Wait, wait, I got it I got it I got it.
I’ve got a new exercise program!
I’m not sure what to call it. It might be called the Facebook program or the texting program or the e-mail program. I haven’t decided yet.
You know how we say we don’t have time to exercise? And now we hear that it’s OK to break up our exercise time into smaller bits, like ten minutes at a time, or just get our 10,000 steps in by taking the stairs instead of the elevator or parking farther away. And every time I hear that, I say, yeah, yeah, sure.
I can’t split my day up into little bits like that! I have to concentrate. I have to focus!
Sure! Just like I never, ever check the auction on e-bay from my desk! I’m so focused on my work, I never…check my e-mail, my Facebook page, play … a game…of Solitaire…
Hum.
I have a lot of friends who work in offices and I have to say, I wonder when they get any work done. Because they sure seem to spend a lot of time checking the latest Travelocity quotes for a flight to The Big Island.
So here’s an idea. Do you really have to check this stuff every two minutes? If we can splinter our attention twelve ways from Sunday to keep up with texting our friends, sending photos, checking a stock quote or the weather and clicking on the YouTube link that Phil sent – then we can swap out a few of those teeny sitting vacations for teeny moving vacations. Just Find and Replace. Do you really have to play a game of Solitaire right now? Could you stand up and walk around for a minute instead? Could you jump on a mini-trampoline in your office? Could you fit a pedal machine under your desk? My husband’s boss never uses the restroom on his floor. He walks down the stairs, four flights, uses the restroom on the first floor, goes to the opposite side of the building and walks back up four flights and back to his desk.
Don’t send that kissy-face text – dance in place for thirty seconds instead. What, you don’t have an iPod yet?
Better still, text while dancing. Who knows what you might send.
Do you really have to check that auction right now? You know everybody’s going to bid in the last five minutes anyway. Walk around the perimeter of the building instead.
See? It’s a great idea. Just needs a name. The Exercise Program for People with Short Attention Spans.
Gotta go...I'm going to try balancing my laptop on the counter so I can play Solitaire while bouncing from foot to foot. Works for me!
This is before...
Monday, November 29, 2010
See Brenda. See Brenda Maintain.
Entropy. It’s the law.
I don’t like it.
Entropy. You know what that is? It’s when you finally get all the laundry done. “I finished all the laundry!” What a laugh. It’s like “the kitchen is cleeeeeeean!”
Ha! And it will stay that way until the teenager gets out the ice cream, leaves it on the counter along with his bowl and the three milk-encrusted glasses that he thoughtfully, finally brought in from his bedroom, and there’s the pot soaking in the sink and did the cat bring this in? And am I the only one who rinses out the cans and puts them in the recycling?
I remember arguing with my mother about making my bed. Why should I? I’m just going to get back in it again in 16 hours.
The fact is that as soon as the laundry is done or the dishes are done, we just mess them up again.
Last year, I left a pot of chicken bones and water on the stove for a few hours more than was advisable. As a result, we learned a new phrase. “Protein burn.” That’s what happens when your house fills up with oily smoke and you move out for five weeks while a disaster restoration team cleans, restores, or replaces every single thing in your house, right down to the paint on the walls. It was inconvenient living in a motel room with a kitchenette but boy, did our house sparkle when we moved back in!
Sixteen months later, it’s not sparkling anymore. Entropy increased. Dang! I had to start cleaning it again.
Same thing happened with my car. Bought a 2000 Toyota Echo, my dream car because it gets 40 mpg city, 50 mpg highway. Laid on new brakes, new tires, new transmission, even popped for the new stereo system. Am I done yet? Apparently not, because the gas mileage has dropped by 10 miles per gallon. Maybe it has something to do with those little postcards that keep coming in the mail, reminding me that I’m overdue for an oil change, the 10,000 mile service, and oh yes, I said I would replace the thing-a-ma-whadjit when it got to the point where I really couldn’t ignore it anymore.
And my husband insists on putting $50 away each month for a new roof. We just replaced the roof, I say. Yes, but in 15 years we’ll need a new one and this way we’ll have the money, he says reasonably.
This is just so irritating. Why can’t anything just STAY the way it is? Why isn’t everything just self-healing? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could drive the car hard and it got more efficient, forgot about composting and just grew stuff in the garden and the ground got more and more fertile? If the house could re-roof and re-paint itself?
But here’s a thought. I do own one really priceless thing that heals itself. It even gets stronger when I subject it to stressors.
That would be my body.
I push it to learn how to walk four miles at a stretch and it does. I lift heavier and heavier weights and it responds by making new muscle. I can even teach it to run better on different fuel, try that with your Honda! More fiber, less fat – it responds by running more efficiently and with a longer burn.
Cool.
Where I get into trouble is when I forget that my body needs ongoing attention, just like my car or house or garden. I can’t rebuild the engine in my car and then blow off the next dozen oil changes. I can’t re-roof the house and then forget to budget for repairs. Well, I can. But the car stops running so well and the roof leaks.
So if I quit eating well and stop working out, of course I’ll gain the fat back and lose that nice definition in my arms and stop feeling as good. Then if I say, “Look! The diet didn’t work and exercise didn’t work!” that’s kind of like saying that I don’t believe in entropy anymore. The clothes will never get dirty again and the kitchen will keep itself clean.
This is why we need a new concept, and maybe even new vocabulary, for what happens when we change our fitness levels and subsequently, our fat levels and pants sizes. You rebuild the engine of your body. Nice! Shiny! Then you have to maintain it. I like to think of my body as a project car, like that old VW camper we had for awhile or the legendary MG my husband had. Nothing stays new. You have to keep tinkering with things.
Maybe “maintenance” is not the happy word. I know I should maintain my car and my house. When you don’t, that’s called “deferred maintenance,” -- this is how you refer to putting off replacing the roof for ten years and then it costs more to fix than if you’d kept it in repair or replaced it when it started to leak in the first place.
When applied to my health (by this I usually mean my weight, even though I know better), “maintenance” always felt a bit like “backsliding,” or “constant struggle,” and when I applied it to keeping to a steady fitness level or fat-to-lean ratio, it felt more like a “losing battle”.
But I don’t want to defer maintenance on my body. It can get pretty expensive. I was looking at knee replacement surgery and medication for chronic high blood pressure, plus the health risks that go along with insulin resistance. Changing the exercise and diet was a lot cheaper.
But “maintain”? Isn’t that what we used to do when we came home late from a date and Mom was waiting up for us and we had to act normal even though we had maybe imbibed a bit too much?
So. For me, not a helpful word. I need a better way to think about it.
Three years ago, I changed the way my body worked by changing my daily life. I lost a lot of weight and changed my fitness level drastically. But to make that change permanent, I have to make my new life feel just as comfortable, routine, and unconscious as the life I used to have. I don’t want to think all the time about what to buy, how to cook, and what my daily activities are. I want to create a way to live that feels normal for the rest of my life. You know, keep up with the oil changes.
In some ways, I’ve done pretty well. Those 10,000 steps are embedded into my day. I’ve got breakfast dialed in – hot cereal, skim milk, fruit and coffee – and my family and I cook and enjoy food that routinely is lower on the fat continuum and consists of lots more vegetables, fruits and beans than we used to eat. We don’t think about it anymore. It’s what happens, just like we pay our bills and put the socks away.
But…I have a confession to make. Nine months ago, I got good and tired of going to the gym. And I got good and tired of counting calories. I’m sure I’m not overeating! I know what I’m doing! So I stopped paying attention to how many little treats I had in a day. And I stopped the cardio and weight training three times a week. I planned to walk in the mornings, ride my bike everywhere and garden and that would replace those gym sessions. Well, I didn’t ride my bike everywhere because I fell off my bike twice, so there went the replacement for the interval training. I raked a lot of leaves this fall and shoveled two yards of compost and gravel. But if I was hoping that this would replace the weight workouts, I’d have to admit that I didn’t do heavy-duty yard work three times a week. I like walking, and I like talking to my friend Sally even better, and this is a good thing because if we hadn’t been walking for an hour every morning, my latest body comp would have been even worse. Yes, I finally got brave and had a (way overdue) body comp test done.
After nine months of the “I don’t need to go to the gym anymore” theory, I have lost five pounds of muscle and gained 15 pounds of fat.
Did the diet not work? Of course it did. Did the exercise work? Of course it did, and thank goodness I’ve kept to a pretty active lifestyle or I’d be real blimpy again by now.
What didn’t work was me indulging in the idea that my body somehow isn’t governed by the same laws that rule the rest of the physical universe. I thought that, somehow, I could stop with the weight resistance and cardio and my muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness level would stay the same. But, “ye canna change the laws of Physics, Cap’n!” Entropy must increase.
Take the body back to the shop for another overhaul. I estimate that six months of building fitness and losing the fat will get me back to where I want to be, and then I guess I’ll have to keep on paying attention to – maintaining? -- my own health.
Just do the laundry, just do the dishes. Eat the good food, not too much, and go to the gym.
And give thanks for my self-healing body that gets stronger and more efficient when I ask more of it.
Now if I could just get the car to do the same thing.
I don’t like it.
Entropy. You know what that is? It’s when you finally get all the laundry done. “I finished all the laundry!” What a laugh. It’s like “the kitchen is cleeeeeeean!”
Ha! And it will stay that way until the teenager gets out the ice cream, leaves it on the counter along with his bowl and the three milk-encrusted glasses that he thoughtfully, finally brought in from his bedroom, and there’s the pot soaking in the sink and did the cat bring this in? And am I the only one who rinses out the cans and puts them in the recycling?
I remember arguing with my mother about making my bed. Why should I? I’m just going to get back in it again in 16 hours.
The fact is that as soon as the laundry is done or the dishes are done, we just mess them up again.
Last year, I left a pot of chicken bones and water on the stove for a few hours more than was advisable. As a result, we learned a new phrase. “Protein burn.” That’s what happens when your house fills up with oily smoke and you move out for five weeks while a disaster restoration team cleans, restores, or replaces every single thing in your house, right down to the paint on the walls. It was inconvenient living in a motel room with a kitchenette but boy, did our house sparkle when we moved back in!
Sixteen months later, it’s not sparkling anymore. Entropy increased. Dang! I had to start cleaning it again.
Same thing happened with my car. Bought a 2000 Toyota Echo, my dream car because it gets 40 mpg city, 50 mpg highway. Laid on new brakes, new tires, new transmission, even popped for the new stereo system. Am I done yet? Apparently not, because the gas mileage has dropped by 10 miles per gallon. Maybe it has something to do with those little postcards that keep coming in the mail, reminding me that I’m overdue for an oil change, the 10,000 mile service, and oh yes, I said I would replace the thing-a-ma-whadjit when it got to the point where I really couldn’t ignore it anymore.
And my husband insists on putting $50 away each month for a new roof. We just replaced the roof, I say. Yes, but in 15 years we’ll need a new one and this way we’ll have the money, he says reasonably.
This is just so irritating. Why can’t anything just STAY the way it is? Why isn’t everything just self-healing? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could drive the car hard and it got more efficient, forgot about composting and just grew stuff in the garden and the ground got more and more fertile? If the house could re-roof and re-paint itself?
But here’s a thought. I do own one really priceless thing that heals itself. It even gets stronger when I subject it to stressors.
That would be my body.
I push it to learn how to walk four miles at a stretch and it does. I lift heavier and heavier weights and it responds by making new muscle. I can even teach it to run better on different fuel, try that with your Honda! More fiber, less fat – it responds by running more efficiently and with a longer burn.
Cool.
Where I get into trouble is when I forget that my body needs ongoing attention, just like my car or house or garden. I can’t rebuild the engine in my car and then blow off the next dozen oil changes. I can’t re-roof the house and then forget to budget for repairs. Well, I can. But the car stops running so well and the roof leaks.
So if I quit eating well and stop working out, of course I’ll gain the fat back and lose that nice definition in my arms and stop feeling as good. Then if I say, “Look! The diet didn’t work and exercise didn’t work!” that’s kind of like saying that I don’t believe in entropy anymore. The clothes will never get dirty again and the kitchen will keep itself clean.
This is why we need a new concept, and maybe even new vocabulary, for what happens when we change our fitness levels and subsequently, our fat levels and pants sizes. You rebuild the engine of your body. Nice! Shiny! Then you have to maintain it. I like to think of my body as a project car, like that old VW camper we had for awhile or the legendary MG my husband had. Nothing stays new. You have to keep tinkering with things.
Maybe “maintenance” is not the happy word. I know I should maintain my car and my house. When you don’t, that’s called “deferred maintenance,” -- this is how you refer to putting off replacing the roof for ten years and then it costs more to fix than if you’d kept it in repair or replaced it when it started to leak in the first place.
When applied to my health (by this I usually mean my weight, even though I know better), “maintenance” always felt a bit like “backsliding,” or “constant struggle,” and when I applied it to keeping to a steady fitness level or fat-to-lean ratio, it felt more like a “losing battle”.
But I don’t want to defer maintenance on my body. It can get pretty expensive. I was looking at knee replacement surgery and medication for chronic high blood pressure, plus the health risks that go along with insulin resistance. Changing the exercise and diet was a lot cheaper.
But “maintain”? Isn’t that what we used to do when we came home late from a date and Mom was waiting up for us and we had to act normal even though we had maybe imbibed a bit too much?
So. For me, not a helpful word. I need a better way to think about it.
Three years ago, I changed the way my body worked by changing my daily life. I lost a lot of weight and changed my fitness level drastically. But to make that change permanent, I have to make my new life feel just as comfortable, routine, and unconscious as the life I used to have. I don’t want to think all the time about what to buy, how to cook, and what my daily activities are. I want to create a way to live that feels normal for the rest of my life. You know, keep up with the oil changes.
In some ways, I’ve done pretty well. Those 10,000 steps are embedded into my day. I’ve got breakfast dialed in – hot cereal, skim milk, fruit and coffee – and my family and I cook and enjoy food that routinely is lower on the fat continuum and consists of lots more vegetables, fruits and beans than we used to eat. We don’t think about it anymore. It’s what happens, just like we pay our bills and put the socks away.
But…I have a confession to make. Nine months ago, I got good and tired of going to the gym. And I got good and tired of counting calories. I’m sure I’m not overeating! I know what I’m doing! So I stopped paying attention to how many little treats I had in a day. And I stopped the cardio and weight training three times a week. I planned to walk in the mornings, ride my bike everywhere and garden and that would replace those gym sessions. Well, I didn’t ride my bike everywhere because I fell off my bike twice, so there went the replacement for the interval training. I raked a lot of leaves this fall and shoveled two yards of compost and gravel. But if I was hoping that this would replace the weight workouts, I’d have to admit that I didn’t do heavy-duty yard work three times a week. I like walking, and I like talking to my friend Sally even better, and this is a good thing because if we hadn’t been walking for an hour every morning, my latest body comp would have been even worse. Yes, I finally got brave and had a (way overdue) body comp test done.
After nine months of the “I don’t need to go to the gym anymore” theory, I have lost five pounds of muscle and gained 15 pounds of fat.
Did the diet not work? Of course it did. Did the exercise work? Of course it did, and thank goodness I’ve kept to a pretty active lifestyle or I’d be real blimpy again by now.
What didn’t work was me indulging in the idea that my body somehow isn’t governed by the same laws that rule the rest of the physical universe. I thought that, somehow, I could stop with the weight resistance and cardio and my muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness level would stay the same. But, “ye canna change the laws of Physics, Cap’n!” Entropy must increase.
Take the body back to the shop for another overhaul. I estimate that six months of building fitness and losing the fat will get me back to where I want to be, and then I guess I’ll have to keep on paying attention to – maintaining? -- my own health.
Just do the laundry, just do the dishes. Eat the good food, not too much, and go to the gym.
And give thanks for my self-healing body that gets stronger and more efficient when I ask more of it.
Now if I could just get the car to do the same thing.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Food Sensitivities
If you are just joining us, be sure to read my first post, "Being the True Story of How a Middle Aged, Overweight, Depressed Woman Changed Her Life ... by Changing Each Day."
My friend Sally and I walk for an hour every morning at 6:30, and we really enjoyed it this morning – yes it was only 20 degrees, but the sunrise was so beautiful and the air smelled great.
So every now and then someone will e-mail me and ask, “What do you and James think about stress and cortisol? What about food sensitivities? I think that I’m bloated. I don’t think this is real fat. I don’t think I can lose weight because I have problems with certain kinds of food.”
It’s true, the body responds to stress by creating cortisol and it’s been proven that this can cause you to store visceral – think tummy – fat. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. Today I want to talk to you about food sensitivities, because there’s been a lot published about them.
It seems like everybody’s read an article or heard from somebody that they shouldn’t eat corn, or they should cut out dairy, or carbs are bad for you, etc., etc., etc. The fact is that most of these foods are fine for most people to eat. Some people have some legitimate food allergies where they truly have a life-threatening response to certain foods. If you are one of these people, you know about it already. You know if you have a peanut allergy. You know if you have Crohn’s disease and have to be super careful to avoid food triggers and get enough calories.
But don’t cut whole categories of food out of your diet without real, science-based evidence that it causes you a problem, and don’t blame your difficulties with weight loss (that is, fat loss) on foods that may or may not be a problem.
Some foods can, indeed, cause water retention, and some can trigger an inflammatory response that will show up in your waist measurement, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But first, let's remind ourselves of what we know about fat loss and fitness.
In my last post, I talked about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight. (I’d like to call this a healthy fat/muscle-ratio-and-fitness-level, only it takes too long to say.) Remember what those five factors were?
1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.
I worked hard for a year on all five of these factors and achieved most of my weight loss and fitness goals. I lost 65 pounds of fat and put on 15 pounds of muscle. My blood pressure dropped by twenty points and my resting heart rate dropped from 70 beats per minute to 55 beats per minute. My energy level rose and so did my outlook on life. At the same time, I needed less sleep. My body fat percentage went down from fifty percent (yes, fifty percent of me used to be fat) to 26 percent.
But I’ve been maintaining for over two years now, going through menopause and raising a teenage son at the same time, and at some point I started to get a little discouraged. I wanted to get to 24 percent fat. I wanted to get below a magic number on the scale. And I got tired of counting calories and getting into the gym every other day. Somehow I wanted to believe that I could cut out the gym visits and not watch what I ate and still stay at that lovely new low weight and maybe even lose a little more. So when I looked down and saw that tummy creeping back, I wanted to blame it on something other than the missing gym visits and adding the cookies back in. It’s gotta be water weight! It’s cortisol! It’s food sensitivities!
The fact is, if you are sticking with your gym visits, continuing to do your weight training, cardio, keeping your steps up and staying in your calorie window, probably you’re not having a problem with progressing toward your weight and fitness goals and then maintaining once you get there. But if you are doing all those things and still seeing some disturbing fluctuations in your waist measurement, then food sensitivities could be playing a role.
There are a couple of things to remember. You can’t gain a pound of fat overnight (unless you’re eating 3,500 calories while you sleep). It’s physically impossible. But it’s pretty easy to retain three to five pounds of water weight. However, the second thing to remember is that the water retention, while it looks bad, doesn’t have anything to do with your fat ratio or your fitness level. Underneath those five pounds of water, you are lean or a little overweight or obese. Your body composition under that water doesn’t change that rapidly.
This doesn’t make the number on the scale look any nicer. What is making you retain water in the abdominal area?
Food sensitivities can cause an inflammatory response in the liver, which can cause you water bloating in the tummy area. Rodale Press recently cited a study which showed that just one high-fat meal can trigger an inflammatory response. I was interested in this because I always take Friday off from watching calories. Therefore, Kettle chips, a hamburger, French fries, steak…lots of fat. Lots of SATURATED fat, which makes it even worse. Then I’d wake up Saturday morning with a big, big tummy. We’re talking about maybe another three inches in the waist measurement. And it would take a couple or three days to go back down.
Okay. Saturated fat isn’t all good for you anyway, and neither are high-fat meals, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that make me just as happy as my French fries and Kettle chips. (A few times a year, yes. Every Friday – maybe no.) I’ll be sharing these with you in future posts.
I decided to cut out all high-fat meals for a couple of weeks, being especially careful not to eat any saturated fat, and then see what happened to the waist line. After a week, I was happy to see that the ol’ tummy measurement was being more consistent. I could look at my arms and tell that I hadn’t been to the gym in awhile, but at least I wasn’t having an unexpectedly round stomach every Saturday.
Even so, I still would get a round tummy every now and then anyway, and that’s when I decided to get a food panel done and see if I had other food sensitivities.
It turned out that I did. For me, it was eggs and navy beans that triggered an inflammation response. (Navy beans??) An omelet or a white bean soup for dinner and I’d be seeing that round tummy again. And some health professionals say that you don’t want to trigger an inflammation response anyway.
So I don’t eat a lot of eggs and navy beans now. I avoid saturated fat when I can, a good idea anyway, and keep my high-fat meals to holidays (and contrary to my previous belief, not every Friday and Saturday is a holiday). I’ve found treats that don’t affect me physically this way.
But does it let me off the hook with eating in my calorie window, doing my cardio and keeping up with the weight training? Nope!
Stick with your healthy eating, your daily 10,000 steps, and get to the gym at least three times a week for your weight training and cardio. Then if your waist measurement is fluctuating and driving you nuts, it may be worthwhile to see how many high-fat meals you’re indulging in, maybe keep track of the saturated fat in your food and maybe even have a food panel done.
My friend Sally and I walk for an hour every morning at 6:30, and we really enjoyed it this morning – yes it was only 20 degrees, but the sunrise was so beautiful and the air smelled great.
So every now and then someone will e-mail me and ask, “What do you and James think about stress and cortisol? What about food sensitivities? I think that I’m bloated. I don’t think this is real fat. I don’t think I can lose weight because I have problems with certain kinds of food.”
It’s true, the body responds to stress by creating cortisol and it’s been proven that this can cause you to store visceral – think tummy – fat. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. Today I want to talk to you about food sensitivities, because there’s been a lot published about them.
It seems like everybody’s read an article or heard from somebody that they shouldn’t eat corn, or they should cut out dairy, or carbs are bad for you, etc., etc., etc. The fact is that most of these foods are fine for most people to eat. Some people have some legitimate food allergies where they truly have a life-threatening response to certain foods. If you are one of these people, you know about it already. You know if you have a peanut allergy. You know if you have Crohn’s disease and have to be super careful to avoid food triggers and get enough calories.
But don’t cut whole categories of food out of your diet without real, science-based evidence that it causes you a problem, and don’t blame your difficulties with weight loss (that is, fat loss) on foods that may or may not be a problem.
Some foods can, indeed, cause water retention, and some can trigger an inflammatory response that will show up in your waist measurement, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But first, let's remind ourselves of what we know about fat loss and fitness.
In my last post, I talked about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight. (I’d like to call this a healthy fat/muscle-ratio-and-fitness-level, only it takes too long to say.) Remember what those five factors were?
1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.
I worked hard for a year on all five of these factors and achieved most of my weight loss and fitness goals. I lost 65 pounds of fat and put on 15 pounds of muscle. My blood pressure dropped by twenty points and my resting heart rate dropped from 70 beats per minute to 55 beats per minute. My energy level rose and so did my outlook on life. At the same time, I needed less sleep. My body fat percentage went down from fifty percent (yes, fifty percent of me used to be fat) to 26 percent.
But I’ve been maintaining for over two years now, going through menopause and raising a teenage son at the same time, and at some point I started to get a little discouraged. I wanted to get to 24 percent fat. I wanted to get below a magic number on the scale. And I got tired of counting calories and getting into the gym every other day. Somehow I wanted to believe that I could cut out the gym visits and not watch what I ate and still stay at that lovely new low weight and maybe even lose a little more. So when I looked down and saw that tummy creeping back, I wanted to blame it on something other than the missing gym visits and adding the cookies back in. It’s gotta be water weight! It’s cortisol! It’s food sensitivities!
The fact is, if you are sticking with your gym visits, continuing to do your weight training, cardio, keeping your steps up and staying in your calorie window, probably you’re not having a problem with progressing toward your weight and fitness goals and then maintaining once you get there. But if you are doing all those things and still seeing some disturbing fluctuations in your waist measurement, then food sensitivities could be playing a role.
There are a couple of things to remember. You can’t gain a pound of fat overnight (unless you’re eating 3,500 calories while you sleep). It’s physically impossible. But it’s pretty easy to retain three to five pounds of water weight. However, the second thing to remember is that the water retention, while it looks bad, doesn’t have anything to do with your fat ratio or your fitness level. Underneath those five pounds of water, you are lean or a little overweight or obese. Your body composition under that water doesn’t change that rapidly.
This doesn’t make the number on the scale look any nicer. What is making you retain water in the abdominal area?
Food sensitivities can cause an inflammatory response in the liver, which can cause you water bloating in the tummy area. Rodale Press recently cited a study which showed that just one high-fat meal can trigger an inflammatory response. I was interested in this because I always take Friday off from watching calories. Therefore, Kettle chips, a hamburger, French fries, steak…lots of fat. Lots of SATURATED fat, which makes it even worse. Then I’d wake up Saturday morning with a big, big tummy. We’re talking about maybe another three inches in the waist measurement. And it would take a couple or three days to go back down.
Okay. Saturated fat isn’t all good for you anyway, and neither are high-fat meals, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that make me just as happy as my French fries and Kettle chips. (A few times a year, yes. Every Friday – maybe no.) I’ll be sharing these with you in future posts.
I decided to cut out all high-fat meals for a couple of weeks, being especially careful not to eat any saturated fat, and then see what happened to the waist line. After a week, I was happy to see that the ol’ tummy measurement was being more consistent. I could look at my arms and tell that I hadn’t been to the gym in awhile, but at least I wasn’t having an unexpectedly round stomach every Saturday.
Even so, I still would get a round tummy every now and then anyway, and that’s when I decided to get a food panel done and see if I had other food sensitivities.
It turned out that I did. For me, it was eggs and navy beans that triggered an inflammation response. (Navy beans??) An omelet or a white bean soup for dinner and I’d be seeing that round tummy again. And some health professionals say that you don’t want to trigger an inflammation response anyway.
So I don’t eat a lot of eggs and navy beans now. I avoid saturated fat when I can, a good idea anyway, and keep my high-fat meals to holidays (and contrary to my previous belief, not every Friday and Saturday is a holiday). I’ve found treats that don’t affect me physically this way.
But does it let me off the hook with eating in my calorie window, doing my cardio and keeping up with the weight training? Nope!
Stick with your healthy eating, your daily 10,000 steps, and get to the gym at least three times a week for your weight training and cardio. Then if your waist measurement is fluctuating and driving you nuts, it may be worthwhile to see how many high-fat meals you’re indulging in, maybe keep track of the saturated fat in your food and maybe even have a food panel done.
Being the True Story of How a Middle Aged, Overweight, Depressed Woman Changed Her Life ... by Changing Each Day.
“Well, you are over fifty now,” said the doctor when I asked again about the stiffness and pain in the morning, the inability to get out of a booth or a car without help, the difficulty in sleeping, the upward creep of the blood pressure reading. “This is all just a part of the aging process.”
At fifty-one, I was tired all the time. Everything hurt. I planned my day so I didn’t have to climb stairs much. Exercise meant a hard slog in the dark and rain in a heavy coat and then feeling exhausted for days. Dieting meant no fat, or chewy microwaved frozen broccoli – so dieting never lasted long! I weighed 210. I was depressed. I felt ugly. I felt hopeless. And after that visit to the doctor, I felt old.
But that doctor's visit finally woke me up. I got mad. "No way! That CAN'T be right!" I started working with a trainer and nutritionist, James Dubberly, to make permanent changes to my life. I changed my attitude, started eating in a healthy calorie window, restored physical activity to my life and started building muscular and cardiovascular strength. One year later, I had lost sixty pounds, my blood pressure had dropped twenty points, I no longer needed knee surgery and my chronic fatigue and depression were gone.
I've maintained these changes for two years, with a busy life, through menopause and with a husband and a teenage son to feed. I've been asked over and over how I did it. James and I answered that question in our book, The Real Skinny: The Practical Guide to Fat Loss and Health Gain, but the learning opportunities continue to come weekly, if not daily.
This blog is the ongoing story of how this new life works. Setbacks, realizations, progress, recipes...it'll all be here!
Welcome!
So first of all, let’s talk about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight.
To be healthy, the human body (any mammal, really), needs five things:
1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.
If you’ve read The Real Skinny, you know this already – but I’ll review for those of you who haven’t. I will expand on each of these topics in later posts.
A healthy muscle-to-fat ratio.
For women, health problems start, in general, when your body is more than 30 percent fat. For men, more than 20 percent! And that’s not what’s optimal, either. The optimal fat percentage for women is between 18 – 24 percent, and for men, it’s best if you no more of your body is 10 - 15 percent fat.
So, this is a pretty important number to know. How do you determine your lean-to-fat ratio? Get a body composition test from an experienced trainer who knows how to do the caliper test, or buy a bio-impedance machine. You can get one from Costco that measures your weight plus the fat ratio of your upper and lower body for less than $60.
This ratio turns out to be a handy tool for a number of reasons.
1) It tells you if you’re at risk for weight-related health issues (which can include diabetes, heart trouble, and cancer, among other things).
2) If you are over-fat, knowing your starting point helps you track your progress as you lose fat over time.
3) This is my favorite. Knowing how many pounds of muscle tissue you are carrying allows you to compute how many calories you can eat in a day before you start to store fat – boy is that a critical piece to putting together a daily eating routine that works.
4) As you gain muscle, not only you’re your lean-to-fat ratio change, but it means that you get to eat more calories in a day because your lean tissue burns more calories, even while you’re sleeping!
How do you change this ratio?
You change how efficiently your body burns fat through cardiovascular exercise.
You change how many calories your body metabolizes through resistance, or muscle, training.
You change how many calories you burn through your daily physical activities.
You take in the right amount of calories for your own body composition.
So let’s take these one at a time.
Cardiovascular strength.
Cardiovascular strength is built and maintained by what many people call “cardio.” Building cardiovascular strength involves getting your heart into its training range and keeping it there for thirty or forty minutes, three to five times a week. To maintain (not improve) cardio health, you can get by with twenty minutes, two or three times a week.
What’s your training range? Working your heart at 60 to 80 percent of its maximum rate. (50% of your maximum qualifies as a low-level aerobic work out, and is good for a warm up or if you are not accustomed to exercise. More than 80 percent and you would be working in the anaerobic, elite athlete range.) Any gym will have a poster in it with the average training range for your age. But it's better if you can calculate your individual training range, using your maximum heart rate.
Your Maximum Heart Rate is the fastest your heart can beat in one minute. Unless you want to go do a stress test, you can get a good idea of what yours is by using this formula:
Males: 210 minus 1/2 your age minus 5% of your body weight + 4
Females: 210 minus - 1/2 your age minus 1% of your body weight + 0
So for me, my calculation would look like this: 210 - half my age, which is 54 - 1% of my body weight, which is 165. 210 - 27 - 1.65 = 181 beats per minute.
Again, using me as an example, 60% of 181 beats per minute is 108 beats per minute. That's my warm up goal. Then I'd keep my heart rate between 70% and 80% of my maximum heart rate for a cardio training session. For me, that's keeping my heart rate between 127 and 144 beats per minute, for twenty to thirty minutes.
How do you know what your heart rate is at any given time? I recommend wearing a heart rate monitor. It is much more convenient and accurate than taking your pulse and multiplying while exercising at the same time! Monitors used to be quite expensive, but you can buy them now for $45 - $90. I’ve found that a heart rate monitor is the most powerful tool for maintaining a healthy fitness and weight level.
How do you get your heart into its training range? This will depend on your fitness level. For some people, brisk walking is enough to get your heart to 70 percent of its maximum. For me, I have to run, bike up a hill or walk briskly on an elliptical. That’s why you need the heart monitor.
If you don’t already exercise regularly, it’s always best to check with a health professional before beginning an exercise regimen.
Muscular strength.
Muscular strength is created and maintained by resistance, or weight, training. To create muscle, you absolutely must demand that your body push or pull weight beyond what it usually does. When you stress your muscles beyond their limits, they break down and then, over the next 24 to 48 hours, repair themselves and, in the process, create more muscle fiber. (A young person can stress the same muscle after just 24 hours – a middle-aged person would want to wait two days between working that muscle to failure.)
Why would you want to create more muscle? Because muscle is active tissue -- it burns fat. As more and more of your body becomes muscle tissue, you increase the number of calories you burn in a day. Besides, you feel stronger. And an upper arm that’s got good muscle definition looks so much better than one that’s defined by flab! Just check out Holly Hunter or Michelle Obama.
Adequate daily physical activity.
We know that humans are built to walk on an average of 18,000 steps a day. Most wellness sites these days recommend that you walk at least 10,000 steps a day, the equivalent of five miles. These steps can be around the house, from the parking lot to the grocery store, or an after-dinner walk. It doesn’t really matter. If you are an average American, you probably don’t get more than 4,000 steps a day and the actual number may be much less. Find out. Buy a pedometer (you can get one for $15 or less), hook it onto your waistband and wear it daily. If you are below 10,000 steps, start figuring out how you can get more steps into your day. Of course there are the obvious methods – walk around the grocery store perimeter once before you start shopping – take the stairs instead of the elevator – park a little farther away. But if you are only getting 3,000 steps a day, this won’t do much. You’ll actually have to start taking walks during breaks, lunch hour, before work or after dinner. A mile is about 2,000 steps and takes about 20 minutes for most people.
Don’t try to go from 3,000 to 10,000 steps all at once. You’ll have to build up to it. If this is you, try adding in a ten to twenty minute walk, most days a week, depending on your fitness level. After a couple of weeks, add in a second walk.
I found myself getting hooked on walking and now I’d rather walk for half an hour after dinner than check Facebook, play solitaire on the computer or watch a TV show for that half hour. I feel better, happier, have more time to check in with my walking buddy, and sleep better. It could happen to you!
Eating in the right calorie window.
Well, and making healthy choices of WHAT to eat, too, but let’s just talk about how many calories for now.
It’s tricky. Most people who have gone on a “diet” know that if they don’t eat enough, they stop losing weight, they lose strength, their mood and maybe their health suffers. On the other hand, look where eating too much got them. We know intuitively that there is a target window that we should hit, not too much and not too little, either.
But how do you know what that window is? It’s different for each person, no matter what the magazines say. It is based on your body composition and metabolic rate. It’s easy to find out what your body composition – the fat-to-lean ratio – is. As I mentioned above, get an experienced, knowledgeable trainer to do a caliper test, or get a water immersion test done, or buy a bio-impedance weight machine that measures both the upper and lower body. You want to know how many pounds of muscle, that is, lean body mass, you have.
Once you have that, you can calculate your caloric window. Get out your calculator.
1. Divide your lean body mass by 2.2. This will give you your lean body mass in kilograms.
2. Multiply that number (your lean body mass in kilograms, that is) by 21.6.
3. Add 370 to that number. That’s your resting metabolic rate (RMR). That’s the bottom of your caloric window. Eat less than that, and you go into famine mode!
4. Now add 300 to that number. That’s the top of your caloric window. Eat more than that, and you may gain weight.
Does this mean you have to count calories? Absolutely, at least until you learn to accurately estimate calories in your usual eating day.
Does this window look smaller than what you usually eat?
Probably. The average fast-foot lunch is about 1200 calories. And my caloric window is 1600 – 1900 calories. So I won’t be eating at Burger King every day.
If you’ve stayed with me to this point, about now you’re starting to ask questions like, “What about traveling? What about eating out? What about dessert, treats, movies, lunch?” You may even be making some strong statements like, “I can’t cook, I don’t have time, I can’t afford this…” Trust me, I’ve been through all this. I’ve learned a lot about how to eat delicious food, conveniently, and stay in that calorie window day in, day out. I’ll be writing a lot about this in the weeks to come.
Thanks for reading my very first post! Stay tuned!
At fifty-one, I was tired all the time. Everything hurt. I planned my day so I didn’t have to climb stairs much. Exercise meant a hard slog in the dark and rain in a heavy coat and then feeling exhausted for days. Dieting meant no fat, or chewy microwaved frozen broccoli – so dieting never lasted long! I weighed 210. I was depressed. I felt ugly. I felt hopeless. And after that visit to the doctor, I felt old.
But that doctor's visit finally woke me up. I got mad. "No way! That CAN'T be right!" I started working with a trainer and nutritionist, James Dubberly, to make permanent changes to my life. I changed my attitude, started eating in a healthy calorie window, restored physical activity to my life and started building muscular and cardiovascular strength. One year later, I had lost sixty pounds, my blood pressure had dropped twenty points, I no longer needed knee surgery and my chronic fatigue and depression were gone.
I've maintained these changes for two years, with a busy life, through menopause and with a husband and a teenage son to feed. I've been asked over and over how I did it. James and I answered that question in our book, The Real Skinny: The Practical Guide to Fat Loss and Health Gain, but the learning opportunities continue to come weekly, if not daily.
This blog is the ongoing story of how this new life works. Setbacks, realizations, progress, recipes...it'll all be here!
Welcome!
So first of all, let’s talk about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight.
To be healthy, the human body (any mammal, really), needs five things:
1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.
If you’ve read The Real Skinny, you know this already – but I’ll review for those of you who haven’t. I will expand on each of these topics in later posts.
A healthy muscle-to-fat ratio.
For women, health problems start, in general, when your body is more than 30 percent fat. For men, more than 20 percent! And that’s not what’s optimal, either. The optimal fat percentage for women is between 18 – 24 percent, and for men, it’s best if you no more of your body is 10 - 15 percent fat.
So, this is a pretty important number to know. How do you determine your lean-to-fat ratio? Get a body composition test from an experienced trainer who knows how to do the caliper test, or buy a bio-impedance machine. You can get one from Costco that measures your weight plus the fat ratio of your upper and lower body for less than $60.
This ratio turns out to be a handy tool for a number of reasons.
1) It tells you if you’re at risk for weight-related health issues (which can include diabetes, heart trouble, and cancer, among other things).
2) If you are over-fat, knowing your starting point helps you track your progress as you lose fat over time.
3) This is my favorite. Knowing how many pounds of muscle tissue you are carrying allows you to compute how many calories you can eat in a day before you start to store fat – boy is that a critical piece to putting together a daily eating routine that works.
4) As you gain muscle, not only you’re your lean-to-fat ratio change, but it means that you get to eat more calories in a day because your lean tissue burns more calories, even while you’re sleeping!
How do you change this ratio?
You change how efficiently your body burns fat through cardiovascular exercise.
You change how many calories your body metabolizes through resistance, or muscle, training.
You change how many calories you burn through your daily physical activities.
You take in the right amount of calories for your own body composition.
So let’s take these one at a time.
Cardiovascular strength.
Cardiovascular strength is built and maintained by what many people call “cardio.” Building cardiovascular strength involves getting your heart into its training range and keeping it there for thirty or forty minutes, three to five times a week. To maintain (not improve) cardio health, you can get by with twenty minutes, two or three times a week.
What’s your training range? Working your heart at 60 to 80 percent of its maximum rate. (50% of your maximum qualifies as a low-level aerobic work out, and is good for a warm up or if you are not accustomed to exercise. More than 80 percent and you would be working in the anaerobic, elite athlete range.) Any gym will have a poster in it with the average training range for your age. But it's better if you can calculate your individual training range, using your maximum heart rate.
Your Maximum Heart Rate is the fastest your heart can beat in one minute. Unless you want to go do a stress test, you can get a good idea of what yours is by using this formula:
Males: 210 minus 1/2 your age minus 5% of your body weight + 4
Females: 210 minus - 1/2 your age minus 1% of your body weight + 0
So for me, my calculation would look like this: 210 - half my age, which is 54 - 1% of my body weight, which is 165. 210 - 27 - 1.65 = 181 beats per minute.
Again, using me as an example, 60% of 181 beats per minute is 108 beats per minute. That's my warm up goal. Then I'd keep my heart rate between 70% and 80% of my maximum heart rate for a cardio training session. For me, that's keeping my heart rate between 127 and 144 beats per minute, for twenty to thirty minutes.
How do you know what your heart rate is at any given time? I recommend wearing a heart rate monitor. It is much more convenient and accurate than taking your pulse and multiplying while exercising at the same time! Monitors used to be quite expensive, but you can buy them now for $45 - $90. I’ve found that a heart rate monitor is the most powerful tool for maintaining a healthy fitness and weight level.
How do you get your heart into its training range? This will depend on your fitness level. For some people, brisk walking is enough to get your heart to 70 percent of its maximum. For me, I have to run, bike up a hill or walk briskly on an elliptical. That’s why you need the heart monitor.
If you don’t already exercise regularly, it’s always best to check with a health professional before beginning an exercise regimen.
Muscular strength.
Muscular strength is created and maintained by resistance, or weight, training. To create muscle, you absolutely must demand that your body push or pull weight beyond what it usually does. When you stress your muscles beyond their limits, they break down and then, over the next 24 to 48 hours, repair themselves and, in the process, create more muscle fiber. (A young person can stress the same muscle after just 24 hours – a middle-aged person would want to wait two days between working that muscle to failure.)
Why would you want to create more muscle? Because muscle is active tissue -- it burns fat. As more and more of your body becomes muscle tissue, you increase the number of calories you burn in a day. Besides, you feel stronger. And an upper arm that’s got good muscle definition looks so much better than one that’s defined by flab! Just check out Holly Hunter or Michelle Obama.
Adequate daily physical activity.
We know that humans are built to walk on an average of 18,000 steps a day. Most wellness sites these days recommend that you walk at least 10,000 steps a day, the equivalent of five miles. These steps can be around the house, from the parking lot to the grocery store, or an after-dinner walk. It doesn’t really matter. If you are an average American, you probably don’t get more than 4,000 steps a day and the actual number may be much less. Find out. Buy a pedometer (you can get one for $15 or less), hook it onto your waistband and wear it daily. If you are below 10,000 steps, start figuring out how you can get more steps into your day. Of course there are the obvious methods – walk around the grocery store perimeter once before you start shopping – take the stairs instead of the elevator – park a little farther away. But if you are only getting 3,000 steps a day, this won’t do much. You’ll actually have to start taking walks during breaks, lunch hour, before work or after dinner. A mile is about 2,000 steps and takes about 20 minutes for most people.
Don’t try to go from 3,000 to 10,000 steps all at once. You’ll have to build up to it. If this is you, try adding in a ten to twenty minute walk, most days a week, depending on your fitness level. After a couple of weeks, add in a second walk.
I found myself getting hooked on walking and now I’d rather walk for half an hour after dinner than check Facebook, play solitaire on the computer or watch a TV show for that half hour. I feel better, happier, have more time to check in with my walking buddy, and sleep better. It could happen to you!
Eating in the right calorie window.
Well, and making healthy choices of WHAT to eat, too, but let’s just talk about how many calories for now.
It’s tricky. Most people who have gone on a “diet” know that if they don’t eat enough, they stop losing weight, they lose strength, their mood and maybe their health suffers. On the other hand, look where eating too much got them. We know intuitively that there is a target window that we should hit, not too much and not too little, either.
But how do you know what that window is? It’s different for each person, no matter what the magazines say. It is based on your body composition and metabolic rate. It’s easy to find out what your body composition – the fat-to-lean ratio – is. As I mentioned above, get an experienced, knowledgeable trainer to do a caliper test, or get a water immersion test done, or buy a bio-impedance weight machine that measures both the upper and lower body. You want to know how many pounds of muscle, that is, lean body mass, you have.
Once you have that, you can calculate your caloric window. Get out your calculator.
1. Divide your lean body mass by 2.2. This will give you your lean body mass in kilograms.
2. Multiply that number (your lean body mass in kilograms, that is) by 21.6.
3. Add 370 to that number. That’s your resting metabolic rate (RMR). That’s the bottom of your caloric window. Eat less than that, and you go into famine mode!
4. Now add 300 to that number. That’s the top of your caloric window. Eat more than that, and you may gain weight.
Does this mean you have to count calories? Absolutely, at least until you learn to accurately estimate calories in your usual eating day.
Does this window look smaller than what you usually eat?
Probably. The average fast-foot lunch is about 1200 calories. And my caloric window is 1600 – 1900 calories. So I won’t be eating at Burger King every day.
If you’ve stayed with me to this point, about now you’re starting to ask questions like, “What about traveling? What about eating out? What about dessert, treats, movies, lunch?” You may even be making some strong statements like, “I can’t cook, I don’t have time, I can’t afford this…” Trust me, I’ve been through all this. I’ve learned a lot about how to eat delicious food, conveniently, and stay in that calorie window day in, day out. I’ll be writing a lot about this in the weeks to come.
Thanks for reading my very first post! Stay tuned!
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