Hello from Mexico

We're here in Cabo San Lucas! The sun is shining and the temperature is a wonderful 75 degrees. Our room at our resort is heavenly and we've indulged in pedicures and room service. It's all so relaxing and good.

Thanks again to everyone for your comments and wishes for us to be here.

I'm using this week as an opportunity to step up my workouts a bit. I started my "lose weight and get strong and healthy" regime on December 1st. Since then, I've lost 18 pounds.

I attribute this success on a couple of things:

The LoseIt app for my iPhone. It records my meals and my workouts. And shows me a big red bar when I've gone over my calories for the day. LoseIt offers a friends community. If any of you who have iPhones want to be my "friend", let me know and I'll add you. You'll get to see fascinating things like how much I've been eating and exercising. How exciting! What joy! What bliss!

Wii Fitness
On weekday mornings, I get up at 5:45 to get in a quick workout in my house. My favorite wii fitness programs (in order) are EA Sports More Active, Biggest Loser, Jillian Michaels Fitness 2010.

Jazzercise.
I've jazzercised off and on since the 80's. For me, it's a perfect fit between awesome music, fun dance moves, and sweating a ton. I stared going 2-3 times a week, two weeks ago.

Running.
On weekends, I go for a run come rain or shine. On January 17th, I ran 4 1/2 miles (the first time in forever) and I did it in the rain. I love my ipod running playlist. All of my songs are at 119 beats per minute or more which really keeps me moving.


Biggest Loser.
I love this show. Seriously. Every time I want to whine about working out so early in the morning or working out twice a day, I think about the people on the Biggest Loser ranch who are working out 6-7 hours a day. They inspire me to keep going.

So I decided to treat this week in Mexico as my own Biggest Loser week. Instead of pigging out on tons of food and even more alcohol, I'm working out hard and eating well.

But I would like to share with you two of my struggles.

Eating out portion sizes and waste. Eating in the restaurant or enjoying room service means looking at a huge pile of food. The portion sizes are immense. And as I'm trying to enjoy my food, I have this little mental conversation in my head that sounds like this, "I'm not going to eat all of this but look at all the waste! Maybe I'll take half of it to go. But even though we have a small fridge and microwave, this is going to taste awful after I heat it up. But look at all this leftover food!" Finally I tell myself to stop it and just try to enjoy my meal.

Working out with a skinny small group. Yesterday morning, I decided to take a "body pump" class offered at the resort. It was at 8:30 (can you believe it? I'm on vacation!). When I arrived, I saw that there were only 4 other women in the class. The woman trainer showed up and began to tell us about the class. But as she was doing so, she noticed a rather overweight man who was trying to use a chest press machine and she made fun of him for doing it wrong. In front of us, she made fun of him. Then she said, "Just wait, somebody else will do it wrong in a minute" and sure enough, someone else did. The trainer shook her head and said, "Some people".

And I had to bit my tongue to keep from yelling at her. You know how you think of what you want to say for the rest of the day when someone has upset you. For the rest of the day, I shouted at her in my head and said, "THAT'S WHY fat people don't want to go to the gym!! We know people like you are making fun of us! Have some respect for the fact that we are trying. And if you can't be respectful, then shut up!"

It didn't help that the other women in the class (who each weighed about 115 pounds) all twittered when the trainer said it. It made me truly reflective for the rest of the day. About how many skinny woman I've been around who make themselves feel better by putting other people down.

I want to be skinny. I want to be healthy. But I promise, I will never have those thoughts about overweight people.

Now, I know that this post has been an epistle and might sound complaining. If you read all the way through it, thank you.

Karen and I are thoroughly enjoying our vacation. I love sleeping late and being responsible only for myself. I love reading for most of the day and smelling ocean breezes. It's all good. Really good.