Zumba rantings and daily challenges

I've been feeling pretty tired today.  After getting in over 20,000 steps the past three days I'm about ready to crash.  However, it's almost 6pm and I have in over 15,000 steps today so I definitely didn't slack.  This morning I took Chloe to the doctor and she had to get her final shot.  I always feel terrible when the kids get shots, like I betrayed them.  She was all happy and smiling and playing with the nurse and giggling and had no idea what was coming.  Then the "mommy! I got owie!" Kills me every time. 

I had a pretty hectic time around lunch time getting everyone's lunch prepared.  I was making myself a green smoothie with peaches, bananas, spinach, and almond milk out of my blendtec cookbook.  It was ok, but definitely needed some extra flavor.  I opted for splenda.  I really like the smoothies with pineapple in them because pineapple seems to pack a punch.  While I was making my smoothie I was also making mac and cheese for the kids.  I mentioned in my last post that I bought some healthier mac and cheese for them at Costco and this package had white cheddar mac and cheese in it.  Lily was ecstatic to try it and has been begging to make it since we bought it two days ago.  She cracked me up when we were making it because she kept jumping up and down shouting "this is amazing!" We totally blew her mind today.

While I was busying myself with that, Matt decided to make an appearance from the basement and proclaimed "I have to leave now!  I was unexpectedly bombarded with phone calls, what can I eat for lunch?"  He decided to have leftovers which I heated up for him while he scrambled to go.  Then while he was eating "Can you pack me a PB and Honey sandwich for dinner since I'm coming home late?"  So all at the same time I was: making a green smoothie, making mac and cheese with two kids on chairs staring at the boiling pot of water trying to make sure they didn't burn themselves, heating up leftovers, and making a sandwich.  *phew*  all in a days work (or more accurately all in an hour's work but that's not the correct phrase ;-)

Anyway, after the chaos of lunch, I put Chloe down for a nap, before I finished drinking my smoothie I might add, and then decided to play Zumba.  Smoothie down, greens ingested and Zumba world party on!  I love all the songs that I've played on Zumba world party, well except for one but I'm going to give that one another shot.  I have to play each song at least three times before I decide I hate it.  I tried a song today called "put the gun down" that I had played a while ago at my sister's house and I remember not liking it very much but today I loved it!  I customized my own playlist today and added in several songs I had never played before. 

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There are only two things I don't like about the game but they are pretty minor.  First the songs are pretty short, maybe 2- 21/2 minutes and I'm used to dancing to songs that are about 3 1/2 minutes long, but that is pretty minor and only causes minor annoyance (because I feel like I switch songs so much during my workout and it's always going to the next song.  This could cause some more distress if you do the quick play and choose one song at a time as you won't get as many songs in a workout due to having to reload the song screen after each song plays, it adds a lot of extra waiting time, but I don't play quick play hardly ever so it doesn't bother me.)  Second, the custom playlist is only 10 songs long.  Due to the short song time 10 songs makes about 30 minutes worth of exercise.  The easy way to get around this is to make multiple custom playlists which is a great feature.  So I just made two 10 song playlists to get in my hour of Zumba today.  Since I tend to change my playlist every single time I play, making and saving two playlists does add a little bit of extra time to the beginning of my workout before I can actually start exercising, but again, minor annoyance. 

Overall I just love Zumba World Party and I will play it over and over and over and over again.  The songs are absolutely great, classic Zumba songs and I love the moves, I love that you can play songs by category (Caribbean, Europe, Brazil, etc) and you can create your own playlists (my personal favorite), there are a lot of pre made workouts for you too which I Like to do when I don't know what any of the songs are.  So I usually play those for the first 3-4 times and then custom make my lists from there on out.  They also have some neat videos that you can unlock adding to the "game" element and those are fun.  They have the Zumba dancers talking about the different dances they perform and you get to go behind the scenes of the making of the game.  You also get points every time you do a song so you can level up also adding to the whole game feeling.  I also love that as you play you can trigger more people to appear on the screen, and then as you continue you get a third level with more dancers and neon lights and swirls and all sorts of fun stuff to appear.  It makes it much more fun to look at and gives you some incentive to dance a little harder.  I really can't say enough good things about this game, it's totally my new favorite and I always look forward to playing it.

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I have to say it is nice to look forward to working out again instead of dreading it.  When I started going to body pump and body attack and all the extra stuff that was really hard that I was doing I was making me not want to go to the gym and making me stress out and when I stress out I eat, and so I was doing a lot of stress eating.  I was definitely sabotaging myself with food, and usually in the afternoons.  I'm feeling really good right now.  Today I wanted to make popcorn because it was snowy outside and we were watching movies and I just really wanted to make popcorn popped in coconut oil, slathered in butter: (3 tbsp butter= 300 calories, 2 tbsp coconut oil=200 calories 1/2 cup popcorn kernels popped= (still haven't quite figured this one out yet) but I think it's around 200 calories.  For a grand total of about 700 calories). Yum yum.  But remarkably I resisted, and instead I decided to treat myself to one of my low fat frozen yogurt with honey and caramel bars that I have in the freezer: 90 calories.  Afterwards I didn't have any desire for popcorn.  Sore one for me!  I saved myself about 600 calories wahoo!  So I'm feeling pretty good about that tonight, albeit very tired and I just want to put the kids to bed and then go to bed myself, but I am happy with how the day turned out.