Hooping Progress: Beginner {and a chat about PMS}

I went to a Gangnam Style flashmob in October and saw my facebook acquaintance who does fire performance there. He was accompanied by a girl with purple/blue hair doing hoop dancing and I found myself watching her more than watching him. She's very spritely and fun to watch. I asked her about her hooping and she said she's only been hooping a year and a half (self taught) and gave me a business card because she sometimes offers classes.

I started taking a class two Saturdays ago and expected to be hula hooping in the first class. As it turns out, I spent most of the class starting the hoop off with a good wind-up and a push to the left, and then trying to catch the hoop from falling to the floor very shortly thereafter.

It's MUCH harder than I expected! However, it is not impossible and she was teaching us other things to do with the hoop as part of "hoop dancing" that I was able to do. This burns about 11 calories a minute and her class is an hour and a half long. Since I can only estimate right now (without a gadget to help me), I accounted for actual "hoop attempting/success" time than actual class time which are 1.5 hrs.

At the end of yesterday's class where I was hooping over my head, floating, helicoptering, hooping to the side and doing a couple of revolving doors in addition to my stubborn attempts to just "get" the first thing I was taught, I was "good tired".

By the time bed came a long, I was still "good tired" and needed sleep. I was hungry most of the evening and I dreamt about looking for a hoop in a dollar store.

* those are usually kid sized hoops and have no gaff tape for a better grip, so not a good idea to buy for those who want to learn this *

Youtube has a ton of tutorials and videos you can refer to. This type of activity seems to have attracted the natural/new age types , along with people who aren't, but you might notice a theme among the people in the videos. I watched a video of a reporter showing how great an activity hooping is. I can't imagine that she's an actual beginner because her hoop does not hit the floor once during her segment. Anyhow, check it out:

THIS JUST IN!   Ohhhh! I'm going to try this : )   The way this girl looks at the beginning is close to how ungraceful I've been looking haha!

On a whole other topic, I want to talk about PMS.

When I was following the Dr.Bernstein program and weighing in 3x a week, it was always discouraging when approaching the date when my period was to be due. I noticed that for me, any reductions to be measured by standing on the office scale would totally stall about 10 days before. And this was on a program where I was to be losing 3.5 lbs a week! But, I knew what was going on and while it was discouraging, I knew that once my period came and went, the numbers would start dropping to reflect whatever fat loss had been happening while PMS had been in play.

I need to know what to expect when I'm not following the Dr.Bernstein program, so I weighed myself today and I'm up another half pound from Friday morning.

Friday my calories were way too high : 2199
Saturday my calories were great: 1398

Logging the food with MyFitnessPal really helps to give substance to what I'm seeing on the scale. I know that people say you shouldn't weigh yourself all the time, but that's not me. I need to understand what's happening and when I don't weigh myself, it feels like blissful ignorance.