Ultimate Color Test

Your Colors Say You Are Quirky

When you are at peace, you are: Thoughtful and sensitive When you are moved to act, you are: Unorthodox and idealistic When you are inspired, you are: Spontaneous and adventurous When your life is perfectly balanced, you are: Totally in the moment Your life's purpose is: To find contentment

The Ultimate Color Test

Total Health & Fitness Update

I just realized that I hadn't been blogging my progress on my fitness plan that I'm doing with a professional nutritionist and health expert. His name's Porter Brinton. Awesome guy! Just a little background information:
At the beginning of the program I was 173.3 lbs and had a 34.8% body fat (that translates into 60.31 lbs of fat) and a lean body mass of 112.99 lbs. My health goal (that probably won't be reached 100% during the 12 week program) is getting to down to 130 lbs, 20% body fat/ 26 lbs of fat. Essentially I need to lose 43.3 lbs., 14.8% body fat, and 34.4 lbs of fat.

Anyway... here's a four week late update:

Week 2 (we weigh in at the end of the week - give or take a few days)
I didn't loose any weight on the scale (still 168.2 lbs) but I lost 1.5%/2.5 lbs body fat while gaining 2.5 lbs of muscle. Hence why I didn't change numbers on the scale (+2.5 + -2.5= net loss of 0)

Current stats: 168.2 lbs, 31.8% body fat, 53.5 lbs total fat mass, 114.7 lbs lean body mass.
Still to go: 38.5 lbs, 11.8% and 27.71 lbs


Week 3:
I was a little nervous about this weigh in since I didn't technically loose any weight last week. Porter asked me to start weighing myself in the mornings. My new low is 166. At the office I

Weigh in: 167.2 lbs., -1.7%, -3.2 lbs body fat, +2.2 lbs of muscle. Lose/Gain of 1 lb this week.
Current stats: 167.2 lbs, 30.1% body fat, 50.3 lbs total fat mass, 116.9 lbs lean body mass
Still to go: 37.5 lbs, 10.1% and 24.51 lbs


Week 4:
This week was more difficult for me because I had a "cheat day" where I had a bridal shower, a graduation celebration & a wedding reception. Essentially whole a day of non-healthy eating.... great... but I recovered nicely from it. I saw a new low of 164.2!! I was excited! AND that was after my cheat day! :)

Weigh in: 166.0 lbs, -0.9%, -1.9 lbs body fat, +0.4 lbs muscle. Loss/gain of 1.5 lbs.
Current: 166 lbs, 29.2%, 48.5 lbs total fat mass, 117.5 lbs lean body mass
Still to go: 36.0 lbs, 9.2%, and 22.61 lbs


Well that's it till next week! 6 days!!

Batting 1000

Today's been great! Not only did it end with a giggle fest at family prayers and me falling off of the couch, but I had my two week appointment with my personal trainer. I've lost 4.8 pounds and 1.5% body fat from last week! :) I was SO excited! I'm hoping that I'll have similar results in weeks to come! I'll be posting my progress every week so check back to see! Sorry so short! Long day tomorrow!

Toodles

End of Another Chapter

Friday was the last day of classes for my junior year. I can hardly believe it! It doesn't feel like it should be the end of the year yet! I'm officially registered for the LSAT in June! SCARY!! I'm actually going through with this! I have no clue where this is going or what I'll end up doing in the long run but this is the first step in my plan. This summer I don't have any real plans which, for my extremely Type A personality, is the absolute antithesis of what I think I should be doing. But I think it's going to be alright... No more than alright. It's going to be just great! I orginally was looking at this summer as a waste of time and thought that I was failing at this game called life. But as I started thinking about whether it was something I really wanted to do or not. I realized that this is the first time in my life - and very likely the last time for a while, if not for ever - that I won't have any responsibilities or things I HAVE to do that take presidence over myself. I'm going to use this time for a massive dose of self improvement. I'm going to work on becoming not only what I want to be but who I want to be. DZ gave us Maria Shriver's book "Just who will you be?" as a good bye gift. It honestly couldn't have come at a more oportune time! So now I'm excited about my post-LSAT summer! It's going to be a blast!

Easter in Palmyra

Happy Easter to all! I completely forgot about having this blog! :-/ oh well... I'll try to be better at it. I'm in Palmyra visiting my grandparents who are missionaries for our church here right now. I love being here and spending time with them! They're wonderful! I'm glad the weekend.

Last week was General Conference and in the Sunday morning session Elder Jeffrey R. Holland gave a beautiful dissertation on the atonement and resurrection of Christ. Completely fitting for the Easter season. I had forgotten that it was Palm Sunday.

Quickly my mind flooded back to all of my Easters growing up. Every year my mother gave each of us a little plastic egg every day from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, with some object to remind us of something that happened in the last week in the life of the Savior. I thought back to the plastic palm leaves, the three dimes, little tack nails and finally the empty egg that we received on Easter morning. I didn't ever look forward to that last egg. There was no surprise. Sure, I understood that the egg was empty because Christ's tomb was empty and he was resurrected. But as a child I still liked the thirty pieces of silver better...

As I was sitting in conference last weekend thinking about these object lessons that I had year after year after year. I realized that that little empty egg was by far the most expensive and most valuable gift over all the other eggs. It really wasn't empty. It was completely full of life! Eternal life! It's because that tomb (or egg if you're going with the analogy) was empty that we are able to live again. That's unconditional. It doesn't matter who you are or what you've done or what you do or don't believe. The fact of the matter is that we are all going to be resurrected - an eternal uniting of body and spirit after they've been separated by death. What a wonderful gift!

I don't know if I can accurately convey the real joy I feel about that. It's just so miraculous the whole thing! The greatest gift truly!

I hope that you all have a wonderful and blessed Easter! Until next time!

An intellectual way to procrastinate

I went last night with Jennie to the lecture on China. The reporter took Route 312 through all of China and told us about his experiences. It was the fastest hour of my life! I wish I had him as a professor! It was absolutely fascinating! I couldn't belive all of the contradictions that exist in the Chinese culture. They have a one party system and yet an open market. There were so many more! Through a series of unfortunate events pushed for by the government some people became HIV positive. These people are confined to one area and essentially are just left there to die! How horrible is that?!?! I had the hardest time fathoming how little they cared about a human life with that and late term abortions just to keep the population low. Life is everything to me. It is the greatest gift. How someone can not appreciate the scantity of life is beyond me. It just doesn't make sense in the slightest!

On a more happy note...I went shopping today and got some nice cranberry nailpolish, cute boots and an inspi(RED) shirt from Gap. I love it! Now all the girls have one! YAY! AND I still have money left over!! :) I'm sleepy but still need to read my research....tomorrow I am not looking forward to in the slightest!

Syllabi are thorns in my eye

I don't understand the idea of having syllabi for college classes if the professors aren't going to stick to them. I also don't know what delusional instructor would plan to have seven sections of reading covered in one eighty minute class. Obviously if after several weeks you're continuously falling behind, why continue to torture your self and the students. When I become a professor I'm not going to be like that. Just not going to happen. What's the point of cramming three exams into three weeks. There's not enough material even covered to make one good exam let alone three crappy ones.

The end of the semester is nearing and my workload just skyrocketed because of inconsistent professors. In my Social Political Philosophy class instead of spending two weeks on Marxism like my professor JUST said on Tuesday, we spent two days. Tuesday Chapter 10, Thursday Chapter 11 and who really knows what we'll be doing in there after our Thanksgiving break.

In my Ancient/Medieval Philosophy class we just had an exam on Tuesday, lecture today, paper due (technically but not really) next Tuesday and then ANOTHER exam on Thursday.... Two lectures and an exam... WHAT!? Then we have two lectures and then a take home exam (again...WHAT?!?) and then the last three class are class presentations. I just don't understand all the huge busy work. If it was like a multiple choice quiz or something I could maybe understand but these are each 100 point assignments - EACH! And we have less than a month of classes. Actually much less because of the Thanksgiving holidays.

Let's take a sidetrack and see exactly how many days we have left. Today is over so I'm not even going to count it... or tomorrow since technically I don't have any classes. SO then we have next week. I'm taking a vacation the entire week of Thanksgiving - YAY- So when we get back we have exactly two weeks (December 2-December12) of classes. Then the madness is technically over. But who am I kidding. It's not going to be. So that's what 15 days?? 15 days for 60% of our grades!!!!!! And you wonder why I'm slightly freaking out.

My Spanish professor has an excuse. She never deviates from the schedule if she can help it. And right now she can't she has bronchitis and has had to cancel classes for this entire week. So we are supposed to have a 5 minute presentation, a quiz, a test and a 30 minute presentation all in the next 15 days. She has a plan B that will eliminate the test - yes - but I'm wondering what is going to replace it. We'll just have to see. But the other professor doesn't have any medical excuse. It's just too much work for so little time. Too much jam-packed into a short 14 week semester. You'd think that after a few years of teaching you'd figure that out. I may be a little harsh in all of this but I'm just frustrated. There doesn't seem to be an end in sight and it all just keeps being pushed back and back. Thankfully he is not one to strictly uphold deadlines for papers which I am taking full advantage of.

I also have a 2000 word research paper on Marriage practices for Hindu Indian. I haven't finished doing all my research with it. And that's due on Wednesday... or Saturday - he's one who is so loose on deadlines he gives several different dates. But I have a reflection paper due by Saturday.

Thankfully guitar is going really well. I'm actually taking the next class (Intermediate) next semester. I love it. Next semester I'm hoping will be a lot better than this one. I have Spanish which isn't going to be too difficult, modern contemporary problems, modern and contemporary philosophers and critical thinking. Two of the classes are with a professor I just love. He's the reason I changed my major to Philosophy in the first place. I should probably tell him that, huh? And the other one should be interesting.

SO i'm exhausted. Enough griping. All in all life isn't bad - in fact it's amazing! I just had to vent a little! :) NOW, I think I'm going to do some cooking and then take a nap and do some of this huge amount of homework. *Sigh*