Bread making

Hello together ;)

I just read some aritcles and thought I drop some lines here. As I wrote in the last post I'm quite busy getting in shape. One thing that I haven't figured out jet is the nutrition part. Your probably irritated by that but it's the truth. I don't know which of the many opinions is the one that suits for me and my lifestyle. I already tried a lot but I'm still not lean and my passion for chocolate is slowing down the overall progress.
I tried to go low carb but it love pasta, bread, and ohh cake, and cookies and,.......
Speaking of bread, I recently found a great ted talk about bread I'd like to share:



:) I especially love the relation between bread and beer. For the upcoming week I'll try to eat as clean as possible until Saturday and then I'll celebrate my cheat day and eat as much chocolate as I want to.

About the season or where is snow when you need it the most.....

The past weeks had been so incredible fast, insane, and awesome that I forgot about my cute little blog :(. After our holidays in Italy I jumped back on work, studying, teaching and exercising. Luckily I taught most of my classes by now and the general background noise (called work) will soften by the end of next week.
I still cannot believe that I haven’t used my snowboard for more than 3 weeks know. It’s a strange feeling. For the first time in my life I don’t like to switch to the summer season. I guess that’s passion. Hopefully we will go snowboarding once more before as a season closing weekend.
Here is a picture from our last day in Italy. We made some videos as well but I haven’t had the time to load up the good and the worst ones. Stay tuned I will definitively post some.

Let’s talk a bit about the insane part of the past weeks. In January I started to change my habits a bit. I stopped eating at the companies restaurant and started to climb (well crawl up) the stairs to my office. I also started to swim for an hour every week. I was desperate to get back in shape and I also considered it a wake-up call. During the NLP seminar I figured out that also I wanted to be slim I never worked towards this goal with emphasis. It was just a goal but not the goal. Somehow I wanted change but I didn’t want to do much for it.
One of my NLP course mates told me about a program called Insanity where you can have rocking results in only 60 days. I thought that’s hinky US marketing stuff. Being desperate enough I took a look and gave it a try. Here is an infomercial for you:


I’m in week three now and boy I was wrong with most of my assumptions on fitness and the program in general. It really is insane and it really is not for everybody. At the beginning I was struggling through the warm up.
Result wise I’m quite satisfied, I do shape up.

Even though I like the workouts, doing them is not as much fun as snowboarding. Especially now with all the stuff going on I miss the opportunity to leave everything behind me by taking a good ride in the snow.

So apparently I’m stuck for the next six month. I researched a bit about carpet snowboarding but I don’t think that it is an alternative but who knows.

Take care.
Christina

User Experience Design

Good morning everyone.

I often find it difficult to explain my day job. So I was exited when I found this clip to visiulize what I'm doing most of the time. Enjoy the clip:


CU
Christina

Key factors for success

As you might have guessed from the previous posts I'm really into motivation, nutrition, mental training, and coaching right now.
One possibility to get successful in a specific area is to find a model and to learn as much as possible from your model.  A while ago I googled something like "training methods Shaun White" because I wanted to figure out how he learned all the tricks etc. Unfortunately, there was not so much about training routines but I found a really inspiring interview. I guess it's a bit older but the amazing thing is that you can find so much wisdom in interviews if you read them carefully.
So here is a part of the article I want you to take a look at:

We don’t see you bail often, but you did manage to smack your head pretty nicely at the X-Games this year. How do you keep yourself out of the hospital?


A lot of it is just riding within your own limits. You try to push yourself, but if you step to something you’re not ready for... Something I learned when I was really young was to fully commit. When I was 8 or 9, I’d see so many kids who’d want to learn a backflip at the Mt. Hood Summer Camp in Oregon. And every single one would panic as soon as they got up in the air, stop rotating and land on their heads.


And that motivated you to smack your head too?


I just realized at that point that if they’d fully committed, they would have been way better off landing on their butts or their backs than upside down. Ever since then, I’ve never gone into a trick without fully committing to it.

The second I read this I knew why I ended up riding against an obstacle two years ago instead of over it. I wasn't committed enough to just do it but I was too interested to just watch the others. Fear bet excitement  and I ended up with some bruises. I'll try to take the obstacle this season and this time I'll make sure that I'm committed for two reasons: first I don't really like bruises and second I just don't like things to be unfinished. Let's get back to commitment in general.
During my time at the university I learned a lot about motivation and success factors both individual ones and those for enterprises. You also heard about commitment being on of the key factors but did this knowledge helped you to get better in anything? Chances are hight that it didn't.
I often searched and willingly accepted other excuses reasons for not hitting the highest score or for not achieving my goals.
When I started thinking about my commitments I figured out that in some areas e.g. nutrition and exercise I functioned on autopilot most of the time. Only when I was close to hit the limits I set myself I started to work out panically.
To be honest it never worked, I intended to finalize my shape last year but got carried away further than I wanted to. I just wasn't committed to my own goal.
Since really getting in shape has been a goal for years now (and I think it is a life long goal for most women) I committed myself to it and somehow everything starts to get easier now.
I'm longing for the summer season to show the results I got :).

Just try it for one tiny aspect of your life commit yourself to have a clean desk or a gorgeous kitchen. Accept that excuses are not allowed and make sure this is a top priority in your life (that even means to stand up earlier to take action).

Take care
Christina

Get Off Your Arse and Lose Weight

This book is completely different from all the books I ever read. It is written in a straight talking way and the none-sense free approach is an alleviation  to my frayed nerves. 

There are just too many people believing that one day a miracle will happen and all their issues in live will be solved at once.

So the big question is: why are we the way we are? When it comes to weight and health Steve Miller's answer is because we are lazy lard asses who are not eating what we should and who do not exercise as much as we should.

I really appreciated the way he tackles people who have an excuse for everything. Everybody knows one or more of these people who act that way. Here's a question to think about: can you stand them? Have you ever been inspired by one of these whiners?

Here are my top 5 excuses and I always have to focus on something else to stay the polite person I want to be:

1. I am too busy to exercise - really? That's hard to believe the proper way to express what these people have in mind is "I'm too comfortable with everything and I really don't want to change that because I know that that could be tough. I also might be forced to admit that the way I lived was not a healthy one."
2. I have this and that condition (fill in what ever organ you like) - okay that excludes you from a healthy lifestyle? I don't think so. I know people who are really sick and they are capable of maintaining a decent diet and recreational activities although they are challenged. So think again.
3. Eating X once in a while is okay because I don't do it regularly. - Right but consider all the X's you can possibly think about.  Many people have way too many of them and altogether they consume at least one of the X candidates per day.
4. First I have to solve ... (fill in whatever you want, the ones I like most are medical conditions, jobs, and other assignment) - The problem is that new things to be solved will bubble up as soon as you solved the existing one. That will prevent you from achieving your goals even before you started. If that's your favorite excuse, I'm really sorry for you.
5. I rather enjoy food than eating salad all day. - I'm speechless. Yeah, go ahead, do whatever you want and leave me alone.

The saying I particularly like is: "If you do not perform in any part of your life as you want to, there is something you don't know yet."

Although the essentials of the book are not very new to me, the way it was written helped me to ban even the smallest excuses I have regarding my eating habits and exercises. I'll try some ideas from the book and combine them with other knowledge I recently gained.

Thank you Steve for broadening my view.

There will be no advice from me today. Enjoy life, as it is, if you like the way it is. If you enjoy excuses and nourishing new ones, feel free to do so but don't ask me to except them :)

Take Care

Christina

Studies on the brain obesity

Here is a wakeup call. Some days ago a read some articles about brain inflammation and obesity. You might think right now: "Come on girl you are not obese, maybe a little bit too chubby but definitively not obese. So why shout you care". To be honest I care because it scares hell out of me. Two years ago I found out that belly fat increases the risk of diabetes. Although using fear as a motivator isn't the best idea, I shed some kilos and never gained them back. 
Let's get back to the original story. Scientists figured out that obese people have a constant inflammation in their brains. That doesn't mean that obese people are less intelligent than others but the inflammation affects areas of the brain that are responsible for self-control.
Isn't that interesting? 
I always thought that self-control, motivation, vision, and the right choice of food are the ingredients for a healthy lifestyle. Well, it seems that self-control might be something that's not equally distributed among all people. Thus what are we going to do with this piece of information? In my case I'm going to put it on the "things I don't want to have in my life list". The list is not very long because I usually focus on things I want to have in my life more than the opposite site. 
In case you do have a hard time to control yourself in terms of food or exercise, I can recommend you to use the other factors :). To have ha vision is vital; you need to know where you want to be before you get started otherwise it will be hard.
For 2011 I want to regain physical fitness. So I pictured my future self to be fit by no means and I figured out what I could do during the day. Also I knew that walking stairs is beneficial, I always avoided them as much as possible. Now I’m giving it a try and I do walk the stares to my office (9 floors) at least once during the day. Believe me small things can have a huge impact.

Procrastination

Irony of studying psychology. I need to read texts about procrastination which are so boring that I rather procrastinate than reading them. :)