Tuesday

I've now gone over 24 hours without talking to Josh. He's at scout camp all week, and I'm sure he's fine, but I miss him! Usually when we're out of town or away from the kids I at least talk to them on the phone once a day. Not being able to hear from Josh all week feels weird! I hope he's having fun, I can't wait to hear about all of his exciting adventures when he returns.

This morning a friend came with me on my bike ride (Karen, of course!). She's an experienced bike rider. I rode 40 miles total last month. She rode 40 miles in one day last month. I warned her when she asked if she could come along that I'm not a very good cycling companion. She can go fast and far. I can go slow and feel like I'm going to die after mile 2. Still, we had a good time. Usually I've got my headphones in my ears and I tune out the world while I ride. It was fun having someone to talk to.

So yesterday we cheated just a bit on our diet. Shawn came home from work last night and I hadn't figured out dinner yet and we both realized that we had a ton of calories left so we decided to order pizza. It's possible to eat pizza and still stay on the diet if you have the calories to spare, but we noticed that Pizza Hut now has garlic bread pizza, which sounded SOO good, but it's new and there isn't a calorie listing for it yet. We decided to live on the wild side and order it anyway. It was good, but I'm sure it was a million calories. I didn't overdo it and actually, I probably did manage to eat within my calorie allotment, but there's no way to know for sure. If I went over it probably wasn't really that much.

But last night I started feeling guilty about it. I started to worry that maybe I had gone way over my calories and that maybe I was way off on estimating (we decided to use the calories for deep dish meat lovers pizza, because we figured that would probably compare calorie wise). I went downstairs and told Shawn I was feeling guilty and he was feeling the same way. We both exercised to make up for it. I actually went down to the basement and used the exercise bike, which has been collecting dust for years.

I hate exercise equipment. I hate treadmills, I hate elliptical machines, I hate exercise bikes, I hate all of it. They're boring, it's hot and sweaty and I don't have the attention span to do it very long. I managed to do the exercise bike for 15 minutes, which is probably some sort of record for me. It's about 14.5 minutes longer than I wanted to do it, I can tell you that! I love riding my bike because I love the sunshine and the fresh air and the grass and the trees. Sitting on a plastic bike in my basement doesn't exactly create the same atmosphere. Maybe someday I will learn to love exercise equipment, but I kind of doubt it.

Anyway, the extra exercise gave me a little calorie buffer in case I really did go over my calories, but hopefully I didn't. I'm sure it was fine and even a little cheat every now and then isn't a big deal. I was just kind of amused at how much a potential cheat freaked us out. We're hardcore on this diet thing. I didn't expect to be that way because I generally have a hard time taking diets very seriously. I usually like to diet just about as much as I like to ride plastic bikes in my basement. We're in it for the long haul this time though. I don't know what is different this time, but it's sticking and I like it. The more I ride my bike the better I feel and the better I feel the better I want to look. I don't want to do all that hard work on my bike and then come home and undo it all with junk food. It's feeling really good to get healthy and strong. I should have done this a long time ago.