Fit Communications

Gulp. It’s been 10 months since I posted. What does that tell you?

Never mind. Don’t answer that.

Well, I’m back, needing calorie counting more than ever. I’m still in favor of using the spreadsheet function of Google docs. I just need to, um, use it.

Easter was great . . . and fattening.

The music season has been busy, busy this year, so I’ve spent much more time wearing my singer hat than my exercise-buff hat. (See my sites for Harmonia Vocal Quartet and the Pope Benedict XVI Schola.)

As I have written here before, the body is responsive. As soon as the exercise habit and the caloric reduction begin, changes start to occur.

Giving myself a pep talk, see?

I’m back to counting calories, having fattened up by about five pounds over the past six months. What’s different? I let my gym habit slide, simple as that.

The past few weeks I’ve been working hard in the garden (see my other blog, Easy Roses), but once those planting and mulching duties subside, I need to be in the gym. Walking six days a week may do it for some people, but it isn’t enough for me.

In any case, I tried to do Atkins again for a few days and realized–duh–how foolish that was, given that I was doing strenuous physical labor in the garden (on my vacation week!). I simply can’t function on nearly zero carbs.

But calorie counting, a la Tom Venuto’s method (use the search function on this blog [search term zig] for an explanation of the zig-zag method and the sidebar at left for info on ordering his e-book), works very well for me. The hard part used to be keeping track between home and office. I kept e-mailing myself an Excel spreadsheet that I had designed to track daily calories and grams of protein.

Now that I have access to Google docs, it’s a piece of cake (should I say “it’s a toasted pita”?). I just work in the Google doc via my browser with whatever computer I’m on. If you haven’t signed up for gmail and Google docs and all that stuff, I recommend it. I don’t work for Google, I just love their (free) offerings.

Here’s an interesting story from the Associated Press that makes me wonder what the teens in question are eating at home. I probably know the answer to that, and it isn’t vegetables and fruit.

The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey has been trying to help teenagers learn to like vegetables and has been serving things like steamed carrots, greens, vegetable stir-frys, and so on. Some of the kids literally spit out the carrots. Vegetables don’t taste like food to them, apparently, and it isn’t the kids’ fault. Clearly they haven’t been getting carrots and broccoli at home—and just as clearly, those haven’t been the mainstay of school lunch programs.

It’s time for schools to get extremely serious about removing all the junk food from both machines and the cafeteria. Now I sound like an old person: When I was a kid, you either ate the school lunch, brought something from home, or went hungry. You didn’t have the option to buy burgers or pizza (unless that was the cafeteria meal of the day). And you shouldn’t have that option.

Schools operate for the public good, and they’re not obliged to give the youth in their charge non-nutritious food simply because that’s what kids prefer.

Anyway, here’s the link:

Eating healthy is a hard lesson to teach teens
New Jersey program holds out hope it’s never to late to set good habits

I hope soon to provide some information about what Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., is doing to improve children’s health. Memorial is working on a pilot program with some Hamilton County schools in order to combat the child-obesity epidemic. The program may eventually be expanded to additional schools. Let’s hope so. Our kids need it.

I just finished reading Leslie Goldman’s Locker Room Diaries. It was interesting and made me vow to quit being so shy when changing clothes in the locker room. I’ll never be comfortable with walking around undressed, as some women are (more power to them), but at least I can try to become less self-conscious.

In any case, having just read Leslie’s book, which devotes a lot of discussion to "scale behavior," I was aware of the woman who hopped on the scale last Friday. She and I had begun and ended our workouts about the same time. She was probably about my age and had obviously come from work to do her workout.

She stepped on the scale, and I looked away, knowing that a lot of people feel self-conscious on the scale.

A couple of seconds later, she let out a minor whoop and said to me (there was nobody else around), "I’ve lost eight and a half pounds in a month!"

I said I thought that was fabulous and told her that I’d lost about 30 pounds a little more than a year ago. Then we had a little chat about how much harder it is to lose fat when you’re 40- or 50-something.

She said she’d been completely ignoring the doughnuts and junk food people bring to work, and then we got to talking about why people bring in such lousy food as "treats." Anybody of normal intelligence knows that cookies, doughnuts, enormous muffins, and so on are special-occasion food—not the sort of fare anybody needs on a regular basis. But how many people bring bananas, fresh strawberries, homemade low-fat muffins, or fresh vegetables?

I know, some of you probably work at enlightened companies where that’s the norm. But in my case, I bring (my own) food from home every single day–and almost every single day make a decision not to eat the chips, cookies, Krispy Kremes, and other junky offerings that magically appear in our kitchen.

Here’s a challenge: If we do have occasion to bring food for everyone, let’s make it something that actually does our co-workers good.

And here’s a horrible (apparently true) story: The successful loser of eight and a half pounds said that one of her co-workers brings Krispy Kreme doughnuts to work almost every day. She commented to the KK-bringer that it must be expensive buying doughnuts so often.

The colleague replied that she had a family member who worked at Krispy Kreme, so she got a discount–and then she added that perhaps by eating lots of doughnuts some of the older workers would vacate their jobs more quickly and create promotional opportunities for the younger ones.

I said, "I hope she was kidding." My locker-room companion said, "Knowing her, I don’t think she was."

Yikes: Career sabotage via Krispy Kremes!

Holy heart rate, Batman!

I wanted to try something different at the gym today whilst working on my aerobic fitness. Decided to climb aboard “Jacob’s Ladder” and see what kind of burn could be achieved.

Quite a burn, as it happens. In six minutes I managed to torch 100 calories (at least, that’s what the machine said). And I wasn’t moving all that fast, although my heart rate was certainly quite elevated.

The machine is pretty simple: you climb the moving rungs of a ladder at a 45-degree angle, going faster or slower as you wish.

When I visited the company’s website a while ago, I read that the contraption’s developer was looking for a way to increase cardio fitness without stress to one’s back or hip and knee joints.

In any case, if your gym has one of these, give it a try. I’m thinking it’ll be a real boost for doing cardio intervals. The one at my gym is rarely used, so on most days I ought to be able to go back and forth between JL and treadmill—or just alternate heavy work and light work on the JL. I like the idea of doing shorter and more intense cardio workouts rather than long, slow, boring ones.

There’s no need to freak out if we’re not a size 4. Most of us aren’t meant to be.

But apparently being even a little bit overweight (that is, overfat) poses dangers. Adding to the confusion is the fact that many of us don’t know what a healthy weight is, judging overweight adults and children as being at “normal” weight.

Study: Even a few extra pounds are risky
Being a little overweight can kill you, according to new research that leaves little room for denial that a few extra pounds is harmful. Baby boomers who were even just a tad pudgy were more likely to die prematurely than those who were at a healthy weight, U.S. researchers reported.

Indulge me: this has nothing to do with women’s fitness.

On the other hand, it could.

I just read an interesting article on msnbc.com, one in a series on how senior news editor Mike Stuckey is coping with prostate cancer. What I liked: once Mike received the diagnosis of prostate cancer, he changed his diet radically.

No, he’s not eating alfalfa sprouts and drinking rice milk (although those could be healthy choices). He’s eating many more vegetables and fruits and cutting way back on some of his former favorites: sausage, cheese, red meat, nacho chips, and so on.

Changing his diet wasn’t all that difficult, he says, once he realized that it could help save his life.

Most of us don’t have a cancer diagnosis at the moment, but one in three of us will have one at some point in our lives. Why not make the dietary changes now?

The ultimate payoff could be a longer, healthier life; the short-term payoff will be increased energy and probably a better-looking midriff and rear end.

Here’s the article:

Battling bad cells with good eating
Had enough of cancer, urine and assorted penis facts for now? Good, let’s talk about food! In his battle with prostate cancer, MSNBC.com’s Mike Stuckey finds that it’s not very hard to do the right thing when it comes to nutrition.

You’ve got to see this presentation on msn.com. It depicts a map of the United States and shows, from 1986 to the present, how the percentage of obese people changed, state by state, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Folks, this is amazing and horrifying. At the end you can click on any state to see what efforts are being made there to combat obesity.

I keep thinking I’m obesity-obsessed, but the fact that “everybody’s fat” now (OK, slight exaggeration) is not my imagination. The numbers don’t lie.

In the interest of keeping myself accountable, here’s a brief progress report on the quest to get down to 125 by mid-September:

I’ve gone from 134 to 131.4 since I began this latest push about a month ago and lost three-quarters of an inch from my waist.

At this rate, I may not achieve my stated goal, but it’s good to be getting leaner. I’m not cutting as many calories as I could—am consuming between 1,850 and 1,950 on my reduction days and about 2,200 to 2,300 on maintenance days. The routine is three reduction days, followed by one maintenance day, repeated ad infinitum.

I’m getting to the gym about three days a week (I find I can’t sustain five days a week—probably has something to do with my age and recovery ability) for both weights and cardio, and we get a 30-minute walk with the dogs most mornings. My strength on the leg press and bench is improving, although it’ll take me a long while, I believe, to get back my former upper-body strength. (A dratted case of tennis elbow is hampering my back and bicep movements.)

I’ve started using my Accu-Measure bodyfat calipers again, although I never like the fat percentage the calipers give me. Even if I don’t consult the chart, I can see whether the skinfold measurement is getting smaller.

That’s important, as I’m working out fairly intensely in the gym and add muscle fairly quickly for a female—that is, former muscle “returns” fairly rapidly. So even if my scale weight stays the same because I’ve lost a few ounces of fat and gained a few ounces of muscle, the calipers will tell me whether I’ve made progress or not.