intervals, birthday cake, and 4 month update

There's a lot swimming around in this head of mine right now, but for now I have three things I am excited to share with you all!

1) Intervals... I have been reading about training / working out using intervals, and Michael has definitely used intervals in my workouts before, but typically when I work out on my own, I go for the old stand by of working out (on the treadmill or elliptical) at a decent pace for a long period of time. Yesterday, I decided to try intervals on my own. According to my reading, there are all kinds of advantages to intense interval training as opposed to longer, less intense training, but yesterday the one that I most was thinking of was that you're in and out faster, and I only had a brief time frame to work out in! Here's the gist of it... after a brief warm up, I set the elliptical on a level of 3 (to begin) and booked it as hard & fast as I could for one minute. One minute... anyone can do that, right? I got up to 13 mph for a little bit! The point is to be pretty much exhausted after one minute (& trust me, I was!). Then you bring the pace down and keep moving, but not super fast for 2 minutes. Then... you go again, for 8-10 rounds (at least that's what this article said). I had 30 minutes, so I did 10 rounds. I switched up the intensity sometimes during the sprint, to make things a little harder/different. Oh my gosh. I was dead after those 30 minutes! Much more dead than after an hour of less intensity. I'll definitely be doing this more often. I'm always looking for ways to change up my workout. Any suggestions??

2) Birthday cake... Last night was a friend's birthday party. They went to a restaurant for dinner that has very little healthy choices, so though I love my friends, I decided not to go. Besides, I was still recovering from the intervals! I also knew they were going to hang out after dinner, so I decided to catch up with them post dinner. But... I knew there was going to be cake there. And Costco cake at that. I'm not really a cake fan, but for some reason, I love Costco cake. I knew today was weigh in day, and didn't want to do anything to jeopardize that, so... I took some time to make myself look as nice as I could... nice enough at least that I felt awesome. hehe ;) The way I figured, if I feel like I look great, I'm not going to want to eat the cake that helps me look not so great. And? It worked! I was surprised with not just cake, but ice cream! My biggest temptation. But... I looked good... and I didn't even care about the cake OR the ice cream. Love it!

3) 4 month update... It was September 15th that I weighed in and decided to never ever see that number again. Today is January 15th... I lost 4 pounds this month, bringing the total to 20 pounds! (As for the 30x30 challenge, I'll update on that at the end of the month.) I picked up Cadey's 20 pound bag of dog food today and thought, "dang... that's how much of me is gone!" GONE!