Week 1, Day 7

Last night, I set my alarm for this morning because I felt the urgency to go swim. This morning, when my alarm went off, I turned it off and made the decision to let my muscles rest. My concern that I will not go back after a break has gone away and tomorrow morning can't come fast enough! I am so anxious to get back in the water. Come Wednesday, I'll have something to give me a little bit of help in the kicking department. I had some of these when I swam with my team, but they ripped.

These are called, "zoomers". They really do help strengthen your legs while giving you some extra speed. This will help me a ton since I am primarily upper body strength. My old ones were blue. I much prefer blue over the yellow. Can you say, "quack, quack!" Yes, I do believe I will look like a duck in these. Thankfully, you only wear them in the water :)

During my day off today, I decided to go ahead and drink a protein smoothie. I wasn't sure whether to drink one on work-out days or not, but I think I can plan to use this as a meal replacement. When I previously figured calorie content for my smoothie, I had forgotten to include the calorie count for the banana. With the banana, my smoothies are about 300 calories. Previously, I calculated that my smoothies were only 172 calories and was concerned that wouldn't be enough for a meal replacement. Not so worried now :) And honestly, I'm not quite sure how to figure how many calories I should have per day in order to lose weight. It would be nice to meet with a nutritionist or at least talk to someone who knows.

So, the above are my smoothie ingredients and here is my recipe:
8oz almond milk
1 scoop of protein powder (contains 18g of protein...not a lot, but it will do)
1 tbsp of powdered peanut butter
1 banana
1 cup of ice

I need to find other smoothie recipes. I do have a couple of other flavors of protein powders (vanilla and strawberry) and some frozen fruit I could add. Truly, I need a better blender eventually. Not sure the one I have will survive daily use; it's already sounding a little rough.

My jeans fit a bit better today. Pretty excited about that! Small victories. They would have fit better if I had made better food choices this week, but next week is when I integrate the better food choices. Baby steps.

Time to finish packing my bag for tomorrow morning, get the kids in bed, and crash.