Just another day.

Hey!
I'm not great at this blogging thing, but welcome! I'm a college student living...somewhere in southern USA and I'm an Irish dancer. It consumes my life and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I have a feis (Irish dancing competition) next weekend that I have been frantically preparing for by drilling my steps and wearing out my legs, and while I will continue in this manner for the rest of the week, I decided today that I need to do more. I know I am not alone when I say I am a dancer who is frustrated constantly by my lack of flexibility and stamina. That being said, I resolved to do something about it. I didn't exactly make any new year's resolutions, so this will work, even if it's 15 days late :)

The purpose of this blog is really for me to hold myself accountable to the things I resolve to do (I'm awfully lazy) and to track my progress along the way, and who knows, maybe it'll help someone else out there with the same problems as me!
Anyways, I figured it was probably wise not to start any stamina or flexibility workouts until after my next feis, because let's be real, wearing yourself out working on stamina days before a competition really isn't a smart idea. That being said, there are things I got started on straight away. I've been scouring the dance.net threads and other online resources for ways that I can become a better dancer, and something that stuck out was my diet.
I'm a college student, so all cards on the table, I definitely don't have a balanced diet and I don't always have the resources to accomplish one. That being said, I'm going to do my best to start eating a balanced diet according to general nutritional standards like those food pyramids we were shown in health class and never really paid any attention to. My first step towards this goal is tracking what I eat/my caloric intake. This sounds like a huge pain in the a** but it really isn't. At school we had to track our diet for a week and we used the MyPlate feature on livestrong.com which is FANTASTIC for this kind of thing. It has a search feature with every kind of food imaginable, it allows you to choose what you ate, how much and when you ate it, then it charts it for you and shows you how many calories it had and other nutritional goals. It allows you to set a caloric intake goal for each day based on height and weight/desired weight and also lets you track exercise by logging what and how much exercise you do- it also estimates calories burned for the exercises it has in the system- and yes, it has Irish dancing! That was a really long sentence, but you get the point- I'm actually pretty excited about how awesome this site is.

Well, speaking of food just reminded me how hungry I am, and the dining hall just opened for dinner so I think I'm going to head off for some food.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you come back to see how badly my plan is backfiring on me! (I don't have high expectations for this particular endeavor, but maybe if people read, I'll actually stick to it!)

Happy dancing!