Sunday, a good day to reflect and reward

Happy Sunday to you all.  I did a few things this week that I am proud of and a few that I'm not.  I'll share both but the good ones first.

Yesterday morning I finally made it to the gym. When I arrived I couldnt help but notice that they were filming a commercial inside the gym on a Saturday morning! Ugh, I thought, this is going to mess up my routine and crowd the equipment, great.  As I walked in and scanned my card I had to ask the front desk clerk for my swim fins that I left at the gym on Thursday. (I  have foolishly done that a few times. This time I called and they located them and tucked them away for me).

I had to wait for maintenance to go and get them from the lost and found. While waiting, I was approached by a good friend; the Operations Manager, he approached me and asked me to be in the commercial for the Ab Coaster. Its the machine in the gym you kneel down on and then rock your knees toward your chest while bracing your arms in holds to help carry your weight. At first I said no, no way. Then he reminded me how it is to cast a shoot and that they just need a few more bodies to finish and its a wrap. He also said, "the faster they wrap, the faster they pack up and get off my gym floor". When I considered that, I said yes.

What a great experience! I got to try the machine with guidance from the manufacturer and I really was impressed. In just a few minutes my abs were burning and my heart rate was up and I broke a sweat. I was laughing at myself for judging the machine and people who would "ride the swings" at the gym. If you control the movement you really engage the abs and get a great burn in your midsection. I felt a bit silly trying to answer the questions being thrown at me by the director while completing a loooooong set on the AbCoaster.  I definitely would use this piece of equipment as my warm up for ab training, then move on to more isolation exercises. It is quite enjoyable for me to focus on one muscle group and really be aware of the contraction and retraction of the muscle. All that to say, I was in my first commercial and it was for fitness equipment! Yay for both. See; Ab Coaster Pro Abdominal Trainer


Another thing I did this week was added the Lose It! application on my iphone. This is a great tool that will track your progress toward your fitness or weight loss goal. Its a calorie counter and will also track the amount of fat, protein, and carbs I consume after I enter in my daily intake. I'm on a pretty aggressive lose 2l bs of fat a week plan that cut my calories down to about 1800 a day. Actually as long as I'm eating healthy its actually easy to stay under that count and stay full all day. It feels like I'm eating so much more than normal, only its all healthy food. I just need to have a rigorous discipline to enter in all the foods.

Now for confession time. I had fried flautas for dinner last night. I need to be careful of eating a meal like that because I have avoided fried foods and flour products for the past 3 weeks and it can give me a tummy ache after eating such a meal. I made sure that I hydrated as much as I could last night. When I got home I had a Macadamia nut cluster and a small piece of toffee before bed. Bad Donnie. Bad Donnie. I'll tell you what though, when I used to binge it would have been a lot worse than that; so I'm getting better. I just want you to know that we all make mistakes but we can strengthen our discipline talk about it together and move on. I will be in the best shape of my life starting this year and it will be a life long commitment. Not just for swimsuit season. Hello, I live in LA. Its almost always swimsuit season. :)