Ach, it’s a Bonnie life!!

My husband is ambitious.  Not work-ambitious (he’s been a stay at home dad for the past 8 1/2 years), but life-ambitious.

A few months ago he entered a contest where he had to write a 100 or less word essay on why he needed to improve his cardiovascular health, with the prize being a trip for two to the Gray Cup in Montreal.  Little did I know that this action was going to impact ME …

As many of you know, he “won” that contest and we are now one of eight couples across Canada competing to reduce our cardiovascular risks and win that trip to Montreal.  It’s been a lot of fun, a lot of pain and a lot of effort so far and the organizers have asked us to blog our experiences so far with the Making the Connection / Pairs Edition - CFL Challenge.   I’m going to post my “draft blogs” here and hope that you guys will tell me what works, what’s interesting and what isn’t — the “final” blog entries will (eventually) be posted at http://5stepmtc.wordpress.com/about/

So….

This has been quite an eye-opening journey for us so far. We thought we were in pretty okay shape – Stewart is a stay-at-home dad. He tries to be active playing with the kids – taking them for bike rides, etc.; he plays soccer when his knees allow, coaches an Under-8 soccer team, and also volunteers in our community as a baseball umpire. I work full-time and I have a 2-hour commute in each direction, so I knew that I was getting quite out of shape – my daily exercise consisted of walking the equivalent of about 5 blocks a day. The first week we worked out with personal trainer Fabian Rayne, and Argo Running Back Jeff Johnson was fun but surprisingly exhausting. Then there was the next 3 days of pain and stiffness. Clearly we were not in such “pretty okay” shape after all!

In the ensuing 3 weeks, we’ve met with Fabian weekly for increasingly tough workouts, and we’ve had a program to follow at home on our own. There’s a lot of work with weights, and a lot of cardio work – walking, jogging, whatever we can do. We started a “walk to school” program – our oldest son walks to the high school, and we walk our youngest child to elementary school and back, so that was an easy way to get out and get moving a little and to start to form good habits with the kids. We’re now almost 3 weeks into the program and I’m very pleased that we’re now able to do the circuit training workouts without too much pain afterwards. It had been an embarrassingly long time since we’ve done much of anything in the fitness area and we both found that there have been a lot of changes in the “conventional thinking” since then. Remember “no pain – no gain”? Well, not anymore. Remember “stay away from carbohydrates and anything white (rice, potatoes, bread etc.)”? Not anymore. Remember granola and sunflower seeds as good snack choices? Not so much anymore. This was a larger re-education than we thought it would be.

We also thought that we ate very well, especially after Stewart’s 2 heart attacks about 3 ½ years ago; we tried to be very conscious of what we ate and what we fed our children. Then we got the guidelines in the package for the program. Uh oh! So much for cheese, Caesar salads, liver, pepperoni, bacon and popcorn!! In tracking the foods we eat for the program we discovered that we drink much more wine and beer than we had thought, so we’ve made a conscious effort to scale that back and to make sure that we drink as much water as possible every day. We have talked at length with the kids about making healthy choices and taught them that vegetables are not the enemy. In fact, one of their favourite dinner “sides” is broccoli pancakes! We have discovered some wonderful ways to make spinach, brussels sprouts, and squash. We have signed up for the monthly box of “fresh local produce” that a local group puts together. We have also tried not to skip so many meals anymore. Stewart has even started to discuss heart-healthy choices with other shoppers in the grocery store and I’m pretty sure that sales of butter have declined and sales of non-hydrogenated margarine and low-fat cheese have increased in our town because of it.

I had quit smoking before the start of the program, but going through this has made it pretty easy to stick to that decision. Using the Daily Activity log on the Making the Connection web site has also helped keep me on track. It’s helped me to see the positive pattern and to make sure that I keep on working hard. I started out in week 1 (September 10^th) averaging about 51 minutes of exercise per day. Week 2 saw that increase slightly to 53 minutes/day; and then 78 minutes/day last week. Hopefully I can keep this from falling back again!

So, I guess at Week #3 we’re making good progress — I’m only down 3 pounds but on the positive side I am seeing a lot of muscle and stamina development, if not a lot of weight loss … yet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.