Week 31 Recap: What Would Granny Have Done?

Eating Plan

What Would Granny Do?

Weight

This Week: -2.9

Total Loss: 28.9

Non-Scale Victory

Yesterday had the potential to be a bummer regarding exercise.  I had plans to do my normal, eight mile hilly loop on the bike in the morning.  But my seven year old wasn’t feeling well, so I stayed home with him while my wife and other son were out.  They returned shortly before we left for a friend’s birthday party.  Uh oh.  A party where there’d be tons of food and a missed opportunity to exercise. 

My epiphany?  Bike back from the party.  I wouldn’t want to gorge knowing a big ride was looming, and I’d get my exercise partially in place of a car ride.  Our friends live across the valley from us – 12.4 bike miles away, per Google Maps*.   It’s a twenty minute drive to their house, nearly half on the freeway, and I NEVER would have thought of biking that distance, even though 12 miles isn’t much, when you think of it.  Just a matter of perspective, I guess.  And fortunately, there’s a bike trail that covers a good stretch of that, with the rest accessible on bike friendly roads with wide shoulders. (I’m not confident enough to ride IN traffic.)

The hardest part of the ride was the hill out of the valley.  It was steep and given my weight, I had to get off and walk some.  Right then, I saw a pole with two obnoxious advertisements for hauling away “junk” on it, and I had to laugh.  I was hauling junk (all my extra pounds!) up the hill right now and I’d have called one of those numbers if they could really make it be gone!  Some day.

I made it in one hour and 20 minutes, five minutes longer than Google predicted. This might not be a big deal to many of you exercise mavens, but it’s an amazing shot in the arm for me. 

*Have you seen the bike setting in Google Maps “Get Directions”?  You MUST check it out if you bike! It shows trails, streets with bike lanes, etc. 

P.O.P. Update

The first round ends this Saturday night.  Woo Hoo!  Those of you who have been reading the blog know that I committed to trying 16 eating plans for two weeks each.  Not all have been a success.  Round two is just the eight most effective plans.   I can’t wait!

What I Learned This Week

It’s a lot harder to emulate Granny than I thought it would be.  Here’s a nugget I neglected to mention, not only did she never work outside the home after marrying, she never drove a car.  So when I was driving home after a long day, with some unresolved work issue on my mind, and I passed restaurant after restaurant offering a quick fix – cheap fat, sugar, and salt laden temptations that didn’t exist when she was in her prime – indeed “what would Granny do?” 

I entered the week thinking there were concrete answers, if I remembered hard enough.  And I spent the rest of the week pondering the literal interpretation vs. the figurative.  The truth, I believe, is in between.  Granny would have made good choices, even today, but she wouldn’t have been as thin and fit without the food culture of sixty years ago.

This week, I’ll try to make my food choices look a little more like 1950 (fresher, smaller, less processed), all the while asking “what would Granny have done now?”