Screw Your C-

Posted on by travelingmarla
hoarding doing the right thing decisions fitness relationships
(This is the honey I’m using right now. My favorite is raw honey still in the comb. It’s more expensive but worth it. My dad kept bees and I couldn’t wait for special times when we got the honey AND comb together.)

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I can’t move my legs this morning, but I’m still hopping mad.

Okay, not so much mad as disappointed. I used one of these recipe calculator sites and it counted my ingredient, raw honey, as a C-. I’ve been trying several recipe counters, and honey always comes up as a negative item.

Overall, the site gave my morning shake an A-, and I can feel every day how great it makes me feel and how satisfied I am in fullness, energy, etc. And really, I’m not worked up over the rating of the honey, but just disappointed that after all these years of increased knowledge about raw food, specifically our knowledge of properties like enzymes, antioxidants, phytonutrients, so many things still aren’t considered in evaluating the benefits of a recipe on every recipe site I’ve found.

Show me one recipe calculator that doesn’t assign raw honey a negative value based solely on its sugar properties and I’ll show you my flying pig…

Sugar is the devil.

health shake protein fiber fruit yogurt honey coconut milk
(A (somewhat) outdated and narrow view of nutrition persists in recipe calculators. It’s time for something able to better look at the quality of ingredients from broader objectives.)

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Of course, but not all sugars are created equal. Give me a good dose of bee vomit any day over something processed, and “refined.” I mean, honestly, do you really see me and “refined” in the same room together?

Okay, so maybe it did get me a bit more worked up than I expected.

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Speaking of worked up…I worked out yesterday and kinda, sorta, definitely made a booboo on the leg press.

enter ingredients get recipe
(Kurt’s parents gave us steaks for our anniversary. I only eat red meat a few times a year. I just don’t digest it well. But I usually have it when they give us fancy steaks. One thing I love about the internet is when I can google the ingredients I have on hand and find a recipe to match.)

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My trainer didn’t show up (turns out he got our workout days mixed up) and I decided to train myself. I knew I wanted a legs day, since I only have 3 days in Coshocton this week I wanted to do Day 1: legs/back/abs, Day 2: arms/chest, Day 3: legs/back/abs

Of course, what I want really isn’t relevant when I have a trainer, because I pretty much let him do the figuring and assessment for me.  You might ask, if I have my own head on my own shoulders, why can’t I go ahead and train myself already? Well, maybe that will happen one day, but let me tell you why it can’t quite happen yet.

So Trainer Buttmunch (actually, I like the guy, but not showing up just pisses me off, considering I had confirmed January 2, 3, 4th at least 3 times with him) had not arrived and I decided to start working myself out.

I started with the leg press.

I knew he said we were around 100 pounds on the leg press, and I remember him putting 45 pound weights on either side..

See on this fancy leg press machine in Coshocton there are 3 bars poking out: two on the sides and one at the back. I always thought the two on the sides were where the weights go, and the one on the back was a storage bar for holding weights not in use.

overworking quad muscles leg press
(I thought that only the two weight holders on the sides were what counted as machine weight. I thought the endcap was just a storage feature. I. am. an. IDIOT.)

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So when I looked at the leg press machine, I saw there were a couple weights on the back bar, but thought it was storage. So I dutifully added my 45 pounds on each side and got to work.

My legs have always been pretty strong, but with my bad knee, I can’t just do everything that the rest of my legs would like to do. Sometimes I catch my left leg cheating and taking on the full weight so the bad right knee doesn’t have any pain. This, of course, is why it seems half the muscles in my right leg don’t even work anymore. They get a free ride from lefty.

But even with my strong lefty, I couldn’t make the press move.

Still, I figured it was because I had been working out at home and my legs just weren’t used to the press. So I pushed harder. I had to put my arms on my thighs and push with both my thighs and my arms to get the press fully extended, but I did it.  It really hurt, but I thought I was just really out of shape from not having good leg equipment at home. So I did three sets of 10. I could barely move it – my three sets were like maybe 6-8 inches each, but I was proud of doing them, despite the fact that my legs were screaming in pain and I had to use my arms to push my thighs to move the press to start each set.

I went on to other moves: squats, calves, etc., until trainer finally arrived and gave me a full workout. He looked at the leg press and determined I had just pressed like 290 pounds. Um… ?

So here I am this today, my left quad a tightly knotted, overworked mess, and my right knee as gimpy as ever. I joked with Trainer that now instead of a limp, I have a waddle, and he joked back about klunking me on the head to further remove pain from my knee.

You know, if you had shown me 290 pounds on that leg press and plunked me down on it, I would never have been able to push it. But THINKING that the weight was the same as it had always been, I managed to make myself do it. Granted, not without straining my quad and crying like a baby, but still…

Isn’t it amazing what the mind can do simply because it doesn’t know any different?

I know, I know. Much wiser people than me have been saying similar things about the power of the mind for centuries. (Probably the same people who would know better than to leg press 290 pounds when they are lucky to get 100.)

Still, can it really be a matter of mind…over matter?

Love, Marla

16 thoughts on “Screw Your C-”

    1. Hey, do you know blogger CultFit? He also uses maple syrup a lot. Not that it means you would know him, but, er, it just seemed like a nice little tie-in since you both mentioned maple syrup to me in the same day.

    1. I haven’t but I keep seeing it in stores more and more. Do you like it then?
      I know it’s natural, but is it also unprocessed? I’m working toward as little processing as possible. May even go raw for a month just to try to reset a few things.

      1. I switch between yummy raw honey, maple syrup and agave nectar. Honey and maple syrup more in baking and the nectar more as a sweeter in drinks etc. A little research goes a long way towards defining unprocessed. One product to look at is XAgave local co-ops and Whole Foods should have this (should).

        1. Thanks, I feel in learning overload lately, but I like when somebody introduces me to new things. I’ll definitely look for XAgave. You rock (as usual)!

          1. I seldom talk/discuss diet stuff online, we are all unique and diet talk requires a certain amount of face to face time.

    1. Yes, it’s my favorite, especially in the comb. One of these days I’ll take a picture of my pantry at home. Kurt says I am apparently the honey queen of America, and he doesn’t mean it in the way I like him to mean it.
      I finally found my first *bad*-tasting honey in the comb. Made me wonder if the bees are sick. I bought it from a local fella around Madison, Indiana and seriously I think those bees must not have a very good diet or something.

  4. Let’s trick our bodies into thinking that 2,000 calories meal is, like, 100. That’ll work, right? *sigh*

    Sucks about your leg press mishap, but kinda…kudos for pressing 290! =D

    1. I know, right? I keep trying to convince my body that I do not have bad arthritis in my right knee, but it doesn’t want to listen.
      Thanks on the leg press. It is kind of cool from the perspective that “Holy crap, I pressed 290!”

      1. My knees are crap too…as a matter of fact, my right knee is considerably worse than my left. I will blame you and your knees. Jerk. 😉

  5. Mind over matter? I’m going to say ‘yes’ – if your legs hadn’t minded, it wouldn’t have mattered. I guess the real matter is that you’d better mind them better next time! 😉

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