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

There is no question in my mind what my absolute favorite activity on Wii Fit is: Running on Wii Fit Island. So far, I’ve opened up the Short Run, the Long Run, Island Lap and Free Run. With Free Run, I can run for 10-30 minutes without stopping.

When I first started working out with the Wii Fit, I was worried that I wouldn’t really be able to get a good cardio workout. The Aerobics activities were intense enough to get my heart rate into the high range, but they were only a few minutes long. With the addition of Free Run, however, I can get a REAL aerobic workout and enjoy the scenery of Wii Fit Island.

Here is a video of the Short Run:

This video only shows you a small part of Wii Fit Island. Here is a map of the running trails:

Anyone familiar with the Nintendo/Mario Universe will recognize many little in-jokes and familiar sites. Wii Fit Town looks a lot like Delfino Square and the run through Rocky Peak is very much like a Mario Kart drive through Choco Mountain (try to see the choco boulders falling off the cliffs).

Everything that I wished for in that Island Worlds program, has come to pass in Wii Fit with the Basic Run and Free Run activities. They’re better, in fact, because I’m running with my Miis. Every time I pass a Mii that we created, it feels like I’m out exercising with my friends. If you watch carefully at the end of the video, Mike is waiting for me at the end of the run. Just seeing that one of my friends is ahead of me while I’m running makes me run a little faster to catch up to them.

Laura,

I know you’re not a medical authority. I know that you will begin your reply to this question with “talk to your doctor”. I also know you do a lot of running, know people who run and read a lot of articles on the subject.

So here goes…

I’m nearing a year ago when I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis. Since then, I’ve limited my walking/running to allow my feet to heal. If you’ve never had this, you can’t imagine how painful this can be.

While I looked good walking with a cane, it was no fun.

I want to start walking/running again, but whenever I do my feet hurt that night. I don’t want to reinjure myself. (The latest was actually when I fired up my Wii Fit and did the “running” minigame.)

I’ve always heard of people who just train through the pain.

Do you know of anyone who has plantar fasciitis and when they went back to training? Did it hurt? How do I know when it’s ok to go back to being active?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ernie

Ernie,

Actually, I DO know about the pain of plantar faciitis. I had it when I first started walking in the early nineties. I went to a doctor for it and he wrapped it. It wasn’t until months later that I found something to help it. I talked about it on Starling Fitness before:

• Starling Fitness » Shin Splints

Before and after exercise, I would do the Straight Leg Calf Stretch. After my cardio, I would also do Calf Raises after the stretch (about twenty per leg). Strengthening the calf muscle somehow protects those tendons at the bottom of my feet and I NEVER have that pain anymore.

You’re right, of course. You really should see a doctor to make sure that your foot pain isn’t something more serious. My doctor x-rayed my feet to make sure there weren’t any other issues.

I actually LOVE the running game on the Wii Fit. It is just like my walking videos and I love to pass the Miis that represent the people I know and love. Now that I’ve opened up the Free Run option in the Aerobics section, I have been running in place in front of my television every day.

Do I “train through the pain”? A little, yes. Sometimes some exercise helps me work out some of the muscle soreness. There are other times when I have really overdone it, however, and I rest. We didn’t get fat overnight, so it’s alright to get slim slowly. Don’t believe the Biggest Loser mentality. You are doing GREAT if you exercise 3-5 times a week. That gives you plenty of time to rest between workouts.

Believe me, I KNOW that it’s easy to overdo it while playing Wii Fit. I was surprised at how much muscle soreness I had after doing EVERY exercise available on the program. Learning to take it slowly is something that I have been working on as well.

Thanks for being such a loyal reader and commenter, Ernie. I hope you know how much I appreciate regular readers like you.

Best,
Laura Moncur

I love Braidwood’s writing on why she is trying to lose weight right now:

• Reacting to the social pressure to lose weight | Authentic Threads

I would like to just not care what society says and not have my weight, up or down, be in reaction to establishment values. BUT, I am a mammal and it’s normal for me to want enough status in my group to be treated with respect and to have access to resources.

It’s true that we are judged every day by what our bodies look like. It’s not fair, but it’s true. As much as we’d like to change that, we’re going against thousands of years of evolution and a lifetime of conditioning. I’m sure that a lot of us want to be thin just so that people will adore and envy us.

Is that a “bad” reason to want to get healthy?

I don’t think so. External validation might be difficult to maintain, but it is an important facet of being human. What do you think?

If you are one of the many people who have bought a Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, then you know that the quote of the month is about Google. This is one of my favorite all-time quotes and you can see it here:

If you trust Google more than your doctor then maybe it’s time to switch doctors.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 08-21-06

Chasing Windmills is an online video drama that is a wonderful story of two young people in love. When she gets pregnant, they are both happy, but when she starts spotting they both get scared. You can see the episode here:

There are lots of times when people ask me advice about losing weight or exercising. I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist. The best advice comes from a health care provider that knows you personally and I just can’t give that advice. SO many times I want to tell you to talk to your doctor. If you haven’t done so, do it as soon as you can schedule an appointment. Only they can give you the best advice for losing weight and keeping fit.

You can see more of Chasing Windmills here:

• Chasing Windmills

If you would like to order your own Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, you can do so here:

• Starling Fitness » Order Your Starling Fitness Yearly Journal

If you order it now, you can choose the month you want it to start and it will last you a year from that date. You won’t have to throw away any unused days from the first of the year. You can start fresh now.

Suunto has just released a new series of watches called the T Series. All of them are heart rate monitors that track your calories burned and time in each training zone. The upper end watches work with foot and bicycle pods to track your mileage.

Only the t6c comes even close to doing all that I would want and the Suunto website is so sparse that I can’t even tell if the computer program would be anything near as good as the Nike+ site.

• New Suunto Training Series

Sure, the Nike+ doesn’t track my heart rate or use a GPS to locate my position, but it has a place where there are a lot of runners who can compete with me in challenges. It’s nearly impossible for me to find a group of runners in my hometown who are running exactly as fast and long as I am, but on Nike+, I can find a large group easily.

Right now, it looks like the Suunto t6c is about $400 and that only includes the heart rate monitor. I’d have to pay extra for a foot pod or GPS tracking device. At that price tag, the new Suunto series doesn’t even pique my interest. I’ll stick with my low tech Nike+ for now. Ironically, it’s still better.

Via: Shiny Shiny: Suunto answer the ‘sun shining = diet’ equation

After a week of exercising with the Wii Fit, I have a few thoughts.

Is it a good workout?

When I started working out with the Wii Fit with my Nike Imara Heart Rate Monitor, I was worried that I wouldn’t get much of a workout. Some of the balance games (like the Soccer Heading game I showed you last week), barely got my heart rate above the low mark. The aerobic sections of the game were the BEST at getting my heart rate up.

Worse still, there is a lot of navigating through menus that wastes time. For example, I kept my stopwatch running and in over an hour of workout time, the Wii Fit logged only 45 minutes of actually working out.

Here are the stats from a typical workout:

Wii Fit Activity Time: 45 minutes
Total Workout Time: 1:07:14 minutes
Total Calories Burned: 536 calories
Average Heart Rate: 121 bpm
Time in High HR Zone: 26:37 minutes
Time in Medium HR Zone: 30:12 minutes
Time in Low HR Zone: 10:24 minutes

In this workout, I did every Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobic and Balance activity that had been opened. I’m sure you could workout for hours once you’ve opened up all the activities and repetitions.

Hands down, the biggest calorie burner is the hula hoop game. My heart rate shot up to 167 bpm while I played this game trying to keep all the hoops in the air and catch more. I’m surprised at how good of a workout it is and I’m excited to keep testing it over the weeks.

Shiny Shiny made a collection of the other week-long reviews of the Wii Fit here:

• Shiny Shiny: Does the Wii Fit actually get you fit? The reviews decide…

It doesn’t look like anyone is reporting weight loss any more than a simple one or two pounds a week, but it certainly is a fun way to add activity to your day.

This article from the New York Times got me thinking. A mother in search of a placebo to give to her child instead of medicine was stymied by the fact that you can’t actually buy a placebo pill. She has created a company called Efficacy Brands and released a “drug” called Obecalp, which is placebo spelled backward. It’s the drug you give your kids when you know they’re not really sick and just need to feel comforted.

• Experts Question Using Placebo Pills to Treat Children – NYTimes.com

Sometimes, the placebo effect has been shown to minimize symptoms better than drugs. Could diet pills help you lose weight, even if they are just sugar pills? What if you KNOW they’re just sugar pills? There is some thought that maybe they could:

At least one study has shown that placebos can be effective even when the patients know that they are inert. In a study in 2007, 70 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were asked to reduce their medications gradually by replacing some of their drugs with placebo pills. The children and their parents were explicitly told that these “dose extender” pills contained no drug.

This article from Mind Hacks, delves further:

• Mind Hacks: Placebo is not what you think

Placebos are not ‘ineffective’. In fact, when three condition trials are run (no treatment vs placebo vs medical treatment), placebo consistently out performs ‘no treatment’ and of course, not uncommonly, the medical treatment condition as well.

Furthermore, studies done in the 1970s showed that when heroin users inject water (sometimes done deliberately to alleviate cravings when drugs are in short supply), they can experience drug-like euphoria and have been observed to show opiate-like physiological signs such as pupil constriction.

I have long said that spending money on diet pills is just wasting your money, but I never took into account the placebo effect. What if I put some Skittles into a bottle and tried to convince myself that they were diet pills that would help me lose weight? Would that work, even if I knew that they were just candy in a bottle?

All of this just makes me think that losing weight is voodoo. Is it really all belief? If I believe I will lose weight, I will lose weight. What if I believe I will lose weight and still eat pizza every day? Do we really know so little about the human mind and body?

The headline on the National Enquirer was pretty dramatic. It claimed that the Biggest Loser diet had turned deadly. What was going on here?

Paul Marks weighed 303 pounds when he started with The Biggest Loser. He was eliminated back in February and has since had some medical problems.

According to the National Enquirer:

“Paul is fighting for his life. He’s had five surgeries since being voted off the show, and has had a bout with gangrene. And it’s all because of ‘Biggest Loser.'”

Of course, the quote from the show tells another side of the story:

“It is our understanding from sources close to Paul, and from Paul himself, that his doctors believe that losing weight on the show may have saved his life.”

The article doesn’t say WHY Paul had five surgeries and nine inches of his colon and appendix removed. Weight loss alone couldn’t cause a problem like that, could it? He must have had a problem with his colon that was separate from the weight loss. The only other mention of this was a brief interview on TV Guide’s website:

• For Biggest Loser’s Kelly Fields, Ex Marked the Spot – Celebrity and Entertainment News | TVGuide.com

He is really, really sick. In the past two months he’s spent six weeks in the hospital. He’s had ruptured diverticula and he got a colostomy, which got gangrenous. He’s had [several] surgeries.

What do you think? I know that the doctors at The Biggest Loser watch the contestants like hawks and any little thing that happens, they ship the contestants off to the hospital. Do you think the weight loss caused Paul’s sickness?

It’s rare when I laugh out loud at anything. I love to read comics. Most of the time, I chuckle happily to myself at them, but this comic from Joy of Tech made me literally laugh out loud.

• The Joy of Tech – Wii Fit Makes a Killing

When the Wii Balance Board turned my Mii into a short and bloated character, I seriously thought the same thing. Yes, I know I’m fat. Why do you think I bought the Wii Fit in the first place?!

Other than that, I’ve LOVED the Wii Fit. I’ll write a full review for it when I’ve finished working out with it for a week.

We got a double-dose of PostSecret this week. Frank has created a Facebook group and is posting bonus secrets there for us to see. You can become a fan of PostSecret here:

• Facebook | PostSecret

Here is a bonus secret that showed up on the Facebook profile:

It reads:

I take pictures of myself naked all the time.
I like my body better when seen in small pieces.

I have never taken a picture of myself naked. As much as I approve of NakedJen and her message about our bodies, I have never participated in naked picture taking.

I like to think that even if I had a perfect body that I would still keep that part of myself private, but I’ve never had a perfect body, so I don’t really know. Maybe if I was gorgeous, I would be an unashamed exhibitionist, but instead I hide behind my clothes.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.