Books for the buff 
Tom Venuto: Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
Detailed info on healthy nutrition, goal-setting and motivation, the basics of weight-training,
and cardio for fat loss. If you could
have just one volume on getting lean, this is it.
Ian
King, Lou Schuler: Men's Health The Book of Muscle
Terrific guide to weight training for
both sexes. High-quality photos, innovative exercises as well as standard
fare, good background in laymen's language.
Lou Schuler: The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess
Tells women what they need to know about lifting weights: their workouts should be heavy and intense, just like a guy’s.
Barbara
J. Rolls: The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan : Feel Full on Fewer Calories
The science of satiety. This book teaches real-world portion control and how
to make healthful, filling choices.
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I just came across an article on post-menopausal weight gain on the Mayo Clinic’s women’s health page. The upshot is that–surprise!–gaining fat is not inevitable.
Here’s why the weight gain occurs:
[C]hanging hormone levels associated with menopause aren’t necessarily the cause of weight gain. Aging and lifestyle factors play a big role in your changing body composition, including
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Exercising less. Menopausal women tend to exercise less than other women, which can lead to weight gain.
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Eating more. Eating more means you’ll take in more calories, which are converted to fat if you don’t burn them for energy.
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Burning fewer calories. The number of calories you need for energy decreases as you age because aging promotes the replacement of muscle with fat. Muscle burns more calories than fat does. When your body composition shifts to more fat and less muscle, your metabolism slows down.
Here’s what to do about it:
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Increase your physical activity. Aerobic exercise boosts your metabolism and helps you burn fat. Strength training exercises increase muscle mass, boost your metabolism and strengthen your bones.
You can become more physically active even without starting a formal exercise program. Just spend more time doing the things you love that also get you moving. Do more gardening and dancing. Take longer walks or try out a bike. Make it your goal to be active for a total of 30 minutes or more a day on most days.
Increased physical activity, including strength training, may be the single most important factor for maintaining a healthy body composition — more lean muscle mass and less body fat — as you get older.
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Reduce calories. Pay attention to the foods you’re eating and slightly reduce the amount of calories you consume each day. By choosing a varied diet composed mainly of fruits and vegetables, you can safely cut back on calories and lose weight. Be careful not to cut back too drastically on calorie intake, or your body will respond by conserving energy, making extra pounds harder to shed.
Because your metabolism slows as you get older, you need about 200 fewer calories a day to maintain your weight as you get into your mid- to late 40s. This shouldn’t be a problem if you eat only when hungry and only enough to satisfy your hunger.
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Decrease dietary fat. Eating large amounts of high-fat foods adds excess calories, which can lead to weight gain and obesity. Limit fat to 20 percent to 35 percent of your daily calories. Emphasize fats from healthier sources, such as nuts and olive, canola and peanut oils.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if lots of fat is bad, zero fat must be better. That’s the false assumption we bought in the ’80s. I vividly remember preparing for bodybuilding competitions by trying to eat as little fat as possible. I ate all day long: dry salad, tuna from the can, dry chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, dry baked potatoes . . . And I was always hungry.
Fat adds flavor and also increases satiety.
A recent Reuters story covers a scientific literature review proving what we already know: that movement keeps us young(er).
Aerobic exercise helps turn back biological clock
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Maintaining aerobic fitness through middle age and beyond could delay the aging process by more than a decade and prolong independent living, according to a new review of research on aerobic fitness and dependency in old age.
One caveat: if you’re also interested in your shape and appearance, you also need weights. Weight training offers scads of health benefits: increased bone density and muscular strength, improved balance, healthier joints, and so on. There’s also research indicating that it improves cardiovascular health.
Ideal combination: aerobic exercise plus weights.
From msnbc.com:
Cutting calories helps people lose weight, but doing so by filling up on whole grains may be particularly heart-healthy, new research suggests.
In a study of obese adults at risk of heart disease, researchers found that those who trimmed calories and increased their whole-grain intake shed more belly fat and lowered their blood levels of C-reactive protein or CRP.
CRP is a marker of chronic, low-level inflammation in the blood vessels, and both abdominal fat and CRP, in excess, are linked to heart attack and stroke.
Here’s an old post, resurrected because I need it and my fitness buddy needs it.
I know I sound like a broken record when I rave on about Tom Venuto’s e-book book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. But at the moment I’m especially gung-ho about Tom because I’m liking the zig-zag calorie rotation he describes in chapter 6 of the book. For one thing, it makes the whole calorie-counting thing more interesting and tolerable.
Here’s how it goes:
First you figure out your basal metabolic rate–how many calories you need just to sustain life. If you know your lean body mass (LBM), the Katch-McArdle formula is best and works for both men and women:
BMR – 370 + (21.6 x lean mass in kilograms)
Hint: divide your LBM in pounds by 2.2 to get kilograms.
If you don’t know your LBM, use the Harris-Benedict formula, based on body weight:
Men: BMR – 66 + (13.7 x body weight in kg) + (5 x height in centimeters) – (6.8 x age in years)
Women: BMR – 655 + (9.6 x body weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) – (4.7 x age in years)
Once you’ve got an estimate of your baseline calories, below which you should never go when counting calories, multiply the number by an activity factor:
Sedentary: use 1.2
Lightly active: use 1.375
Moderately active: use 1.55
Very active: use 1.725
Extremely active: use 1.9
So, given my LBM of 109 pounds (49.5 kg), my BMR, using the Katch-McArdle formula is 1,440 calories.
I use the activity factor 1.55. Multiplying it by 1,440, I get 2,232 calories per day.
I suspect I probably burn a few more than that, but I’m being conservative.
Okay, so what’s the zig-zag rotation all about? The idea is to spend three days on a moderately reduced-calorie diet (15 to 20 percent below maintenance), then one day at maintenance level.
Why zig-zag? To prevent the body from reducing metabolic rate in response to reduced intake. By eating at maintenance level a couple of days a week, so Tom says, you help prevent the body from thinking you’re starving. The other plus, of course, is that not every day is a restricted day. Nice.
The key reason to zig-zag is that it works. In 30-plus years of caring about this sort of thing, the ZZ is the fastest, most-effective, most muscle-preserving method of fat loss I’ve ever seen.
And I’ve seen it work wonders for people I know as well. Usually women who tell me, “Well, I’m eating right, but nothing is happening.” Sad but true: if nothing is happening, you need to change the equation. Alter the food plan. Increase the activity. Try the ZZ.
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.
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