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

Weight Watchers Points make keeping track of calories very easy, but they are overkill. The Weight Watchers formula has been registered as a patented formula for giving values to food using calories, fat and fiber. I have a couple of problems with the Points Program:

• Fat is counted twice: Fat is a macronutrient that accounts for nine calories per gram, so the Weight Watchers Points system counts it once with its calories and again as fat grams. It entices people to choose low fat foods, which might be a healthier option, but I find it to be inaccurate for calorie calculation.

• Fiber is overrated: Fiber is an important macronutrient, but the Weight Watchers Points system weighs it far heavily than it should. Additionally, many diet foods have caught on to this and have added fiber to foods where it doesn’t occur naturally. If you carefully look at the food labels, many manufacturers have started adding the equivalent of a teaspoon of Metamucil to their food in order to lower the Points value.

Weight Watchers originally created this elaborate formula to encourage its people to eat foods that are lower in fat and higher in fiber. That’s a great philosophy, but it’s not good accounting. Keep track of what really counts: calories.

But Weight Watchers Points are so easy…

You’re right. They are. If you want to keep track of your food using the Weight Watchers Points, go ahead. It’s a relatively accurate system of monitoring your intake, and it’s better than not keeping track at all. If you are familiar with it and you like the program, stay with it. The first rule is to write down everything you eat. If you keep track of your calories using the Weight Watchers Points, it’s really just a shorthand and will work. If you don’t know the Weight Watchers Points, then don’t follow their system, just keep track of your calories. Calories are more accurate anyway.

Laura,

I hate to be a bother, but since I have your attention – do you have any advice on what to look for when buying a treadmill? Hey, what a great idea for a blog entry!

(Of course, I’ll do a search in your archives.)

Ernie

Ernie,

I haven’t written that entry because it’s so complicated. It depends on a lot of things, like your space requirements. We live in an 890 square foot house, so the only spot we had to put a treadmill was a tiny area in Mike’s office. It was essential that we had a fold-up design, so we compromised on horsepower and stability because of space.

We use ours so much that I wish we had gotten an industrial grade treadmill (like the kind they use in gyms). One that works with a Polar heart rate monitor would have been nice also. I thought the iFit thing would be important, but I rarely use it anymore. I used to use it a lot with a program called i2Workout, where I could program workouts that controlled the treadmill, but I haven’t used it lately.

• Pick Me! » i2Workout

The most important thing is to wear workout clothes and running shoes to test them out. If the store doesn’t let you test them, then don’t buy them. And REALLY test them out. Try running on them at top speed and see how they vibrate. Ours makes a lot of noise and it has been a bother because I will wake up Mike when I’m running, even though the treadmill is in another room.

I just remembered that Wendy Bumgardner wrote a few entries back in March about the latest treadmills. Maybe they will help:

• Best Budget Treadmills

• Top Picks for Mid-Range Treadmills

• Top Picks Quality Treadmills

I guess I WILL turn this email into an entry on Starling Fitness, if you don’t mind.

Happy Shopping, Laura

For the next couple of weeks, Starling Fitness will be updating once a day (instead of twice a day). Feel free to leave comments on this entry about that and how it works for you.

Sometimes WHEN you exercise is as important as what you do and for how long. Choosing your time carefully can keep your exercise routine a routine or kill it in the water:

What time of the day do you exercise?

How often do you exercise?

Does this work for you? Are you able to keep your exercise appointments or are you tempted to skip them?

What would be the best time for you to exercise and how often?

What have you done in the past? Did it work?

The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.

Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.

Bonking happens when you are exercising and your glycogen stores run out. It’s like running your car on fumes, except your car doesn’t have fat storages to draw from. It has been described as painful and long distance racers avoid it by loading up on high calorie supplements like Gu Energy Gel and PowerGel.

You can find out more information about bonking here:

• Dr. Mirkin – BONKING

• Bonk (condition) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bonking is actually a very rare condition and usually only shows up during extreme exercise. Of course the marketing for products like Gu and PowerGel don’t want you to know that. They hype their products by providing them for free to the extreme athletes who need them, focusing the cameras on Lance Armstrong when he sucks down a mouthful of the sugary stuff.

Most of us are exercising to get rid of the fat in our bodies. Consuming mass quantities of sugary goo is counter-productive to that goal. If you are going to be exercising for more than an hour, eat half a banana before your workout. Longer than that should probably be broken up into two workout sessions.

There is also the idea that doing extreme exercise in the morning before breakfast, when glycogen levels are low, burns more fat than doing the same amount of exercise after eating. This hasn’t been proven and can lead to dizzyness and shaking. Be careful and listen to your body.

I told you about Lisa some time ago when she was training for her Century Ride:

• Starling Fitness » Training for The Century Ride

Well, she finished it and here are her thoughts about it:

• Learning The Lessons of Nixon » 100k!

She did pretty well until the last five miles:

“I was fine up to the 50 mi rest stop, but the last 5 miles were very, very painful — I felt like my legs were on fire from just above the knees to just below the hips from all the lactic acid built up in my muscles; my hands had started to go numb, and my neck and shoulders hurt. I ticked off every little bit of a mile during that last stretch. It came on very suddenly — maybe I was bonking (experiencing muscle failure due to depleting glycogen, a condition that happens when you’ve used up all your body’s available quick energy stores).”

We’ll talk more about bonking tomorrow.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Tish is toying with the idea of dieting again.

• love and hope and sex and dreams: Diet Culture

She’s in that uncomfortable spot of not liking her body the way it is, but not really wanting to jump into dieting again.

“Take me as I am–chubby and all.”

“But that’s not the point. There are times when I’m uncomfortable. And I don’t like my underwear size.”

“So, I’m toying with the diet thing again–wondering if I can do it, even for a couple of months, to lose a couple of pounds.”

If you are feeling like you want to be thinner, but don’t want to diet, I have two words for you, “Don’t Diet.” Seriously, dieting will only make you feel deprived.

What to do about the body image issues?

My answer has always been to start with exercise. I allow myself to eat whatever I want, but I insist that I exercise regularly. Once I work up to six sessions a week, it seems more natural to eat healthier. It’s almost as if the exercise makes my body crave healthier food.

I never really lose any weight when I’m eating whatever I want and exercising, but it leads me to the place where I can actually consider eating healthy again.

52 Projects is a craft site with projects to do each week, but this week, in addition to the project, we got a lovely story about running on a path in a park.

• 52 Projects: Tree

The author had run past that tree for years and has a craft project to prove it. Running has been very helpful:

“Running is a way to keep the pounds off my mid-riff, to keep me from screaming because the TV volume is up too loud or some other stupid thing that I shouldn’t be losing my temper over, to keep my blood pressure down, to do some thinking or to do no thinking at all, to help clear my mind, to be alone, to move forward, faster and faster and faster. And throughout and within all of the running, that tree was my fixture: to reach the tree, to see the tree, to think back on it as I walked into my apartment, winded, soar and soaked in sweat, but smiling down to my core.”

If you run a similar route every day, pick a tree on the route that is YOUR tree, just like this person did. Hopefully, yours won’t suffer the same indignity that this tree did.

With all the gushing I’ve done about the Nike+iPod, you might think I am in love with Nike. Quite frankly, I was a little bit. The Nike+ has gotten my butt out the door for a couple of months now. When I walked into the Nike Store in Las Vegas, I was a fan.

I walked out a hater, though.

You’re looking at the reason why. I have been in love with the Nike+, so I thought I would look at some of their overpriced iPod clothing and see if there was anything that I would be willing to plunk down my money for. The commercial for the Nike+ had the guy wearing a shirt where the iPod fit into the sleeve. I liked that shirt so much that I was willing to pay the 70 bucks for it. Unfortunately, Nike lost a sale.

The shirt that I’m holding up is an XL. By my estimation, it is about the same size as an extra-small in other brands, but Nike thinks that this is an extra-large. The not-quite-so helpful service girl said, “Try it on. They are stretchy.” I took the XL into the dressing room, but it was so tight that the bottom seam rolled up to my bra. It was a painful reminder of what it felt to weigh 235.

At that weight, I couldn’t fit into any exercise clothes except one brand from K-Mart. I was so grateful that they made exercise clothes in my size that I bought two weeks worth of pants and shirts. I bought the entire inventory at three K-Marts.

Nike just doesn’t get it.

The fact that they don’t carry a size for me when I’m fifty pounds lighter, just tells me that they aren’t an athletic clothing company. They’re a fashion clothing company just like Kenneth Cole. They don’t want “fatties” like me wearing their clothes and giving them a bad name.

Despite the look on my face, I was near tears when I had Mike click this picture of me. Despite all the weight I’ve lost, I’m still not thin enough for Nike. Well, they can take their 70-dollar shirts and stuff ’em. I’m going to give my money to a company that deserves it.

It makes me want to throw my Nike+ in the garbage.

I’ll admit, I have. When our mail carrier left a plastic bag in our mailbox to donate food to the local food bank, I got rid of all the tempting food in my house. Anything that hadn’t been opened that was a troublesome food for me, I sent on its way to charity. I even felt like I was doing a good thing, but if it’s not good for me to eat, is it good for the homeless?

• Food banks and junk food – Slashfood

It seems food banks are receiving an influx of unhealthy food.

“The shift in the types of food donated to food banks leave the administration of the banks wondering ‘whether they should distribute all food received, regardless of nutritional value, or only the more healthful items.’ This is an area of concern for many, especially considering that obesity rates tend to be higher among the low income groups that need food assistance like food banks provide and in some cases, banks are already turning down certain food items, like sodas.”

The quote, “Beggars can’t be choosers,” is so old and such a part of our language that the original author of it was lost long ago. Then again, most of that food is something that I actually like. I consider it a treat and I’m only sending it on so that I don’t add to my girth. I really don’t know how I feel about this.