Belated Birthday

Every year, we go to this wonderful restaurant called Shifters on my birthday. It's been a tradition with our friends, Beth and Tony, for the past few years. It used to be called K.C. Dippers, and the "dip" part of the name is the exact reason we go.

You can order either one dip or the "sampler", which includes your choice of three dips. All of the dips are either cream cheese or sour cream based. You get tortilla chips and pita bread with your dip, giving you the means to shovel it into your mouth.

Usually, I order three dips, eat two, and then have one leftover for the next day (or power through it). Now that I'm watching calories and carbs, I thought it best to order one dip instead of three.

I got the sundried tomato dip, knowing most of the calories would come from the cream cheese instead of adding additional meats and cheeses to it. My dip came in around 300 calories, with another 200 for the pita bread.

I also had a Cosmo, though, not realizing how many calories are in those things. YIKES.

It's a good thing I went to the gym yesterday morning. Between Friday night's meal at Comensoli's and Saturday night's meal at Shifters, I knew I would need a metabolism and calorie bump. I tried a new routine of treadmill, elliptical, bike, back to elliptical, and then treadmill again. I normally don't do the second round of elliptical and treadmill. I thought I was going to die on the elliptical, and then the treadmill wasn't much of a cooldown since my knee and foot were kind of mad at that point and I had to quit after five minutes.

Also, my calorie burn wasn't much higher than it would have been after 45 minutes of my normal routine, and I was much more tired from all the switching.

My knee and foot are going crazy with pain today, so I really think I need to switch things up. Instead of trying to be the cardio queen, I'm going to stick with two machines - the bike to warm-up, the elliptical for the burn, and then the bike to cool-down again. Both machines are low impact and give me a higher calorie burn than the treadmill. This will prevent the pain in my foot and knee the next day

-=-

We're under a lake effect snow warning tonight and tomorrow. We're supposed to get 6-10 inches of snow. I'm pretty excited. Beth was teasing me because, every time we go to Shifters for my birthday, we get six inches of snow that night. Looks like we missed it by one day. :)