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

I’m not young enough to buy the kid’s meals and I’m not old enough to buy the Senior meals. You know what? Ninety percent of the time, my server doesn’t care. If you are polite and order nicely, they will give you the kid’s meal or the senior meal ninety percent of the time. It’s the other ten percent of the time I’m talking about.

When the server says, “I’m sorry, but those meals are for twelve and under / 65 and older.” Here’s what to say:

Fast Food Option: Order the meal To Go and tell your server that your child/grandmother is in the car.

I’ve only had to use this option once. I was at Wendy’s for lunch. After she said that the Kid’s Meals were only for kids, I told her it was To Go and that my child was in the car. She shrugged and gave me the Kid’s Meal even though I didn’t order anything else.

Restaurant Option: Try the very polite response, “I’m watching my weight and I prefer the smaller portion sizes. Could you charge me full price and give me the smaller portions?”

I’ve had this work once. I don’t mind paying extra in order to keep myself from eating too much. Another time, I ordered the children’s portion, but the waitress brought the adult portions to me. I called her back and sent half the food back with her on her tray. The third time I tried this, the waitress wasn’t willing to help me, so she got an insignificant tip.

Remember, we are the consumers. We drive the market. If we ask for smaller portions often enough, the restaurant business will scramble to create healthy and delicious meals for us that are meant to serve one person instead of three.

Additionally, the employees of restaurants aren’t paid enough to REALLY care about the rules. Ninety percent of the time, I order the Kids/Senior Meals without anyone saying a word or raising an eyebrow. They just want to get me fed and out of their place quickly and the path of least resistance is giving me what I want. Try it. It works for me.

Controlling the amount of food I eat has been an important factor in my weight loss success. Whether I am eating at home or at restaurants, managing my portions has been essential. Ordering from the Kid/Senior Menus is just one way I’ve been able to keep my portions manageable.

Shape magazine has what they call a boredom busting workout that is supposed to break you out of your physical fitness rut.

• Shape Magazine – Get Fit Fast And Make It Last – by Alexa Joy Sherman

After looking over the program, it looks like a fairly easy plan to follow. You will need dumbells in a variety of weights, a weight bench and a stability ball. The cardiovascular training can be done on any cardio machine. In all, this program is best used at a gym where you have easy access to all the equipment and the variety of different cardio machines.

As far as navigation goes, Shape’s web designers could have done a better job. Make sure you read the side bar on the first page about RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion). It isn’t discussed on the first page, but is used heavily in the cardio section. Additionally, you could use a Heart Rate Monitor instead of RPE.

The article is several pages, but there isn’t navigation at the bottom, just names of “Related Stories.” Those related stories are the actual workouts that you are supposed to follow and a nice little inspirational piece about “sticking with it.”

On the whole, it looks like a really good workout if you can get past the clumsy user interface. I guess they want you to buy their magazine instead of getting all your information for free on the Internet. Imagine that…

When I heard that Adidas was making a tennis shoe with a built-in microprocessor, I got really excited. At first, I thought it could be something to gauge my mileage and speed. Maybe it could even monitor my heart rate. It could at least tell me if I’m running too slow to finish the race on time, right?

No…

No, that would make too much sense. Instead, the microprocessor automatically senses the environment and whether you are running and walking and adjusts the springiness of the shoe to match it. I’m feeling a rant coming on, but I’ll just say that I don’t need that. The running shoes that I have right now are perfectly springy without a microprocessor.

• Adidas 1 Website
• Engadget – Review of the Adidas 1 – by Peter Rojas

Since the Engadget review didn’t make it clear, I had to sit through the tiresome animation at the Adidas 1 website to make sure that it didn’t actually have some useful features like pace monitor or GPS tracker. A stopwatch might have been helpful too, but it doesn’t seem to have even that.

At the cost of $250 a pair, you could buy a cool pair of running shoes and a GPS tracker. That’s the computer/shoe combination that I would recommend.

The concept of Mini-Meals is a two-edged sword. Eating five to six Mini-Meals each day is an effective way of keeping you feeling full and preventing your blood sugar from dropping. If the meals start inching away from the mini size, however, you have the potential of eating more calories throughout the day. Keeping your Mini-Meals mini is the key to this technique.

The way I keep my Mini-Meals small is that I only snack on fruit and vegetables. They are so low in calories that they balance things out if I happen to overdo it a bit at dinner. I don’t recommend making your breakfast smaller. When I eat a well-rounded breakfast with enough protein to keep me satisfied, a snack between breakfast and lunch can stay small.

I usually space my Mini-Meals about two to three hours apart. Sometimes that makes me feel like I’m eating all day long. When I first started dieting, it felt really comforting to know that I only had to wait two hours until my next snack. Now that I am eating healthy on a regular basis, I am used to the Mini-Meals. I don’t get hungry between them, but they are a nice break in my day.

Favorite snack foods: V-8 Juice, apple, nectarine, orange, carrot sticks, tomato, peppers (green, yellow or red – they’re all good in their own ways), blueberries, raspberries, pear, clementines, snap peas, snow pea pods

I usually choose one or two from the above list for my snacks between breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I have two snacks, I choose one vegetable and one fruit so that I get a wider variety of nutritional value. Remember, a serving of fruit or vegetables is only a half cup. It is recommended that you eat five servings a day. If you eat two for your mid-morning snack and two for your mid-afternoon snack, you’ve polished off four servings.

Controlling the amount of food I eat has been an important factor in my weight loss success. Whether I am eating at home or at restaurants, managing my portions has been essential. Mini-Meals helped me learn how satisfied I can be with smaller portions.

Once again proving that obesity and poor nutrition are not the same problem, Tech Central Station interviews two people who ate McDonald’s food every day and still lost weight.

• Tech Central Station – 30 Day McDiet: Results Are In – by Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.

This article is a rebuttal to the entertaining, but scientifically flawed “Supersize Me.” I finally saw that movie a few weeks ago and I’m so glad that I don’t have to eat McDonald’s food every meal of every day for 30 days just to prove that I could lose weight. Two other people did it for me.

Of course, nutritionally, McDonald’s food did not provide them with some nutrients and oversupplied them with saturated fat and sodium. That is poor nutrition, however, not obesity. If Murlock removed all references to obesity in his movie, it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling.

Via: Fitness News

I’ve held some strange nationalistic pride in what I considered the ever-growing life expectancy of Americans. Ever since I was a child, I have been told that because I live in America, I will live longer. Because they invented antibiotics, I will live longer. Because our medical care is the best in the world, the life expectancy of all Americans is higher. That may no longer be the case.

• Reuters – Obesity Threatens to Cut U.S. Life Expectancy – by Greg Frost

This article talks about the Social Security debates that are raging here in the United States. The Social Security officials have based the life expectancy on past performance in the U.S. and expect their citizens to live to their mid-80’s later in this century, but a group of concerned health experts warned them about the obesity epidemic. Considering that 1 in 3 Americans is obese, the life expectancy ages may be lowered for the first time. Just as I felt a nationalistic pride before, I feel a shame now that makes me lower my eyes.

Braidwood has written a great piece about Self-Sabotage and how it can show you the reasons why you make plans and don’t follow them:

Yes, please! – Self-Sabotage Can Be Healthy – by Braidwood

Each time you find yourself in the middle of a binge or guiltily driving past the gym, don’t berate yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. This is an opportunity to find out why you are doing these things and how to get what you really want out of your life.

I have seen so many different calculations for Target Heart Rate that I really don’t know what’s true anymore. For years, it was always:

220-Your Age=Target Heart Rate

I vaguely remember a heart rate that took into account your current weight. I saw another one that used your BMI. I remember another one that had a different rate for women than men. I remember another one that took into account your fitness level. I’ve read about others that take into account your resting heart rate. There are now so many potential calculations for your Target Heart Rate that I can understand if you might be tempted to just forget about it.

One day, I decided that they all were bogus…

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As a child, I watched Richard Simmons’ show every day all summer long. My grandma wanted us to watch the show so that we could lose some weight, but she ended up hating him. She didn’t like the way he would scream and encourage his audience to scream. She said he gave her a headache, but we should watch him so we could lose weight.

The idea of watching a show so that you can lose weight seems laughable to me now. We weren’t expected to exercise with him. We weren’t expected to cook the recipes that he recommended. We were just supposed to sit in front of the television and watch the show. Somehow the weight would magically come off.

Even though he was a tool used by my grandmother to tell me, yet again, that I was fat, I loved Richard Simmons. Even to this day, I love him. (more…)

Chitosan is an ingredient that has been marketed as a “fat magnet.” It is said that it can cause weight loss by preventing fat from being absorbed. Unfortunately, the claims are too good to be true. Three studies have found that chitosan has no measurable effect on weight loss.

Quackwatch: Is Chitosan a “Fat Magnet”? – by Stephen Barrett, M.D.

The FDA and FTC are cracking down on advertisers that claim that this product can help you lose weight without changes in your diet and exercise, but that doesn’t protect you from health store employees that like to recommend these products. So watch out…