“Finnigan Begin Again” My Health, Diet, and Fitness Review of January 2019

My month of January can best be described by the old (reportedly Irish) children’s song “Michael Finnegan.”

“There was an old man named Michael Finn-egan,
He had whiskers on his chin-igan,
They fell out and grew back in-again,
Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin-again.”

In other words lots of stop/starts. The first part of January was strong. I exercised every day up to about the 10th and was logging my calories on “Myfitnesspal.com.” Each day I was under 1500 calories. I was still on the vegetarian thing although not vegan (I had cheese and eggs)  so pretty good, right?  Well, then we had a massive snowstorm and lost power and heat for four days. The house was too cold to stay in so we ended up in a motel three of the four nights. Many of my friends were also out of power so finding somewhere to stay let us with no inexpensive options. I had to put the motel charges on the credit card, and we ate out.

I really took all this hard, that and I may very well have a seasonal affective disorder because wintertime really brings out the melancholy in me. It makes me wish I lived in the Southern Hemisphere, and starting the new year in the summertime. But you roll with what you got. As I said in the post, I wrote a week or so about “Self Compassion” the real test of success isn’t how you behave when you do well, but rather how you act when you fail. So I am glad to say this week I have gotten back up again.

So I plan to start reposting weekly updates on the diet, exercising and how much weight I (hopefully) have lost. Also several of my friends have given me books that have inspired them to lose weight (a couple of them have done quite well. So starting February, I thought I would do a review of some of them. First off is the book “Bright Line Eating” by Susan Pierce Thompson Ph.D. My friend Sharyl has lost a lot of weight and credits this book for being a real inspiration. So what I plan to do is each week cover two chapters. (The first week the forward, Preface, Introduction and Chapter 1) When I make the post I want to recap what was covered in the book and any thoughts, or concerns I may have. Also, I would just LOVE to have feedback from others especially those who have read the book themselves.

For now, I will still be also posting bi-weekly updates on calories and exercise as well. But I may do the second one at the same time as I do the book update. I understand a book is merely a roadmap and I still have to walk the path, but if the ideas in the book inspire me, I will most certainly include them in my practice.

Here’s a picture of me holding the book. If you have already read this book and have an opinion either favorable or unfavorable, I’d love to hear from you. See you next week, the first health/fitness update will be Monday and the first book update will be Friday. Also, stick around if you love to travel I have the “50 states in 50 Days” series posts running daily.