Fit Communications

Back pain bites (substitute your favorite verb).

Things that help:

Strengthening your core.
Getting strong, flexible hip extensors and cultivating a balance between the strength and flexibility of hip flexors (which are often worked when you exercise abs) and hip extensors.
Strengthening the small muscles of the back. (An entire book is devoted to this approach to reducing back pain.)

Here’s a Men’s Health article offering several useful moves (thanks, Kris, for turning me on to this).

But sometimes these approaches aren’t enough because the pain is caused by nerve impingement, damage to a spinal disk, osteoarthritis, or any number of other maladies.

Dutifully performing my exercises makes a difference–but the pain is still there, and some mornings it’s bad. I suspect I’ve got some arthritic changes as a result of a deadlifting injury many years ago. So I’ve made an appointment with the neurosurgeon who diagnosed my bulging disk in 1986. We’ll see what he says.

I should’ve seen this story (Reuters report, published on MSNBC.com) two weeks ago but didn’t:

Trans fat suit costs McDonald’s $8.5 million
McDonald’s has agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a lawsuit over artery-clogging trans fats in its cooking oils, the company said on Friday.

Who benefits? The plaintiffs, of course; the American Heart Association, to which Micky D’s has promised to donate $7 million; and consumers of French fries etc., when McD’s further reduces the amount of transfat in its foods.

When you see "hydrogenated vegetable oil" on the label, that means transfat–which is worse for your arteries than saturated fat (e.g., butter [mmmmm good] and lard).

As always, if you stick to less-processed foods, you’re okay. Fruits, vegetables, lean meats, low-fat dairy, whole grains: no transfat, no problem.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is clamoring for the fed to categorize sodium (salt) as an additive and thus to regulate it. Here’s a Reuters story published on MSNBC.com:

Government should regulate salt, says group
A consumer group sued the federal government, saying that salt is killing tens of thousands of Americans and that regulators have done too little to control salt in food.

I don’t know much about the science, as I’ve never worried about salt intake. It strikes me, however, that the simplest way to avoid ingesting too much sodium is to cook your own food, from fresh ingredients, and avoid all that packaged snack food and prepared stuff that isn’t good for you anyway. Apparently restaurant food is a key contributor to the high sodium content of the American diet. Just one more reason not to eat out.

Well, it’s not much different from what I did at 28.

Except.

I think (hope) I’m a little smarter now about the foundational stuff. Now that I know I am not immortal (a common misperception of the young), I warm up more carefully. I go to bed earlier. I eat more nutritiously. I stretch more faithfully. I go easy when something hurts and go to beat hell on days when the planets align and everything goes right and I feel strong as an amazon and my arms and chest are pumped up to there and my legs are so fatigued that I have to grab the handrail to walk down the stairs in the gym. Is there a better sensation in this world? I can think of a few . . . but just a few.

Being 48 isn’t bad, and it had better not be because I hope to be here next year and the year after and the year after and so on, God willing.

One side effect of training with weights and generally being in shape is that I have energy to burn. It’s still hard to get out of bed at 5 to walk the dogs, and I still yawn my head off at night. But in the intervening hours I’m the Energizer bunny. Last Monday night at a choral rehearsal one of the women in the alto section said to me, "I’m 24, and I don’t have half as much energy as you." And she was a healthy-looking young thing.

In other news, I managed six unassisted reps with 95 in the bench press on Tuesday.

I also reduced the amount of assistance I’m getting from the assisted pull-up and dip machine. Man, do I love that machine. In the old days the only way I could get pull-up assistance was to have my friend Jim McKairnes stand under me, grab my knees, and heave, heave, heave as needed to get me up to the bar. Can’t wait for the day when I can do unassisted pull-ups and dips again.

All in good time, my pretty. All in good time.

This from HealthDay News, published on MSN.com:

Clue to Controlling Appetite Found:
Discovery could one day lead to weight-loss pill in humans

But don’t hold your breath:

"The
tantalizing lure of a ’silver bullet’ to prevent weight gain and treat
obesity propagates irrepressible hope alike among the public at large
and scientific researchers alike," said Dr. David L. Katz, director of
the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.
"To date, such hopes have consistently been dashed."

Katz added there are reasons to be cautious
about any drug for weight control. "Weight gain occurs because of more
calories in than out," he said. "The physiologic mechanisms that favor
weight gain are diverse, redundant and profound. To turn them off is
tantamount to shutting down much that is fundamental to human
metabolism. Intuition suggests such an endeavor is fraught with hazard."

Perhaps
a C75 derivative will one day be one of the weapons used to combat
obesity and its consequences, Katz said. But there’s "no need to hold
our breath and wait," he added.

"We already
own the solution to obesity: increase daily calorie output above daily
calorie intake. There will likely never be a medication as supportive
of overall good health as the combination of healthful,
portion-controlled eating, and regular physical activity," Katz
stressed.

I love this guy.

Here’s a completely irrelevant post. Last night Steve and I attended a fundraising banquet to support research to cure cystic fibrosis. To make a long story short, the brother of Steve’s boss is very involved in the fight against CF, as two of his three children have the disease.

To learn more about CF, visit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The meal was quite good (and I took advantage of it, having planned things so that yesterday could be a maintenance day), but upon reflection, here’s what I remember most about last night:

Most of the people there were of normal weight!

This is not the norm, folks. But it was great.

I don’t know what the explanation is–and after all, this took place in Tennessee, by all reports one of the fatter states in the Union. But perhaps most of the people there are living with CF patients–and perhaps that makes them try extra hard to provide healthy food for their families. Wild guess, but I’m not sure what could explain it.

An article recently posted to MSNBC.com’s health section tells us, in a nutshell, that we should choose a food plan (diet) we can live with. To me, the whole point of changing one’s diet is to improve one’s health in every way: by reducing bodyfat, by taking in more of the good stuff (antioxidants, vitamins, phytochemicals) in healthy foods, by reducing one’s consumption of trash (transfats, refined grains, sugar).

The "diet" shouldn’t be something that can’t be sustained with pleasure for a lifetime. I plan to eat this way for the rest of my life. Once I’m not working on losing bodyfat, I can increase my calories moderately. But the portion-control and food-choice habits I’ve learned are not ones I want to ditch as soon as I reach goal. What would be the point, given that I hope to maintain a healthy weight?

I’ve done the Zone diet, Atkins, South Beach. They all "work," from the standpoint that all result in caloric reduction, which results in a loss of bodyfat. Atkins is untenable (at least long-term) for anyone who works out. I found the Zone too rigid–always having to worry about eating a "proper" ratio of carbs to protein.

Read Walter Willett (see "books for the buff" at left) for specifics on eating right. Then eat the right number of calories to lose fat, maintain bodyweight, or build muscle.

Here’s the MSNBC.com link:

Finding the right diet
"Proven weight loss" is a claim often made by weight loss programs. Yet two recent studies show that which diet you choose is less important than how well you stick with it.

Just for chuckles, I’m investigating a personal-trainer certification program offered by the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

Once upon a time (early ’90s) I took some graduate courses in exercise physiology and was considering a master’s degree. Still have all of my textbooks in physiology, functional anatomy, etc., as well as some current books on designing strength programs etc.

If (big if) I decide to work toward certification, I’ll use the summer to study for it, then take the test in autumn. Summer is down time for me, as most of my musical commitments go on hiatus, leaving just a full-time job, my husband, six dogs, my fitness program, and occasional freelance articles to occupy me. Piece of cake, right?

We shall see. I’m not contemplating a career change but would like a new goal to work toward.

A woman’s reach should exceed her grasp, or what’s a heaven for? (Apologies to Robert Browning.)

I was sure the new size-8 jeans would be snug. Nope. They fit great. OK, it’s a style that runs large, and there’s no way I could wear a pair of size-8 Dockers today. But I’ll take it.

In other news, body-pump class is tomorrow morning, and I’m wondering how I’ll get through the lunges, given the second-day soreness I’m bound to have. It’s bad enough today.

I did an extended drop-set with the leg adduction machine yesterday and discovered that at the lowest weight, I could do about, oh,  dozens of reps . . . and reps . . . and reps. Nice burn Thursday. Big soreness today.