Stairs. Oh How I Hate Stairs.

I work in an office building, on the 7th floor. Good view, but that's a lot of stairs to climb. In fact, I rarely ever take the stairs. In the past 5 years, I may have climbed them 10 times. Each story is 22 steps, and they're tall steps.

This January, it seems that everyone in my office is on some sort of diet or exercise plan, and a couple of them were doing the stairs twice a day. I thought it was a good idea, but I didn't want to share my wheezing discomfort with my office mates. Besides, I said I was taking things slowly.

But I'd been re-reading the Primal Blueprint and thought I was done with excuses. So I started climbing the stairs. Just once a day, and just by myself. No one else to see how red faced I was getting.

You know what I discovered? It's not that bad. Yeah, I'm out of breath. But I just go slowly. I figure I'm still burning calories, whether I sprint or plod. So for the past week, I've plodded up the stairs at least once a day.

The last couple of days, I've been thinking about sprint workouts. Seems good in my head, but I've never been able to get up the gumption after 22-month old Groksy goes to bed to do anything strenuous. Today, I decided to change that.

I sprinted up the stairs.

Okay, maybe I only made it up three flights before my legs got too rubbery to go on. But I plodded my way up another four flights, then forced myself to sprint two more flights. By this point, I had to actually stop and catch my breath before I plodded the remainder of the way to the top.

You know what I learned?

The trip goes a lot faster when you sprint, even if you take time out to rest. You're not thinking about each individual stair, but whether or not your rubbery legs will make the rise or if you'll fall flat on your face.

And two, I actually felt kind of exhilarated. Yeah, I was sucking wind and my legs were rubbery, but my mind was happy. I'll have to try it again tomorrow. Small steps, but it's a start.

The Take Away: Don't just walk up the stairs. Sprint up a couple of those flights.

Recipe for a Primal Pizza

I got this from This Primal Life.

I tried it and it was really good. Not only that, my husband and my picky 22-month old toddler loved it too. So it gets three thumbs up and a place in my tried-and-true recipe folder.

I did make some changes. I didn't have almond flour, and I'm still avoiding giving my toddler nuts. Instead, I mixed in coconut flour. I could detect a coconut smell in the dough, and I was worried because Mr. Grok doesn't like coconut. But when the crust was baking, it smelled more like the Parmesan cheese than coconut.

We also had to bake it a lot longer than the original recipe called for. Not sure why. I cooked it 15 minutes, then flipped it onto a baking sheet. Then it had to bake almost 20 minutes more, checking it every 5 minutes.

For toppings, we were almost out of pepperoni, so Mr. Grok claimed what was left. I made a veggie topping out of sauteed onions, red peppers and mushrooms.

We cut it into 8ths, and I had 3 big slices, and it more than filled me up. A salad would go well with it, but as a former vegetable hater, I thought I had a decent amount of veggies as it was.

In The Beginning

What am I?

I could start with the easy stuff. I'm a woman, 42 years old, a mother of a toddler, a happily married wife, a professional engineer, a non-native Texan, a jill-of-all-trades.

Or I could try something a bit more personal. I love reading and playing video games, I'm hooked on reality TV, I love chocolate and all things bready and sweet. I hate exercising. Put all that together, and you get a middle-aged mom who's chronically overweight and probably flirting with diabetes, if not cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome. Okay, I'll say it. As of this morning, I weighed 219 pounds, and I hate it.

I pretend it's not that bad, because hey, at one point, I weighed 265 pounds. But a couple years ago, I got down to 165, and now I'm back up. why? Probably because I didn't lose weight a very sustainable way. I did the Medifast plan, and it worked. It worked great. But I was always hungry, and toward the end, my hair started falling out. Eeek! So I tried to eat sensibly, limit my calories to 1200 a day and do some moderate exercise, including weight lifting, which is the only exercise I like.

But after a few months, the weight was up to 185, then 190. Then I got pregnant and everything went out the window. I tried so hard to eat carefully during the pregnancy, and did okay til the very end. The first year was so stressful, and I turned back to food to cope. I never did lose the baby weight and I added another 5 pounds on top of that.

I finally said enough is enough. I found Marks Daily Apple, and he made a lot of sense. I've always thought that we evolved a certain way for a reason, and the human body is a smart thing, independent of our brains. What Mark was saying passed my BS test, plus I've always been most comfortable eating on a low-carb diet. I've just never had the motivation to stick to it for more than a few months, especially when Christmas and the holiday baking season came around.

Now I've got a better reason for sticking to it. I don't want my little boy to grow up having a fat mommy, or having him watch me struggle with weight or get food issues from me. I have to fix this and soon!

Anyway, this is my personal place to detail my ups and downs, the struggles and successes, links to interesting articles, recipes and anything else primal that strikes my fancy. I've given myself a goal of 50 pounds in one year. So far, I've lost 7, so this is another place to be honest with myself.

I'm doing this blog for me, but if anyone else finds it, I hope they find something useful. Feel free to leave comments, and best of luck to anyone reading this. Especially me!