HYC: Week 26

Week 26!  Holy toledo - we're halfway through the year!

This past week was another good one.  I fulfilled my no-longer-a-secret goal of five days of activity (six if you count the time spent running around getting caught up on errands on Saturday).  I only hit the elliptical once for a whopping five minutes, but I'm trying to get in as many walks as possible before it gets too hot and humid for me to exercise outside.  I wasn't happy with my time on the elliptical, but as I mentioned last week, I was warned that my lack of endurance would be shocking.  The way I look at it, it will be easy to gauge improvement based on how much my time improves.  Chebbar hopped on it on Sunday; despite my warnings, he was highly disappointed by the fact that he was huffing and puffing a minute in, and had to step off after two minutes.  Just gives us something both to work toward, right?  :)

We put a diagonal line through the day on the calendar when we've walked, etc (purple for me, green for Chebbar so we don't get confused) as a visual of how many days we've been active in a month.  While he was striking through for yesterday's walk, he started counting and informed me that I had been active 17 of the past 28 days.  Do you know what my reaction was?  Betcha can guess...

"Is that ALL?!?"

*eye roll*  He pointed out that there were still two days left in this month, which would give me 19 out of 30. I started to think and do the math: two "rest" days per week times four weeks is eight days, or 22 days of activity.  Considering the weeks I've only done three days of activity, I'm not doing too badly!  So, yes, I redirected my mind and stopped being so damned negative.  ;)

My eating has been good, as well, with all but one day showing at least a small deficit on Lose It.  Being able to see how my nutrients break down on Lose It's website, I am shocked by the amount of sodium in EVERYTHING.  According to Lose It, there is sodium in tap water, for crying out loud.  Tap water!  O_O  I had no clue.  We don't add salt to anything (other than, say, french fries (baked in the oven, NOT fried, thank you veddy much)), but I guess my semi-reliance on convenience foods (if you consider the odd can of mushroom soup in a recipe a "convenience") contributes to the high amount of sodium in our diets.  It's absolutely frightening looking at the nutrition information on some of the recipes I've come across to see that the sodium in one serving is almost the same as the daily recommended amount.  That's nuts.  Looks like I'm going to have to start reading up and learning how to wean us of the convenience junk.

How do you attempt to control the amount of sodium in your diet?  What changes have you made to the way you prepare recipes to cut back on the sodium?  Any tips, tricks, or substitutions you could share?

I was recently asked to join a health/weight loss/fitness/maintenance group blog, No More Muffintop.  I was flabbergasted by the request because I'm not exactly a bastion of fitness, heh.  However, the cool thing about the blog is that everyone contributing is at different stages in his or her journey.  My intro post is up, so I hope you'll pop in over there and say hello!  (I will be continuing my HYC updates here.)