Just Get Walking...

In one of the weight loss blogs that I follow, “I Lost Big and So Can You”, Kristine’s boyfriend, “The Steele Project” has created a game on Diet Bet. I had never heard about this before, but it’s pretty cool. In the games that I’m signed up for, you bet a certain amount that you will lose 4% of your total body weight in 4 weeks.

There are other types of games, longer one’s and just about every amount imaginable. I went with a modest $30 bet. While I’m sure that I can make the bet, I’m also pretty tight with just putting my money somewhere that I’m not familiar.

The games that I joined are called “Self Love and Sweat” and “Spring into a healthier you!”.

I signed up a couple days before the games started and after paying my money, I had to take two pictures of myself weighing for the initial weight check-in.

For each game you are given a “challenge word” that you must write down on a piece of paper and have in view in both pictures – here is the first pic and below is the second pic which is a close-up of the scale itself with my weight and the challenge word in clear view.

My first word was “Lychee”. What a weird word. How funny though because that is my daughter’s favorite gummy candy sold at World Market that I give her every Christmas.

My second word was “Nettles” (which after Googling I found out is a herbaceous perennial flowering plant), but since I signed up for the second game within a day of the first game, I was given the option to use the first weight and pictures which was very handy. There is a companion app that you can download for both Android and iPhone and each game has their own chat room where you can get to know the other players and motivate each other and post status updates and workouts. You can also submit unofficial weigh-in’s which can help you stay accountable.

I’m super excited and ready to add another layer to this weight loss journey and road to healthier living!

You know that saying, when you can’t run with your legs, run with your heart? Yeah, well, if it’s skipping beats you might want to get that checked out.

And that’s how I spend my Monday, seeing a cardiologist, walking up a 10% incline to see how my heart would respond.

Apparently, these chest pains that I’ve been having, and the overall discomfort, is due to extra heartbeats, also known as early heartbeats.

Sometimes when I’m riding the bike at the Y, I’ll notice that my heartrate drops to 40 beats per minute. Then I’ll check my fitbit and it will either say the same thing, or just have the two dashes like it can’t read my pulse.

According to the cardiologist, this is because mechanical devices don’t know how to interpret these extra beats so they get all wonky and just display whatever they think is happening at the time.

I wasn’t really that impressed with the Dr., tbh, he didn’t really seem to act like this was any big deal and just told me to stay under 145 beats during exercise.

The problem with that is that my regular, just walking around the house, heartbeat is 105-110 so to get up to 145 doesn’t take much. My resting, laying in the bed watching TV heartbeat is 85. So I’m really thinking there’s more going on here.

I’ve decided to just chill out on the heavy cardio for a bit and keep walking and see what happens. But if it’s not better in a week or so, well then I’ll probably be posting again about going to a different doctor. Better safe then dead. ✌️