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The weekend before last, while I was spending a lot of time with my family, my brother (who is wonderful in many, many ways) disappeared and came back bearing a set of very pretty shiny chrome dumbbells.



So now I can claim to have a home gym! I’m planning to follow routine 1 of Krista’s “All Dumbbells! All the Time!” programme. I have to work a bit on learning the lower-body exercises, though, as I’m used to doing those with a barbell. Learning is good. After all, eighteen months ago I hadn’t done anything with free weights, ever.

I had a kind of finding-my-limits workout with them straight away, and although nothing hurt at the time, my right bicep ached so much the next day that I had difficulty straightening my arm. However, it wore off, and since then I’ve managed not to hurt at all, even a tiny bit, and to work back up to the same amount of weight. I don’t know why it hurt. Maybe my arms were just protesting for the sake of it.

J and I have been having an interesting time, diet-wise. He has been on medication recently which has the side-effect of making him crave sweet foods, and I kept coming home to find him saying guiltily that he’d eaten all the cereal, or worse, the ice cream. He didn’t like this and is convinced he’s gained lots of weight*, something (one of the many things) he continually worries about.

We had made sporadic attempts to rid the house of trigger foods (such as cereal) but this tended just to shift the problem on to something else. So we bit the bullet and got rid of EVERYTHING that comes under the heading of snackable complex carbs. Essentially we’re both going to do a low-GI diet until his side-effects wear off (he’s now off the medication, thank goodness).

I’ve actually been doing this for a while out of sheer laziness. The local supermarket’s cottage cheese comes in tubs that are just the right size for lunch, and if it’s a choice between making a sandwich and grabbing a tub out of the fridge… I take a packet of soup as well, and the office provides fruit (something I will miss when I stop working there, I can tell you). So that’s lunch sorted.

I must start running again now the days are getting longer. Somehow my motivation is just not there, though. J is just getting back into running again: he ran two miles in 24 minutes this evening, and was gloomy because he used to be able to do it much faster when he was in training. I told him my best time for 1 mile is 11 minutes (which is true), so I would cheer him up by coming with him and being slower than he is. I hope he’s going to hold me to this.

Meanwhile, over at my Livejournal, there’s a food meme if you like that sort of thing, grabbed from Jeni. Bear in mind that if the question asks what I like, it isn’t necessarily what I’d consider a healthy choice…

*This is for J values of "a lot of weight". We're not talking anything visible to the naked eye, and I have told him so. But it's his body, poor boy. And if he wants to get fit, I'm not going to discourage this.