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

Why do people gain the weight back? Part of the reason is that they blame so many things on their weight that really have nothing to do with it. They finally get to goal and their life still sucks, so they give up on their health.

The best advice Seventeen Magazine ever gave me was “Fake It Until You Make It.” It told me to think about how I would be like if I was thin instead of fat and act that way now. Do all the things that I would do if I was at my goal weight. They urged me not to put my life on hold until I lose the weight. It was good advice because it took me over twenty years to finally get to a healthy weight. My entire life would have been on hold if I hadn’t taken their advice.

Think about what life will be like for you when you get to goal. Will you be more confident and outgoing? Then work on those skills right now. Stand up straight and look people in the eye. Introduce yourself. You’re a great person who is worth getting to know. Give people the opportunity.

Will you be more secure and happy with your life? Then act like that right now. Breathe deeply in the knowledge that you have a wonderful life. Act as if you are safe and protected. Enjoy all the little things that DID go right with your day. Enjoy the blessings that you have right now.

Get a clear image of how you imagine life to be when you are at your goal weight and work on creating that in your life right now. Then you’ll be able to avoid re-gaining after you finally do get to your goal weight. By then, your life will really be as good as you imagined it to be.

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.

There is a new weblog devoted to combating stress, depression and addiction. It has a really catchy name: Treatment Online Public Blog. They had an entry about binge-eating in honor of Thanksgiving.

• Treatment Online – Happy Thanksgiving to all who visit and peruse! A brief review on Binge Eating for the Holidays!

If you fall into the clinical category of Binge Eating as described by the DSM IV, it is recommended that you seek treatment. I was grateful to notice that I don’t even fall into that category anymore. What a wonderful thing to be thankful for this season. I’m smiling inside to know that I am no longer a binge eater.

All of the exercise gadgets of the past look silly and it’s rare when a gadget comes along that looks just as silly as the entire catalog of 1950’s fitness equipment. Meet the Vacunaut:

• Vacunaut Vacuum Suit System

They claim that this suit changes the atmospheric pressure within it, causing fat to be lost in the abdominal area instead of other areas when you exercise:

The air leaves – the pressure increases. To begin with, the low atmospheric pressure sucks blood directly into the fatty tissue contained in the stomach and hip areas. Here, the exact dosage of fat is released into the blood as energy matter that the muscles need to burn. By changing the atmospheric pressure, blood which has meanwhile been enriched with fat, is pumped into the bloodstream. Once it reaches the muscles that are being trained it’s then burnt off. This constant change in pressure ensures that fat-enriched blood is steadily transported to the working muscles over and over again.

There is no scientific documentation backing up these claims, only heresay and testimonials. It’s not even something you can purchase. You need to exercise at one of their qualified “studios” to try the product out. This company would have you believe that exercise and diet alone isn’t enough.

Not even regular exercise and a controlled diet can help a man shed those pounds around the “problem zones”.

That’s not true. If you eat healthy and exercise, all the fat eventually goes away. It’s physics and there is no way you can avoid it. Don’t let this company get you. Everything that you need to lose weight is right inside you now. Don’t give them your money.

Via: Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women – Vacunaut Fat Burning Suit

Just like this PostSecret postcard, I must admit the envy I’ve felt when I’ve looked at the incredibly thin and perfect. I’m not talking about the walking skeletons that I’ve seen. Those women make the Italian mother in me swell up. I want to give them a sandwich. I want to cook pasta for them.

No, the envy I’ve felt is for those perfect little women right on the border of an eating disorder. I’ve seen them at the gym and at the mall. They pick at their salad from Chick-Fil-A, avoiding the crunchy chicken bits. They try on the smallest sizes and complain that they don’t fit. They shop at The Limited Too.

I feel like they don’t deserve it. It’s not logical because I see them sweating it out at the gym. They run and run on that treadmill. How could they not deserve the perfect body? Somehow there is a glitch in my brain that feels like they couldn’t possibly know how it feels to be fat. I wonder if anyone thinks those things about me?

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.

Ben Goldacre with The Guardian wrote up this article explaining why most diet books make things more complicated.

• badscience – Nutritionist-free diets – by Ben Goldacre

His idea is that we all know that a healthy diet consists of eating your fruits and vegetables, some whole grains and some protein. Simple, right? Yes. It’s so simple that you could fit all the recommendations on a 3X5 card. Not much to fill up a book.

More importantly, when things are that simple, there is nothing left for marketing. If all we need to do is go to the Farmer’s Market to get healthy food, then we don’t need the prepackaged stuff. Atkins Nutritionals may have gone out of business, but the idea was genius. You can only buy a diet book once, but if the public becomes dependent on your food line, then you keep them coming in.

It’s one of the reasons that I feel uncomfortable with Weight Watchers. They have helped me lose weight, but they also have their fingers in the food industry. Can I really trust them when they assure me that their Weight Watcher shakes “count” as a milk? Should I even believe them when they tell me that I need 2-3 servings of milk a day? When the diet industry has their fingers in the food industry, suddenly everything is called into question.

You may not recognize the company name of NBTY, Inc., Puritan’s Pride or Nature’s Bounty, but I’m pretty sure you recognize the name Vitamin World. They have been ordered by the FTC to pay a two million dollar fine for bogus weight loss claims.

• NBTY, Inc. to Pay $2 Million Penalty For Alleged Violations of FTC Order Company Distributes Dietary Supplements in the U.S. and Abroad

You see their stores in strip malls around the country and they have a strong presence on the Internet. They seem legitmate in every way, so it’s understandable that people might have been taken in by their claims.

The FTC alleged that, among other things, the company claimed falsely or without substantiation that its products promoted weight loss, increased muscle mass, decreased body fat, promoted hair growth, prevented premature hair loss, lowered cholesterol, and prevented arthritis. Under the terms of the order settling the matter, NBTY agreed not to make unsubstantiated claims about any dietary supplement and not to misrepresent the results or conclusions of any test, study, research article, or any other scientific opinion or data.

That takes care of them for now, but what happens when another company jumps into the fray, saying that you will lose weight with their product? Don’t wait for the FTC to protect you. These violations were from 1995. It takes the government a decade to knuckle down on offenders. Protect yourself by staying as far away from any product that promises that you can lose weight. All you need is within you.

Via: Consumer Health Digest, October 11 2005

They interviewed over 10,000 students at 650 schools. That’s only an average of 15 students per college. When are magazine editors going to take a statistics class and learn about statistically valid percentages?

• Men’s Fitness – America’s Fattest and Fittest Colleges

According to CollegeBoard.com, there are approximately 3800 colleges in the United States. With an average enrollment of approximately 2,800 students, there are over 10 million students in school right now. Do you really think the answers from only 10,000 students is statistically valid? That’s only 0.09% of the student population.

Magazines want to attract your eye with promises. They want you to think that they know the secret to becoming thin and strong.

“Which colleges and universities are helping their students keep their weight under control?”

Can you really believe what they have to say, when they can’t even grasp the basics of statistics? When are colleges going to start requiring advanced mathematics for their journalism degrees? They sure need it.

These postcards from PostSecret just call out to me every week. I wish I could talk to this person and explain what’s going on. This is actually a healthy habit gone wrong. Sometimes we are too close to our problems. When something is really hard and I’ve been thinking about it too much, I find it helpful just to abandon it for a little while. I don’t think about it. I don’t try to solve the problem while doing other things. I literally abandon the problem.

Coming back to it after hours or days, I can usually look at things with fresh eyes. Suddenly the answer to the problem is right there in front of me and I don’t have to wonder what I’m going to do anymore. It’s like my mind solves the problem when I’m not thinking about it.

Now, if we could just take the snacking out of the picture for this person. If I could teach him how to abandon the problem without resorting to food, he would have the healthy habit without the negative consequences. Here are some things that I do when I’m trying not to think about something that is hard:

• Go for a walk outside. It’s not for exercise, it’s just to see new things or pick up some garbage off the ground.

• Work on a hobby. For me it’s crochet or any systematic hobby that occupies my hands and mind so much that I don’t think about the problem.

• Play video games. I have to concentrate on what I’m doing in the game so that I can get a higher score. I don’t have any extra room in my head for thinking.

• Surf the web. Reading all that there is out there helps me forget what is going on here.

All I need is distraction for a couple of hours and I usually can get past whatever was bothering me.

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 week on the Biggest Loser, Mark decided to take it up a notch. He had two weeks of big losses in a row and he was feeling ready to give it his all, so he added an extra hour of exercise a day to his routine. This is in addition to the four hours a day that the rest of his team is doing. He asked his trainer, Jillian, if she was proud of him because he was willing to do five hours a day. She was more worried about him than proud. She was worried that his body might go into shock, slowing his progress instead of speeding it up.

When he got on the scale at the end of the week, he showed a four pound loss. You could see the disappointment on his face. “Four pounds, that’s it?!” After losing seventeen pounds two weeks ago and ten pounds the previous week, he was crushed at losing four pounds.

…insert record scratch noise here…

Four pounds in a week is a FANTASTIC loss, especially since he had such big losses the previous two weeks. Normal people have an adjustment period after losing so much weight. I have to give snaps to Jillian. She told Mark that if he was going to exercise that much, he needed to eat more to compensate. She must have gotten the balance exactly right for him to still have a loss at the scale.

I am continually amazed at how much weight each of these people are losing. Andrea said it perfectly:

“In the real world, a two pound loss is great, but here it just doesn’t cut it.”

When you watch this show, and find a loss of a half a pound on the scale for yourself, don’t get discouraged. When you find yourself lying in bed, thinking about whether you should get up on time to exercise, remember Mark busting his butt on the treadmill for five hours a day. I think I can get up and do forty minutes.

Amphetamines: it’s what killed a bunch of stars in the late fifties and early sixties. The doctors would prescribe “vitamin” shots and then more “vitamins” to sleep at night. Eventually, there was an overdose. Most of the rich and famous didn’t even know they were addicted because they were told that the shots were “all natural vitamins.”

Welcome to the present, where you can die like a movie star.

• Miami Herald – Danger Lurks in Popular Pills for Dieters – by John Dorschner

It looks like there is a popular pill in the Florida area that is being brought over from Brazil. It is advertised as an “all-natural” herbal weight loss medication. Yellow pills in the morning and orange pills in the night. When taken to an independent lab, the analysis showed that the yellow pills contained amphetamines and the orange pills contained tranquilizers and generic Prozac.

This is the best quote from the article:

“Any product that says you can lose 20 or 30 pounds a month does not have legitimate ingredients, or they’re lying.”

Remember, you already have everything you need to lose weight. Don’t let companies profit by lying to you and risking your life and livelihood.

Via: Diet Blog – Brazilian Diet Pills Causing Stir