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

Neurotica is a comic about a woman named Petunia and her grandfather. They moved to California a couple of years ago, but Petunia is just now learning how to surf.

That feeling of learning and mastering a new sport is hard to get any other way. The feeling of trying and failing is even fun. When you finally do it right one time for the entire day, you feel an ecstacy that is difficult to describe in words or drawings. Big Al (the author) does a pretty good job of showing the feeling of success when you finally get it right.

This is why we exercise, so we are strong enough to do fun things like surf, mountain bike, ski or kayak. This is why we lift weights. This is why we build our endurance.

If you have never felt the joy of learning a new sport, get out there. There are so many choices of sports to choose from, choose one. Get used equipment (or rent some) until you know whether it’s the right sport for you. If it’s not, move on and try another one. Keep trying until you find something that you like. You can do this!

Research has shown that part of being able to effectively lose weight involves journaling your food and exercise.

How do you journal your food and exercise?

Do you use a computer?

Do you use an online service?

Do you write it down on paper?

What has worked the best for you?

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.

On my search for a Palm program to track my calories and exercise, I tried Diet Tracker.

• Diet Tracker – PalmGear.com

I found it difficult to use. Adding food into the diary was time-consuming because it took too many clicks to do it. The software that I’m using now just lets me click on the line and start typing. It will bring up the database of foods that match what I’m typing and I can choose from that, or add my own. EASY. With Diet Tracker, it was much harder. I had to click on the little +Food button, which was impossible to do with my finger, so I HAD to pull out the stylus. Then there were several more choices before I could get to adding my food.

The screens were so pretty, that I was reluctant to give it up. Plus, it let me track things like how many hours of sleep I got and how good I felt each day. I really wanted this software to work. In the end, it crashed my Palm when I pushed the Delete button. That was enough for me to decide that I was going to try some different software.

I’m so grateful that they allow trial downloads to test software because I can find exact right software for me.

While on my search for new software for my Palm, I checked out Weight Commander for the PC. It wasn’t what I needed, but it was an interesting program.

It doesn’t allow you to keep track of your food or exercise. It’s not a nutrition or exercise log, it is strictly to keep track of your weight. It recommends that you weigh every day and input the weight into its system. Every day it gives you a little word of warning or information.

My one problem is that I tend to lose weight in drops. I’ll stagnate for days or even weeks on end and then have a sudden drop in weight on one day. When I had this, Weight Commander chided me for losing weight too quickly and told me to slow down. I know my body and that sudden weight loss was the accumulation of days of eating healthy and exercising while the scale didn’t move, so I was bothered by the admonition to slow down.

The best advice that Weight Commander gave me before my 5-day trial expired was “Don’t follow the hollow.” That meant, don’t look at your daily weight data, look at the average. Look at the general trend. Is the general trend going up or down or staying the same? Don’t look at today’s weight, look at the weight average.

That is really helpful advice when you’re weighing every day. My body weight can fluctuate wildly from day to day, which means that I get ecstatic when I see a huge drop and depressed when it bounces up. “Don’t follow the hollow,” is something that I can remember when I see those big changes.

If you are tracking your weight daily, my weight log and spreadsheet would not work for you. It assumes a weekly weigh-in, but it could be adjusted for a daily weigh-in. If you have Microsoft Excel on your computer, this spreadsheet would do much of what Weight Commander would do without the admonishments.

Anyone who has gone to see Pixar’s new movie, Cars, was treated to a trailer for Ratatouille. It’s a movie about a rat with a taste for good food.

What bothers me is this rat, who is obsessed with good food to the point that he is willing to risk his life is thin. Quite frankly, I haven’t found this to be true. His fat friend who doesn’t care what he eats gives him advice.

“You know if you can sort of muscle your way past the gag reflex all kinds of food possibilities open up.”

Of course, all my friends who don’t really care what they eat tend to be thin and forget to eat all the time. Why can’t I have that problem?

Does the world really need a tale about a food obsessed rat? Watching this trailer made the hackles on my back raise and I don’t really know why.

I found out about CalorieKing.com from PalmGear. They were selling a Palm handheld calorie counter and I was looking for a new one, so I tried it. I was unimpressed because it crashed my Treo a couple of times and the Palm software didn’t sync with the PC software, so I didn’t purchase it.

I promptly forgot about CalorieKing until Jeremy Zawodny recommended them in his weblog entry, “The Diet Plan and The Three Habits“. I worried that I might have been a little rash in discounting them, so I looked at them again.

Jeremy was right about CalorieKing. They have a MASSIVE database of food and you can search it from their website, but their software leaves a lot to be desired. I wanted to be able to set up my weight and have it find my metabolic rate automatically. Then I wanted to tell it my goal and have it tell me how many calories a day I should eat. Instead, it just told me that I should eat a certain number of calories a day without any other ability to tweak it. It just wasn’t the software for me.

Additionally, the fact that the Palm and the PC software didn’t sync (whereas the PC software syncs with their monthly web program) was the final decision-maker for me. I don’t want to pay a monthly fee to keep track of my food. I just want to put my food on my Palm and be able to view it on the PC sometimes. Maybe even print it out and put it in my journal or show it to a nutritionist.

CalorieKing wasn’t for me, but it might be for you. They allow a free trial download with a 7-Day trial, so you can check it out for free. And as always, you can just look up any food you want for free, which is what Jeremy recommended in the first place.

Want to try out CalorieKing? Here’s where they are:

• CalorieKing – Diet and weight loss. Calorie Counter and more.

• CalorieKing Handheld Diet Diary – PalmGear.com

• CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager for Windows – PalmGear.com

The Hillbilly Housewife has another tip for you. This time it’s about Regular Ground Beef vs. Extra Lean Ground Beef. So many of my family’s recipes require ground beef that it’s something that I still use on a regular basis. Instead of spending the extra money to get the leaner beef, here is a technique to make regular ground beef less fatty.

• Hillbilly Housewife – Reducing the Fat Content of Regular Ground Beef by Draining and Rinsing

I haven’t tried this, but it seems like it would work. My only problem is that I wouldn’t know how to count the calories unless I just believed her. I know that draining any ground beef and rinsing it like this would help it be less fatty, but I think I would be tempted to count it as the higher calorie count “just to be safe.”

Via: Get Rich Slowly » The Hillbilly Housewife

Over the years, I have learned to feed a headache.

If I get a headache, I immediately feed myself, before I even think about taking a pain reliever. Food is my first instinct.

The saddest part of this ritual is that most of time it doesn’t even work. I would say that 90% of my headaches are caused by sinus allergies. Most of the time, I get a headache, eat and then wait an hour in pain until I finally give up and take a Sudafed.

This is all because I don’t like to take pills.

My grandma was the kind of woman who thought pills were the answer to everything. I remember at a very young age deciding that I wasn’t going to be like that when I grew up. I didn’t want to have bottles and bottles of pills. I was going to find ways to get rid of my pain without Tylenol 3, Darvocet and carisoprodol. If I couldn’t then I was just going to have to be in pain.

I found ways to deal with my pain without pills. Sadly, it was with food instead.

So, I’m breaking myself of my habit of feeding my headaches. When I get them, I am consciously staying away from food and taking a Sudafed instead. It’s a difficult habit for me to break because about 10% of my headaches are actually caused by me needing to eat. I’m slowly learning to tell the difference. Until then, this is going to be an interesting journey.

There is an episode of Friends called “The One Where Phoebe Runs.” Rachel and Phoebe go for a run together, but Rachel gets embarrassed because Phoebe runs like a little kid with her arms flailing. I love what Phoebe says to Rachel when they argue about it.

“I run like I did when I was a kid because that’s the only way it’s fun. Didn’t you ever run so fast that you thought your legs were going to fall off?”

Rachel is reluctant to try it, but on a run alone one day, she tries running Phoebe’s way.

She runs into Phoebe while running and they scream at each other.

Rachel: “I’m so sorry! You were right! This feels great!”

Phoebe: “See? And you don’t care if people are staring. It’s just for a second ’cause then you’re gone!”

I love this episode and whenever I’m feeling bummed out about exercising, I think of it. If I’m huffing and puffing along, sometimes I try running like Phoebe for a second or two. I let my arm fly out and just run as fast as I can like I did when I was a kid. It makes me feel so much better!

Update 02-21-08: I found the video!

• Starling Fitness » The One Where Phoebe Runs Video

Friends: Season Six – Disc 2: The One Where Phoebe Runs

During my runs, I have been listening to Christopher Lawrence’s new album, Subculture, Vol. 01. It happened to be in my collection because Mike put it there, but I found it and have been digging on the beats. It makes running so easy.

I decided to listen to it while I ran the Salt Lake 5K. It made the race very different than any other race I’ve run. I’ve never listened to music while running a race. I didn’t want anything weighing me down. I didn’t want to have to deal with holding a music player. It just wasn’t practical before.

This time, I found some great shorts for running that have a plethora of pockets. There was room for my chapstick and most importantly, my phone. I can play music on my phone, but I wanted to bring it along on the race because I always get separated from my family during a race and it would make it easier if I just had my cell phone with me.

So I listened to Christopher Lawrence during the 5K and I finished slower than I’ve done in years. Not the music’s fault, of course. It would have helped if I had actually trained for the race. I must say that having the music helped me survive the race better than I have ever done before. The beat kept me pounding away even though the heart rate monitor said 190 bpm. I finally stopped to walk when it hit 200, but the music drew me forward.

Next time running sounds like a drag, download a bunch of techno music from the likes of Christopher Lawrence, DJ Tiesto or Paul Van Dyk and you’ll find yourself pounding the pavement with a vigor you didn’t know you had.