What am I doing New Year’s Eve?

Sipping Absinthe and enjoying some pre-schnitzel appetisers:

I’m up in Prince George, experiencing one of the last New Year’s of the globe. And I, for one, am SO GLAD 2011 is over. It was a hard year—not bad, per se, but not easy at all. I’m not afraid of a challenge, but some of this year was just garbage-y. Some smoother sailing would be A-OK by me.

I probably set some great resolutions last year and then proceeded NOT to follow through on any of them… I’ve never been as slack as I have been the second half of 2011. But there are some things I want to see happen in the first half of 2012 because Slack Stephanie doesn’t feel quite like home.

I want to send more letters. I suck at mailing, but I’d like to overcome that particular limitation. Send me an address if you want to be included in this particular desire.

I want finally to start writing the historical fiction I’ve been thinking about.

I want to do yoga every day. Not a whole HOUR everyday, maybe, but my hamstring/quad issue on the right side has sidelined my group fitness intentions, and that shit makes me feel old. If I can’t jump, run, kick, lunge, squat and make merry, what’s the point?

And most of all, I want to live more. It’s hard freaking work for me (and a lot easier to stick my head into individual endeavours and avoid living REAL LIFE), but it’s coming along.

I’m a little bit too afraid of the still burnt-out kid that I am to make any more defined resolutions than that—my lack of stamina these days still scares me. Maybe just being patient with myself (yay! My strength! :S ) till the burn-out recedes is the key. For that reason, while I do *really* mean to come back to blogging—and reading blogs—sometimes, sleep and / or doing nothing will take precedence.

You guys are so great, however, that I do plan to celebrate all of you a whole lot more in 2012, too.

Be well.

Be happy.

Be. And I will be thrilled to be with you all in the interweb, too.

Happy New Year, everyone!

It’s 4.47 am as I begin writing this. I have just submitted my article. I LOVE THAT. I’ll still have edits after the peer review, but the worst is over. Squeee!

So let’s focus on the love first—and sorry to burst your bubbles, but it’s not romantic. Brazilian men can be quite pleasing to the eye, but it’s not *that* kind of post…

Here’s my big 5 Loves for the last week, in no particular order:

1) It was almost exactly a year ago that I happened upon HEAB, which I was thinking about the other day because I realised that I MISS PROTEIN ICE CREAM. I love protein ice cream. So I re-watched Heather’s video, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend—especially the part where she puts a cushion in front of her pregnant belly so Summer, from inside, wouldn’t lose her hearing because of the VitaMix. Pretty much too cute for words.

(In the absence of protein ice cream, I consoled myself with “Yogoberry” at the mall last night—Brazil’s answer to the fro-yo craze. I had mine with oreo bits, Marcella with… condensed milk. Spot the Brazilian!)

2) thanks to Lindsay, for this brilliant idea: I am new to and loving baked chickpeas. With a dusting of cinnamon, Lindsay recommended them in yogurt. And it’s delicious. Then I started having them with cold milk and my bran sticks (or with oatmeal and flax and unsweetened yogurt, whatev) as if they were breakfast cereal, and it reminded me of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal from my youth… only not quite so artificial. Crunchy, sugarless-but-still sweetish goodness in a bowl.

3) I’ve been hanging out with an old high school friend who married a Paulista and the blast-from-the-past has been so much fun… that it’s made me nostalgic! High school was the 90s for me, so I went back and started watching that 90s icon of ass-kickery and fantasy mayhem: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Forget Angel, I’m totally Team Oz. (source)

4) This past Sunday was the last of the Campos do Jordão music festival I’ve been loving so much… and this final concert was in São Paulo. After a phenomenal performance by a youth orchestra, the pianist played as his encore Débussy’s “Claire de Lune“. To hear it live, played to perfection on a beautiful instrument… I never imagined I would get a chance in my lifetime. It was unreal. (OK, this photo is from last weekend during their rehearsal with the opera singer (!!), because this weekend’s photos were all blurry… go with it. The conductor’s smile says it all… “yep. She’s *that* good!”)

5) When does 16 days = 40? When Puff Mei comes EARLY!!! Just when my bed had sprung a slow leak that was getting… less slow with each day, THE COUCH ARRIVED! I’ve slept on it once, it’s hella firm, and it changes the room *completely*. Let’s check out before

and after:

It’s like it’s a real room now!

What are you lovin’ this week?

Now: back to the gym!

I told Carol I preferred free weights to machines… it’s just more “real world” to me. But we were chatting up a storm and she forgot until we were almost finished and then she said “oh, that’s not right”. Well, I wasn’t going to complain, really… I would have just gone rogue later.

Here’s an interesting point for you: the magic number is 16.

Every gym I’ve ever been to says, “it’s 8-12 reps”. Not here—when I get to 16, it’s time to raise the weight. Hm.

Here’s another interesting point for you: going rogue would have been bad.

My gym, as I said before, promises results. This is where the five meetings come in: they test you medically (#1), they give you a weight program (#2), they make sure you’re doing it right (#3), they look at your diet and nutrition (#4), and they follow up with you at the end to see how you’ve progressed.

And along the way, you fill in your workout sheet each day, and it gets checked by staff… and they interact with you regularly as you work out (even the foreigner no one can talk to gets smiles, thumbs ups, and “tudo bem?”), but even if it sounds sorta Big Brother, it’s all very friendly. Judgement-free.

That means that they watch to see that you’re following the chosen path—so had I gone rogue, I’d have been breaking the rules. That just means that I wouldn’t have been eligible for “guaranteed results”, but it’s not like I was aiming to fail and get my money back: I wanted the fitness!

When Carol realised that we hadn’t given me free weights, she said, “come back Monday and we’ll do a new one”. Just like that, I was getting a freebie! That’s Brazilian service… but I ended up working through the “casual drop by” I’d been offered so we turned my “review” on that Thursday into my free weights program.

So my path to health, cardiovascular improvement, and increased muscle mass (my three stated goals, with the added benefit of leading to number 4: weight loss so that my cholesterol is kicked back in line), was paved with this:

1) Smith machine squats: 3 sets, up to 16 reps [they all are, let's leave this out], 5 kg plates

2) Dumbbell bench press: 2 sets, 9kg

3) Seated row: 2 sets, 28 kg

4) Skull crushers: 2 sets, 8kg

5) Lateral raises: 2 sets, 3kg

6) Distinctly Brazilian Don’t Know What to Call This: I strap an 8kg ankle weight on. I stand on the bench in front of the bench press machine. I drop one leg off the bench and bend the knee on the bench. It’s like a squat, but not. And it’s bloody hard. 2 sets.

7) Bosu ball sit-ups: 3 sets, as many as I can

8 ) Back raises: 3 sets, as many as I can.

Right now, I like it. And if I do it three times a week (their recommendation), I get a new program in another 3 weeks. Which is good, because I’m wishing I could do more “muscle confusion”.

Tomorrow is appointment 4: the nutritional consult. I don’t know if it’s actually with a nutritionist, and I know where my weaknesses lie… but knowing and doing are different things.

OK! This post took me 41 hours to write. Is that normal? I still want to hear what you’re loving this week!

Oi, blogosphere, tudo bem?

I’ve spent my waking hours—almost all of them—since we got back from Campos last weekend in the service of a profession that I realise I was right to leave. Well, it left me, but I’M SO GLAD IT DID! I really truly love the material, but the demands are madness. I think I’ve gained 5 lbs because in my misery of stress and pushing the deadline, I ate sugar. And I didn’t leave the house. This was a bad week that way.

BUT: thanks to an all-nighter on Wednesday (double-you tea eff, I’m too old for that), I wrote about 4,000 words in 30 hours, and thought I finished the article… and then, I went to submit it and realised that I had screwed up the length of a variety of sections and it was going to be rejected, so now, I’m editing. Which is still a whole heckuva lot better than first-drafting. And I wish it was done already, but then they said “it’s more important that you do your editorial duties rather than submitter duties”, so I switched priorities and: wham! Another almost all-nighter last night (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). I’m starting to feel like the floor of a taxi cab. PS: I miss the Ghostbusters, don’t you? (Points to whoever remembers who said that without having to Google it.)

So now that I’m well over a week late with this post, I want to tell you about the gym. But that’s going to be text-heavy, so I’m breaking it up in a few posts, and even with that this is still crazy long so HAVE A BATHROOM BREAK NOW, BEFORE YOU START READING.

And then I also have to have a holla for Wednesday last, which, as 20 July was both my one monthiversary of being in Brazil, and also the anniversary of the 20th of July conspiracy plot to kill Hitler. Didn’t work, but props for the (partial) effort, boys. And that concludes the part of today where I’m a stodgy old historian, I swear. But as proof that I was actually not 100% stodgy, and kinda concerned with keeping my students’ attention in lectures, this Lego virgin of Stauffenberg was in my PowerPoint to pep up my lectures. Heh. Please don’t be offended at all, I just liked to tell jokes where I could in serious material—usually in ways that were only absurd, to emphasise that it was a joke. Like with this—seriously: the real Stauffenberg was blond!! So not funny that it’s funny, right? No? OK, moving on, then.

MY GYM—

Chapter 1: “In the beginning, there was Bio-Ritmo”

Best money I’ve ever spent, let me tell you. This whole process is very cool, and the name of this game is, “I will never see such good service at a gym again“. Let’s start at the beginning:

Last Thursday I had my medical evaluation and first appointment–that’s first and second of FIVE (!!) appointments. The night before, Marcella and I realised that they were both *earlier* than Dante—the English-speaking guy—started working. Well! I was just going to have to bring my dictionary and make the best of it.

I showed up. I gave them my best “não falo portugués“, while also brandishing my appointment card so we’d be speaking the same language, yet without in any way actually speaking the same language. STILL, the guy at the desk just looked at me (and the three horns CLEARLY growing out of my head), and called a woman over. She looked at me, and said, “I’m Carol. I don’t speak as good as Dante, but I can help.” Awesome. I was set.

She brought me to the doctor and as we waited we talked body image a bit. She’s a tall and thin sort and said she was sorry she didn’t have a big bum like they like in Brazil. I love this place. We talked about how people do dangerous and stupid things to try to fit those images when it’s not natural for them. You have to live, right?

She said, “have you had pão de queijo [Brazilian cheesy bread, recipe forthcoming!]?” OF COURSE I HAVE! and then “I can’t believe they don’t have that in *every* country!” Too true! And if you’re being a slave to an impossible aesthetic and live a pão de queijo–free life, are you living at all?? We bonded instantly. I thought Carol was great.

The doctor, (“Silvia. In Brazil we always use first names for everything”), was *also* great, and also spoke English (so there, Dante!). She took my blood pressure and pulse (really good and really bad, respectively—totally normal for me, unfortunately), and then she hooked me up to a bunch of monitors and got me on the treadmill. This phase involved me being shirtless… and walking up an incline. Then, Silvia cranked the speed and I was shirtless… and *running*… while I’m a touch gorda. I only felt bad for her. But it all came out in the wash: I was wearing my koru necklace from NZ (like that one (source), but in hematite), and at the end of our meeting she got excited and said, “I normally wouldn’t show you this, but LOOK AT MY TATTOO!” while pulling up her left pantleg, showing a HUGE Maori-style tattoo covering most of her calf… instant bonding! She’s a gym-user too and said, “any time you need anything, please just ask me!”

So at that point, of the people at the gym who had actually spoken to me, I was 3 for 3 with beyond-amazing service. I felt better about paying exorbitantly for membership.

And then Carolina came to collect me… and *that* is when the weighing, the measurement, the goal discussion, and the status-quo taking took place. Meeting two of five.

(I avoid weighing myself because I fixate on numbers and then either overly restrict or self-sabotage.) When it came time for the scale, I just said, “if I’m over X, I don’t want to know.” I got on the scale. There was a pause… and she said “oh”. And I laughed.

Well, that’s OK—gorrrrrrrrrrrda—FINALLY I had the time and inclination to fix it. How many times have I made goals and plans to get healthy on this blog? I can’t even guess. At least 7. But this is actually different. Mark my words!

She took my measurements (source). I went to my happy place. We did waist, hips, each thigh, and arms. Strangely, not a chest measurement, but I suppose so many people have implants here that it’s kinda bogus.

We did a flexibility text (the sit and reach past your toes—three times), and my flexibility was good. Not so good that I love me a downward dog or anything, but I rise to testing occasions.

Loving the gym some more—-the next part of this evaluation was about my FEELINGS.

How is my self-esteem? Am I confident? How does going to the gym make me feel? I rated all these (and more) on a scale of “good / bad” or “yes /no”, and we talked about the plan I had in front of me. I stated that my goals were three things… related to my gorda-osity, but not directly

The thing about my weight is, if I’m over the weight that I’m most comfortable at, that’s when my cholesterol is bad. I’ve played this game enough that I don’t even need to have the blood test to prove it—and I’m not in a tizzy about it because I know from experience that I can fix it.

In some ways, when I snuck a look at my weight on the sheets Carolina was filling out, it was a good wake-up call: shur, I would like to like the way my clothes fit, but more than that, I don’t want Lipitor.

And that gave me the awesomest shot-in-the arm. Hooray for motivation!

I can do this. And not only that, I already *am*. I’ve done it before—this is my 28th birthday picture, when I had *just* found out I had my cholesterol record:

A bit out of focus because it’s a self-portrait, and it can be hard to focus using the timer…

And this is 4 months later—forgiving the asinine expression on my face, because as I’ve said before, I’m not photogenic and I avoid pictures, but I had just got the BIGGEST CHEQUE OF MY LIFE and I took a dorky “woo-woo” photo to send to one of my sisters:

Do you see the difference? It’s about 17lbs, 1 chin, 2 dress sizes, cardiovascular endurance, muscle mass, AND a fraction of the BAD cholesterol. Do you also see the running cheetah border in the house I was renting? Underneath that was leopard print wallpaper. I DIDN’T DECORATE.

So in the end, there was light. And now, different me, different year, different *continent*, but I’m going to kill this thing.

Did I mention that my gym guarantees results?

More next time—on goals and weight programs—and more briefly.

Thanks for your two cents on Epsom salts! It appears that we’re all over the map, and I like it. And maybe just taking time to soak, to have a little peace and quiet is just as important as having magnesium in the Epsom salts draw the toxins out?

Something’s got to, after all… because it was wrong that I was still finishing my breakfast while leaving work at 4pm today. And it’s wrong that I came home and had a cake pop instead of veggies (like how I photographed it in front of an Oxygen magazine—just for the fun of the contrast?). But know why I ate that cake pop, anyway? Because my fridge is a mess of tupperwares of various vintages, and the cake pops (made for an event on Wednesday) were in front. And fresh. Oh, the week of baking has only just begun—but my promise to myself is that the rest is for others. Because, baby, I’m Spring Cleaning!

It’s not just my fridge, though its lack of organisation stresses me out each time I open it (they call me Type A for a reason, dontcha know?). In fact, Spring Cleaning feeds out of what I brought up last week when I quoted the lovely Clive Owen from Bourne Identity… I reflected over the weekend about what kind of a new beginning I wanted, and I’ve opted for a phased plan of action. It addresses my real-world limitations, and thereby (I hope) makes itself realisable.

My plan for Spring Cleaning

March is always a super-tough month for me. It’s a long time since I’ve been able to come down from having too many responsibilities, and still far enough away from the next break that I turn to unhealthy habits to bridge the gap. Not this time!

SO: PHASE 1: for the rest of March… plus 3:

• Reduce sugar: it creeps in as a mood-booster whenever things get hairy, and I know that until April, it’s not realisable to stop it completely… even though I know that if I could, it would be better for not exacerbating the stress. So for now, I’m going to say 3 little visits to the sugar fairy per week.
• Follow the first month of an Oxygen body workout schedule: Notice! I’m not following their schedule of exercises, but instead their breakdown. This is perfecto because this way, I’m not going to have to marry the gym, but it’s got a great rhythm… like so:

MONDAY:     Upper body
TUESDAY:     Cardio
WEDNESDAY:     REST
THURSDAY:     Lower body / Abs
FRIDAY:     Cardio
SATURDAY:     REST
SUNDAY:     Group run!

Why I like this plan: I can give as much or as little as I can. SO! If I don’t have time for anything more than a “gym quicky” (1 set to fatigue on each muscle group), or if I’m not able to get to the gym, I can hit the bands in my living room and still fulfill the requirements.

My goals in phase 1:

• find alternatives for the sugar crutch all but 3 times
• establish a strength-training rhythm that also allows for the cardio I love keeping up with

PHASE 2: April 3-17

• focus on longer strength training workouts
• add 3 days of yoga per week: luckily, come April, I will be bestowed with the gift of more time, and I plan on filling the gap with physical fitness!
• reduce sugar to 1 time per week: this will be tough!
  

For this phase, I’m going to modify my schedule to the following:

MONDAY:     Upper body
TUESDAY:     Cardio; Vinyasa
WEDNESDAY:     Lower body / Abs
THURSDAY:     REST
FRIDAY:     Upper body
SATURDAY:     Lower body / Abs; Vinyasa
SUNDAY:     Group run!

My goals in Phase 2: my move is so soon! Gotta pack on the heavy lifting capability to be healthy enough to lift all my books! And there is no better complement to, well, LIFE than MORE YOGA! And I really don’t know if I can hit the once-a-week sugar thing, but that’s the goal.

Phase 3: 18-30 April

• shift from heavier lifting to circuits
• maintain a yoga regimen
• complete the first half of my mood injury-free!

I know I’m going to be on the road and on the move for the last couple weeks of the month, and since I’ll be super-active every day, I’m going to reduce my time in the gym and aim for circuits:

MONDAY:     HIIT on the AMT; Yoga Flow
TUESDAY:     1-set-to-failure, 1-exercise-per-muscle-group circuit
WEDNESDAY:     Abs; Yoga Works
THURSDAY:     Run hills
FRIDAY:     1-set-to-failure, 1-exercise-per-muscle-group circuit
SATURDAY:     HIIT on the AMT; Vinyasa
SUNDAY:     Group run!

My goal for Phase 3: shift it up! I want to stay active, but doing things that are out of my norm. I might take more walks, I might buy a DVD for home use… this is going to be a “mixer” period, but also a “stay safe” period, since I have to run up and down my stairs with boxes etc.

Come the 1st of May, I hope for more sleep, more activity, and more time to devote to cooking healthfully. There’s been little of that of late, mostly because I suffer from a deplorable lack of imagination. Time to clear out the cobwebs!

Will the new season coax a new routine out of you?

(pic 1: mine!) (pic 2: source) (pic 3: source) (pic 4: source)