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

One of the biggest attractions for our move (and subsequent upending of our lives) was this trail map of Daybreak. We moved to this community so that we could live right next to a huge number of trails that go around lakes and through green areas.

Our last home was located near downtown Salt Lake City. There were lots of parks to enjoy. In fact, you can see the videos of all three of them here:

• Starling Fitness DVDS » Liberty Park
• Starling Fitness DVDS » Fairmont Park
• Starling Fitness DVDS » Sugarhouse Park

When we first moved downtown, I was so happy that I lived within walking distance of three parks. After six years of taking walks to them, I can still honestly say that they are just as wonderful now as they were when I first moved there. If Daybreak hadn’t had such accommodating trails all so close to my home (including a lake), I may have never been tempted away from the Sugarhouse area.

The truth of the matter is, no matter where you live, there is SOMETHING interesting to walk past. If you live in the heart of a big city, there are interesting restaurants, galleries and shops to peruse. If you live in the boondocks, there is wildlife, tall grasses and open skies to keep you company. The suburbs have parks and plenty of homes to walk past and compare with your own.

Stop reading my blog RIGHT NOW and go online to Google Maps to see what is near your home. Look for parks, shops, trails and back roads.

• Google Maps

Wherever you live, there is something interesting to walk and run past, I guarantee it. Explore your neighborhood right now because for all you know, your life may be packed up in boxes and you’ll be sleeping halfway across town within a month.

Mike and I are in the process of moving. Our entire life is packed up in cardboard boxes. Even my beloved computer has been broken down to it’s component parts: keyboard, mouse and monitor are all packed neatly into labeled boxes.

The bad part of this is that I’m barely able to work. I am tapping this entry out on my iPhone using an app I downloaded on a lark over a year ago. Even worse, I can’t send out any journal or DVD orders. If you want to buy anything, be forewarned that it will take an extra week to show up at your door.

The good part of all of this is that my real life is providing me with more than enough exercise. My muscles are stinging with the work of the last few days and there are many more to come. I’m ashamed at the pain I’m feeling in my legs and arms. Just when I think I’m a tough and strong bird, I find that my quads aren’t up for the challenge. I guess I need to increase my weight training when all of this is over.

My posting maybe sporatic over the next few weeks, but don’t be worried. I haven’t fallen off the wagon. I just don’t know where I packed it.

My friend, Jere, had a strange incident the other day. It was wonderful reading it:

• Blind Prophecy » Hey, good looking!

You know how sometimes you’re walking down the street casually glancing in the windows of the various shops on a sunny day.

And then you pass a shop where you see a cute guy inside the store, so you slow your pace just a bit.

And in the space of time it takes to walk one more step, you think, “He’s cute…

“But he’s probably in a relationship or out of my league…

Read the rest here: Blind Prophecy » Hey, good looking!

I don’t want to ruin the end of the story, because it’s a great one. I want to be that kind of person, too, Jere!

In Utah, the home builders periodically have The Parade of Homes, where they showcase their building skills. It allows normal people like me to tour huge mansions.

Most of the time, I don’t care at all for the homes. They are so large that I can’t even imagine keeping them clean, much less living in them. This year, however, I did fall in love with one aspect of one of the homes: The Canterbury Gym.

The house was on Canterbury Lane and their personal exercise room was gorgeous. On the wall was the following quote:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

There were treadmills and elliptical trainers, but the most interesting feature of the gym were the light fixtures. They were a combination of light and rotating fans. Here is a little video of what they looked like.

Do you need a home gym like that to keep fit? No. All you need is enough room to move around or maybe a corner of a room for a treadmill. The fanciest home gym on the planet isn’t enough to get you fit if you don’t USE it. Those rotating fans were sure nice, though. What they provide more than a normal ceiling fan or even just a cheap fan clipped to your treadmill, I don’t know, but they looked pretty.

This postcard from PostSecret reminded me of my high school days.

There is a weekly pill box with a tab from Monster Energy Drink in the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday sections. It reads:

I haven’t eaten since Sunday.

When I was in high school, I thought the way to lose weight was to just not eat. Back in the Eighties, they didn’t know as much about metabolism as they do now (even now, they have just scratched the surface of human physiology). I remember starting some new diet pills and I decided that I could drink as many Diet Cokes as I wanted, but I wasn’t going to eat.

That worked for three days and then I ate an entire box of discount Twinkies from the bakery thrift store.

Now I know that I have to eat OFTEN to lose weight. It doesn’t need to be a lot, but it really helps if I eat every two hours or so. I feel fuller with the same amount of calories and I feel like I’m eating all day, because face it, I am. I’ve finally found what works for me. To lose weight, I need to EAT!

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.

I was browsing through Flicker the other day and I found these runner photos. I thought you’d like to see them.

While driving up to Oregon last year, we passed by this truck hauling milk across the Interstate.

I’ve seen these trucks many times, but that was the first time I was able to get a good photo of one. It says:

Milky-Way
Drink-A-Mug-A-Milk-A-Meal

Sounds like good advice to me, even if it was coined by the people trying to sell me milk.

My hair stylist was significantly skinnier. I had seen her a mere six weeks ago, so she had lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time.

“You look great!”

“Thanks! I’ve been doing a new diet.”

“Really? What are you doing?”

“It’s the HCG diet…”

She continued talking, but I froze up. That was that diet that was promoted by Kevin Trudeau and the FTC slapped him with a huge fine. I squeezed my eyes.

“Isn’t that the one with the injections?”

“Yeah. I go to a medical spa. I actually haven’t even met the doctor. I just go in once a week and the nurse hands me the injections that I give to myself every day. The doctor looks at my file, though.”

“Hmm…”

“Of course, you have to follow the diet, too. It’s really low fat and pretty restrictive.”

“Wow…”

I keep my mouth shut. Over the years, I have learned that people don’t want to hear me burst their bubble. They don’t want to know about double-blind testing against placebos. They don’t want to hear about the fact that they would have lost all that weight by themselves without those expensive injections. They don’t want to hear about the placebo effect. They just want to continue living their weight loss fantasy.

And who am I to burst it for her? Heck, the placebo effect is WORKING for her! I’m not going to get involved with the power of that.

If you want to know the SCIENCE, however, it’s pretty damning when it comes to HCG injections. Here are links to just two of the many studies that were conducted in a proper manner (1976 and 1990), showing that HCG is no better than saline solution when it comes to benefits of weight loss.

• Chorionic gonadotropin in weight control. A double-blind random cross-over study of the effectiveness of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) vs placebo in a wieght reduction program [JAMA. 1976] – PubMed Result

Two hundred two patients participated in a double-blind random cross-over study of the effectiveness of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) vs placebo in a weight reduction program. Serial measurements were made of weight, skin-fold thickness, dropout rates, reasons for dropping out, and patient subjective response. There was no statistically significant difference between those receiving HCG vs placebo during any phase of this study (P greater than .1).

• Human chorionic gonadotrophin and weight loss. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial: Bosch B, Venter I, Stewart RI, Bertram SR. Department of Medical Physiology and Biochemistry, University of Stellenbosch, Parowvallei, CP. [S Afr Med J. 1990] – PubMed Result

Low-dose human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) combined with a severe diet remains a popular treatment for obesity, despite equivocal evidence of its effectiveness. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, the effects of HCG on weight loss were compared with placebo injections. Forty obese women (body mass index greater than 30 kg/m2) were placed on the same diet supplying 5,000 kJ per day and received daily intramuscular injections of saline or HCG, 6 days a week for 6 weeks. A psychological profile, hunger level, body circumferences, a fasting blood sample and food records were obtained at the start and end of the study, while body weight was measured weekly. Subjects receiving HCG injections showed no advantages over those on placebo in respect of any of the variables recorded. Furthermore, weight loss on our diet was similar to that on severely restricted intake. We conclude that there is no rationale for the use of HCG injections in the treatment of obesity.

For more information about Kevin Trudeau:

• Starling Fitness » The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About

The new season of True Blood started a couple of weeks ago and it reminded me of something Lafayette said last season:

A way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, that shit true as gold. You put some love in your food and a fool can taste it.
Raelle Tucker, True Blood, Cold Ground, 2008

In the episode, Sookie’s grandmother had been murdered and the entire town showed up with casseroles to console her. Tara and Lafayette were wondering what to do with all the food and Lafayette said they should just throw it all away, “Sookie don’t need no bad juju cookin’.” People were scared when they made the food and he could smell it. You can see the scene here (Warning: Strong Language):

I think Lafayette was right. Food made with anger and bitterness doesn’t quite taste as good as food made with love and joy. That’s why home cooking tastes so good. It was made for us with love. That’s why some restaurants just make mediocre food. It was made with indifference.

The next time you’re choking down a healthy meal that just doesn’t taste right, think to yourself, “Did I make this with love and joy? Did I just throw the ingredients together haphazardly?” Next time you make a meal, really think about who is going to eat it and the benefits that you hope they will receive from the meal. It will truly make a difference in how the meal will taste (at least to you, if not the others).

This article from Rudd Sound Bites takes a fascinating look at Disney’s efforts to brand themselves with celery, bananas and blueberries.

• Rudd Sound Bites: Branding Bananas is Still Branding…

It’s hard enough to find unbranded versions of almost any child-related items (diapers, bottles, clothing, toys, just to name a few), but come on, cartoon-stamped eggs? Really? Do we need to turn fruits and vegetables into another “But I want the Mickey Mouse ones!” battleground? And do we really want kids to learn that you buy, eat or enjoy food because of a cartoon character’s ‘endorsement’? Whatever happened to food itself and to the pleasure of eating?

Unfortunately, Camille Lizarribar has completely forgotten what it was like to be a kid. COMPLETELY.

I, however, vividly remember being a kid. Observe this Bozo the Clown fork. It was part of a set of spoon and fork that I loved as a child. Even looking at that fork right now makes me feel happy and special. When I was a kid, my cereal tasted BETTER when I ate it with my Bozo the Clown spoon. I remember refusing to eat one morning because the Bozo the Clown spoon wasn’t clean. The vision of my frustrated mother hurriedly washing my spoon just so that I would eat my breakfast is burned into my mind. I think I was three or four years old because I wasn’t even in school yet.

I wasn’t the only kid with this obsession. My sister Stacey felt the exact same way. I’m the LUCKY one because I got the Bozo the Clown fork (the spoon was long ago lost or demolished). My sister was a full five years younger than me and never lived east of the Rocky Mountains. She had never even SEEN an episode of Bozo the Clown, yet she loved that spoon as much as I did.

Really, Camille? Do you not remember feeling like that when you were a kid? There MUST have been something that made you feel like that.

If plastering Hannah Montana’s face on bananas and strawberries urges children to eat healthy food, then I’m all for it!