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

I tried exercising with the Swami’s Beach DVD with my exercise bike for the first time on Sunday. I just can’t wait to tell you how it was!

It sucked!

Seriously, this is a pretty video where you get to see a lot of ocean and see interesting things along the way, but when I was exercising with my bike and watching it, it just didn’t do it for me. First off, there’s the huge staircase. I can’t even imagine going down that with a bike, so it just felt like I was watching a movie. Then, when we finally get walking on the beach, it didn’t feel right because riding a bike on sand is extremely difficult to balance on. I constantly felt like I was going to fall over because of the sand.

I had to turn it off after ten minutes or so.

I’ve walked and run with this video lots of times on the treadmill and just LOVE it. Every time I watch it, I notice something different and I was the one who filmed it. It’s amazing how much our minds filter our consciousness. I love the video on the treadmill, but it was thoroughly unpleasant on the bike.

I have two more videos in the works and BOTH of them have stairs. Next time I do filming, I need to make sure that I choose a course that is accessible to both walking and biking.

Here is a glimpse of what the Swami’s Beach Video looks like:

If you have a treadmill next to a television and DVD player, you might like this DVD and it’s only five bucks plus shipping. You can buy it here:

• Starling Fitness – Fitness, diet, and health weblog » Walking Videos For Sale

Sometimes eating and obsessing about food gets me to to the point where I just wish I could have a simple thing that I could just throw in my purse and never have to worry about again. Obviously, The Last Angry Young Man feels the same way:

“Imagine going to the grocery store only once every 6 months. Imagine paying less than a dollar per meal. Imagine never washing dishes, chopping vegetables or setting the table ever again. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“But can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? For the good of human kind, I’m about to find out. On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: ‘a complete and balanced diet for the nutrition of primates, including the great apes.'”

He is logging his endeavor at The Monkey Chow Diaries.

• The Monkey Chow Diaries

The American Council on Science and Health noticed his experiment and have logged their opinions on his diet. They agree that the monkey chow is complete nutrition for humans and suspect that he will lose weight on the diet because the food is monotonous and unpalatable.

• ACSH > The Ultimate Convenience Diet: Monkey Chow > By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D., Jeff Stier, Esq.

It’s interesting to watch his reaction to eating the food for the first time and even more interesting to hear his simple resignation the second day. He is saving about $600 a month by eating monkey chow instead of restaurant and home-cooked food. I’m excited to see what this experiment brings.

Via: Freakonomics Blog » The Monkey Chow diet

Jeremy Zawodny is another blogger who has undergone a startling transformation. He has lost 50 pounds over the last year and he is sharing his tips and tricks this week. Here are the links to the first two entries:

• Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web Site (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• The Diet Plan and The Three Habits (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• The Diet Spreadsheet (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Diet Tips: How To Eat Less (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Diet Plans and Goal Setting: How Many Calories? (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Closing Diet Tips and Advice (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Over the year, he learned the following things:

• Eat Fewer Calories and Monitor Your Intake

• Weigh Yourself Daily but Don’t Obsess Over It

• Learn the Difference Between “Not Hungry” and “Full”

This is a really simplified list, so you’ll have to go to his weblog to get the full story. Keep reading each day this week to get all of his tips and tricks.

Way to go Jeremy!

There are days when I’ve eaten too much and it comes to dinnertime and I have very few calories left, maybe 150 to 300 calories.

What do you eat when you are in that situation?

What kind of low calorie dinner concoctions have you found that really fill you up and make you feel like you’ve had a real meal?

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.

The official times for the 5K haven’t been posted yet, but here’s a low resolution video that Mike took. I’m the one in the long-sleeved gray shirt.

I started and stopped my stopwatch correctly this time, and it said it took me 37:15 minutes to complete the race, which is 3 whole minutes longer than my best time.

It just goes to show you that you can’t cheat physics. If you want a good finish time, you have to put in the training time. There’s no way around it.

Update 06-04-06 11:42 am: The results are up online now. My official results are:

Race: Salt Lake 5K 2006
Name: Laura Moncur
City: Salt Lake City, UT
Bib Number: 20366
Sex: Female
Age: 37
Time: 37:16
Pace: 12:00
Place in Age Division: 79 out of 139
Place Overall: 1478 out of 2321
Place in Sex Division: 775 out of 1425

Ironically, this race would have earned me an A in my jogging class so long ago, but it’s not good enough for me. I’m racing again this August. We’ll have to see if I do better when I train.

This is old news, but it got me thinking. Justin Gatlin broke the 100-meter world record. His time was 9.76 seconds. The previous time was 9.77 seconds.

• ESPN.com – TRACKANDFIELD – Gatlin sets 100m world record at 9.76 seconds

That’s .01 of a second: one-hundreth of a second. What can you do in one-hundreth of a second? Break a record in track and field, I guess.

Today I run the Salt Lake City 5K. I haven’t been training for it. I haven’t even been running regularly. I’ve been slacking more than I want to admit. It’s not like I’m cross-training and riding my bike or swimming to protect my joints. I haven’t been exercising more than once a week, period.

So, I’m not expecting much from this race. My personal record (PR) is 34:15 minutes. This is not an amazing time. I haven’t quite got to the point were I’m actually competing in a race with anyone except myself. The Laura Moncur from 2004 trained a lot more for this race than I have, but something inside still hopes I kick her butt. I weigh less than the Laura Moncur from 2004. I regularly run faster. Somehow, I am still holding hope that I’ll beat that Laura Moncur from two years ago, even if it’s just by .01 of a second.

Wish me luck!

Via: kottke.org

The title on the US Weekly magazine said, “How I Got Thin.” Janet Jackson’s belly button stared back at me as I picked up the magazine. Do you want to know how Janet Jackson got thin? She ate less and exercised.

That’s about all I learned from that article.

Her diet consisted of meals sent to her every day and her exercise consisted of workouts with her trainer. She just did what the experts told her to do without cheating and she lost weight.

I thought to myself, “That’s useless advice for those of us who don’t have private chefs and personal trainers. What are we supposed to do?”

EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

I just need to do what the experts tell me to do and I’ll lose the weight.

Let’s face the facts. I KNOW what I need to do. I need to eat less calories than I expend. There are enough tools out there to tell me exactly what I need to eat to lose weight. There are enough websites out there telling me exactly what exercises I need to do. There is little doubt in my mind what I need to do to lose weight.

The hard part is doing what the experts tell me to do.

Getting different experts doesn’t help. They are either crackpots or they tell me the exact same thing, over and over. There are no exceptions.

Next time you’re feeling jealous of some celebrity because they lost a lot of weight using some expensive plan, remember. You can do it to if you’re willing to do exactly what the experts tell you to do.

Update 06-03-07: Janet has kept the weight off for a year. See more here:

• Starling Fitness – Janet Jackson Keeps The Weight Off For A Year

I’m pretty inspired by her.

Lucky for me, Maggie Mason reads Esquire magazine. She found an excellent quote from Tom Hanks.

• Mighty Girl – » Blog Archive » Lack

Tom Hanks spoke frankly about gaining sixty pounds for the movie Castaway:

“Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?”

When I have made my eating far too restrictive, I fantasize about being able to eat anything I want in huge quantities. If I’m not careful, this turns into a huge binge in which I actually do eat whatever I want in huge quantities.

The only solution I’ve been able to find is to eat whatever I want in SMALL quantities to prevent that binge. Tom Hanks is right. Living a life with no boundaries DOES create LESS joy. There are very real consequences to living life with no boundaries and they cause real pain. Learning to control myself has been the most joyful thing I could have ever done.

Don’t let it take 44 years before you realize how fantastic you are. Just think of the one thing on your body that you hate, whether it’s your butt, your nose, your irritating laugh, your ugly mole or your wandering eye. Whatever it is, it makes you unique. It’s what is about you that people love and they would miss if it disappeared.

Eating healthy and exercising isn’t about making your butt smaller. It’s about taking care of yourself so that you live a LONG time. The people in your life love the unique qualities that you have and they want you to stay in their lives for as long as possible. That requires that you eat healthy and exercise.

You are amazing just the way you are. Take care of yourself so you’ll stay around longer.

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.

This postcard from PostSecret made me want to stand up and cheer for the writer. Managing bulimia is an ongoing practice, but every day starts with that rededication. That was “The Last Time” can be a reality if you just nuture and love yourself.

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.