Over 50 Travel - My Travel Log #1

Life changes and so do we.  There are many seasons of life and recently began a new one. 

A couple of months ago I decided to go on the road with my husband for his job.  Two weeks ago I had my last day at my desk job at a health care facility.  So begins my travel log.

In preparation for my new life I bought a new DSLR camera and a couple of lenses.  I've always loved photography and it's now my reason to stay out of the hotel room.  Aside from loving photography it is also my reason to get outside and exercise.  It's a win win. 

Fortunately, right now we are in Harrisburg, Penslyvania.  It's a beautiful, historic city with a lot to see and photograph.

I've realized that I always end up taking photos of three things:  architecture, animals and plants.  There are a lot of statues in Harrisburg but, for whatever reason, I don't find them interesting so I don't try to force myself to photograph them.  So you won't see any of that in my photos.  What you will see is lots of the things I do find interesting.

In walking around Harrisburg yesterday I found several examples of tiny little building attached to much larger buildings.  They were so cute.  Here are two examples:

Because Harrisburg is such an old city there are very old buildings mixed in with building from every subsequent era.  As you might imagine, some of the old buildings are in need of much repair.  Here, there are two historic homes side by side.  One is being renovated.  The other is in need of some.

Sometimes I photograph a building just because it's beautiful, like this one.  It looks like it's probably four homes.

There are two main animals that are abundant along the Susquehanna River:  Canadian geese and groundhogs.  I don't know much about either but I can't stop photographing them.  I get scared for them living right along side a very busy road, but it doesn't seem to bother either.

Lastly, there are so many really beautiful gardens here.  Everything is in bloom and it really beautifies the city.

Fitness After 50 - Strategies to Help with Motivation

The photos in this post were taken this morning while I was on a two hour hike.  Keep reading to find out how photography helps me stay fit.

If you are a lady or a man over 50 you know as I do how hard it can be to maintain a healthy weight.  For us ladies I can attest to how hard it gets once we hit menopause. 

This post isn't about menopause or how hard it is to loose weight.  It's about strategies that have helped me that I want to share.

1.  For me it helps to have a routine.  To create continuity I get up and go to bed at approximately the same time every day.  That creates body memory so that it becomes habit.  I do the same thing with exercise.

I like to exercise first thing in the morning before I do anything else.  That way, no matter what, it's done.  I can check it off of my get healthy and stay healthy list.

2.  There are so many different types of exercise.  Pick one that you love and don't get tired of.  For me that's walking.  To make walking exercise it should be done at a brisk pace.  It shouldn't be a stroll, although even that's better than nothing.

3.  Incorporate a hobby into exercise.  I enjoy photography.  So several days a week I take a two hour hike and take lots of photos along the way.  You could do this with running or biking as well.  I love photography.  I will literally take a photo of anything.  It does reduce the exercise value because I stop frequently but my photo hikes are typically twice as long in duration I'm ok with it.  I become so absorbed in the photography that I completely loose track of time. 

4.   Join a group.  I hike alone but my husband enjoys exercising with others so he's been part of swimming teams and running clubs.  If you enjoy the socialization that comes with group activities, find a group to exercise with.  It's a great motivator.

5.  Use a fitness tracker.  For Christmas last year I bought myself and my husband smart watches that track out fitness.  I use mine for walking primarily; he uses his mostly for swimming and we both use them for cycling.

I find these strategies very helpful and I hope that anyone who comes across them will too.  Thanks for taking the time to stop by.

Vegan After 50 - What to Eat

I feel like I'm a pretty average fifty-five year old.  I enjoy cooking but I don't want to spend all my time in the kitchen.  I lean toward very simple dishes with few ingredients.

Here are some of the dishes I ate this week:

Green smoothies.  I love these.  They are sugar, salt, oil free.  Just fruit, greens, flax seeds and almond milk.  Very low in calories and high in nutrition.  This one has banana, pineapple, unsweetened coconut, spinach and unsweetened almond milk.

Salads.  I love salads and I try to load them with lots of nutrition.  Most of my salads have greens, beans, onions, tomatoes, beets, dried fruit and a low or no calorie vegan dressing.  On this salad I topped it with some vegan chicken fingers.

Toast topped with natural peanut butter, flax seeds and banana.  I love peanut butter.  I think I could eat it on almost anything.  Although it offers a healthy fat and good protein it's also concentrated calories so I try to eat it in moderation.

Spaghetti squash steamed in the microwave and topped with marinara sauce and mixed veggies.  Using a vegetable as a replacement for pasta is a great way to increase nutrition and decrease calories.

Toast topped with vegan cheese and sauteed tomatoes and spinach.  I sprinkled on some onion and garlic powder.

Wild rice, green beans and vegan turkey patties.  I will often cook up a batch of rice in my pressure cooker and eat it all week with various vegetables.

Once a week we eat a meal out.  This week we ate at WhichWich.  It's a sandwich shop that offers a few vegan options.  This one is black bean pattie, hummus, avocado, cole slaw.

So there you are.  Good, hearty meals that simple but nutritious.  More to come.

Going Vegan in my 50's

Out of all the diets in the world why pick veganism?  I'm not sure I addressed this early on in my weight loss journey but I thought this was a good time to talk about it again.  I'm in my third year of weight loss success.  That's the longest I've ever been able to sustain any noticeable weight loss so there must be some significant component that has led to that success.  Yes, I've recently had some weight gain.  I've been battling a ten pound gain this year, but I'm back on track and I'm determined to reach my all time goal of 125 by the end of this year.

Before going vegan I was never able to keep weight off.  I had all but given up on being any size smaller than a 12 and prior to three years ago I was up around a 14/16.  My health was failing.  I was tired all the time and miserable about how I looked. 

My doctor asked me to loose 25 pounds and that was my goal.  I didn't start off even thinking about veganism as a way to loose weight.  I stumbled upon it months after trying several other diet methods.  To my surprise, after going full on, all in vegan I began to loose weight and I was able to keep it off and keep loosing.

Don't get the wrong impression here.  Veganism isn't magic.  I could be a fat vegan very easily.  I still have to watch how much I eat.  But by eating primarily plant based whole foods it's easier to keep my weight down than ever before in my life.

The best part about my new lifestyle is the part that I seldom think about.  My health is better than its been in decades.  Before starting my new life I had my yearly checkup.  My blood pressure was sky high, I was pre-diabetic and severely anemic. 

My yearly physical and blood work two years later revealed that I am no longer anemic or pre-diabetic and my blood pressure is normal.  My bmi is still above the normal range for my height right now.  I'll have to get down to 125 for that to be in the normal range.

I don't think about that part of my success because I don't have to think about it constantly anymore.  For years I was concerned about my health but I didn't know how to fix it.  I'd tried every diet and failed at them all.

Now, instead of worrying I focus on working the plan every day.  I know that if I do that my health will be it's best and it will be easier to maintain a healthy weight.

I think it's also important to have realistic expectations.  My goal is to maintain the best health I can as long as I can.  I believe the way I now live is my best path to that goal.

As a side note; the longer I'm vegan the more I am committed to never eating meat or dairy or eggs.  I'm not the vegan police nor will I ever be.  I live within a family and extended family of meat eaters.  My choices are for myself alone.  But I feel much more sensitive towards animals than I ever have.  I've always loved animals but it never bothered me to eat them.  Now I don't think I ever could again.  Maybe that's because I now see that there are so many plant based alternatives that can completely satisfy human health.  I no longer believe that humans need to consume animal products for health purposes. 

Being vegan is not an easy road to take.  It's not the road I had planned on but having traveled it for two years now I wouldn't have it any other way.

Going Back to What Works

Since I last posted I've struggled, I've floundered, then I dug down deep and I've found a way to win the war.

Once I reached 137 I plateaued.  I was stuck and I couldn't figure out a way to loose any more weight.  Then I started gaining weight.  Slowly the pounds started coming back.  I could see it in my belly and I could feel it when I tried to squeeze into my clothes.

I couldn't find any motivation to exercise at the level I did while loosing.  My heart wasn't in it anymore.  Every day I promised myself that I'd work harder and longer. 

Two weeks ago I made the decision to go back to how I was eating while I lost weight last year.  I put that off thinking I could exercise the extra calories off.  That doesn't work.  It never has for me and it never will.  It has to be 80 percent diet. 

The major change that I've added back in is fasting.  I've never strayed from my commitment to veganism.  I was just eating too much.  Too much of anything is still too much. 

Fasting is really just a eating schedule.  My schedule looks like this now:
Saturday and Sunday I eat what I want (that's vegan).  After dinner on Sunday I fast till Tuesday breakfast; about 32 hours.  Tuesday - Thursday I fast 18 hours, with an eating window of 6 hours.  After lunch on Thursday I start fasting till Saturday Breakfast; 42 hours.  So I have two longer fasts and three shorter ones. 

I'm at the beginning of my third week with this schedule.  I'm at 131.  My goal weight is 125; 6 lbs. to go.  I expect it will take me two more week.  Once there I'll evaluate how my eating schedule needs to change for maintenance.  I expect that I will need to keep fasting as part of my lifestyle permanently.  Veganism has given me my health back but fasting has enabled me to attain and maintain a healthy weight. 

I don't feel any different at 131 then I did at 137 and I don't expect that will change once I get to 125.  My main reason for that goal weight is to give myself some room to fluctuate.  It's my safety net.  I know that once I try to start a maintenance program again my weight is bound to go up and down a little while I figure out exactly what my eating schedule needs to be.

Wouldn't it be great if I could just eat a healthy vegan diet and weigh exactly what I want to weigh.  Unfortunately, life, my life isn't like that.  I've come to some conclusions about my weight and one of them is that I will have to have periods where I'm a little hungry in order to maintain my slimmer body and my better health.

I'm not trying to go back to the exercise level I had during my weight loss.  I just don't want to spend two hours every day exercising.  What seems to be my new normal is 1 mile of walking, then 1 or two miles of jogging each morning.  In the evenings I've been doing 30 minutes of step.  Today I'm changing that to 30 minutes of my strength building exercises: squats, sit-ups, etc.

So this is my new life.  My second attempt to get to maintenance and actually maintain. 

Settling In to a New Lifestyle

This is me on Sunday,  March 4, 2018.  I still weigh 137 lbs.

Last month when I posted I was going through a real, serious mourning process.  I wasn't prepared for it but now that I've come through it I understand it better.  Choosing to live a vegan lifestyle sets me apart from everyone I know in my day to day life.  I'm already a quiet, introverted person.  Eating differently from literally everyone I know has not helped that.  If anything I'd say that it's a good thing that I tend to be so quiet because many times I've caught myself just before I pointed out how unhealthy something is that someone is about to eat.  Of course I know that it's none of my business what anyone else eats.  What I've chosen to do to save my health is a personal decision.  It's not something that can be pushed on to anyone.  But for me I think I was feeling very isolated and the realization that I've chosen this for the rest of my life sent me into a period of mourning my old life.  I don't want to go back but I had to say goodbye.

I've done that now and I feel more resolved than ever about the life ahead of me.  I still want to loose another ten pounds and I'm confident that I will.  It's a process and the process continues.  The longer I eat a vegan diet the more I fall in love with it.  The variety and combinations of dishes is endless.  What's so great about eating a whole foods plant based diet is that it all goes together perfectly.  I try now to focus on foods, not recipes.  I just buy lots of whole plant foods and put them together.

So what do I eat?  Things like this:

 15 Bean mix with rice

 Salad with black beans, corn and salsa as the dressing

 Oat, banana, date muffins that are fat and sugar free

 Wild rice with different beans each day

 Steamed veggies, cabbage mix and potatoes

 Cabbage soup

 Spring mix with wild rice and steamed veggies

 Vegetable soup with carrots, potatoes, beans, peas, winter squash, tomatoes, corn

 wild rice with steamed veggies and "cheese" sauce

Kale, bean chili with wild rice and "cheese" sauce

I also still eat loads of fresh fruit.  One of my favorite snack foods now is a bowl of chick peas.  Salads are still a weekly staple.  I load at least 5 cups of greens into a plastic container with a combination of vegetables, a starch like couscous, some beans and a fat free dressing like salsa or homemade hummus.

So my journey continues.  Now that I've made my peace with the choices I've made about how I want to live and eat I'm happier and more focused on continuing to make the the life that I have better and better.

Profound Realizations

 This is me in a dressing room yesterday, Saturday, February 3, 2018.  I tried

several size 8 pants but they were too big so I tried 6 petites and that's what I ended up with.

So, I'm smaller now than I have been in 30 years.  I haven't been this size since before I had children.  Reason for celebration and excitement...right?  You'd think so, but no.

This last week a profound sadness came over me.  As I continue to get smaller I feel like I am mourning a previous life that I can't go back to.  In my workplace my friends and coworkers routinely order in all kinds of meals that I no longer eat.  They routinely bring in sweets to share that I no longer can indulge in.  They routinely ask me if I want anything and I always say thank you but no.

I don't know any other vegans and I feel very isolated most of the time.  I feel like I have to keep up my defenses all the time because the temptation is always there to go backwards.  I still like the scent of meat even though I don't really want to eat any.  The smell of McDonalds drives me crazy.  I don't want to eat that stuff because I know how unhealthy it is, but Dam is smells good.  It's like crack and I'm the addict.  I know I cannot take even one bite because I won't be able to stop even though it's not something I want to put in my body.

I can never go back.  I'm too old to start over again.  This is my life now.  While my husband eats the homemade chili with cheese, sour cream and crackers I eat a pound of salad.  Today we went out to lunch.  He had a huge fish sandwich that smelled so good.  I had a veggie burger that clearly did not taste anything like a meat burger.  That's my life from now on.

This last week I was so depressed about that.  Sometimes success is bittersweet.  I know I'm doing the right thing for myself.  I don't want to go back and yet there's something about that past life that I miss. 

Is this what maintenance feel like? 

Too Much Stuff

Every year for the past several years I've told myself that I'll buy less stuff, have less stuff, use less stuff.  I want to buy less cheap crap from Walmart.  At my age I don't need anything.  Every year, at some point I declutter my closet and haul several trash bags full to the local Salvation Army.

And in 2018 I find myself once again, looking at my closet trying to figure out why I have so many shoes.  It's like a sickness.  I can't stop buying shoes or t-shirts.

So once again I am resolving to buy less, have less and use less in 2018.  Once again, I'm on my knees clearing out my shoes.

Here's what I started with:

 And here's the new shoes I've bought this year already:

Yes, I know. I made a resolution and I broke it like in the next breath. 
BUT, I am determined not to buy any more shoes for the rest of the year.

Now to make room for the new shoes, these are the ones I'm getting rid of:

And this is the decluttered, organized shoe collection:

I know it still looks like a bit of a mess but there is a strategy.  I like to keep the shoes that I wear every day on the floor, right inside of the closet; easy access and easy to return them there.  I keep the shoes I wear on the weekends on the racks.  The new sneakers are sitting out side the closet because they don't stay in my bedroom.  I keep them in the dining room where I get dressed in my running gear at 5 am in the mornings.

Now on to the t-shirts.  I have two drawers packed full of t-shirts and I've recently bought half a dozen yoga type tops.

What you see there is at least 30 tops that I wear when I'm not at work and working out. 

I weeded out the ones I don't wear and don't need.  I'm get rid of 13.  That's still too many to keep, but it's the best I could do. 

Keepers on the right and donation stack on the left.

That's a good start.  I feel like I did something good this weekend.  I'm really going to try not to buy any more t-shirts or shoes this year.  I do need to buy some shorts for the summer because I've lost so much weight, what I've got is way too big.  I'll try to keep it to a minimum and once that's done I don't need any more clothing this year.  If I stick to that it will be a major accomplishment.

It's Time to Weigh In

It's been a month since I weighed.  I struggled so much during December that I was afraid to weigh.  I know I gained several pounds because I could tell the difference in how my clothing was fitting.

So this last week I was back on plan, eating right and exercising every day.  I did everything right, kept to the plan and when I weighed on Saturday the scale said 137.  That exactly what I weighed at the end of November.  So the plan works.  I  It got me down almost 5o pounds and it will take me down into the 120's, where I'll start maintenance.

This morning I told my husband that I want to get down one more size and then I'm done trying to loose weight.  He said, "you know that means nothing will change".  He's right.  In order to maintain I'll have to go on working the plan, eating how I'm eating now and exercising every day, twice a day.  It won't get easier.

If anything, it's getting harder.  I understand why the vast majority of those who loose weight gain it all back within a year.  The end of a successful weight loss journey is the beginning of the struggle to keep it off.  For me it's quite easy to stay on task during my work week.  It the weekends where I struggle.  And vacations are a nightmare.

As long as I'm working full time I'll be safe.  I don't think I can ever retire.