8, I got on the scale today and I am back down to 234.2!!! That is almost 4lbs! Wahoo! Now the battle will be to keep it up! I have only taken the Bontril two days this week thus far. I really do not like to take ANYTHING but I certainly need to get my appetite back under control. Actually, I am rather shocked that I lost anything seeing how I ate nearly 12 Chips A Hoy cookies last night. They were reduced fat but does it really make a difference?? No. It was empty calories none the less! Time to get busy and get off of this computer!!

Does anyone have any tips for increasing your water intake during the cooler months? With the weather being so much nicer now and not so sweltering, I find it difficult to get in my 8-10 glasses a day.

Ugh...another week.

This is it. I have hit the final slump. I gained another 0.2 lbs which seems very trivial but is HUGE in my eyes! What am I thinking?? This has to stop and it has to stop now! This week I am going to start over. I still have some Bontril left so I am going to take it for the next week or until it's gone, whichever comes first. The elliptical will be purchased this week so I will have no excuses on exercise. I tried my hardest to climb the stairs this morning at the Dr's office and I did it but oh goodness did my knee feel it!

Let me tell you, last night was probably the biggest mistake I have made in the last week or 2. After working a hellacious 11 hours yesterday I was starving. The mindset I had was that since I knew dinner at home would not be a good option for me I would go through Taco Bell, order 2 fresco tacos and call it a night. The line at that place was unreal. I waited for a few minutes and said forget it, I can eat something unprocessed and not handled by a bunch of people at home. Yea right! I got home and felt completely and totally drained! I walked in, grabbed a PARTY PIZZA out of the freezer and ate the whole thing!!!! What on earth was I thinking? Needless to say, my water weight was up this morning after that extra 750 calories, 1200 mg of sodium and 40 grams of fat!!! Ugh. Great way to end the week.

So, here we go. Here is to a much better week filled with healthy choices, water and lots of exercise!

Off to a much better start! How exciting!

After getting on the scale this morning I was electrified! Down to 234.4 pounds! I have officially gotten below the weight I was when I arrived at the hospital to have Lillian. Phew. It is officially down hill from here for me! Finally, I feel as if I am headed somewhere. Hopefully being on My Fitness Pal with my si-in-law will help to keep us BOTH excited and energized to get where we want to be physically and emotionally. Not only do I want to be in a smaller size, my ultimate goal is to be healthier and hopefully live longer. This way I can spend endless years with my family, my children. I would love for them to grasp the same desire to live healthy so that they don't have to fight the same battles that I have had all of my life. Just as Dave Ramsey urges us to change our "family tree" by being out of debt, I want to change my family tree by living a healthier lifestyle.

Changing to My Fitness Pal

I have lost interest in My Fat Secret. I don't feel a lot of accountability anymore using it. My dear sis-in-law is rocking her weight loss and using My Fitness Pal so I am going to jump along and use it with her! Together we can hold each other accountable. (Or so I hope!!) It has a lot of the same features that MFS has and it even has a better Android app for my phone. It has a blog feature and an easier food database. Woo hoo! Come along and join me there! The ONLY thing I am sad about is that my weight loss to date is not accurate. I may delve into the site and see if I can log a weight from August to make it more accurate. Let me know if you join so that we can be "friends."

MyFitnessPal - Free Weight Loss Tools

Moving up, not down, time to get down to business!

My visit to the Dr's office today was not a happy one. I gained 0.4 lbs. Yikes! This is the 2nd week in a row I have shown a gain. Slight as it may be, it is still a movement UP in numbers instead of down. Hopefully this is the slap in the face and the swift kick in the buttocks that I need to get motivated again. I feel like I have hit a stagnant point. When I left the office I went straight to Publix and stocked up on fibrous, no calorie snacks like celery and cucumbers. I also picked up some more hummus and cottage cheese as well as jello. Planning my meals in advance also needs to be a priority for me. For the last 2 weeks I have not "counted" my calories and it shows. I am also hoping to receive the letter I need in order to have my elliptical reimbursed from our health savings account. Maybe with the combination of efforts I will see some results next week. Surely, if I got on here a little more often I might want to stick to it a little more as well.

This weekend was nice though. And really, if you think about the things I ate, gaining less than 1/2 a pound isn't really terrible. We went to the casino on Friday and ate the buffet. I felt like I was doing really well by choosing steamed crab legs and shrimp. (I only dipped a few pieces in butter, then I stopped.) I made sure to eat a salad but what got me was dessert. I could not look at that long row of sweetness and avoid reaching out to it. A piece of chocolate cream pie and strawberry/cherry/marshmallow fondue later, I felt terribly guilty. :( To make matter worse, for breakfast I ate at Huddle House. I honestly don't think there was anything there that wasn't fried or cooked in grease. Even the waffle iron was coated in lard. Yuck. It was not the best decision to order a cheese steak omelet with hash browns and toast. Nope, I can promise. On the way home we had to pull over because I was physically ill. I am sure that the lack of sleep didn't help matters, but I "ate" that breakfast until I went to bed Saturday night. Yucko!! I don't want to see anything fried or greasy again so long as I live. It is amazing how your body rejects such terrible stuff when you go so long without eating it. A good thing I suppose.

I am off to organize for the holidays. We have family coming in and I am so excited! I think this is going to be the biggest Thanksgiving we have ever had! Ohhhhh I can't wait!!! Yippee!!!

Don't forget to stop over at my other blog, Dothan Dinners For Less. Check it out and tell me what you think!
Amanda

Ellipticals

Yesterday was spent testing every elliptical in the city of Dothan. Which, let me tell you, isn't many. There are 3 stores that I know of that carry the machines. We went to Play it Again Sports, Sears and Dick's. I am not sure if I am any closer to a decision than I was when I left. My mind was kinda set on the Esprit model I found online but after seeing so many I am once again unsure. Here is what I have found out.

Play it Again Sports has the Horizon treadmills that are made by Sole. They did not have any set up, they were actually putting them together when we arrived. He said that he would have them ready to see today. The 2 models, the EX-59 and the EX-69 he would have run $500-$700 and the Spirit model would be around $1300 (which can be ordered at Amazon for $999 with free shipping and no tax). He was very helpful and spent quite a bit of time teaching me about the ellipticals and what I would need to look for. It helped, I am sure, that I had educated myself pretty well prior to shopping. Some exciting news was that he is actually getting one of the Esprit ellipticals in as he is a reseller for them. The downside is that it won't be in for a couple weeks. Can I wait that long to try it out? Let alone wait that long to get it? I am ready now. Ugh, just one of the downsides to being impatient. I do feel though that I really need to try it before I buy it. Especially once I got on a few that he had in the store and realized that certain models hurt my knee. How crazy. I am not sure if it is the foot pedal placement or just the difference in the mechanics of the machines. I thank him very much and we trudged on to Sears.

To no surprise the help at Sears was no where near as good as that I received at PIAS. The sales guy knew a little bit about the machines he was selling, but mostly just the "selling points." I did however really like the NordicTrack 990 Pro. It feels sturdy, rides smooth and has some awesome features like iFit technology, it folds up and a power incline. The price on it was $999. Not too bad. The different sites that review them rank it as a "Best Buy" for treadmills under $1,000. Now I had a kink thrown into my plan. Dang it. We waited for over 15 minutes for the sales guy to give me a print out of the specs. The funny thing was that he simply printed it off the website. I got 1 page of the elliptical info and the 2nd page was specs on a refrigerator. LOL. Fabulous. Thanks for the great info sales guy!

Our next stop was Dick's. This is where I was really turned upside down. Not literally, but with my wonderful balance it could've happened! They carry the Sole Ellipticals that seem to get really great reviews online. Honestly, I just wasn't sold on them. The machine just felt weird. I was really disappointed because once I saw that they carried them I thought for sure i would like them. What I DID like, to my surprise, was the Livestrong machines. They just felt so fluid and natural. They had 3 models, the LS8.0e, LS10.0e and LS13.0e. Unfortunately, I can't remember if I liked the 10.0e. Waylon says that I didn't, but I know I liked the other 2. The downside is that the 8.0 doesn't have the tracking capability of the other 2, nor does it have the MP3 option and the price difference between the top and the bottom line machine is nearly $700. The bells and whistles don't add up to that much extra to make it worth that much money. Oh, the other difference is the power incline. The 8.0 has a manual incline and the other 2 have power.

As far as features go, I am not overly concerned with the power incline. If it is manual and easy to adjust that is fine with me. I do like the MP3 player option but my cajun-engineering husband says he could "rig it up for me" to play music. Oh Lord, who knows what that will be. I am having flashbacks of the GPS ziptied to his bike. I do like the technology available to me though. Tracking my progress is a big issue for me. Readouts of my workout is something that I know I would thoroughly enjoy looking at. It is very motivational to see improvement and I just love graphs etc. Have I drug anyone into my dilemma? Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Thank you Alli and Pam for responding and giving me some insight. It was very helpful in my shopping yesterday. Here goes a few more weeks of indecisiveness. Weeeeeee!

Yikes!

My weigh in yesterday did not go as well as I wanted it to. I ended up gaining 0.4 pounds. Which, in light of my week, was not terrible. It definitely could've been worse. Hopefully once these antibiotics are done and the bladder infection is gone I will get back to normal. There has also got to be a limit to my snacking. It has got to stop. In happier news, I got on my scale this morning and was actually down to 236. Definitely makes up for yesterday's slump.

Does anyone have any tips on searching for a good quality elliptical? Researching them is getting overwhelming. I think I have looked at every brand elliptical out there and have come to no conclusion on what I want. Decision making is not one of my best skills. I can see myself spending hours, then days, then weeks and never making a decision. Help!!! I would like to stay under $1k but still get a good quality machine that doesn't wobble and squeak. An MP3 input would be nice as well. The ellipticals at www.Smoothfitness are really nice but the low end affordable model has not MP3 input and their higher end models only have Ipod docks (which I don't have). Any help would be appreciated!.com

Here's to a great week!

It's been a while...

I know it has been quite some time since I have written anything. Time seems to be slipping away from me. As soon as I think I can sit down and do this I get pulled somewhere. I finally decided to just do it. My weight loss has slowed a little bit. I haven't been logging my foods like I was. I am still watching what I eat and trying to stay clear from the junk but I really need to be writing it down. I have however been exercising a lot. Go figure. I go from one to the other. Why can't I do both of them together? Today I walked/ran 3.5 miles in 50 minutes. Not too bad considering I am pooped from not getting any sleep over the last few days. My next step is going to be getting an elliptical machine. When it starts to get cold I am sure I will use that as an excuse not to exercise. My knees are also starting to hurt from running. It feels so good to run but then my knees start crunching and cracking and I pay for it that night. Any ideas on what kind of brace I could use to help alleviate some of the stress on my knees? My right side is worse than my left. I do have an ACE brace but it doesn't seem to do much for me anymore.

Saturday I did my measurements. The areas I measure are arm, bust, waist, hips and thigh. Since August the 11th I have lost a total of 13 inches!! So, even though the scale has kinda stopped moving, the inches are coming off and THAT is what matters to me.

My total weight loss as of my last weigh in was 20.6 pounds. I did it. I broke the 20 lb mark! That is 4 bags of potatoes! Woo hoo! I definitely feel the difference. I noticed this morning how my calves are much more defined and hard lol. It took me by surprise when I was shaving my legs. :D Great feeling! My next goal mark is going to be 30 lbs. Hopefully I will be there in 4 weeks. That will also be my next picture posting. Oh joy. The lipo/Bcomplex shots are reimbursable so I will be getting one a week now. I really hope that they speed the process up a little. I am happy with 1-2 pounds a week but that occasional 3 pound or more loss is really a motivational boost!

Thanks for listening to my rant. I am shocked that I got it all out quite condensed!