No kids next Tuesday. My intention is using the opportunity to set up my workout plan. Painfree, Yoga, Aftershock, Posture fix, and my stationary bike. Just not sure yet, exactly in what order or how often for each. That’s what I’ll be deciding on Tuesday. Then I will implement the plan. I really want to get into better shape by this fall. I feel fine most of the time, but I have little stamina and our annual roadtrip always requires walking and sometimes climbing. I’m more interested in that than in losing weight, although that is a secondary goal.
I have been working on the diet thing as well. I was eating from about 9am til nearly midnite. Not constantly, of course, I’d be big as the house if I did that. However, between meals and snacks, I was eating every 3 or 4 hours for a total of 12-15 hours a day. I know some diets recommend that kind of schedule, but what I’ve been reading lately indicates it’s not only not necessary, but also a bad idea.
I’m trying to cut my eating back to 8 hours a day. The plan I’m using as my basis, says to wait until you’ve been up for a few hours to eat because that forces your body to burn fat for energy. I never used to eat sooner than that and only weighed 105 lbs. Of course, there were other factors involved in that weight and I really don’t want to go that low again. The other half of the plan is to stop eating about 2 hours before I go to bed, that’s the hard part for me. I usually compromise with a healthy snack, like an apple, or a small piece of hard candy. I’ve been dropping about 1/2 pound a week for the past month or so. I figure, if I can maintain that from now until the end of September, I should drop about 15 more pounds. My current weight is 163 so that would put me just below 150, which would bring my BMI into the normal weight range.
The hardest part will be finding time to do the workouts. I’m too busy in the mornings, too tired in the evenings and usually have kids in the afternoon. However, most of my exercise routines can be broken into 15 minute segments so, hopefully, I”ll be able to make room for them. To assist in the will power department, I’m using a devotional book I purchased as a Lenten exercise, Made to Crave Devotional: 60 Days to Craving God, Not Food by Lysa TerKeurst. 100th birthday, here I come.
At the time, all I did was scan through the index and start the introduction. Yesterday, I finished the intro and started the first chapter. I will make a better effort this time to share my readings. MacCulloch says that Christianity must trace its roots beyond the birth of Jesus to the ancient Jewish and Greek culture that fed into His life here on earth. 
Bishop Spong is giving me much food for thought. I really don’t believe that God wants us to simply accept everything we are told about Him at face value. I feel “called” to dig deeper, to study, and also to use the brain He gave me to think about what I find and use the logic He also gave me to decide what is “True.” I can accept the idea that the men who wrote the books of the Bible were God inspired. Even the men who chose which books to include may have been God inspired. However, they were still men, subject to error in spite of that inspiration. They viewed the revelations they were given through the lens of their own experience. If you are exposed to an idea or vision outside your experience and knowledge, you must relate it to something familiar in order to understand it.