beating my obesity- week one

Monday, June 24, 2013

Today began my fight against my obesity.

As a workout, I began my first day of couch to 5K. I actually found it a lot of fun to do. The podcast was easy to follow. All in all, I only did a total of 8 min of running, but it’s better than what I did yesterday, which was nothing.

Let’s not forget that my dog walks also count towards calorie burning.

As far as eating goes, I did not do very well. At the end of the day, I still ate more calories than I burned, but I’m still happy about using MyFitnessPal to keep up to date in calculating my calories burned and calories consumed.

Even though it was not a successful day for weight loss, it was a successful day in taking the right steps towards it.

obese

I don’t like what I see in the mirror. “Beauty is from the inside”, they say, and though this is true, you can’t deny that beauty is a combination of the outside and the inside. Let me make myself very clear, I do not think overweight people can’t be beautiful. I know a lot of overweight people who are absolutely beautiful inside and out. I’m merely saying that I am my own worst critic and knowing this is the heaviest I have ever weighed in my entire life, is hard on me. In my eyes, I am physically ugly. I won’t be satisfied until I lose the now 30+ pounds (that’s 15kg for you EU folk) I have gained since moving here to Switzerland. Not working and living a more sedentary life has destroyed my fitness. I don’t eat any worse than I did in the states. In fact, I eat much better since grocery stores are not lined with aisles of junk food and there aren’t dozens of fast food chains here. I can easily say we went to fast food restaurants 3-4 times a week back in the states, where as here, once a week. I had a very active job working with animals. I was always on my feet and exhausted by the end of the day. Today, I’m not on my feet as much. I’m simply not burning enough calories in the day even if i happen to not ingest much. I think I would have to starve myself if I were to “diet” without exercise.

tough decisions

It’s Father’s Day today, but this isn’t going to be a post about being a father, but rather a post about being a parent and making tough decisions. Mind you, I am not a parent to human children. I don’t plan to ever be. For whatever reason, my “mommy” gene skipped a species. I seem to have love for everything but primates. Having said that though, I am a step mother, but I use the term very loosely. My husband has a daughter from his first marriage, and so, she is technically my step daughter but I have no intentions to step in and play a mom role with her. She has a mother. I can be an adult figure in her life who also enjoys spending time with her and playing games, but I don’t ever want to be her mother, unless there comes a point in her life where she needs me to be. We’ll cross that bridge if it ever comes.

Today I am thinking about the sacrifices parents make for their children. Some parents will sacrifice their happiness just to keep the family together because it is best for the children. Is it though?

Honesty and the Care of Animals

The fact of the matter is and what most people don’t realize, is that if you have an animal under your care, you have to be extremely honest with yourself. To be the best possible provider for another living being, requires an exceptional amount of maturity and with that comes the ability to be honest with yourself.

Naturally, as an animal trainer, the biggest thing I deal with on a day to day basis is behavior. I can’t do my job without an understanding of animal behavior and I can’t be any good at it, without a phenomenal amount of understanding it. What people don’t notice in the day to day activities with their own pets, I do. But, that’s my job, that’s what I was trained to do, to go well below the surface and seek answers where others didn’t even knew existed.

 

Most people who are pet owners, always run into a problem they need a solution for. “My precious pet has always been well behaved, but lately, they have been a complete nightmare and doing all kinds of things that is not normally in their nature.” As an animal trainer, I need to know all the details in order to properly assess the situation and find a solution. This requires a large amount of uncomfortable honesty, because who really wants to admit that they have failed their pet in one form or another?

Cannes

My husband always tries to give me a good birthday. This year, we went to Cannes for five days. We packed our bag and road tripped into France. 645 km (more or less) later, we finally arrived. We took a route that had us cross underneath the swiss alps and into the Italian region. We then drove through northern Italy into the southern coast of France. Parts of Italy were quite boring to drive through with it being just flat land, but then as we got closer to the french border and closer to the ocean, Italy became a series of bridges and tunnels, bridges and tunnels, bridges and tunnels. It went on for a very long time. Our poor GPS unit had to constantly change from daytime screen to nighttime screen and at some point gave up and had to be reset altogether!

Cannes was exciting to get to. We left a very rainy Switzerland and were looking forward to the nicer weather. What we weren’t prepared for was the amount of traffic we encountered, made worse be the city undergoing construction. We were late for my birthday dinner out, but not by much.