My latest workout stats

Find my complete workout stats here

Yes, your eyes are not playing tricks on you, I did do Zumba Cardio back-to-back.  It's strange that I burned less calories (well by 1 calorie) on Feb-4 than on Feb-3, even though I was in the hard zone longer.  I wonder how my Polar heart rate monitor calculates the calories burned?

I'm not happy about my workout today, (Zumba Sculpt), my performance was relatively poor, only 13 calories/min.  I don't know what happened, I was panting and sweating a lot, so I definitely was working hard, but for some reason my heart rate was just not getting up there.  

One reason could be that I'm getting fitter (but then the workout should have felt easier), or there's something wrong with the heart rate monitor.  It was getting loose on me, it kept on slipping, especially when I was shaking my ass to samba.  

My latest daily caloric burn & food intake

Find my complete stats here

Ahhhhh!  Curse Super Bowl Sunday!  I was bombarded with some of the best food that Texas is known for, TexMex, which means there was a lot of  BBQ, cheese, guacamole, corn chips and throw in a ohhh so moist and fatty carrot cake!

Which is the reason for my 4000 caloric food intake!  Perhaps I even went over, but who's counting after you hit 4000.

It was the first time I went to a Super Bowl party, but heck, I don't remember a thing about the game.  I wasn't even sure what team was playing who, my love and attention was completely devoted to my plate piled high with warm, soft burritos, hmmmmm

Overcoming resistance

It was sooo hard getting through the Chest & Back workout today.  All my "stars" were totally misaligned; it was raining and miserably cold; I must of slept crooked or something because I woke up with a terrible kink in my neck; and I simply felt tired.

And you know you're fighting a uphill battle with yourself when the thought of hibernating like a lumbering bear feels like the ultimate goal in life.  And it didn't stop there; rationales left and right were springing into my head persuading me to skip the workout: "I strained my neck, so I shouldn't do an upper body workout" (doesn't that sound reasonable?); "It's dangerous working out when it's so cold, I could pull a muscle" (also very reasonable, no?);  "My husband's being lazy and sitting on his ass eating yummy bonbons, maybe I should join him, wouldn't want him to be lonely" (Ok, that's just me desperate to find any reason to get out of the workout).

But I stared down all those sinister thoughts and shouted "NO!"  I've suffered worse "resistance" in my days.  (Resistance was coined by Steven Pressfield in The Art of War to describe our inner antagonist that essentially goes around sabotaging our life's goals, such as I want to lose weight, but instead end up ordering a McDonald's meal with a double-thick chocolate shake!)

In the end, to overcome resistance, you simply just have to bulldoze it over; there aren't any magic tricks.   And I simply told myself that I can do it; if I simply take it one-step at a time, and don't think about the gasping pain of the pull-ups, chin-ups and all the tortuous push-ups introduced by Tony Horton, then I can get through it.  In fact, I cleared my mind of thoughts and simply pushed the play button.  I concentrated on the moment, never thinking about the last move or the next, simply working on the present and extracting every ounce out of myself that I could.

And I got through it!  In fact, even with a neck strain I was able to perform just as well as my last Chest & Back workout, woo hoo! (See my workout stats for Jan 9 )

I didn't let resistance beat me today.

Magic Pop

Magic Pop: Strawberry flavour shown

I've discovered another wonderful low calorie snack that'll help keep the munchies at bay; it's called Magic Pop.  It's essentially like a rice cake the size of a medium pita-bread but "popped" in a pressurized contraption.  But the real "magic" is that it's only 15 calories per "cake"!

How does that happen?  Well, essentially a small amount of flour (traditionally rice flour is used) is added to the machine and subjected to high pressure, then low-pressure; and it's this extreme pressure differentiation that causes that tiny-bitty amount of flour to explode and expand multiple-folds in volume, kind of like popcorn.    

In the end, you have a product that is low in calories but big in volume.  So you can eat the entire bag completely guilt-free!  

And what's more, the taste is pretty decent; it's very similar to rice cakes: crispy, crunchy and lightly flavoured in a variety of flavours.  

I've tried strawberry, onion and honey; my favourite is honey (tastes least artificial), but I think there are 7 other flavours, so you have a wide selection.  (Ok, it can't compare to chocolate ganache cake or BBQ ribs, but then you shouldn't be comparing apples and oranges, right?)   

Great low calorie snack: main ingredients is wheat & rice flour.

I discovered Magic Pop at my local HEB grocery store, but you can find them in a number of grocery stores on the East Coast or order their products online.

The only complaint I have is that a bag of their Magic Pop is kind of pricey.  At $2.99 for a 75g bag (contains 15 cakes), you're really not getting much in real substance.  If you compare it to a normal box of crackers at about the same price such as Kashi crackers (which you get 255g/box) then Magic Pop is over 3x more expensive!

Nursing my stiff neck muscles

Since waking up with a really bad stiff neck a couple of days ago from overexerting myself, (you can read post here) I've been learning about how to nurse my poor neck back to health.  

So after researching online, a pulled muscle, strained muscle, stiff muscle, whatever you want to call it, is usually the result of tears in the muscle cells due to exercising improperly.    

Which is why to protect your muscles you should always, always do a pre-exercise warm up as well as concentrate on achieving proper form in your routines, i.e., don't overextend your knees over your toes, don't bang your joints, etc.  I understand now that the warm up is really important, especially going into a hardcore workout.  The warm up helps pump more blood to your muscles which supply them with life-giving nutrients and oxygen so that they have the energy necessary to perform their job, which is essentially contracting, relaxing, contracting, relaxing.  

The warm up also helps prepare the nerves-to-muscle pathways so that your brain and body are in a more ready state to perform physical activities.  Incorporating some stretching is also essential to help "relax" and make your muscles all happy and pliable for a hard workout.  I suppose you can think of it like caramelized sugar; when it's hot the caramel is fluid and pliable and you can do so many magical things with it, but when it's cold, it's hard and brittle and if you exert too much force, SNAP! and oops, you'll have broken something, just like your cold muscles.

Now should you end up with a pulled muscle from exercise, the standard remedy for mild pulls involve: cold compress (to alleviate swelling and pain), resting (well your muscles are in pain, so give it a rest), hot compress (to increase blood flow so all the wonderful goodies of nutrients and oxygen can be delivered) and stretching (well your muscles are sore and stiff, and probably feeling very down, you've got to help them rebuild their self-esteem with baby-stretching steps).  

I essentially followed this formula to nurse my stiff neck, except for the cold compress because by the time I learned of the cold compress, it was already many hours after my injury.  (You're supposed to apply a cold compress immediately after the injury).  But, everyday I made sure I did a proper warm up before exercising, in which I added a neck stretch before and after the exercise.  (I essentially followed the neck and back stretches shown in P90X).  Afterwards, I would take a hot shower, making sure to bath my neck in the hot water while also stretching it out again.  And, I avoided strenuous exercise in the injured area.  

On the first and second day it was painful to just stretch out my neck muscles, but I noticed significant improvements with each passing day.  And by the 3rd day I barely noticed the pain any more; and certainly by the 4th day the pain was completely gone.  Given that in the past it has taken at least 1 week or even longer for me to recovery from a stiff neck, this experiment was quite a success.  

Happy Holidays!

All the things I ate for Christmas Eve dinner! I must have eaten 4000 calories, I can't be sure, I lost count after my third helping of food.  

Ain't the holidays grand; best excuse to "hog out".  

Just a few of the things I ate: fried chicken, green bean casserole, baked potato, baked cauliflower, salad
and some strange rice cracker potato salad mix (strange but tasty)

Close up of fried chicken.  Wooo, look at the crispy, crunchy golden skin

Glazed ham, hmm hmm

Tender beef tenderloin, yummy.  I had at least 3-4 pieces.  

Major neck pain from hard workout

Following up from yesterday's post where I was describing my boneheaded attempt at working off a crazed food binge through hardcore exercise.  Well, not only did I nearly make myself throw-up, but I woke up with a major stiff neck today.  I can only look at people by turning my shoulders!  My relatives think I've been imitating Michael Jackson's robot the whole day.

When I crashed out of yesterday's exercise I already felt a strange kink in my neck.  And I think I've isolated the reasons for my pulled neck muscles: 1) I was exercising too hard, i.e., over-extending my punches and over-twisting my shoulders to try to squeeze out as much calorie burn as possible, and 2) taking long "water-breaks", hence allowing my muscles to get cold.

Now I totally blame myself.  I ended up having to take long water-breaks because my stomach was stuffed to the brim with the mountain of food I had eaten.  So, as a result, my muscles got "cold" but then I threw myself into the exercise with a vengeance whenever I restarted the video.   

I'm going to do some research and self-experiment to see how to nurse my strained neck muscles.