diet and exercise – tallgirltinysteps

2/19/23. Weird dreams with carbohydrates.

I have been eating low carb/keto for the past 5-7 weeks and I was trying the technique in the book “Carb Nite Solution” where you eat what you want one day a week. Well, two things. The first being, I dont think I am really losing much weight so that is disappointing. However, its the second reason that I need to stop/modify what I am doing.

After I eat carbs and dessert (on Saturday nights), I have the WEIRDEST dreams that night while I sleep. Last night, my two cats were in the parking lot of a furniture store. I kept picking them up to bring them home and they werent my cats. They looked similar to my cats but they werent my actual cats. Then, my husband was wandering around the parking lot with no sock on one foot. When I would ask him what he was doing, he would reply with “just trying to get comfortable.” It was sooooooooo weird. Also, I slept 10 hours last night AND fell asleep on the couch watching TV before bed.

I believe this blog should be honest so I am being honest. I am not sure if I am going to continue to follow this program. Here are the things I do know for sure.

I feel better with lower carb eating.
I think it is weird (and unhealthy) that you cant eat fruit on Keto.
I am not sure how sustainable a really strict diet is for me.
If this carb nite is causing weird dreams, what else is it doing to me?
However, It is nice to feel like I have a treat at the end of the week to look forward to.

So where do I go from here? Well, I made low carb lasagna with egg wraps (my new discovery!), I ate eggs for breakfast and I will eat a salad for lunch tomorrow and yogurt for breakfast. So, at this point, I am continuing to eat a lower carb diet. I am also “upping my steps” which I will post about next week.

To my 105 subscribers and 335 social followers…THANK YOU! You give me a reason to keep writing and for that, I am thankful.

1/7/23 Keto/low carb-one week down (how is it going???)

So, I hate to even mention this on this on my blog because this diet is more of a “burst” than tiny steps. Yes, leading up to starting the new way of eating was all tiny steps (more water, cut down on sugar, more steps, cut out chips, etc…) but the actual low carb diet itself is a maj0r “burst.” You have to go all the way to get into ketosis, and so you cant really tiny step your way there (there are other diets like weight watchers that are more conducive to tiny changes) but Keto/low carb is not one of them.

Why do I like a low carb diet? 1. It is easy as far as what you can/ can not eat. 2. It REALLY curbs my hunger. 3. It seems to provide me with more energy than other diets. 4. It brings down my cholesterol, sugar, and triglyceride numbers. (I have been able to avoid medications by eating this way)

Why don’t I like a low carb diet? IT IS NOT FUN-It is boring and repetitive and strict. It is difficult to eat with others (like if everyone is ordering pizza)

So…in order to make it more fun and hopefully stick to it long term, I am trying a technique called the carb nite solution. It is a book that professes you can eat low carb for 6.5 days and have what ever you want for dinner at the end of the week and it wont derail your progress. (I am picking Saturday night.) Tonight will be my first try at this. I will let you know how it goes.

Also, I am taking part in a lot of other bursts today such as deep cleaning the house (need to reset before school starts again Monday), taking down and putting away Christmas decor (including tree), washing all the laundry, towels, and bedding, washing the carpets (our cats like to dribble their food).

Today isnt really a tiny action day. It is a day of many bursts but it is a day I feel needs to happen every once in a while in order to have tiny actions work the other 99 percent of the time.

THANK YOU to my 99 followers-got a new one this morning so thank you to that person! Stay tiny my friends!

December 23,2022. Update on “Declutter December” and a few holiday tiny actions leading into a big burst.

Declutter December started out great. I was able to get rid of/give away/recycle about 35 items before I started to fizzle out. This might have been a super aggressive task considering the upcoming holidays. I didn’t follow through with the whole month, but the stuff I did get rid of, I feel really good about. Maybe I was being too ambitious? Maybe I don’t have as much clutter as I thought?

What am I most proud of? The tea that I wasn’t drinking and took into school and someone who loves tea took all of it and it is making her happy!

What am I most disappointed by? The fact that I kind of fizzled out mid month.

So what is next?

Well, tiny actions to get through the holidays are drinking more water and trying to get more steps in any way I can (we are currently experiencing a blizzard in Michigan so walking outside is not an option).

A burst after the holidays? I am going Keto again. I have a LOT of plans for this summer and I need to be in better shape. I will keep you posted on my progress.

Keto works well (in my opinion) if you have total control over your own food at all times. You may be asking…well when dont you have control over your own food? Well, get togethers where there are carbs, pizza dinners with friends, traveling (fast food usually has carbs), etc… I am going to embark upon “modified keto” and see if that is effective. I also dont love that true Keto cuts out a lot of fruit so I may try to figure out how to incorporate that.

To my 96 followers-thank you! May you incorporate one tiny little action that keeps you happy and healthy!

October 30,2022 Maintenance is just as important as tiny steps

When working on achieving a goal, most of us want to make progress at it every day. We tend to become impatient and want things RIGHT NOW (Hello, Amazon!) However, maintaining progress is just as important so that we make keep charging ahead when we are able. We don’t want to wind up completely back at the start and lose all of our hard work!

I had a step goal of 10000 steps by November 6, 2022. I am holding steady at an average of 9000 steps per day. I could beat myself up and be discouraged. Instead, I am choosing to look at where I came from (7000 steps a day) and realize that I have held this number for a few weeks now. (I have even made it to 11000 on a couple days!) So, I am going to focus on maintaining it (I would try to increase it but right now, 9000 feels difficult for me so I want to wait until it feels a bit easier).

This maintenance is important. It is important to stay here and not slide back to 7000. or even 8000. It is important to not lose all of the hard work I have been putting in and the progress I have made.

A burst I have been working on is “no candy, sweets or desserts until Halloween.” Well, Halloween is tomorrow and I feel kind of “meh” about indulging in sweets tomorrow. I have felt pretty good the last 20 days and I am not sure that I want that to go away. There have been tempting moments but overall, it hasn’t been too bad. So, I may pick a day to indulge (Thursday night cheesecake factory) and then wait again until Thanksgiving.

Also, I may reduce how much bread I am eating. I am not ready to go full keto ( I love bread and missed it so much during my keto diet time). However, my husband suggested that maybe I could cut down how much I eat. So this week I will count all the pieces of bread I eat (chips and tortilla shells count) to evaluate where I should place my goal using tiny steps. For example, if I am eating 5 pieces a day, I will not reduce it down to zero but maybe reduce it to 3 instead? I will keep you posted on this.

To my 90 followers, THANK YOU! Have a great week!

August 7-Week 4 of no sugar went pretty well

I had a bite of a chocolate dessert and macaroon. I also had a cookie at a graduation party. However, this is WAY better than before. I also started a “no potato chip” month and week 1 of that was easy!

I have snacked on nuts instead. It feels a ton healthier.

I gave up social media on August 1. I will write a whole post about that later but so far, it is amazing and a friend has joined me on the journey!

I am sad about all the time I seem to have wasted on social media. I have already finished 3 books and I feel a lot more relaxed.

To my 86 followers-thank you!

April 8-just returned from Vegas and am still 3 weeks no sugar-kinda

Many of you know that I am a teacher and since my husband and I work in the same school district, we have the same Spring Break. We were going to just stay home and do things around the yard of the house we bought in November. However, Michigan weather decided it was going to be about 40 and snow the whole week. So we hopped on a plane to Vegas where it was 85 and sunny for the whole week. It was awesome!

Sugar update. I only ate sugar twice (it was vacation after all) and I didn’t finish the dessert either time. The first one was watching the NCAA title game and our restaurant had a skillet cookie with ice-cream. I only ate a quarter of it.

The second time was a really special restaurant that served banana gelato and Nutella filled donuts. ( I LOVE anything banana and I love Nutella).

Can I tell you something that makes me sad? Neither one was very good. I had waited all this time and was expecting them to be out of this world amazing and they weren’t really. I read a book on vacation that said “who will you be if you give up your story?” Who will I be if I, as a sugar addict, no longer eat sugar? I know to some of you this seems silly. But Vegas was different when I wasn’t searching for all the sugary treats I would eat. It was weird. Good weird, but weird.

Step update- DEFINITELY exceeded 8500 a day. Its Vegas and there is a t0n of walking. I have not tallied in today yet but the average is about 10,000 a day. And man was I pooped! I have to continue to walk and increase my strength. I will aim for 9000 this week (remember that Vegas was a “BURST” and I still need to increase my progress toward my goals in a tiny manner)

Challenge for next week is to continue to stay sugar free (not a huge thing at this point) and eat 1 day of NO CARBS. So totally KETO. And an average of 9000 daily steps. I will keep you posted!

To my 76 followers-THANK YOU! See you next week!

March 22, 2022-which mode are you in? Surviving, Tiny stepping, Bursting or Retreating?

Recently (on the treadmill actually) I was thinking about goals and working toward them and what a convoluted process it is and that led me to this post. I think we are always in 3 stages of something that we are experiencing (4 if you count retreating-but we are going to focus on the first 3)

Survive and Advance
Tiny steps forward
Bursts forward
Retreating-but we are trying to stay away from that for now.

So let’s take the goal of weight loss. We see a magazine article or diet book that promises “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days” and we get excited. We want to lose 30 pounds! And we can do it in 30 days-YES! So we start the diet, start working out and may even lose a couple pounds that first week. Then, we don’t lose weight in week 2 and we get frustrated. We keep trying the program and maybe lose 1-2 pounds in week 3 but then week 4 creeps up and we have lost nothing. We feel like a failure. We only lost a total of 4 pounds-we were supposed to lose THIRTY! So we give up, go to the grocery store, buy an entire bag of cookies and eat them all before we even get out of the parking lot. Thats just me? Oh ok (its ok-I know you have done it too and just don’t want to admit it) Then we retreat back into our old habits and ways until we try again to lose the weight.

We were in burst mode for 3o days and when our results were not as promised, we think we have failed.

In my opinion, every goal should be attacked in 3 ways and we should avoid #4 at all costs. But that is not how we currently do things. We “go burst or go home.”

So lets take the weight loss goal to start with. First, I survived the holidays/funerals/job change/house move/ etc…for last 10 months and only gained about 5ish pounds. Success! Next, I started taking a few tiny steps in the last couple of weeks like drinking more water, wearing my Fitbit to see how many steps I am averaging, and working on my sleep (supposed to help with weight loss). JUST this week (actually yesterday) I decided to cut out sugar for 30 days. It is a burst for sure but I am not doing ANYTHING ELSE differently with my diet, so it is also a bit of a tiny step to lead me back to the low carb lifestyle that I had been enjoying before my world exploded. The other tiny step I am working on is advancing my average steps for the week from 8100 to 8500.

I am not doing this for weight loss (although that would be an added bonus). Instead I want to feel better and stronger. I know that by cutting out sugar and increasing steps, those things will start to happen.

I will update you Sunday on how Week 1 went! To my 74 followers-what tiny step could you take this week toward a goal?

February 6,2022-“we don’t wake up and say today is the day to destroy my life”

I just heard a YouTube interview with Mel Robbins and she said this almost word for word. She then went on to explain what she meant and it really resonated with me. We make hundreds of decisions every day. TINY DECISIONS. And when those add up, it creates a life we like or a life we don’t.

For example, lets say that I use a different coffee cup every day and instead of washing it, I leave it in the sink. Then I put my lunch and dinner dishes in the sink. Then the sink fills up so I stack them on the counter. Then the counter fills up so I use paper plates. Then the garbage fills up because of all the trash. Then the trash fills up but its cold outside, so I simply put one bag of trash in the garage and start filling a second. Then that starts filling up. Then the bathroom trash can fills up but I have no where to dump that so I start just filling small grocery bags full of trash and placing them around the bathroom. It seems silly but I didn’t “wake up and decide to trash my house-it just kind of happened” and I would be telling the truth. It did just kind of happen. THEN I have to spend HOURS cleaning and tidying and I get into a bad mood. Then I snap at m husband. Then, then then…

It is JUST like that book, “If you give a mouse a cookie”. If you don’t know the book, I highly recommend it. The premise behind it is that if you give a mouse a cookie, he is going to want a glass of milk and then the whole book is what he needs after that-a napkin, a plate, etc…

The two stories above may seem like silly examples but I want to ask you…Do you have a pile of unopened mail somewhere? Do you have a pile of laundry somewhere? Do you have a sink full of dishes? Do you have boxes stacked up in the garage or basement that haven’t been looked at in a while? Do you have items in one part of the house that belong in another part of the house? Do you have things sitting out in your bathroom that need to be put away? Do you have a desk at work that needs to be organized? Do you have bills to pay or accounts to look at to budget your money for the week/month?

If you spend 4.50 a day on coffee/pop/cigarettes/beer/etc… and have it each day Mon-Fri, you spend 90.00 a month. You didn’t MEAN to spend 90 dollars a month, it just kind of happened. Then at the end of the year, you either have 1080 dollars in your bank account or you don’t. you have 1080 paid toward a debt or in a retirement account or you don’t. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a fancy coffee as much as the next guy, I am simply pointing out these small decisions that affect us long term and when we try to just “survive the day” we sometimes lose sight of how that will affect us in the future.

Another example is my sophomore year in college. I needed to lose the THIRTY pounds I had put on from freshman year. I read an article that said very simply if you cut out 250 calories a day and burn an extra 250 calories a day, you could lose 1 pound per week. In my 19 year old brain, this sounded easy. I left cheese and mayo off my sandwiches and drank water instead of juice. I also biked to my classes (uphill) instead of taking the student bus. I managed to lose about 25 pounds that year. And I felt great! Nothing I did was super drastic, it was merely a couple of tiny steps that changed my entire body.

So here is my challenge to myself and my question to my readers. What tiny decisions are you making each day that are “destroying your life?” I know that one of mine is eating a small piece of candy each day. It doesn’t seem like much and in the grand scheme of life, it isn’t much. However, that little piece of chocolate MIGHT be destroying all the weight loss efforts that I have been putting into place. Its worth a try to see if that helps. We all owe it to ourselves to examine what we are doing and change it in a tiny way if we want. I don’t want pants that don’t fit, so this is the small change I have to make this week.

THANK YOU to my 69 readers and followers! You keep me inspired!

Jan 30, 2022-some days (or weeks) will just be bad ones

This week, I fell. We got almost a foot of snow on Monday while I was at school and as I was walking to my car, I fell. I am fine, but that one small thing basically threw off the rest of the week. How you may ask?

Well, for starters, I was sore. I fell onto my left side and it kind of jostled everything in my body. Each day when I woke up, I could feel a different part of my body reacting to the fall. Everything was just jostled. So I thought I should not do the elliptical until my body felt better. Today is finally that day (6 days later)

Then, Tuesday-Friday nights were busy with appointments, classes, basketball games after school. Every single day after school. My husband and I like to call this the “night shift” of our jobs. No disrespect to actual night shift workers but when you are at school from 6:45am until 3:45 pm and then you start another part of your job that goes from 4-10…it feels like 2nd shift.

On top of all that, my husband ran a 12 hour wrestling tournament yesterday and I spent the day studying for a French exam that I am taking 6 days from now. So we didn’t really have a Saturday either. And because of these things, even “tiny tips” weren’t helping-laundry and dishes weren’t done. Working out wasn’t done. Eating out happened instead of cooking at home.

It has been kind of a “just survive week” and you know what-its ok. At first I was super frustrated that we had dishes in the sink , bills to pay on the table, laundry in the hamper. I kept thinking to myself-just do a little and even that seemed overwhelming, so I just left everything. But then, something magical happened…I washed the coffee cups while my coffee was brewing. I threw in a load of laundry while I took a study break. I paid a bill while I was waiting for my husband to bring home takeout. And slowly but surely, things started to get done.

So embrace the bad days (or weeks). Call them what they are (survival) and start again. Start small. Henry David Thoreau says “One is enough” and I always thought he meant that owning one of something was enough. Now I am thinking that he also meant that doing one thing is enough. Just do one. Wash one cup. Pay one bill. Do one load of laundry. Wipe down one sink. Just one. Until you can do ANOTHER “one.”

Here’s to a great week for me and a great week for my 69 subscribers! KEEP GOING ONE TINY STEP AT A TIME!!!!!!!!!

Dec 30, 2021 Get rid of New Year’s Resolutions

If they work for you, then keep going with them. However, in a 2016 study of the 41 percent of Americans that make resolutions, only 9 percent felt like they had accomplished them at the end of the year.

Top resolutions every year are to workout/improve fitness/get fit, lose weight, save money, improve diet. So that tells me something. We all WANT to be better and we start out with a bang and then something happens and we stop working toward the goals for whatever reason (I think it is because we go too big too soon and too many-hence the purpose of this blog)

I don’t know about you, but I have made resolutions for a majority of the New Year’s and I seem to always fail at them just like most people do. So I am taking a different approach in keeping in line with this website.

I started working out on the elliptical for one minute on Monday. One minute, that was it. Then 2 minutes on Tuesday, 3 on Wednesday, and I completed 4 minutes today. Going VERY tiny. It has been hard to get motivated since I had Covid. I am still very tired. My goal is to increase one minute each day until I get up to a good 30ish minutes of Cardio. But that might take a while. It might take until summer. It might take until next December. I don’t know but I do know one thing. One minute on the elliptical is better than no minutes on the elliptical.

I am not worrying about my diet at this moment. I am not worrying about losing weight or saving money or any of the other goals that I put on my resolution list. I am going tiny. Just exercise. Just one minute increases. Just that. Thats it. OBVIOUSLY, my long term plans would be to accomplish all those other resolutions but if I can get one under my belt, I know that I will feel better. I will keep you posted on this progress.

THANK YOU to my 65 followers! Keep on keeping on!