The World According to Jennyfur

I’ve been meaning to write a follow up the the piece I wrote on Health & Fitness: Dieting awhile back because I get a lot of questions on a regular basis on dieting and fitness. I’m no expert by any means and different things work for everyone. The best I advice I can give is start slowly. Don’t expect to jump straight into a two hour high impact aerobic work out, running 5 miles a day or spending every evening at the gym. Once you get past that, working out comes easily and naturally. Personally speaking, I prefer to work out at home because I can do it at my own pace and am not tied to spending X amount of hours at the gym. I can take breaks between workouts and move at my own pace.

Luckily, a few years ago we picked up an Elliptical Machine on Craigslist really cheap. They retail new around $1000, I think we got this one for $100 or so. I started out doing 10 minutes a day and honestly I find the use of most gym equipment of that variety to be ungodly boring and tedious. I haven’t stuck with doing the elliptical over the past couple months, but it was a good starting point for me. In addition to using the elliptical, I also have a set of 2lb and 5lb weights, again I started out doing about 10 minutes a day to build upper body and arm strength, which is fairly important for yoga and pilates.

I also try to get in as much walking as I can while I’m at work. Whether its taking a quick jaunt at lunch or the combined efforts of walking a couple blocks from where Tim drops me off in the morning, then walking to the subway to meet up with him at work and also walking from that subway station to where he picks me up. Minus the lunch jaunts I get about 30-45 minutes a day of brisk walking. Also, since I work on the 3rd floor I almost always take the stairs, which throws in some extra exercise while I am at work.

I started exploring Yoga and other types of fitness in February or March. I’ve been practicing at home. Someday I plan on venturing out and taking a weekly class somewhere, but I’m rather broke at the moment because of the house selling drama that has been the past 7-8 months of my life. Also, I can’t find classes downtown that work out with my commute and work schedule. I’ve been trying different types of yoga. I really like Kundalini Yoga and the Vinyasa Flow styles. I’m working on learning the Ashtanga series, but to be honest Sun Salutations kind of bore me after awhile. I sometimes work out on my own, but I find I have greater focus if I work out to a dvd. All you need at home is a decent yoga mat (which you can also use for pilates) and if you so desire a yoga block (its helpful for beginners if you aren’t flexible and are doing modified poses) and a yoga strap. To be honest, I don’t use either all that much, but they aren’t that expensive.

In any case, if you have Netflix, they have an amazing selection of fitness DVDs. I suggest renting a selection to see what you like and what you don’t like. That way you don’t waste a lot of money on DVDs you don’t like or will never use. I have some quirks and preferences I’ve developed over time. For some reason, I have yet to explore any Yoga DVDs done by male instructors. I also cannot and will not tolerate unitards of any kind. I honestly don’t care what the instructors are wearing, but I draw the line at full body unitards. It helps if the instructors have decent voices that are serene and calming. As far as the settings go I can deal with outdoor settings or studio settings although if it looks like it was filmed for some crappy local public access television station I won’t watch it.

Here are some recommendations for DVDs I like:

Jennifer Kries – Yin Yoga
This is the first dvd I started with. Its a compilation of three yin yoga workouts from her Hot Body, Cool Mind Series. Yin Yoga is somewhat different from other yoga varieties, the focus is on the deep tissue and fascia and organ function as opposed to building muscle, tone, flexibility etc. The poses are much longer and all are either sitting or laying poses. The minimum time for a pose is at least 10 breaths, the maximum can go up to 15 minutes. Its a great workout before bed. Most of the poses are fairly easy at all levels, though there are a couple I have trouble with because my boobs get in the way. In the Hot Body, Cool Mind Series, she closes out each work out with a Yin Yoga & Meditation Segment. Its a great transition from the yang (heating) workouts into a yin (cooling) restorative workout.

Jennifer Kries – Hot Body, Cool Mind Level 1
This DVD has a little bit of everything and its broken up into segments so you don’t have to do the whole workout from start to finish everytime. The first two segment are Qigong, one sitting and one standing. Honestly, I don’t know enough about Qigong to really have a grasp at what I am doing, but it seems like a decent, although somewhat long, series of light warm up exercises. The next segment is a relatively short segment, under 10 minutes, called the 5 Tibetans, which are a series of yoga exercises that open up your chakras. I really like them. They are fast paced and get the heart pumping. She has a basic yoga segment covering Sun Salutations and Warrior Sequences, which are very helpful for learning the basics of yoga. The Pilates segment is really good, but it totally kicks my ass every time. While I’ve toned the majority of my body through yoga, I really need to work on pilates for my abdomen. I need to find the right time of day to do pilates because I always seem to end up nauseous afterwards. In addition to all that there are two dance segments: Jazz and Ballet. I really enjoy the Jazz one a lot. Ballett kicks my ass, but I need to give it a try again. I really like the dance aerobic workouts. She closes out the workout with the Yin Yoga and Meditation practice.

Kundalini Yoga with Gurumkh
I love Kundalini Yoga. I feel absolutely amazing after I do either part of all of the workout. Kundalini yoga is quite different from the other forms of yoga I have seen or tried. Its challenging and rewarding. I particularly like this DVD, I find the instructors voice to be quite serene. The Kundalini practice requires you to do the majority of the workout with your eyes closed, with the exception of a few standing sequences. The movements are very fast and fluid each one is done for a couple minutes. There are some breathing exercised throughout. The breath of fire, I hate it and love it. Its kind of like forcing yourself to pant very fast and very hard through the open mouth and then through the nose. I think the best thing to come out of the Kundalini experience is learning how much I absolutely love gong meditations. The peace and serenity, its like I popped a valium. Its clean and euphoric and absolutely amazing.

Shiva Rea – Fluid Power Vinyasa Flow Yoga
Admittedly I picked this up on a whim at REI about a month ago and have done various workouts every day since then. I highly recommend her DVDs because they have a customizable workout that you can create from over 3 hours of various segments that run anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. I still haven’t gotten through all of the segments and some of them are quite advanced like handstands and backbends. Otherwise, I highly recommend her work and am anxiously awaiting checking out some of her other fitness dvds. Next on my list is Yoga Trance Dance… if its anything like the free form flowing meditations I am so there! There are a variety of segments some are really fast and challenging, others are slower, heavy on the counterposes, and dreamy floating off into outer space stuff.

Yoga in Bed
Honestly, skip the DVD and pick up the book. If you have trouble sleeping and/or getting up in the morning this book has a series of poses you can do, while in bed to either relax and wind down before you go to sleep or to get yourself up in the morning.

On occasion when not focusing totally on yoga, which has been a little on the rare side lately, I dabble with using a Resistance Cord for various exercises. I haven’t done it recently, the workout dvd is really challenging. I probably should’ve started with the light cord instead of the medium. So this may be one I return to more regularly once my upper body strength develops further. I also have one of the smaller handheld pilates balls, which adds a different dimension to the workouts. At some point in time, I plan on picking up one of the larger balance balls for pilates.

These days, I work out just about every day. If I am super busy, I still try to squeeze in at least 20 minutes of yoga. I was always one of those people who balked at the concept of exercise. I always had a reason not to do it. I was too busy… blah blah blah. Now, I can’t live without it. My body craves it and I feel awful (not just guilt wise) if I don’t exercise every day. I’m working on a fitness calendar so I can balance out my workout schedule.

One of the biggest changes I have noticed is that I’ve boosted my normally sluggish metabolism and built up a lot of muscle tone overall. Every week I notice something new or slightly different about my body. Its neat to see the change. Part of me wishes I could go back and make a photodocument of all these things.

As I mentioned before I had switched my Weight Watcher’s plan over to maintenance to hold steady at 169, since I had entered a healthy weight range and BMI for my height. I held steady at 169 for a few weeks and then noticed that I had been splurging more and feeling like I was overeating. Since then, I dropped 2-3 more pounds. I’ve been fluctuating between 166-167. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but then someone pointed out to me that the more muscular you are, the more you can eat because your muscles burn fat/calories etc. fairly quickly. Now I don’t want to end up falling into old patterns, but I’ve been playing around with my food intake to test out where I should be as far as my daily points go to hold steady at my current weight.

Of course, I eventually want to lose another 10-15 pounds, but I am more concerned with handling the array of stretch marks that have developed since I dropped 33-34 pounds since January. Like all things I am trying to find a healthy balance between how much I eat, how much I exercise and everything else.

Recommended Reading:
- Yoga For Women by Shakta Kaur Khalsa
- Ashtanga Yoga for Beginners by Michaela Clarke
- Yoga in Bed by Edward Vilga
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga: A Practical Guide to Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit by Deepak Chopra and David Simon
- Yoga Journal Magazine

I get a ton of questions on a regular basis about Facebook filters and privacy settings so I figured I’d write down some tips and best practices for you all. I have 500+ people on my friends list from all aspects of my life and very few people need to be privvy to every single thing I do, think, say or whatnot.

1. The first step in the process is creating Friends Filters. You can do this by clicking on your Friends tab at the top of the screen between Profile and Inbox. You should see an option to Create A New List.
- Click Create New List, this will open a pop-up window – Fill in the name for your list where it says Enter Name i.e. Work Filter, Family Filter etc.
- Click on the pictures of the people you want to include in this filter
- When You are done click Create List.

2. Now you have a list of people grouped together. You can now designate the filters in the Privacy Settings. Between your Name and the Logout button on the Top Navigation bar you will see Settings. If you mouse over it you get three options

2a. Account Settings gives you several options on the tab: – Settings, Networks, Mobile, Language, Payments can be ignored for now. – Notification is the big one here, you can set up how you are notified and by what for things like Sends me a message, Adds me as a friend, Posts on my Wall etc Go through this list and click on/off based on your preferences. I check this area once a month because everytime I look at my trash in gmail 90% is still facebook notifications. You can do this for every part of your profile and applications.

2b. Privacy Settings & Overview You have four options here, Profile, Search, Newsfeed/Wall & Applications.

Profile: You can customize your settings for Basic and Contact Information on this tab. This is also where having filters comes in handy. The default settings are Everyone, Only Friends, My Networks & Friends, Friends of Friends or Customize.
- Click Customize, now you customize each aspect of your profile based on what you want people to see or not see. If you select Only Friends and Except these people, you could include by name or one of the filters you created like Work Filter, Family Filter etc.

Search: this will be how people can search for your name and what they will see before they add you.
- You can select Search Visibility based on the default or customizeable features. I keep it to everyone, but if you have a crazy ex-spouse you don’t want finding you, you can type in their name and make sure that they never see you come up in any search function.
- Search result content, this will show a brief snippet of your profile to people who search for you.

Newsfeed and Wall Posts You can further customize what you see in your newsfeeds and on wallposts here. There are two tabs Actions within Facebook and Social Ads. The Social Ads one is a big one selecting Show you Pic in Ads to No One means that you won’t see Your Name loves Brand Name Detergent Become A Fan.

Applications Click the link to the applications page. You can individually change the settings on all your applications. You can also hide or block certain applications from showing in your newsfeed from the newsfeed page. Applications have the most convoluted settings and are really hard to search through. There is a drop down on the page defaulted to Recent Activity.

**If you go to your newsfeed and say you see an application that really annoys you like zombie pirate ninjas sending you drinks and monkeys. If you click the HIDE button on the right of the post you get an option to Hide the person who posted it or Hide the application. You can also hide certain people that come up in your newsfeed this way as well. If I think of more tricks I’ll post them, but those are the basics. Pay attention to the posting options Notes has the privacy setting built in, so you don’t have to worry about a default beyond Only Friends, though if one note you want to post to a select filter of friends and another note you want to post to everyone, but XYZ people you can easily do that.

I’m still working the Weight Watcher’s maintenance plan for now, though I managed to lose a pound this week without even trying and whilst splurging a bit more than usual between my birthaversary party last Friday and a couple brunch & lunch excursions. I’m not complaining seeing as I had braced myself for the possibility of having gained a couple pounds.

I’m still working out  a ton… mostly doing various yoga stuff. I picked up a DVD I really like by Shiva Rea recently. Parts of it I can do really well and then there is just a ton of epic fail segments and the I am so not doing that segments. Luckily the DVD is broken down by segment so I can customize my work out with what I can do versus trying to kill myself with a handstand workout that would probably result in death and destruction. I’ve gotten a lot stronger and have built up my upper body and arm muscles significantly. I can finally do chaturanga without epic fails. Now Side Plank is my new enemy. I need to learn the modified version because doing half-chaturanga (knees on the floor) helped me figure out how to do it in full.

I’m at a weird point in my weight loss and fitness. I want to lose another 10-15 pounds, but I am worried about my stretch marks getting worse and feel like I should focus on that and tightening my abdomen and building muscle mass and toning my body. I realized that when I lean forward, my belly hollows inward on the sides and I have this hideous pouch of loose skin. I like saggy kitteh tummy that flails back and forth when they run. I always called it “mummy tummy” because Apocalypse had it pretty significantly.  In any case, I really need to focus my workouts, which gets hard when  I am busier and whatnot. I really need to do Pilates every day in addition to my yoga workouts. I haven’t done much weight training lately and have been ignoring my poor elliptical machine again.

I discovered ala the Kundalini Yoga DVD that I picked up a few weeks ago that I absolutely love gong music/meditation. Its so weird, my body actually craves it like I would crave a cigarette.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about weight loss and exercise since embarking on the journey to health and wellness in January. It is now June, which takes me through a full six months of the journey. I’ve slowed down the weight loss (31 pounds to date) for the time being and am maintaining my current weight nicely. I still plan on losing another 10-15 pounds, but figured I’d give myself a break and work the fitness angle a little more intensely.

The first step in the chain of progress was joining Weight Watcher’s after seeing the success one of my closest friends had on the program I decided to give it a whirl. I highly recommend the online version of the Momentum Plan. It has worked well for me seeing as I lack the motivation and general interest in attending local public meetings and it also works well with my Web 2.0 geekery given the set of online tracking tools and their overall performance. I can easily look up various foods, recipes and figure out the points, chart my food intake, activity levels, weight loss & measurements. I wish I had done the measurements early on because I am curious to see how they have changed in the past six months.

As far as diet goes, I’ve learned to modify and balance my eating habits for the most part.

- While I love breakfast food, I’ve never been a big breakfast eater, which always led to snacking throughout the day. I usually have something from the grain family whether it be a fat free or low fat muffin, cereal bar, granola bar etc. Weight Watcher’s has delicious Blueberry and Double Chocolate Muffins. I really like the Special K Strawberry Cereal Bars. If you happen to live near a Genuardi’s, they carry a brand called Eating Right and they have awesome Cranberry Citrus Bars. Kashi also makes a yummy pumpkin pie granola bar. Odwalla makes some decent “superfood” bars, which are quite tasty and replete with omega fatty acids and are all natural.

- I had never been a big fan of diet soda and always loved my dark carbonated beverages like Dr. Pepper. I still limit my intake, because I don’t want to overdo it on aspartame. I wish more sodas would be made with Splenda or other natural sweeteners. For the most part, I drink Coke Zero (or Cherry Coke Zero). I like other diet sodas now Diet Sunkist, Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Pepsi, however Diet Coke is just gross. I also drink about 2-4 cups of tea per day. I tend to prefer herbal blends, florals and fruity ones. Other than that I drink a lot of water. Thank the foods gods and goddesses for Crystal Light on the go packets. I was also happy to see that Ocean Spray makes some on the go packets as well. I really love the White-Cran-Peach. If you can find them the Mixed Berry Water Sensations are pretty good. The grape one is okay, but the lemon and orange ones are surprisingly gross.

- The next big food modification was bringing my lunch to work. I realized I had fooled myself into thinking I was eating relatively healthy getting fresh sandwiches, salads and whatnot from local eateries and the cafeteria at work. I love Italian Hoagies, but for all intents and purposes I may well have been scrafing down a McDonald’s Big Mac and French Fries. There really isn’t much difference when you breal down the caloric intake and fat content. That is setting aside processed foods versus unprocessed foods. Granted I have slipped a little bit away from the organic/natural foods in the process, but losing weight came first. Anyways, normally I pick up something I can easily reheat in the microwave, which tend to be frozen lunches from Smart Ones, Eating Right, Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice. I tend to balance out the lunch with random combination’s fresh fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese with pineapples, rice cakes, dried fruit, carrots, rice cakes, pretzel sticks and some sort of low fat dessert. Weight Watcher’s desserts are awesome. I love their cookies and cakes. Also, No Pudge brand makes an awesome fat free organic brownie mix. You just add fat free yogurt instead of eggs, oil and water.

- While on the subject of work. I have a desk drawer totally dedicated to healthy snacks. I highly recommend this because it prevents me from heading down to a vending machine and getting unhealthy stuff. I usually keep the kind of stuff I would crave that would also be filling. So I have an array of 100 calorie snack packs and candy, the aforementioned granola and cereal bars, raisins, and sometimes rice cakes.

- Vitamins are also helpful. I usually stick to a regiment during the week, sometimes I forget though. I find having a healthy dose of vitamins reduces the appetite and gives you energy. In general I take, a multivitamin, Vitamin D, Vitamin C (sometimes I up the dosage with Emergen-C if I am under the weather), Fish Oil, Flax Seed Oil and Alphalipoic Acid (its good for hair and nails). I only take Iron as needed, same with things like Ginseng, Mothers Wort and some dietary aids.

- I used to be really bad about making dinner and would almost always stop and pick something up along the way (or having Tim do so) thus falling into the same patten I did with lunch. I tend to be somewhat lazy when it comes to cooking after working 9-5 and commuting. I’ve learned to keep things on hand that can be combined and prepared quickly and easily. The George Foreman Grill is your friend. I prepare most of my meats on it unless for some reason they need to be baked another way. I find having various marinades and sauces on hand to be an easy solution and most (when used in correct proportions are not bad at all calorie/fat wise. Sometimes I cheat and make a frozen pizza or something from my lunch stache. I’m not a big fan of frozen food, but I have grown to love frozen french fries. Normal french fries are pretty unhealthy given the whole fried in oil scenario, but baked french fries are less than half the amount of points for a decent sized serving.

Stay Tuned for the Fitness & Exercise Installment….