Trying not to overdo it

On Thursday nights, I have a late class at the university that doesn't let out until at least 9 p.m., sometimes later.  I know I can't go for a workout at the gym because they close at 10 p.m.  So, in the past, I have skipped exercise.  I know there's no hard and fast rule that says I have to do a workout every single day when losing weight, except I have been advised to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise daily from Kaiser to help with the pain in my legs.  Because I am trying my hardest to take good care of my body, I asked my friend at work that I walk with at lunch if she wouldn't mind if we walked longer today.  Usually we get in about one and a half to two miles each time we walk.  There are a lot of hills near our work, so it's generally never a straight path for us and it does get our hearts pumping.  I figured this way, if I can't get to the gym later on, I would have gotten in a longer than usual walk.  Every time I walk outdoors, I use MapMyWalk on my iPhone to track how far I've gone.  It tells me my speed and how many calories I've burned.  Even though it was a little chilly since it had been raining, here's the walk we did:

We ended up doing a 5K during our lunch break, which was awesome.  For those of you that know where I work, we turned left from the campus, went down the hill into the houses on the left, then turned around and went past the high school down to the Albertson's shopping center and the road behind it, went to the end and turned around to go back to the campus.  We went 3.3 miles with lots of heart-pumping hills and I burned 626 calories.  Yay me!   Then later in the day, I got a text from my professor saying that he was cancelling our class for tonight because he had food poisoning.  I was really sorry that he was experiencing that, but then I thought, Hooray, I don't have class tonight.  Yahoo!!  I just get so tired with leaving house each day by 6:45 a.m. and not getting home sometimes until late, especially when I haven't been sleeping well.  In this case, on Thursdays, I generally don't walk in the door until 9:30 p.m.  That's a looong day.  Then I wondered if maybe I should to the gym if the class was cancelled.  But, I know me well enough and, if you've been reading my blog long enough, you know me well enough to know that I'm competitive and I would likely overdo it.  I probably would go to the gym and end up doing another 5K on the treadmill, as well as probably adding more machines.  The overexercising can be just as addictive as the overeating is.  There have been times in the past that I would spend a couple of hours at the gym and that's just not healthy behavior for me. Not only that, I do have significant leg pain all of the time and that might just be too much for me to take right now.  So, I came home and took a nappy poo ;-)

The thing that I am trying to learn in living a healthier life is that I must have balance.  If I go to an extreme with the exercise or obsessively counting calories to the point that I become too critical if I don't do enough or I do too much, then that's not good for me either.  Those are the very things that can cause me to pick up food I don't need to have.  Food has this way of soothing a moment or even making me forget what I'm doing.  There have been times that I've picked up food to eat before even realizing it how much I've eaten.  That's how cunning it can be.  Instead, I had another fantastic day with my food.  I have been tracking it using the Weight Watcher's e-tools to make sure I'm within my allowable points for the day and to be honest about what I'm eating.  I'm so grateful that I can end this day with no shame about what I had or the exercise I did.  In fact, I'm pretty proud of myself.  I've had times where I've gone to bed beating myself over the bad choices I made in the day or wanting to hide what I ate.  It's great to feel so clean.