Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

This TEDMed video was titled, “How healthy living nearly killed me.” It’s not quite as dramatic as that, but it was interesting.

When he talked about wearing a helmet EVERYWHERE, it pushed things over the edge for me. I admit I’ve had a bicycle helmet that I’ve loved so much that I wanted to wear it all the time, but when I said that to Mike, he let me know with a single look that I was acting crazy.

When the health advice out there is so extreme that it makes you look crazy to follow it, it’s time to reevaluate our health advice.

Yesterday, Mike and I got our first weekly delivery of veggies from Petersen Family Farms. We signed up for their farm cooperative in January, so we have been eagerly awaiting veggies from them for months. After such a cold winter and spring, they are just now harvesting some for us.

Having a weekly shipment of veggies brought to us lets us try new things and urges us to eat more vegetables. You’d think that going to the grocery store and buying a couple heads of fresh lettuce and beet greens would be incentive enough, but when we picked up this box of produce, it was different. We met the guy who grew them, so it made me want to eat them instead of letting them go to waste.

If you have been having trouble getting more veggies into your diet, try visiting a local farm, farmer’s market or signing up for a farm coop. It won’t provide you with fresh veggies all year long, but during these glorious months of summer, you’ll have great tasting veggies.

• Local Harvest / Farmers Markets / Family Farms / CSA / Organic Food

I was haunting one of my favorite antique stores when this soda bottle jumped right out at me.

The soda was called Like and the tagline was, “Diets Like Like.”

What was even more interesting was the subtitle:

Artificially sweetened special dietary carbonated beverage

Nothing says delicious like the words “special dietary.”

It took me a while to track down exactly WHAT Like Soda was, but I finally found a footnote on Wikipedia:

• 7 Up – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diet 7 Up: Originally introduced in 1963 as Like (not to be confused with 7 Up’s Like Cola from the 1980s), it was discontinued in 1969 due to the U.S. government ban of cyclamate sweetener.

The history for cyclamate is interesting as well:

• Sodium cyclamate – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Controversy developed when in 1966, a study reported that some intestinal bacteria could desulfonate cyclamate to produce cyclohexylamine, a compound suspected to have some chronic toxicity in animals. Further research resulted in a 1969 study which found the common 10:1 cyclamate:saccharin mixture to increase the incidence of bladder cancer in rats. The released study was showing that eight out of 240 rats fed a mixture of saccharin and cyclamates, at levels of humans ingesting 350 cans of diet soda per day, developed bladder tumors. Other studies implicated cyclohexylamine in testicular atrophy in mice. On October 18, 1969, the Food and Drug Administration banned its sale in the United States with citation of the Delaney Amendment.

Abbott Laboratories claimed that its own studies were unable to reproduce the 1969 study’s results, and in 1973, Abbott petitioned the FDA to lift the ban on cyclamate. This petition was eventually denied in 1980 by FDA Commissioner Jere Goyan. Abbott Labs, together with the Calorie Control Council (a political lobby representing the diet foods industry), filed a second petition in 1982. Although the FDA has stated that a review of all available evidence does not implicate cyclamate as a carcinogen in mice or rats, cyclamate remains banned from food products in the United States.

Apparently, Diets DON’T like Like…

Take a look at this small video of animals yawning.

If seeing them yawn, especially the hamster, makes you yawn, then you probably should think about adding another half hour of sleep to your schedule. Get to bed a little earlier tonight and skip the TV, reading or whatever you find yourself doing when you should be tucked in snugly.

They say that getting more sleep can help you lose weight. I don’t know if I believe that, but I DO know that I do much better at EVERYTHING when I’ve had a full night’s sleep.

Animated GIF via: Your daily gif blog: Animals Yawning

When I saw this image from the movie, Repo Man, I was surprised at how easily my mind translated the word DRINK to SODA. I had to look at it three times to make sure it said DRINK instead of SODA. Those cans are just props used in a movie, but they seem like so much more to me.

Is soda bad for you?

I honestly don’t know. There are studies that say even diet sodas can cause an insulin response. There are people out there saying that soda is rotting my teeth and making me fat. I even have a friend who says that carbonated beverages (even unsweetened ones) make me fat because they expand my stomach and make me unable to tell when I’m full.

The only facts that I have are how my body responds to soda. When I keep my diet drinks to one or two cans a day, I have an easier time following my program. When I drink a 32 ounce monster of Coke Zero, I get an energy boost from the caffeine that just doesn’t feel the same as two cups of coffee. When I feel deprived, a diet root beer and a small scoop of low calorie vanilla ice cream tastes like a extravagant indulgence.

Is soda bad for you? That’s something you have to decide for yourself. Is it bad for me? I’m still trying to decide.

Animated GIF via: three frames – Repo Man 3

At the end of December, Weight Watchers started including little magazine handouts at every meeting. This year’s New Year’s Resolution that I set was to attend Weight Watchers EVERY week so I could collect all of the handouts.

It’s funny how something as simple as a little paper handout can get my butt into the Weight Watchers door. The desire to “collect all 52″ is so strong that I actually have attended meetings in Las Vegas and Del Mar already this year. Even though it was a pain in the butt to find a meeting in a unfamiliar city, I made sure that I attended my meetings.

Ironically, just getting my body into the door helps me every week. They always have something motivating to talk about and even if I HATE the teacher in the other towns, the members have stories that have kept me going.

I know Weight Watchers doesn’t work for everyone and I certainly accept that their program isn’t PERFECT, but attending the meetings every week has kept my motivation level far higher than it was last year at this time. And I can thank those weekly handouts for it all.

I had a shock yesterday when I took out my measuring cups. I had been wondering how much water my coffee mug and my favorite water cup actually held. I counted the coffee mug as two cups and the tall glass as three cups based on an eyeball estimate.

Imagine my surprise when I pulled out the measuring cup, poured water into them and found that BOTH only held two cups of liquid. There is a little room at the top of both of them for about a quarter cup more water if I were willing to carefully lift them to my lips, but mostly, they only hold two cups.

This was a surprise to me because I had been counting the tall glass as three cups ever since I bought the cup full of alcoholic slushie in Las Vegas. Not only did I overestimate the calories of the alcoholic drink, I have been overestimating how much water I’ve been drinking ever since.

Instead of six glasses of water every day, I’ve been getting only four. In the case of the alcohol, I ended up counting more calories than I actually had, which is probably why I lost weight that week in Las Vegas.

Why should I measure? Because looks can be VERY deceiving.

I just came off two weeks of severe sickness. I’ve worn a indent into the couch in the living room and every garbage bin in the house is filled with tissues and empty Mucinex bottles. I’m still coughing and stuffy, but now I’m finally able to stand without dizziness and I have enough energy to turn on the computer and push a few keyboard keys. How did I eat while I was sick?

Quite poorly, actually…

I usually stay away from juices because they have a lot of calories and don’t really fill me up. While I was sick however, I craved orange juice. It was one of the foods my mother gave me plenty of when I was sick because the vitamin C was thought to help with colds back in the Seventies. While I lay on the couch, unable to do anything more than read some comic books and gossip magazines, I drank almost a gallon of orange juice.

Probably not the healthiest choice available to me.

What should I have done? Shouldn’t I just stop trying to diet when I’m sick? No. Following my diet plan would have probably helped me get healthy quicker, but I abandoned it at the first moment of ailment. Why?

Comfort.

Comfort food has its name for a very important reason. It makes us feel a little better. Did the orange juice and the Tyson Chicken Cordon Blue Bites make my sinuses drain? No. Did the french fries and cheeseburger make my muscle aches go away? No. Did the macaroni and cheese ease my dizziness? No. How exactly did all that food make me feel better?

It didn’t. Comfort food makes my BRAIN feel better not my BODY.

So, how do I fix this? How do I make my brain feel better without abusing my body?

The New Comfort

There are several ways to comfort myself without stuffing my face. Firstly, is to nurture myself WITHOUT food. Here is a list of things that make me feel comforted.

• A warm bed: A heated mattress pad or cuddly husband, either will do.
• A SOFT blanket: Not the scratchy afghan I huddled under on the couch. I should have found a soft blanket that makes me feel hugged by a cloud.
• Quiet music: Instead of watching endless episodes of South Park, I should have listened to some soothing music. It would have helped me sleep, which is what I needed more than anything.
• Light reading: I got this one right. I curled up with a stack of comic books and gossip magazines. Not enough intellect to tax my mind, but just enough entertainment to distract me from the pain.
• A purring kitty: Maggie, purring, warm and kneading on my shoulder was another comforting moment in my day.
• A humidifier or vaporizer: The new vaporizers are a lot safer than they used to be when I was a kid, but the vapor in the air is different, somehow. I’d like to find an old Vicks vaporizer that risks burning me every time I fill it just to get that thick and watery humidity in my room.

Giving myself this sort of nurturing will help me need comfort food less. What do I do about those cravings for comfort food, when they do come?

The New Comfort FOOD

Macaroni and cheese, chicken soup and orange juice used to be the foods that I ate when I was sick. In fact, they were the staples of my diet this last time around. They don’t actually cure me, however, although there is a case for chicken soup. All they do is make me feel better emotionally.

The only way to solve the comfort food problem is to teach my body to crave new comfort foods.

Next time I’m sad, sick or upset, instead of turning to high fat, high carb and high salt foods, I need to turn to healthy foods. If every time I got sick, I ate apples, I would start to crave apples every time I got sick. Comfort food isn’t some magical combination of ingredients that makes me instantly calm. It’s the mere act of repetition that makes it comforting to me. I need to retrain my body to crave healthy food instead of what it currently craves.

I suspect this will take a while before the new cravings take hold and override the years of abuse I’ve done to myself. As soon as I’m able to make that leap, I’ll tell you about it.

A special thank you to Braidwood at Authentic Threads for reminding me of Alanis Morrisette’s song, Thank You.

In the first verse, she sings, “How ’bout stopping eating when I’m full up.” In fact, everything she says in the song is a healthy way of living, no matter who you are (unless those antibiotics are keeping you alive).

When that video came out, I remember thinking that Alanis was so brave for being willing to show herself to the world, nearly naked. She has said that she fought anorexia and bulimia when she was in her teens. She wrote the song, Perfect, to express how it felt to struggle with eating disorders.

She is a runner and completed the New York City Marathon last year in 4 hours, 28 minutes. She said running a marathon is, “An unbelievably harrowing and beautiful and moving and serene experience.”

Thank YOU, Alanis, for giving me another hero to remember when running and eating healthy gets difficult.

This hilarious commercial is from the movie The Invention of Lying. What if Coca-Cola couldn’t lie in their commercials. I suspect they would sound a lot like this:

The announcer says:

Hi, I’m Bob. I’m the spokesperson for the Coca-Cola company. I’m here today to ask you to continue buying Coke. I’m sure you’ve been drinking it for years and if you still enjoy it, then I’d like to remind you to buy it again sometime soon.

Basically, it’s just brown sugar water. We haven’t changed the ingredients lately, so there’s nothing new I can tell you about that. Uh, changed the can around a little bit, though. You can see that the colors are different there and we’ve added a polar bear so the kids’ll like us.

Coke’s very high in sugar and like any high calorie soda, it can lead to obesity in children and adults who don’t sustain a very healthy diet. And that’s it, it’s Coke. It’s very famous, everyone knows it. I’m Bob, I work for Coke and I’m asking you to not stop buying Coke.

If any soda was forced to advertise at this level of honesty, I don’t think anyone would drink it.

Video via: What If Advertisers Couldn’t Lie?