Saturday, January 14, 2012

Active Weekends

I mentioned in my initial post that I had to change my lifestyle to lose weight. My husband did this with me, which made the whole thing SO much easier, I'll talk about that in a later post. One change that we made was to plan really active weekends.

Our weekends used to consist of going to the movies, eating out, reading or watching movies at home and grocery shopping. Sure we had season passes to Sea World and the Zoo, and we would go on occasion and do a lap or two, but nothing substantial...despite what we thought at the time. Then, we would always go out to eat after our walks.  We were getting some exercise, and that was good, and it's not like we would pig out when we went out to eat, but this all needed to change for us to make any real progress.

Now, we plan to be active for a substantial part of our weekend. Take, for example, this weekend: Today, we went and walked around Disneyland for about 5 hours, tomorrow we will go and walk around the zoo and Balboa park for a good part of the day, Monday, we are going hiking at Torrey Pines.  While a lot of what we do is walking, hiking, or biking, we are planning to try other things to keep it interesting. For example, we are planning to try kayaking when it gets warmer. I have flabby arms and I need to find a way to work them, I HATE lifting weights and kayaking seems like it would be a fun alternative that would do the trick.  I'll blog about it if I survive without drowning, getting eaten by a shark, or getting taken out by a flying whale.

Finally, we stopped going out to eat all the time. In addition to being a healthy change for our weight and our bodies, it was a healthy change for our bank account. I did not realize just how much we were eating out until we stopped. We still do go out on occasion, but not very frequently. When we do go out to eat, we are careful to be honest with ourselves about how many calories we are taking in and we balance it with by increasing our exercise over the next day (or the next few days). And we still watch movies, but we will generally do that at night at home unless there is something really worthwhile in theaters (Batman).

What do you do to stay active? Do you have any suggestions about things to try that would keep our active weekends interesting? Feel free to comment. Thanks!

2 comments:

  1. Maybe since your balance is getting better as evidenced by the lack of falling in Zumba, you should give paddle boarding a shot when its warmer as well;)

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