summer body – The Girl In The Orange

It’s a painful journey, this. It’s hardcore enough when you take it on the first time, but after bum knees have forced you to sit on the sidelines for 5 months? Getting your fitness groove back on is hard. Especially when you were getting really good pre-injury, and you remember how easily all these exercises used to come to you, before you stopped doing them all…it’s really enough to make you cry.

But “re-fitting” myself needs to be done, sometime. And “now” is always the best time to start those sometime-things.

SO. Because I like to plan things and because I like nice, neat little starting dates for all my antics, a while back I designated May to be the month of getting my badassery back. Selfishness aside, I want to look awesome in my Carnegie Hall dress at the end of the month. I want to look okay in my swimsuit during my Costa Rica vacation (!!) in June. I want to put in some good, hard, sweaty work I can be proud of–I have missed exercise SO MUCH.

In terms of exercise, I’d like to take my own advice and start following some of the tips in this post for working out with my knee issues. And putting into practice some of the moves from The Bum Knee Workout. I LOVE cardio, so it’s harder for me to work up the chutzpah to bust out a strength-training-session, but that needs to happen more often as well. I want to move more on a daily basis–this will include the more simple stuff like pacing during a phone call, taking a stroll outside with free time rather than surfing the glorious YouTube, indulging in little childhood things (like hopscotch and swinging and jumping rope and trampolining–because Spring has finally, finally hit here!). You know, as opposed to living on the internet. Though that’s fun, and by no means am I abandoning the blogosphere for any length of time.

I also want to make really-super-extra-sure I continue my physical therapy and put my focus into it, rather than just zoning and rotely doing leg-lifts. Though it keeps being pushed back, the tentative date for a running assessment and a reintroduction into the world of human propulsion is about 3 weeks from now.

And, of course…

This apple has little apple abs. It’s “hard”-“core” 😉 Get it..?

This graphic is from an older post on Sprint2theTable…yes, it’s older, but it’s exactly what I need right now. Healthy eating and regular exercising often go hand in hand for me–if I’m not consistently working out, for some whacked reason it makes more sense for me to overindulge and lounge around on the laptop popping dark chocolate into my mouth by the bar. (Somehow I’m not obese…) As I work to redefine my body, I also want to clear up my diet; for me, this will mean changes including:

amp up vegetable levels!

Yeah, I’m a vegetarian. Yeah, I eat reasonably healthy. But yeah, I NEED to bump up my veggie consumption! Come on, TGITO…girl cannot thrive on only one serving of the green stuff a day. I want to broaden my vegetable horizons, eat more salads (it’s summer now; yay! farmer’s market here I come!), and cook more veggie-centric dishes. I want to play with variety and spices.

no (processed) sugar except for weekly cheat

This is important for me, since I know that personally once I have some sugar it is all too easy to just stick my face in a bag of C&H and just snort the stuff. (Erm…not really…) Point is, it’s a slippery slope. I just want to make a point to avoid empty calories in my diet, that don’t really enrich my life beyond the taste experience.

replace refined grains w/ whole

‘Nuff said. Bye-bye, pasta, white tortillas, baguettes.

reduce grain consumption overall

I’d like to experiment with eating more on the paleo side (haha…paleo vegetarian, haha…); macronutrient-wise, at any rate. I want to see how I perform, feel, and look on a diet that’s higher in protein and fat; I’d like to gain muscle, and I feel like I listen to my natural satiety cues better with proteins and fats. Carbs are all too easy to overeat!

weekly meal prep so no “emergency” disasters

THIS is the BIGGIE, folks! I always tell myself I will get my week of meals prepped out on Sunday, and it is never so! Really, I’d like to develop a system that I actually carry out that would enable me a whole-grain source, lots of chopped-up veggies, some prepared protein sources, and some homemade frozen meals (e.g. soups, rice/quinoa dishes and the like) for when the time crunch gets really dastardly. I’m drawing my inspiration from here and here and fixin’ up a Pinterest board for weekly recipes and tips as well.

Behold, the official “May Shapeup” Button! ^^I am becoming a veritable HTML coding master. 😉 I’ll be Instagramming and Pinning my way through my moves and meals this month–if you’d like to join in, use the hashtag #mayshapeup on pins, instagrams, and tweets, and link up any “proof” posts with the button!