Brrrrrrrrr!

I'm having a difficult time summoning any enthusiasm for cross country skiing this morning. The snow is lovely, just perfect in fact, but it is NINE FREAKIN' DEGREES OUT! Never mind that skiing always warms me up, just the idea of being out in it is daunting. It's cold enough INside the house, let alone OUTside.

The only "resolutions" I came up with this year were to practice yoga every other day, and walk on the days in between. My goal was (notice past tense - heh) to do one or the other every day and not substitute other activities for either. I haven't done too badly, but again, this cold weather is difficult to overcome. And now I have plantar fasciitis.

The good news is I found out that my weight problem may not be from eating too much, but from sleeping too little. Someone somewhere did a little study (and if I weren't so lazy, I would look up the facts here), asking a group of women to change nothing about their lifestyle except to get at least 7.5 hours of sleep a night. After six weeks, every one of those women lost weight, between 6 and 15 pounds, I think. I know I eat more when I am tired, so this makes perfect sense to me.

More good news (depending on how you look at it) is the discovery that the calorie counts on packaged foods and restaurant menus are frequently off, and are allowed to be off by up to 20%. (Again, too lazy to find the article, but it's online somewhere, so Google it, folks.) And the errors always seem to be calorie counts that are less than they are in reality. Why is this good news? It explains how I can count calories and still not lose weight. I'm drifting away from packaged foods and restaurant dining more and more these days, anyway, and now I have added reason to.

Hmm. It's 15 degrees now. I'm running out of excuses.