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

I was browsing through Flicker the other day and I found these runner photos. I thought you’d like to see them.

I read teen lit all the time, mostly because the science fiction is better than the sci-fi written for adults (less sex and more cool ideas: see Scott Westerfeld for more). While perusing the teen section at my local bookstore, I saw The Fat Girl by Marilyn Sachs. The blurb on the back of the book was compelling to me.

Jeff Lyons can’t stand Ellen de Luca, the fat girl in his ceramics class. She’s huge and clumsy, can’t throw a pot to save her life, and stares at Jeff all the time. But he’s a “nice guy” and feels bad when Ellen overhears his hurtful remarks about her. The “crumbs of kindness” he tosses her way soon turn into advice on weight loss, college, clothes, hair… To everyone’s surprise, good-looking Jeff soon dumps his pretty girlfriend to be with the fat girl! But as her pounds melt away, Jeff resents the happy, independent young woman he has unleashed. Where is the gratitude for all he’s done for her?

Through most of this book, I had a uneasy sense of distress for Ellen. Here was this good-looking guy who seemed to enjoy being with her only because she was easy to control. He dressed her, he chose their activities, he was in complete control and when he wasn’t in control, he was pissed off at her. It just didn’t seem like a healthy relationship. Fortunately, Marilyn Sachs is a brilliant writer who can make even the controlling Jeff Lyons a likable character and the story works out well for everyone in the end.

Overweight teen girls LOVE stories about fat girls who lose the weight and end up with the cutest guy in school. I know this because I was an overweight (or so I had been told my whole life) teenage girl. My beloved fat girl book that I read over and over in ninth grade was Dreams Can Come True by Jane Claypool Miner. It was about a girl name Ellie who lost a lot of weight right at the time that her mother moved her to California, so none of the kids knew how fat she used to be at her old school and none of them were surprised when she tried out for cheerleader. It all risks crashing down around her when her old friend from the Midwest comes back to visit, exposing her dark secret of her past self. I LOVED that book and read it countless times. Even now, I’ve come to realize that my desire to move to California was first spawned by that very book.

Unlike Dreams Can Come True, The Fat Girl is a book about losing the weight and coming into your own life and an additional story about not allowing anyone to control you or your dreams. It’s a better role model story about health and fitness for young girls than Dreams Can Come True and I wish I could go back in time and give it to my fourteen year old self instead.

The ever wonderful Braidwood has written a couple of great entries about eating healthy and listening to your body when it comes to eating:

• Every weight issue is really a power issue | Authentic Threads

What impacted me the most when I saw this was hearing that, “The root of the problem is giving away your power.” ! What? That’s the root of the problem? … Hey, that is the root of the problem!

I said that phrase to myself a few times and then turned it around. If that’s the root of the problem, then: The root of the solution is accepting my power.

• Thintuition | Authentic Threads

She recommended this video:

I understand the feeling of not wanting to diet again. Somehow, Weight Watchers works for me because communicating with my body was really hard at first. Weight Watchers gave me a good idea of what to eat to stay healthy. Eventually, I’ll develop enough Thintuition to eat healthy without guidelines, but for now, I WANT to follow a program that helps me make healthier choices.

I dare you to watch this video without wanting to get up and do something active.

There are a few particularly cool scenes:

• When he jumps into a moving car and gets into the driver’s seat.
• When he does a back flip off the back of a moving car.
• When he climbs up the light post just like the Cirque du Soleil people do in their show.
• When he jumps onto the car going right for him, bounces off it onto the wall and bounds past it to continue running.

The description of the video is humbly listed as:

Playing around with some new moves for 2009.

My description would have been.

Super-human feats of gymnastics! Do not try at home!

Next time you’re feeling a little down and not wanting to workout out, watch this quick video and get inspired to MOVE!!

I watched a couple of videos last week that really inspired me to eat healthy and exercise right now.

The first video is a talk by Alan Russell about medicine and the upcoming methods of making our bodies healthy again with regenerative medicine.

He said:

The richer we are, the longer we live. The older our population, the more expensive the diseases are to treat.

Diabetes is a debilitating disease. Why can’t we inject the pancreas with something that regenerates the pancreas and cures Diabetes?

We are learning how to switch on feature that our bodies could do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb in the first trimester of pregnancy, will regrow that limb. Our DNA has the capacity to do these sort of wound healing mechanisms.

In the future, medicine will be able to regenerate our bodies. This talk from Aubrey de Grey about how medicine could eventually get to the point where we could actually live forever.

It’s VERY important that we take the BEST care of our bodies now so that we can be the people who are able to take advantage of these technologies when they finally become available to all of us.

Yesterday, I talked about The Digital Diet, which is changing your photographs so that you look slimmer. I stated that this technique isn’t a good idea because it clouds our view of reality. If we can’t accept how our bodies are right now, then how can we change them?

But sometimes, we NEED to cloud our view of reality.

Sometimes we can’t remember what it was like to be thin, or in my case, I didn’t ever feel thin, even when I was. In that case, I needed a photograph to tell me what I was shooting for. I needed something to use for visualization for a goal. Now, I could have used an old photograph of myself and slimmed it down using the Digital Diet techniques, but there is another way to create a goal photo and that’s Face Swapping.

This video gives you an example of how face swapping can be done using Photoshop. I suggest you mute the volume unless you like The Beastie Boys.

That video looks great, but it isn’t a very good tutorial. Here are two videos that are GREAT tutorials, but their finished effects weren’t that spectacular.

I used the techniques in the Tom Cruise/Jennifer Aniston video to make this photo of myself. I look at it for a couple of minutes every night before I go to sleep to visualize my perfect body and how I’ll feel when I’m physically fit.

I’m actually incredibly embarrassed to show my goal photograph here. I’ve used this particular one for a few months without mentioning anything here on Starling Fitness, but having something to work toward is really helpful to me. I’m actually MORE embarrassed to show this photo than to show my before pictures. I’ve never gotten to goal, so this photograph gives me an idea of what it will be like to be thin (and about five inches taller).

Using Photoshop techniques to give yourself a Digital Diet is a double edged sword. It can be kind of bad if you are using it for family photos to change history and further keep your head in the sand about your health and fitness. It can, however, be an amazingly powerful tool to help you visualize what you want from all this exercise and healthy eating.

Use your Photoshop Skillz wisely.

Update 05-29-09 3:09 pm: Braidwood has written an excellent entry in response to this one:

• Photoshop Yourself Thinner | Authentic Threads

If you don’t own Photoshop and don’t want to pay the $600 price tag for it, there is a great open source program available that can do almost as much as Photoshop for FREE. You can download it here:

• GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

Swimsuit season is nearly upon us. If you are thinking that you’ll just forget about getting a suit this year, go read last year’s series starting with this one:

• Starling Fitness » Get Into That Swimsuit This Summer: Week 1

Why bother?

I don’t know about you, but too many summers of lost opportunities have gone by for me. I refused to participate in activities that I really wanted because I was “too fat.” Honestly, if I had found a swimsuit that I loved and enjoyed, I might have been more willing to participate.

If I had lived with that attitude my whole life, there are a myriad of wonderful experiences that I would have never had, like snorkeling in Hawaii.

I wrote an entire series meant to get you back into a swimsuit and feeling good about it. You can see all the episodes here:

• Starling Fitness » Get Into That Swimsuit This Summer: Week 2
• Starling Fitness » Get Into That Swimsuit This Summer: Week 3
• Starling Fitness » Get Into That Swimsuit This Summer: Week 4
• Starling Fitness » Get Into That Swimsuit This Summer: Week 5

Photo Via: Found in Mom’s Basement: Swimsuits for sale in the 1972 Sears catalog

Sometimes I wake up and I just don’t want to exercise, but watching a video like this is enough to get my butt on the treadmill or out the door.

I have to admit that when I was running outdoors in all sorts of weather, I was much more able to handle any extreme. Now that I depend on my treadmill so much, I tend to be more of a wimp during extreme weather.

Next time you are feeling like skipping your workout, take four minutes and watch this video. It will get you moving!

Via: Quadrathon: The often asked question…

I love this little animation of a yellow guy running. It really gives a good idea of the quiet and calm that I can get from an early morning run.

Running on the treadmill never felt like this, so that’s why I started filming the Starling Fitness Walking Videos. Now I get that same sense of calm and wonder on my treadmill as well.

Via: Spokane Al: Another Nice Video

I LOVE this video of an Exotic Aerobics class dancing. They are from Lady of Essence fitness club in Texas.

Every one of the women in this class is a DIVA! I loved watching them all! Women of all sizes shaking their booty! Terrific motivation to keep exercising and to keep healthy!