Fit Communications

I can’t read a magazine these days without seeing an article or a blurb about antioxidants—for heart health, for cancer prevention, for healthier skin. It’s all good motivation for me to continue improving my diet.

About a year and a half ago I went on a big crusade to eat more fruits and vegetables (primary sources of antioxidants), and although my intake has been higher than it had been before, I’ve got a long way to go.

Have been reading Dr. David Katz’s books (The Way to Eat; The Flavor-Point Diet) and finding them interesting. He talks a lot about fruits and vegetables, and again, I’m on a crusade—not following a new “diet” but seeking greater health.

Because I’m always in a rush and rarely take time to cook, the trick for me is to go raw and focus on food I can wash, pack, and eat in a trice. So berries, apples, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and baby carrots are good options. I always have healthy snacks with me (I get overly hungry most days if I don’t eat every two to three hours), so it’s just a matter of carrying fruit/veg snacks in addition to my usual South Beach cereal bars, yogurt, whole-wheat pita, and light mozarella sticks.

The best news of all: coffee is one of the best sources of antioxidants in the American diet. I’ve got that one covered.

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.

No, this isn’t about one of those ludicrous diets that proclaims “Eat all you want of your favorite foods and still lose weight!”

U.S. News & World Report’s cover story for March 7 is about “Volumetrics”–the eating plan developed by Dr. Barbara Rolls of Penn State. In a nutshell, Rolls discovered that people tend to eat about the same weight of food every day, and that equal weights of food tend to produce equal satiety. In other words, eating a certain volume of, say, potato chips, produces about the same satiety as eating an equal volume of fruit, vegetables, whatever. But as you already know, the portion of chips has a whole lot more calories and many fewer nutrients than the fruit.

Foods can be categorized by their energy density–calories divided by weight. Water and fiber reduce density, so, for instance, 100 calories’ worth of raisins (a dry food) is much more dense than 100 calories’ worth of grapes. The portion of grapes is also much larger, hence producing greater satiety.

The concept is simple but explaining it is tough. Read the article.

I read Rolls’s original book, The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, several months ago and thought it made a great deal of sense. I’ve tried to incorporate her principles, which merge nicely with my other dietary goal of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

The funny part is that the aforementioned book was published in 2000 to–as far as I can tell–little or no fanfare. It certainly never reached the levels of publicity enjoyed by Atkins or the Zone or the South Beach diet books. I suspect it wasn’t well publicized. When I borrowed the hardcover from the library, I almost didn’t open the book because (embarrassing confession here) the cover was so ugly. Obviously, not much effort was put into marketing the book.

Just recently Volumetrics has begin getting lots of publicity because Rolls’s second book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories, was just published. I’ll buy it. And I highly recommend the first one.

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.