My wife is awesome!

The title pretty much says it all, but I'll expound on that here. Over the past 6-7 months, she's been really watching how much she eats and getting a lot more exercise. Those are the 2 categories I'm focusing on for this post.

On the exercise front, I'm probably close to being in the best shape of my life. Yes, that's right, I said "I". As a result of Charleen getting more exercise, I've been getting more exercise. People who have been around me for a while have probably heard me say, "I miss Gym Class". Well, it's true. As soon as I hit college I started to notice that I just didn't have the endurance that I had in high school, and I realized that the main thing missing was my daily exercise from P.E. As college went on and I actually had to devote time to studies (read Jr and Sr projects) things got even worse. Then I started working...my exercise dropped down to zip.

Fast forward to 5 years later and I am now hitting the Y 3 times a week and riding my bike 1-3 times a week. I have my wife to thank for that. As most people know, having a partner to work out with can make all the difference in keeping you accountable and continuing to go. I don't know for certain, but I think in the past two months, I've skipped only 1 workout. The next scheduled day, I was right back at the Y with Charleen. So, for being my reason to go to the Y, even on days I don't really feel like it, she is awesome.

On to food! Charleen is awesome for a few reasons regarding food. First, she has been doing fantastic with watching what and how much she eats. We used to eat out quite a bit and when we didn't, we ate a lot of boxed dinners which are horrible for you. This leads me into number two which is that she is cooking most of our food. She's gotten (much to her surprise I think) to be quite the cook and has been experimenting with a lot more foods, but most of what we eat at home is now mostly made from scratch. Third, she's gotten me to start watching what I eat a bit more. I'm still at that point in my life where I'm not being told by a doctor to watch what I eat, but I'm sure in another 10 years or so, I'll be a bit more restricted on what I can and can't eat. Cholesterol/blood sugar issues run in the family so I may as well try to get a bit of a head start on eating a little healthier.

The biggest food category where I think she's awesome however; is in keeping track of what she eats. Forgive me. I'm going to ramble on just a little bit more. She's been using myfitnesspal.com for months now to keep track of her daily calories. Now, Charleen's a very organized person. There's an episode of Friends where Monica spends 8 hours putting together a binder with possible jobs for Chandler and he ends up picking the first one in the binder. He apologizes for making her waste her time and her response is, "you call 8 hours alone with my label maker wasted time?". That's Charleen. She likes organizing stuff so when she was being so organized about tracking her meals, I thought little of it. Well, I'm trying to do the opposite of Charleen with my weight. I'm extremely light for my height and I could probably stand to gain about 20 lbs, though I'd honestly probably be happy with just 10. Well, I've been doing some strength training and realizing the more I look into it that I probably don't eat enough to promote weight/muscle gain. So this weekend I took the plunge and had Charleen help me start tracking my food to see just how much I'm eating and how much I should be eating. Oh My God!!! I will say here that I'm not nearly as organized as Charleen, but holy crap is that a pain in the butt! I'm still not quite done with getting all of my stuff in for Saturday and today is Monday. So, very long story short. My wife is even more awesome for putting up with meticulously tracking the food she's been eating for the last several months.

Oh and for reaching (and passing) the 40 lbs lost mark. /cheer!!!

Nom Nom Nom

Pat and I bought a grill this weekend (with part of our B3 store credit). It's just a tiny one, like the kind you would take camping, but it's just for the two of us, and needs to fit in the apartment when we're not using it, so tiny is good for now.

Tonight we tried it out for the first time. It smelled SO good! I always love the smell of a grill -- even just the charcoal smelled good, before any food was added! -- but I think it smelled EXTRA good this time because I knew it was OUR grill, and we can now have yummy grilled stuff all summer long, any time we want. This time we cooked up some Andouille sausages. We plan to fire it up again this weekend for hot dogs.

I'm also looking forward to experimenting a bit, once we get the hang of using this little guy. A couple friends of ours brought shishkebabs to the 4th of July BBQ we went to (it was BYO meat) and they looked SOOOO good! I plan on looking into some good healthy recipes that use the grill, instead of just the standard burgers, brats, etc. (Of course, I know Pat's looking forward to that part of it!)

Feel free to share your favorite grill recipes so we have different ideas to try!