I took the blood pressure meds and the headaches went away the very next day. Amazing. So I'm grateful for that. But.....I still don't want to be on the meds forever, so I've been scouring the internet to find out all I can about high blood pressure prevention. After much research, I believe that I can tweak a couple of things:
Primarily I've added three cardio workouts to my routine. Just 20 to 30 minutes each on a treadmill, but I think it will help. I do my pilates and while my heart rate increases, I don't know that it increases enough to have the impact I would like. I actually don't mind the treadmill - I like doing intervals where you run really fast and then take a brief walk.
Also, I've been pretty exclusive to doing Pilates but now I'm looking at stuff like Tai Chi. People I've talked to say it has really helped them with their stress levels. We have a DVD that my husband uses and I gave it a whirl this past weekend. I don't know the forms yet, so it isn't necessarily "relaxing". So I have to take a swing at it for the next couple of weekends before I incorporate it into my workout. My main concern with this one is that I naturally exercise with precision in mind. The Tai Chi movements are designed with "flow" in mind, and I don't flow. I mean, my very early training in dance was about precision. Even when you have a dance movement designed to look like you're floating or you are to perform it smoothly, you still have to do it within a certain measure of music, so there is a definite precision to that. Pilates is about precision, so it is natural that I would like it so much, I think. Have to retrain myself.
Remember I said we had no history of high blood pressure in my family? I was wrong. I have one sister who has it as well. So that makes two of us. My parents didn't have it and I just wonder why she and I have it.
So far I've not caught the cold being passed around in my household and I'm just going to hope it stays that way. We had a lazy weekend of rest and Gene Kelly movies at our house. The boy has now decided to become a dancer/pilot/explorer. He has made me replay the dance scenes with Gene over and over. But hey, I dont' mind. I LUV Gene. Very graceful. Very masculine. If he were alive, he'd be on my free pass....
Lastly, went to a booksigning for three of my fellow RWA chapter members. After much discussion and debate, I've decided to enter a few contests through various RWA chapters. For those of you not in the the RWA world, RWA chapters hold annual contests and you submit approx 25-30 pages of your book to one of the designated categories (Single Title, Contemporary Category, Historical, etc). If you make it to the finals, the final judges are editors and agents who work with your kind of book. So I've gone online and found four contests whose final editors are Harlequin people that I'd like to get in front of. If I don't final, I'm going to send it straight to London (Harlequin editorial office that houses my category) in May. We'll see.