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Saturday, April 30, 2011

A Little Bit About Me

Let me introduce myself to my new readers.  I am a 31 year old epidemiologist (and student) who lives and works in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area in Texas.  I moved here in 2006 after briefly living in Michigan.  The joke in my family is that I'm slowly moving west; perhaps Hawaii is next?

I work full time and am a full time doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of Texas School of Public Health.  I will be taking four classes this summer, two of which I'm sure I'll be posting about because the topics are extremely interesting (occupational epidemiology and pharmaceutical industry).  I don't feel at liberty to discuss where I work; as a disclosure, this blog is about my personal journey and my beliefs, interests, and views.  I hope that the knowledge that I share with you will encourage you in your life, and maybe I will challenge your thought process as well.  Feel free to encourage me and challenge me too.

I am a cat owner and a chicken co-owner.  As an urban chicken owner, I feel the need to discuss and teach others about chickens as I learn.  I am also learning about home ownership; I've been in my house for just over a year now.  And yes, being organic is important to me; I suppose a bit of Austin has rubbed off on me.

The main reason for this blog is about my weight loss efforts - my successes and my failures.  Currently, my failures have been vast in comparison to my success; I'm back at square one in this journey.  The key, though, is that I haven't given up.  Nobody should ever give up.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Imperfections...

It's the imperfections that make us who we are. Why is it that I can accept and even love other peoples' imperfections much easier than my own? It's my imperfection, or flaw, of wanting to be perfect that has led to my "destruction" in the past. Will this time be any different? Why can't I convince myself that I will never truly be perfect and that's just simply okay?

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Optimal Workout

YahooSports had an interesting article posted today (Warm Up With Cardio, Then Go To Weights. Right? Wrong.) on what the optimal workout is. Go figure, my trainer is right (shhhh...don't tell him). You do a 10 minute warm-up, and 30 minutes of weight lifting followed by 30 minutes of cardio. When I was at my best, I was doing 30 minutes of warm-up followed by 60 minutes of weight lifting and 45 minutes of cardio. I just wish I had the time these days to do that again! Working full time and going to school full time has eaten up a lot of that! Give up sleep? Perhaps that is what I need to do. Any thoughts any juggling workouts, school, and work?

Oh yeah, the article does mention that if time is restrictive, go for the weights, but at my size, I definitely need to get that cardio in!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Song of the Week: Javier - Lovin' U

We've all been there before. Other people have wanted to love me, but never knew how to. This reminds me of how lucky I am right now.

Just as an FYI - Javier is a contestant on The Voice, which I kind of got roped into tonight as I was writing up a final exam.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Ready to blog again!

I miss blogging!  And more importantly, I did SO much better in my life journey when I did blog.  I am officially back!  I am going to start blogging in the next couple of weeks due to finals, but I will ramp it up as quickly as possible.  As a guideline, I'm leaning towards to posting on specific topics on certain days of the week, but this will not be set in stone.

Monday - Song of the week and/or "need to know"
Tuesday - Food and/or environment
Wednesday - Typical weigh-in day at Weight Watchers
Thursday - Physical fitness and/or the body
Friday - Data day
Saturday - Past, present, and future
Sunday - Recipe of the week

I have a few housekeeping notes before I start blogging again.
1.  Please feel free to sign up to get e-mails of my journal entries!  And don't hesitate to follow me on Twitter too!
2.  If you are a fellow blogger and would like to be added to my blog roll, please let me know, and I will take it under consideration.
3.  Lastly, I am 95% sure that I will never been adding advertisements to my blog.  If I do so, there will be strict requirements of what I will allow to be added.  Advertisements, in my opinion, take away from the blog and what I want to convey to my readers.

I'm excited to be back, and I look forward to getting to know you!!!!