UPDATE: Kill Your TV

In jumping on board with Whole 9's kill your tv challenge, the hubs and I are on day 11 of life without the tube. I have to admit the temptation to plop on the couch last night to catch my faves (Glee, Parenthood, and Biggest Loser) was tough. But I resisted! Instead, I emailed a few friends, called my mom, worked on my goals, and read a magazine. So productive. I love it!

So in the past eleven days, here are some of the things I have had the time to do...

Improved Training Performance

• Catch up on some training & programming articles (gotta ramp up my "Beast Mode", ha!)
• Practice some yoga with the Lululemon G-Team
• Write out my personal, career, and health goals, and having time to actually reflect on them…(will do a post on this soon!)

Improved Sleep

• Lights out by 10pm. Not in bed with the TV on. I can imagine plenty of you out there, who like us, would "go to bed" at 10, only to find out you can't fall asleep until almost 11. That kind of time adds up in a hurry.
• Finished Hunger Games Trilogy (so good!) and now on to Water for Elephants
• Soak in a hot bath, which has to be the perfect way to end a long day
• Develop a pre-bed routine - wash face while the hubs makes tea, take a couple melatonin, and then read till I feel that comforting wave of sleep

Improved My Nutrition

• Prep and cook food for the week - Sunday is officially grocery shopping and food prep day. The hubs and I plan a week full of meals and we will shop and prep accordingly. When the TV is not providing noise in the background, it's amazing how much more efficient we are. (Especially the Hubs, whose brain is far too absorbent when it comes to random sports factoids.) I can't emphasize enough, how much easier the rest of the week is if we spend just an this hour or two in the kitchen!
• Try a new recipe - Paleo lasagna with grassfed ground beef - nom nom!
• Read Everyday Paleo's new recipe book (I liked it so much I actually ordered it twice! So happy Mother's Day Mom! This will for sure help with your Whole 30) - can't wait to try all her recipes!
  

Improved Family Time

• Call my parents and see how they are doing on their Whole 30 (started on May1)
• Cook dinner with the Hubs - This has been one of the most rewarding benefits of turning off the TV and spending time creating meals together. We've learned that all those meals previously spent hunched over on the couch was selling our time together short. Not to mention, the dining room table is enjoying being used rather than as a place to store mail.
• Took a walk after dinner - the weather is so nice in Houston lately, so we are going to enjoy it as much as we can before the summer heat comes bearing down...eesh!
• Plan our vaca to Chicago in 9 days!!!!!

Improved Me

• Went to Tuesday night bible study
• Wrote this blog post :)

All of things I love doing. I love spending time with family, reading a good book, or cooking up a new recipe. But I will unconsciously push these things aside all too often during the week so that I can watch TV.

So what are you pushing aside? How much time do you really spend watching TV? You can never know how something affects you (whether its food, drink, or a habit) until you go a period of time without it. 

Kill your TV...Day 2

So after a little internal debate with myself and some encouragement from the hubs, we have decided to take on Whole9's 30-day Challenge to "Kill Your TV".

At first I thought to myself, 'this is so silly, I don't need to do this, I hardly ever watch TV anyways'. Then over the weekend I began to be more consciously aware of when I turned the TV on and what I was doing. I surprised myself and I'm here to say I have some bad habits when it comes to watching TV. 

I found that as soon as I walk in the door, I will turn the TV on just as if I'm turning on the lights in a room. Its like a I felt the 'need' to have that constant background noise, regardless of whether or not I was tuned in to what they were saying. I also noticed that my hubs and I had developed a nasty habit of eating dinner on the couch, with the coffee table pulled up, and the TV turned to sports center of food network. Shame! We were totally bypassing an opportunity to connect with one another, catch up on our day, and ENJOY the delicious paleo meals we were cooking up. Instead we were completely zoning out in front of the TV, and more often then not, I would finish dinner well before the Hubs and quickly fire up the laptop to begin my head-spinning web browsing multi-tasking. I will then proceed to spend the rest of the evening, browsing the web, online shopping, catching up on blogs, emailing, texting on my phone, and watching 'Chopped' on Food Network until we shuffle off to bed around 10. So while we are getting to bed at a decent time, there are at least two hours of my day that I spend zoned out to mindless entertainment.

Those are the hours I could spend doing something productive, fun, enriching or restorative. I'm constantly complaining about how busy I am with my heavy work schedule and commitment to training and cooking, yet I throw away these precious hours every night!

So this month, every night, I'm going to reclaim those hours of my life!! Each night I'm going to do one thing from Whole 9's list of 174,203 things you can do with your life instead of watching TV.

1. Improve Your Training Performance

2. Improve Your Sleep

3. Improve Your Nutrition

4. Improve Your Family Time

5. Improve Your Household

6. Improve Your Fun and Play

7. Improve YOU

Lift Heavy Things

STRENGTH:  Deadlift: 5-5-5-5
I love lifting heavy things! Its so empowering to step up to a loaded bar, set your position, and power the weight up. So I was really excited to see this WOD post Wednesday night and couldn't wait to to start off my Thursday morning with some heavy deadlifts. The sets went really well, warmed up at 95lb and added 20lb each set. I was really surpriesed to count of the lb's on my final set, because to tell you the truth I had lost count of how much weight I was adding. Lately I have hit a mental block in my deadlift. Basically I will see that I have 155lb on the bar and I will mentally in my head already decide how hard or heavy the set will be.  So this morning I decided to just keep working through the sets, and so long as I continued to move the bar with good speed, I would add weight. Before this morning, 5 reps of 155lb would have taken a toll on me. But this morning, I lifted 5 reps of 175lb with great speed and form!

WOD:
AMRAP in 6 minutes:
3 HSPU
6 Front Squat (95)

I got 7 full rounds in

AFTER PARTY:
Tabata Planks