Fit Communications

Raise your hand if you’ve ever read an article in a women’s fitness magazine that recommended a daily weight-loss diet that provides around 1,300 calories. Yeah, I thought you had.

This afternoon I paged through the latest Oxygen magazine—or maybe it was Oxygen’s annual glutes special—and found sample menus for such a diet. Keep in mind that Oxygen promotes intense physical activity—both weights and cardio. Keep in mind that these far-too restrictive diets are often said to be the food plans followed by female fitness athletes.

That is simply impossible unless the women in question are anorexic.

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

• Exercising less. Menopausal women tend to exercise less than other women, which can lead to weight gain.

• Eating more. Eating more means you’ll take in more calories, which are converted to fat if you don’t burn them for energy.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

What do you do with your time between sets?

Here’s what I usually see: people sitting on a piece of equipment between sets, zoning out, or chatting with people. The sitting around part can be a pain because in a crowded gym, chances are good someone else would like to be using the bench or machine you’re perched on.

Now I’m going to sound like an old crank. But when I first started working out in gyms, in the early 1980s, it was common gym etiquette to allow others to “work in” with you. The person using the bench, machine, whatever, might ask someone standing nearby, “Did you want to work in?” And nobody took offense if you approached someone and asked whether you could work in. That’s a phrase I rarely hear these days.

The other problem with sitting around, as I see it, is that you’re losing focus and losing an opportunity to keep your heart rate up.

What I like to do upon finishing a set: immediately move to another exercise for the same or a different bodypart or immediately begin a few laps (40 seconds each) around the indoor track. I find that staying in motion keeps my energy up, and if I’m walking, I start thinking about the next set and what I hope to accomplish with it.

If I just sit and wait, I can almost feel my energy level draining.

And although I don’t want to be antisocial in the gym, there’s only so much time I’ll devote to chatting with people unless the workout is over. Talking about something other than what I’m doing at the moment also causes me to lose focus and energy.

So what do you do between sets? And are you happy with the energy level of your workout?

My plan for today was to post a summary of how I’ve changed in the past 18 months. Then I spoke to the neurosurgeon’s nurse and learned, in brief, the results of the x-rays and MRI performed last week.

It could be worse–I mean, I could have a tumor or something. The results in brief: I have a bulging disc I didn’t have before, though how in the world I injured it, I don’t know. The first injury–to the disc at L5/S1–occurred in 1986 or ‘87, and if I went back to my workout logs, I could pinpoint the day. I was deadlifting without adequate warmup after a deadlifting hiatus of about six months. Don’t try that at home, folks.

The new disc problem was a surprise.

The fact that I’ve got some degenerative stuff going on (another word for osteoarthritis, or "wear and tear") wasn’t a surprise. So that’s number two.

Number three: I’ve also got some narrowing in the lumbar spine (lumbar spinal stenosis). In a word, there’s not as much room for my spinal cord as there should be.

I won’t panic till I hear what the doc says, but surgery may be needed at some point.

I permitted myself four Hershey kisses and a small chocolate heart. Figured a proper pity-party needed a modicum of chocolate.

More later, after I speak with the neurosurgeon on April 1.

Ready for the good news?

On Sept. 15, 2003, I weighed more than ever before–162 pounds, to be shockingly precise. My best guesstimate is that my body composition was about 37 percent fat (gak!), which means I had about 102 pounds of lean body mass (LBM). I was wearing size 14 trousers, and I could no longer squeeze into my size 12 Rider jeans, which have the virtue of running large.

I began a "diet" (Atkins–shudder) and talked my friend Anne into joining Curves with me. Even then Curves seemed awfully wussy for a former bodybuilder, but hey, it was a workout of sorts, and the 30-minute duration appealed to me. About the same time my husband and I began the habit of taking four of our dogs for a 30-minute walk each morning.

By the end of November I’d lost about 10 pounds of fat. By the middle of May I was thoroughly bored with Curves, talked my friend into joining a "real gym," and had lost only about another five pounds.

Along the way, I had punted Atkins. I wasn’t hungry, but I couldn’t sustain even thrice-weekly Curves workouts and daily walks on restricted carbs.

I hadn’t wised up about food yet, however. I still refused to count calories, but I shifted to the South Beach diet.

Last spring was tough, as my father was dying of cancer. My weight stayed pretty much stable throughout the painful process of his death, and I managed to get in the gym about twice a week.

Once I began to emerge from the grief, I started hitting the weights harder and increasing the cardio portion of my workout.

I began 2005 weighing around 145, with a LBM of 109. That means my bodyfat had dropped to about 25 percent. I’d lost 24 pounds of fat and (re)gained 7 pounds of muscle.

By that time my focus had shifted entirely to 1) eating healthy, 2) controlling portion size, and 3) exercising a lot. In late January I started counting calories and doing the zig-zag thing: mild caloric reduction (1,800 to 1,900 kcals daily) for three days, maintenance eating for a day, then back to three days of mild caloric reduction.

Zowie, Batman, did that do the trick. On Jan. 29 I weighed 145; on Feb. 17 I weighed just shy of 140; on March 17 I weighed 135.4 (where I’m currently sitting). My bodyfat is about 19 percent, with my LBM holding steady at 109.

I’m wearing size 8 trousers and size 6 jeans (generous cut, remember?). I have an entire closetful of clothes I bought years ago and can finally wear again. Did I mention that I have tons of energy and feel absolutely terrific (with the exception of the occasional back back-pain day)?

If you want more detail, here’s the routine:

*six days a week, walk dogs 30 minutes

*two to three days a week, work out intensely with weights, 30 to 45 minutes

*two to three days a week, work out intensely on elliptical trainer, 30 to 50 minutes, at 80 to 85 percent of maximum heart rate (calculating max with the 220 minus age formula)

*one day a week, body pump class, 60 minutes

*calorie zig-zag as indicated above, focusing on plenty of fruits and vegetables, whole-grain carbs, low-fat dairy, lean meat, and limited amounts of whatever else I want to eat and can squeeze into my allotted calories for the day.

Jeez, what a lengthy post.

I haven’t felt very talkative (should that be blogative?) lately. My apologies.

Workouts are going well, bodyfat is going down, and I feel generally terrific. I keep getting comments about how much “energy” I have–from various sources. So I must be doing something energetic-looking. Fidgeting? Wiggling? Jumping up and down?

The enhanced energy level is making me want to add–though cautiously, very cautiously–more exercise. I’m already occasionally adding an additional day of cardio (the intense kind–not the routine 30 minutes’ walk through the neighborhood with dogs at 5 a.m.), and I’m thinking of adding a fourth weight workout per week. If I do, the number of sets will be ridiculously low: maybe eight to 10. On a typical weights day I’m currently doing only 12 to 14 sets. Not many by volume-training standards.

In the past I’ve slipped into overtraining when I went great guns, but I hope now I’m old enough to figure out what’s happening if I do get excessive.

I’m intrigued by Ian King’s book Get Buffed (yes, silly title but a boatload of information) and his take on the number of sets one should perform. There’s no easy answer, but many factors influence the decision, e.g., one’s age, how active or sedentary one’s job is, how much life stress one has, and how much rest one is getting.

Well, this one has a sedentary desk job, but she has a fair amount of life stress, is no longer a spring chicken, and doesn’t always get as much sleep as she wants. I can do 20+ sets per workout, but within a week or two, my mood is crap and my motivation is gone. When I do a dozen sets per workout, I improve or maintain my strength levels and am eager to get to the gym. That seems to be the magic number for me at this stage of life, with a full-time job, commitments to four separate singing groups, half a dozen dogs, and so on.

The moral of the story is, when you’re losing interest in the gym and think you ought to be doing more, you might need to take a weeklong layoff, then come back to the gym and start doing less.

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.

When I first started lifting weights seriously in 1983, one of the things I noticed was how good my body felt. I remember telling someone I felt like I was "walking around on springs." I’ve started feeling that way again, nine months back into my regular appointments with the iron.

I don’t do as many sets as I used to, and I’m less wacked out if I end up altering my workout plan because time is short or I have pain somewhere or I just feel like doing something different. The main thing is just showing up and lifting. And my muscles have that great springy feeling again.

These days I have occasional joint problems to cope with, and it’s weird when I have a morning on which my lower back aches like a son of a gun (largely because I haven’t been doing my flexibility work) but the rest of me feels like a million bucks.

Joints or no joints, I feel about 10 years younger now than when I started back into the gym. Can’t remember who said it or where I read it–but someone made the statement that weight-training is the fountain of youth. It’s certainly the fountain of energy–and of firmness.

Received the latest issue of Muscle & Fitness Hers yesterday in the mail but couldn’t read it because I had my regular send-the-newspaper-to-press deadline to cope with first. Started reading it today while doing my time on the ellliptical trainer and was very impressed by the one-page bio I read of a 46-year-old complete fox who just took a silver medal in some worldwide kickboxing competition. She looked gorgeous and is obviously extremely fit. It’s great to see 40-plus muscular women.