Health Benefits of Tea

In my ever continuing quest for health, I've found that there are many benefits to drinking tea.

My personal preference is southern sweet tea, but I do like green tea as well.

Southern Iced Tea.Com

This site has a lot of good info on the health benefits from anti-oxidants to different chemicals that can help.

Even though there are not as many health benefits to black tea, I still like it.  The white tea and oolong tea that the site describes, I have never tried, but I did order some to give it a taste.  White tea apparently has the most anti-oxidants and healthy stuff.

I'm imagining the flavor of the White to to be really light, I'm thinking the way green tea is different from black tea.   I'm excited to see!

Changing my approach

After reflecting on my past month and a half of exercise, I've decided to make some changes.

I'm thinking my cardio isn't being as helpful as I had thought.  Originally, I decided to run a mile and then increase my speed until I get to a 10 minute mile, then add in a second mile.  The problem with this is my heart rate gets up too high and I think I'm loosing fat burning potential.

The reason for the change is that my entire amount of weight loss at this point seems to be related to my caloric intake vs. any effort expended exercising???

So, my change is going to be doing 30 minutes at my target "fat burning" heart rate.  I did that this morning.  It was pretty easy as my heart rate was low enough that I never felt like I was pushing myself.  Also, I could have went longer.  At my target "fat burning" heart rate, I could probably walk for an hour at least.

That's my adjustment, I'll let any of you reading this know how that changes things.

Getting back to exercise!

Well after a week and a half of being sick, I have begun working out again! I mentioned in my last post how much a struggle this has always been for me in the past. This time, it's only a minor struggle that is made easier because I'm not overdoing it going back. I only ran on Wednesday and on Friday I ran and did a few weight exercises. I'm planning on being back to full exercised by this coming Wednesday. I was surprised that my running time stayed about the same, even though I'm still dealing with a minor cough. To me, this means I should be able to speed up when my cough goes away. I'm still shooting for 10 min mile before increasing my distance to 2 miles. The significantly important for me to keep this habit and lose weight. I did weigh myself on Wed and have lost about 7 lbs, The MyFitnessPal app is a serious help, combined with the exercise I only need to keep doing everything and my goals will be reached!

When Sickness Interrupts Your Workouts

For the last week I've been crazy sick and haven't been able to work out. This totally sucks. However, I was able to do my running this morning! Being sick, I didn't have to worry about caloric intake and didn't track anything. I'm down almost 7lbs since I began using the MyFitnessPal app and tracking my calories. In the past, when I was able to work out for more than a week straight, any kind of sickness or cold caused me to break the pattern and then I'd stop working out for months on end. The big breakthrough for me here is in getting back into my workout pattern ASAP. If I wait, I'll lose the habit. As I said, I did run today and it felt great. I'm exhausted, but I did it. I plan on adding back in my weight routine on Friday.