Coffee Table Revamp

Matt and I haven't had a coffee table since he first lived with Jess back in Ypsi. We originally had our eye on a pretty cool table from Ikea, but we were reluctant to buy it because, well, we are kinda cheap sometimes, and it just seemed like a lot of money every time we looked at it.

One day this past Spring we went out thrift store shopping for a new little dining table for our new little apartment. We wanted an older wood table, and we were willing to do the revamp to get a good solid piece.

Our first stop was the Ann Arbor Recycle ReUse Center. We didn't have any luck finding a table we liked, but we spotted a coffee table that spoke to us. We snatched it up, and started working on it as soon as we got home (we were just a little excited...).

Here's the before:

As you can see, someone let this table become a kiddie play/craft table. It was covered in kids paint and chalk. The picture from underneath shows a little better what the color the table originally was.

Here's some of Matt hard at work sanding it down. It had been redone at some point before. When Matt was sanding the top it was so thin on the edges he had to be careful not to go down through it.

Now for the fun part...the AFTER photos! All we did to finish it was pick out a stain color we liked, and I stained it in the garage for a couple of days. Then I put on a layer of polyurethane to protect it a little, and we were done!

Here's the basics of how the costs for this project broke down:

$20 Coffee table (ReUse Center)

$9 Stain for coffee table (Home Depot Gift Card)
$10 Polyurethane (Home Depot Gift Card)

In total, this great wood coffee table only cost us about $40. And - it was fun to work on!

New life, new old stuff

It's been almost 1 month since I graduated with my Master's degree. I am still looking for a full time job, and I am working part time for the office that I did my internship with. Job searching has been hit or miss, because I am in a really specialized field, and I don't have much leeway in terms of location. There have been 2 or 3 postings that really excited me, and the rest have been things I could take or leave. I actually had two interviews for one position, but was ultimately not chosen. They had 80 applicants and only interviewed 5, so that's kind of cool, but, it would have been a really great opportunity.

While this ongoing job search is always lingering in the back of my mind, I have been looking for distractions. Matt and I are moving to a new apartment very soon, and I cannot wait to set it up and decorate it.

We will be downsizing significantly, as we are moving from a 4-bedroom house with a garage and basement, to a 2-bedroom apartment. We have been working on getting rid of things by: selling, donating, recycling, giving away, and throwing things away. There's always more we could do, but we have made some pretty good progress.

This past weekend we found ourselves talking about getting a smaller dining room table. We aren't sure yet how much room we will have, but we know it will be less than we are used to. Our table we used in this house is on loan from the Tinseys, and it's great, but we don't need it for the two of us for day to day use.

We talked about finding a small table with wings, and we decided to start thrift store shopping. Ann Arbor has SOO many thrift stores!

On our first stop we went to the Ann Arbor Recycling ReUse Center. There were no dining room tables that matched our needs, but something caught my eye. Sitting on top of another table was a coffee table, obviously a little mistreated over the years by children who liked to paint. It was so unique that I just kept coming back to it. We bought it, and we started sanding it almost as soon as we got home.

The next day we went out to buy stain for said coffee table, and we decided to stop at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Let me tell you - this store made me never want to buy something for a house at a retail store again - at least until considering thrift options. They had everything there! Including, a table that was just what we were looking for.

Needless to say, we snatched it up, and we have been hard at work refinishing them both. I will be writing a separate post with before and after pics, and a cost break-down. Stay tuned!

Oh, and our next purchase will be some chairs for our table. We are currently using some straight backs that I don't think anyone who has been over here likes. In addition to the ReUse Center and ReStore, we might go to the Salvation Army and the Ann Arbor PTO Thrift Shop!

I am the kind of person who...

A discussion in one of my Health Behavior and Health Education classes recently got me thinking. Not that my classes don't always get me thinking, but this one really stuck with me.

We were in my Sticky Health Communications class, and we were talking about why New Years resolutions don't work.

There were a number of ideas thrown around by students, and there isn't really one right answer. But the professor, Dr. Brian Zikmund-Fisher, posed this as an explanation:

If you don't convince yourself that you're the kind of person that does something, you won't stick with it.

I have kept this idea with me for over a week now, and I have spent a little more time considering it than I should probably admit. I first tried to think about it in terms of my own behaviors, and previous attempts or successes in behavior change.

It wasn't hard to see how this idea applied to some things in my own life, like making the transition to not eating meat, the trials of committing to diet and exercise, something as simple as actually flossing every night.

So then I started looking for it to pop up as a theme in TV. Tuesday night it popped up right on The Biggest Loser. Not too surprising that this would be the first place I see it.

Some of the things I think this can be most easily applied to are:

• resisting food temptations, ex. "I am the kind of person who can walk away from the cookies in the break room at work, and know it's not worth it to indulge on low quality cookies"
• adding small amounts of exercise to your day, ex. "I am the kind of person that parks a little farther from the store to add some extra walking in to my day"

These are relatively simple behaviors, but unless you have convinced yourself that they are a part of you, it is sooo easy to say "well I just can't resist."

This by no means make this system flawless. You can end up off track. In my opinion though, every time you get off track and realize you need to work on it harder next time, you make yourself stronger in your convictions. You also learn what you should feel bad about, and what is really just a one-time indulgence that you know doesn't need to lead to other indulgences.

This all comes at a time when I realize I have gotten horribly off track for just over a week, after losing 12 pounds. Time to recommit, and get back on track, stronger than ever.

If anyone out there reads this and has a reflection of something in their life that took changing self-concept to change behavior, I would love to hear about it.

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Additional note: In my field we talk a lot about self-efficacy as a key predictor of behavior change. Self-efficacy is the belief in oneself to be able to perform a specific behavior, in a specific situation. I don't see the concept discussed above as being the same. I think this is much more self-concept/personal identity based.

think about your food

Reading this recent New York Times article, and talking to Matt about it, really got me thinking.

As someone who has struggled with wanting to lose weight since leaving high school (and really, even before that) who will soon have a Master's degree in the field of Health Behavior, I've actually thought about this in my own life.

Overall I eat a quite healthy diet. I am a semi-vegetarian (I eat fish), and I am careful to eat fruits and vegetables. I don't eat fast food (maybe some fries on the run once every 6 months or so), and I have cut back drastically recently in the amount of milk and cheese that I let myself eat.

I have historically struggled with sugar though. I love sweets. I used to love to drink Coca Cola (a habit being with my husband hasn't helped), eat chocolate, ice cream has had a hold on me in recent summers, and cookies, cake, you name it - I loved it.

Days before my most recent birthday I ate an ice cream sandwich of my husband's from the fridge. After eating it, I felt disgusting. I started to reflect on what led me to pick up that ice cream sandwich, unwrap it, and eat it. There was no reason. I had absolutely no reason to eat it. And what's worse, I didn't even feel good after eating it.

It was then that I decided sugar COULD NOT have this "power" over me anymore. I decided that after my birthday, I would not eat dessert until Christmas. There have been a few minor exceptions along the way. Some very low-fat frozen yogurt, some pudding a friend made, half of a slice of pumpkin roll at Thanksgiving. I also stopped drinking soda with sugar.

Setting all these restrictions on myself has had me thinking, what the hell is the point of all those things I was eating. I know what they taste like, I know exactly what I am in for when I pick it up. I also know that there is NO health benefit to them. They don't provide long term benefit, they make you feel good for what, like, 5 or 10 minutes?

I have thought about food a lot the last few months. And I am by no means saying it is easy, I still like sugar, it tastes good to me. I am learning to rationalize it away though. I am learning to use moderation when I do choose to indulge. A friend made one of my favorite cakes recently for a party, and being that it was a Christmas party, I said ok and had a piece. One piece. Later I wanted a pop because I was exhausted and wanted a little bit of caffeine to help get me through the night, but there was no diet pop. I almost said what the hell, I am just going to have this Dr. Pepper, it's just one night. But then, I stopped and reminded myself that's another 140(?) calories. Not worth it. Instead I poured a glass of water, and went to sit down.

By no means do I think this breakthrough means that I will be perfectly in control from hear on out, but thinking about reasons for doing things, and thinking about how you feel and think about them (metacognition anyone?), is important.

So even if you don't think about taking 30 bites of a food before eating it, every time you're eating a guilty pleasure food, think about why you're eating it. Does the benefit outweigh the cost? Do you need 140 extra grams of sugar? Do you need the extra grams of fat? Do you need the second cookie - what does it give you? A moment of happiness. How are you going to feel next time you are trying on jeans?

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Check it out. Pay it forward.

Happy Thanksgiving

No long, drawn out, self-aware entry here. Just stopping to say how incredibly thankful I am for everything in my life. Any complaints or whining sessions are purely superficial, and just venting in the moment.

Life is good. I couldn't ask for anything more.

And thanks to all the family and friends who are always there for me. You're the best.

My Food Pyramid Results!

For the last week I have been keeping track of how many fruits and veggies I eat during the day. I wanted to see if I was meeting the recommendations of the MyPyramid site. I tried really hard to not change my eating habits this week, because I wanted to find out how I was doing on my own.

Here's a fun little graph a created to show visually how I did. 

Purple represents the fruit recommendation of 2 cups/day. 

Green represents the veggie recommendation of 2.5 cups/day. 

The peaches are how many fruits I actually ate, and the carrots are how many veggies I actually ate.

I love how this gives a visual of what my eating habits were over the week. 

Can you guess which day Matt and I went grocery shopping? Sunday

Can you guess which days I was at school all day and packed my own foods? Monday and Tuesday

Can you guess which days I ate at least one meal out (a whole other issue of it's own)? Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

So the verdict is clear I think. I NEED to eat more veggies. And, I need to work harder to eat we rounded all week long, not just the days that I spend all day on campus. Oh, and I obviously favor fruit over veggies.

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Now, for the next week I am going to track how I do trying to even out the recommendations with my actual intake, and find more of a balance between fruits and veggies.

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Did you know the fruit and veggie recommendations are now measured in cups/day, not "servings?" Did you know that recommended amounts vary based on your age, sex, activity level, and weight goals? To find out your recommended amounts, check out the MyPyramid site for yourself!