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

The Veteran’s Administration is tackling obesity by offering a program called M.O.V.E! Here is a link to the handouts that they will provide the veterans on the program.

• Managing Overweight\Obesity for Veterans Everywhere!

It’s a down-to-earth program of move more, eat less that explains the calories in versus calories out dilemna. Since these handouts are available to everyone online, you can benefit from this program, even if you’re not a veteran.

Via: Happy News – New VA program targets obesity, diabetes – by Associated Press

This entry on Diet Blog about free weight loss programs versus ones that make you pay a weekly fee really got me thinking.

• Diet Blog – Free Versus Expensive Diets

I keep telling you that you can eat healthy and exercise for free, yet I go to Weight Watchers and advocate their meetings. Am I a hypocrite? Am I confused? What am I really trying to tell you?

You CAN do it for free

The truth of the matter is, you CAN lose weight for free. You don’t need expensive dietary supplements, gym memberships or fancy exercise gadgets. All you need is to eat less calories than you burn, and there are a myriad of ways that you can do this within the confines of a healthy diet. You don’t need to pay anyone anything to lose weight.

I wasn’t able to do it for free

I tried for years and years to lose weight before I decided to just love my body the way it was. I had tried every diet and sometimes I lost weight, but mostly I just lost five pounds and then gained back ten after the diet-induced bingeing. When I decided to stop dieting forever and to just love my body the way it was, I gained a few pounds and decided that I was okay with it.

After a few months of accepting myself the way I was, I decided that I wanted to exercise to help keep my heart healthy. That step alone took me from 235 to 190 pounds. Exercise was my first step toward a healthy lifestyle, but after a muscle strain, I started gaining the weight that I had lost back. That’s when I had a realization.

Exercise alone won’t do it. Dieting alone won’t do it. I needed to do both and I REALLY needed help in the eating department because all diets had sent me into binge-mode. When I found out that a close friend and my sister had great success with Weight Watchers, I decided to join. What I learned there changed the way I dealt with food.

Conquering bingeing took more than just learning what is healthy. It has taken a daily focus on keeping myself satisfied both physically and emotionally. It’s such a vast subject that I don’t think I would have ever been able to get past bingeing on my own. That’s why I’m so dedicated to Weight Watchers.

So, should you pay for it?

That’s a question that only you can answer. There are people who have paid their Weight Watcher dues every week without success. There are others, like me, who have completely changed their lives. It all depends on you. Are you ready to do it on your own? Do you need extra support? Give yourself an hour or two and a stack of paper and write it out. That has always been the most helpful way for me to look at things.

Cheryl Koch has a quick list to help you stay within your calorie range to lose weight.

• Yahoo! Health Expert Blogs Eat Right, Stay Fit – Calorie Control for the New You

It really helps to have a refresher like this on the little things that we can do to get and stay healthy with our eating. Here are her suggestions:

• Control your portions

• Use common, everyday reference points to help you recognize a healthy portion size

• Write down everything you eat

• Increase the “hidden” exercise in your daily routines

• Fill up on healthy selections

• Don’t eat right from the package

• Pay attention to labels

All of these ideas have helped me over the years to keep my eating in control. Try adding one of these habits a week to your lifestyle and you will notice results.

Weight Loss That Lasts was published last year and I saw it on the shelves in bookstores, at Amazon and at Weight Watchers. I picked it up because I always like a little extra boost of inspiration. How did this book do? Did it inspire me to live healthier?

What’s Good About This Book:

This book talks about ten myths that hold people back:

• You can’t lose weight and keep it off.
• A few extra pounds don’t matter.
• Willpower is the key to successful weight loss.
• You can lose weight with exercise alone.
• Calories don’t matter – avoid fats or carbs to lose weight successfully.
• You can’t lose weight if you have the wrong metabolism or genes.
• You can boost your metabolism by what, how, and when you eat.
• It doesn’t matter how you take the weight off; you can think about keeping it off later.
• There is only one right approach to losing weight.
• Your weight is your problem and you need to solve it on your own.

Some of these “myths” are a bit of stretch, but I would seriously recommend this book to the fat acceptance people who insist that “Diets Don’t Work” and say that there is no way for them to get thinner than they are. This book has the scientific backup with over 14 pages of sources to the medical studies cited in the book. Unlike some books that spout ideas without proof, this book gives you the actual studies to which it is referring when it states a fact.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

I think this book overdoes it on the scare tactics. The author is very careful to only state that obesity correlates with disease instead of causing it, but after that, goes on a long tirade about the devastating effects of each disease. It made the book feel a little like a propaganda piece to me. Dr. Rippe is very careful to tell the truth, but then keeps beating you over the head with it until you just want to say, “Okay, shut up about the diseases already!”

Should I Buy This Book?

If you have ever thought that you can’t lose weight because you come from a fat family, you should buy this book. If you have every blamed your inability to follow through on a diet with lack of willpower, you should buy this book. Sure, you’re going to get hit over the head with scare tactics about disease, but that might inspiration enough to get yourself to a healthy weight.

I bought Stop Stuffing Yourself when I felt helpless about my bingeing. I had stagnated at 180 pounds for over two years and I knew that I couldn’t lose any more weight and still binge. I knew I needed to get past the bingeing, but I had no idea how to do it, so I got this book.

What’s Good About This Book:

Like all Weight Watchers books, they sprinkle many case studies from people who have lost weight. In some books, they even show the before and after pictures. This book has profiles such as these, but no pictures. I always love to see other people who have succeeded because it gives me hope. Even though I know that those people might have gained all that weight back (or might not even exist), I get inspired by those “true to life” stories and advice. It’s the same reason I like Weight Watchers Magazine every month.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

Chapter 2: Discovering Your Eating Style really turned me off to the whole book. It was a large chapter of quizzes to determine your eating style. I find quizzes like that to be a simplistic condensation of the real issues behind overeating. I started out answering the questions, but by the second page, I stopped to see how long this quiz was going to be. When I realized that it was a full chapter of questions, I stopped right there.

This book has a lot of good advice about not eating when you’re bored or angry, but it wasn’t what I needed to conquer my bingeing.

Should I Buy This Book?

If you have a serious problem with bingeing, this book will not help you get to the bottom of it. If you tend to eat when you’re bored or lonely, then this book might help you, but only if you can get past the neverending quiz in Chapter 2.

I found Helping Your Child Lose Weight the Healthy Way at the library. I was looking for a book by this author on a completely different subject (Not Buying It : My Year Without Shopping). The library didn’t have the book I was looking for, but DID have this one. I thought I should check it out and see how it relates to my experience as an overweight child.

What’s Good About The Book:

I knew I would like this book when I read the first page:

“A variety of factors can influence your child’s body self-image, but probably the most important is what family members do and say. Certainly, if siblings tease him about being fat or his grandmother offers suggestions for losing weight, the message will be that something is wrong with him. This likely to have a negative impact on the way he sees himself. And what family members do is as powerful as what they say.”

Judith suggests monitoring your child’s current eating and exercise habits in order to assess the situation, but she also suggests monitoring the family activity levels and the eating environment of your home.

“There is no generic eating plan that is appropriate for every child, or every chubby child – one side does not fit all. A cookie-cutter approach just doesn’t cut it.”

The beginning of chapter 8 says it all:

“Don’t put your child on a diet. We’ll say it again, for emphasis, ‘Don’t put your child on a diet.’ The truth is, diets don’t work for children any better than they do for adults. And worse, they can cause considerable harm to a child’s growth, health, psychological development and ability to learn.”

This book is down to earth in its approach to helping your children lose weight.

What’s Not So Good About The Book:

I’m uncomfortable with secretly monitoring what your child is eating. As an overweight child, I used to wish that my grandmother would just leave me alone. I always knew when she was tallying up what I had eaten. It’s not like you can hide something like that.

I think the best option is to provide healthy food and a good example. It’s your child’s body and if he or she wants to eat cookies all day, there is NOTHING you can do to stop them. The best thing to do is make sure there are healthy alternatives at home and have your child notice how you eat.

Should I Buy The Book?

Even though I agree with the nutrition and activity recommendations in this book, I’m reluctant to recommend it to a parent. There is no way you can hide a book like this from your child unless you only read it at work and it never goes home. Once your child sees the title of the book, an emotional blow will hit him or her in the gut. “Mom (or Dad) thinks I’m fat…” Do you really want to do that to your kid?

I’ve heard lots of rave reviews about Curves. When I saw this book at the library, I picked it up, hoping that the book would tell me a little more about their program.

What’s Good About This Book:

The Calorie Sensitive Plan will help you lose weight. It restricts your calories to 1200 a day in Phase 1 and ups them to 1600 in Phase 2. It doesn’t take into account different body sizes, unfortunately, so if you are 5’11” and weight 250 pounds, they are going to recommend the same amount of calories as someone who is 5’2″ and 150 pounds. That seems a little short-sighted, but at those calorie amounts, you WILL lose weight.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

Unfortunately, they still believe in the high protein diet, so they have an option that recommends allowing you to eat as much protein as you want and limiting your carbs to 20 grams in Phase 1. This program has shown to lose weight only when the calorie consumption is low enough to cause weight loss. If you overeat protein, you WILL gain weight.

Additionally, they seem to have “magical” workout machines at their facilities that adjust the resistance based on how swiftly you use them. They didn’t explain the physics of it, but I have a hard time believing that the hydraulic resistance is better than free weights. They gave me nothing in this book to persuade me otherwise or convince me that their machines actually do what they say they do.

Over 100 pages are forms: dining out diaries, exercise diaries and daily calorie logs. The book is only 206 pages long, so almost half the book is EMPTY, waiting for you to fill it out. There are also several pages dedicated to calorie lists of foods. All in all there is very little “meat” in this book unless you count the Carbohydrate Sensitive Plan.

Should I Buy This Book?

No. Don’t bother with it. You could buy the Runner’s World Training Journal and get a better log to write down your exercise and food intake.

I have been reading raw food diet books in an effort to find some proof that this might actually be a better way of living. I am scouring all these books in an effort to find some (any) medical data or scientific proof that supports the claims of the raw food proponents.

Unfortunately, this sentence is on the first page of the preface for Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods:

“Empirical knowledge is not absolute. My theory is that change is the only constant; take what you know and go with your gut (especially with food where your guts are at stake). The intelligence of imperical explanation is only a part of the union of life.”

That didn’t leave me with a lot of hope for scientific data in this book. Living Cuisine goes on to say that enzymes are killed when food is heated above 110° F and that “many studies suggest that a predominantly raw foods diet is the optimal diet and promotes health” without providing any reference to said studies. There’s not even a footnote. If there are so many, why aren’t they referring to them?

What’s Good About This Book:

Under Chapter 4: Transitioning to Health, there is a list of recommendations. Some of them will help you eat healthier, such as drinking plenty of fresh water, reducing fried foods, eating healthy oils and reducing your sugar intake.

Other ideas are harmless like being mindful of emotions and sensations surrounding eating. They have some really good things to say about analyzing the reasons we eat:

“Peace with food is possible. Eating should be a satisfying and joyful experience that nourishes the body.”

Instead of living in shame because of bingeing, they suggest looking at our emotions and feeling peaceful about food.

What’s Not So Good About This Book:

There is no documented evidence that cooking food kills enzymes or even that these enzymes are beneficial to our digestion and health. I was hoping this book might provide some, but it is sorely lacking in this department.

There are over 200 pages dedicated to recipes for eating raw foods, which just seems like a way to bulk up the book. This book is almost half recipes. Instead of listing study after study of research, they skip right to the non-cooking of food. If that wasn’t enough, Section 2: The Raw Foods Pantry is a huge list of foods that are considered healthy. I’m not talking about a simple list of fruits, veggies and grains, they list EVERY fruit, vegetable and grain from White Onions to Umeboshi Plums. If you need a primer on food, then this book might be helpful, but I’m sure there are cooking books that will give you a better introduction.

Should I Buy This Book?

If you are unsure whether eating solely raw foods is right for you, don’t bother with this book. It will not give you any evidence to convince you to eat the way they suggest.

The whole reason I started eating healthy is because the doctor said that the reason my stomach hurt was because I was fat and eating poorly. I knew he was wrong because I had systematically removed various foods from my diet (only for one week at a time), so I thought it wasn’t what I was eating that was hurting me. Somehow Eating for IBS came up on a search that I did on my library’s website, so I put it on hold.

If my problem was just IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), then this book would be great for me. Heather Van Vorous gives a specific list of foods that tend to trigger attacks and foods that are safe to eat. She then provides a large list of hints to prevent attacks and over half the book is stomach friendly recipes.

Unfortunately, I have a problem with bingeing in addition to the stomach problems. The surest way to spur a binge is to tell me that I CAN’T eat something. Give me a list of BAD foods and I will think about those foods all day long. I borrowed this book from the library and realized that I would not be able to follow the Eating for IBS plan, no matter how healthy it was and how much peace it offered me.

Why did I buy the book anyway?

I bought Eating for IBS from Amazon a couple of weeks ago so I could let the library have their book back without panicking. I’m not ready to limit my diet the way Heather Van Vorous recommends, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ever be able to do it. I’m not ready to go nearly vegetarian right now, but I can forsee a future where I am able to eat just as this book suggests. I’m just not there yet.

Additionally, the hints for eating healthy with IBS were really helpful to me. She suggested acidophilus supplements in an effort to establish a colony of healthy bacteria in my system. This whole IBS thing got worse when I had to go on a series of antibiotics several years ago. The doctor never suggested to me that I might solve my problems by re-establishing the healthy bacteria in my body.

Finding the acidophilus in the health food store was a little difficult. If it’s the good stuff, it’s not stored with the other health supplements. It should be stored in the refrigerator section, so look for it there. After three weeks of taking the acidophilus, my IBS attacks have been much less severe. They feel like a little bit of gas now instead of feeling like someone shivved me in the gut.

Three weeks of less pain. I was willing to buy the book in gratitude for those three weeks. Maybe someday I’ll be able to limit my diet the way Eating for IBS suggests, but until then, I’m just happy for the one piece of knowledge that helped make my days less painful. Acidophilus, it would have been so easy for that incompetent doctor to mention the word…

Unlike the glossy pages of The Biggest Loser, Jillian Michaels’ book, Winning By Losing, is simple and down to earth. There are no color before and after photos or an unhealthy obsession with the contestants of The Biggest Loser. Instead, Jillian has focused on what she did to help her team lose as much weight as they did while they were on the show.

What’s Good About The Book:

She has designed her eating and exercise plan around the calories in – calories out philosophy, but she takes it a few levels further by adding information about zig-zagging your diet and addressing carbohydrate sensitivity.

She has great advice for people who might have a hard time following the program:

“One setback is one setback – it is not the end of the world, nor is it the end of your journey toward a better you.”

Instead of dedicating half her book to recipes, she dedicates about 10 pages to healthy recipes. I have found that books that don’t have anything important to say tend to fill their pages with recipes, but Jillian just gives you a few and moves right on to exercise.

She does dedicate much of her book to portraying proper form for the weight training that is required to lose the amount of weight that the contestants on the Biggest Loser lost. I’m all for that. I found a few variations of exercises that were new to me and I think this book is an excellent introduction to the concepts of weight training.

What’s Not So Good About The Book:

Jillian was VERY thorough about the diet and exercise needs of people who want to see the same dramatic results as the contestants on The Biggest Loser. That is great to me, but it might be a little daunting to a beginner. If you follow this program to the letter, you WILL lose weight. I’m just wondering if everyone could follow this program to the letter without someone to help them through the process.

Some of the concepts she introduces are pretty detailed. These concepts will keep you from falling into a weight loss plateau and keep you feeling satisfied while you are losing, but they might overload you at first.

Should I Buy This Book?

YES. There’s no question in my mind about this one. I got this book from the library, read it from cover to cover and decided that I needed to own it. It’s an excellent reference for weight training exercises and a intricate look into weight loss science at its best.