Category Archives: Miscellaneous

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It’s a Workout Wednesday…

Hello World!!!

Before...my eyes always do weird things in pictures...

As I was getting ready to teach a class last night at the gym, it occurred to me that I should share how I went from the girl who always placed last in those awful and humiliating physical fitness tests I was forced to take each spring of my childhood to the woman who teaches weekly classses at the gym and looks forward to training for road races each summer…

Like many major decisions in my life, I was motivated by vanity 🙂 … The year was 1992.  I had graduated from high school earlier that year and was now a proud freshman at UGA (Go dawgs!) Although I was homesick, I had managed to find comfort in the dining hall…At home, my mother never really fed me and my brothers baked goods as that was not her specialty. But now that I was on my own and armed with a meal card, I indulged in cakes, cookies and pies galore particularly as one of the dining halls was next to my dorm….And since a vending machine was nearby my room, I often indulged in Baby Ruth candy bars with a can of Coke as a pick-me-up for those early morning classes…And for a mid-morning snack, I downed small bags of salt and vinegar chips from that same vending machine…My girls and I frequently devoured slices of pizza at midnight before, during and after late night study sessions…And after church on Sundays, my roommate and I got down at our local Ryan’s Family Steak House….

Three months later, I was 20 pounds heavier, and my father began calling me “Big Mama…” It was especially troubling as my roommate who ate along with me had not gained any weight…It must have been all of that exercise she was doing as a member of the Army Reserves…My other girl didn’t gain any weight either…she was just one of those naturally skinny chicks….(i was soo jealous…) But I continued to eat and gain weight anyway…

The summer before my junior year, I saw myself in one of those surveillance videos at a supermarket…Before I saw myself on the video, I thought I was looking hot…I had on one of those full-body, shaped linen dresses that were in style at the time…I just knew I was just looking voluptuous…but I had to face the truth when I saw the video…I was beyond voluptuous…I was fat…

So when I started school in my junior year, I had a plan…I had to take one P.E. class to graduate so I decided to go ahead and finally enroll in a class…all of the walking classes were full so I had to take a running class….Thankfully, UGA had a diet program similar to Weight Watchers. I decided to enroll in the program at the same time that I took the running class. In the diet program, we learned how to count calories and plan nutritious meals according to what was served at the dining halls…I learned that with moderate exercise combined with eating 1345 calories and 37 grams of fat each day, I would lose that 20 pounds or so that I gained…

I huffed and puffed in that running class, and I was sooo slow that sometimes the teacher had to run with me because I was sooo far behind the other members of the class…And I monitored each morsel that passed through my lips and tallied up all of my calories and fat grams for months….And it worked, by spring quarter, I was fine as wine…And I had a new found appreciation for exercise…Our teacher told us at the beginning of the class that he wanted to inspire us to continue to run and exercise for the rest of our lives…at the time, I never imagined that could happen for me, but it did…I have never stopped working out….And by the grace of God, I will be working out even when I’m old and gray….

Now, I’m not as skinny as I used to be…In fact, I’m not skinny at all…I have discovered since then that what you eat not how much you work out is the most important factor in long-term weight loss…but I still love working out…To celebrate 10 years of working out, I ran a marathon (26. 2 miles) in 2004…True to form, by the time I finished, the finish line had been packed up and most of the runners were gone…but I still did it…I trained with the Jeff Galloway Training Groups. I don’t know if I will ever do a marathon again, but I do manage to run a few road races each year….And each year, I run with a Jeff Galloway Training Group…I cannot describe how alive I feel as I run on those brisk Saturday summer mornings…

If you’re in Atlanta, the 10k training program starts on April 17! I’ll be there…will you?

After...again, my eyes always do weird things in pictures...

Any thoughts?

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Dream a little dream…(R.I.P. Corey Haim)

Hello World!!!

I’m writing this post an hour later than I usually do…I wonder why… 🙂

Anywho, when I was in high school and was blessed to have a boyfriend (wish didn’t happen very often), I knew that that the death knell of the relationship had rung when I dreamt of them…I don’t know why this happened but it did without fail…looking backing I wonder if this was God’s way of preparing me for the sad inevitable or maybe it was just something my subconscious mind picked up on before my conscious mind did…

Still, I do know that dreams are one of the ways that God chooses to speak to us…It happens over and over again in His Word…God uses dreams all thoughout the story of the birth of Jesus Christ….

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.  Matthew 1: 20-21

And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they (the Magi) returned to their country by another route.  Matthew 2:12

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”  Matthew 2:13

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”  Matthew 2:19-20

My father, who also believes in the power of dreams, and I have had numerous discussions dreams, and he has given me tips on how to decode dreams. I have also attended a seminar about dreams in 2004 which was moderated by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, a clinical psychologist who has conducted dreamwork seminars for over 25 years in the U.S., Europe and Asia.  I was blessed to have him interpret an important dream of mine in front of the whole class. I cannot share it here, but I thank God for using that dream to showing me a bit of my future…I have also read some literature on dreams and have Googled numerous dream interpretation Web sites…

Everyone dreams….but every once in a while, we dream something that stays with us…These are the dreams that we are meant to seriously consider because God may be trying tell us something…Most experts suggest a few tips for dream interpretation…

1. Keep a journal next to your bed. In the morning or in the middle of the night, as soon as you wake up, write the dream down…You don’t want to forget important details that help you decode your dream…

2. The language of dreams is typically symbols….For instance, if you dream of a toilet, you may be flushing someone or something toxic out of your life…Consider what symbols mean to you personally and what they may mean in literature…I love to Google dream Web sites to figure what symbols mean….

3. Consider the events of your life at that moment…I typically have dreams at stressful times of my life, and my dreams often tell me truths that I need to know and act on….

4. And of course, pray and ask God for illumination…

Any thoughts?

P.S. Check out this song, “Dream a Little Dream” by the the great Louis Armstrong…listening to his songs always make me think of episodes of  “Tom and Jerry.” Guess it’s because they used to play those kind of songs in the background…Probably had to be born in the ’70s to remember that… 🙂

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It’s March….Where Are You With Your Visions for 2010?!

Hello World!!!

So what’s up y’all? It’s March…time to check in about our goals…How are we doing? A few years ago, I made a vision board hoping that the images would somehow manifest in real life…and to my surprise, even today those images are becoming reality…I haven’t made a vision board since then but I do write down my goals each year…And while all of my goals don’t necessarily come true, I am amazed how many of them do without very much effort on my part sometimes…it’s as if there is magic in writing them down…This principle is illuminated in God’s word…

“And the LORD answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.”  Habakkuk 2:2

Actually, it’s not magic…I think that in writing our goals down or creating a vision board, we input the images and words into our subconscious minds. And then our subsconcious minds go to work to enable us to take the actions that we need to take…And of course, God works on our behalf to make our goals come true if they are in His will for us…

So as I said before, we are three months into the New Year…how am I doing? I’m working it out….How are you doing? Let me know…

Any thoughts?

Check out the video for “Optimistic” by Sounds of Blackness!

You hear the voice of reason
Telling you this can’t never be done
No matter how hard reality seems
Just hold on to your dreams…

As long as you keep your head to the sky,
You can win as long as you keep your head to the sky….