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

I have a few healthy snacks that help me eat healthy:

• 94% Fat Free Popcorn
• Carrot sticks
• Granny smith apples with lots of salt
• Diet rootbeer with a 1/4 cup of REAL ice cream

What are your favorite snacks?

This postcard showed up on PostSecret today. I feel like giving this girl a big hug.

Stop trying to lose weight to get a boyfriend. Just stop it. You deserve love right now, just as you are. There is probably someone who loves you right now. He is hiding in the wings, wondering what to do. Quit wasting time trying to make yourself fit into a hole that wasn’t made for you and go find him.

Eat healthy. Move around. Find love. Quit starving 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.

As an owner of a beloved black swimsuit, I thought I would disagree with Tish’s article when I saw the title. Instead, I was rooting her on!

• love and hope and sex and dreams: No More Black Swimsuits!

It’s time to buy a swimming suit for the season. This time, don’t hide behind black. Let yourself wear the suit you always wanted to wear, no matter what your current size. Life’s too short to wait to buy your dream swimming suit. You don’t have to be a size 0 to be beautiful. You’re already beautiful right now.

Josh Kenzer has an excellent entry explaining how you can calculate how many calories you should eat every day:

• How Many Calories Should I Eat a Day?

Remember, because this number is based on your weight, you need to recalculate it when you lose or gain weight. If your weight loss has stalled, it might be time to lower your caloric intake a bit. Go check out his site and run the numbers. Are you eating too much? Are you eating enough?

Around here, these billboards have been popping up everywhere. They don’t really make any sense. There is another one about not succumbing to the creme filling. I snapped a photo of the billboard in order to find out what they are about. The website is a little more clear:

• LiVe Homepage – Learn to Live Healthy

With these horribly designed and obtuse billboards, Intermountain Healthcare (a local health insurance provider) is trying to convince children to get healthy.

Sorry folks, digital captivity isn’t what’s making our kids fat.

They threw up “8 Healthy Habits” that are supposed to help kids get healthy:

• Always eat breakfast and make it healthy.
• Eat more fruits and vegetables.
• Limit or eliminate sweetened drinks.
• Limit screen time.
• Increase physical activity.
• Eat meals together as a family.
• Be positive about food.
• Don’t criticize about weight.

In essence, I don’t really have an argument with what they are suggesting, but their advertising tells a different story than their actual recommendations. When you watch their TV spots on their website, it looks like Intermountain is blaming potato chips, television and video games for obesity, yet they haven’t shown one obese kid in their ads. In fact, these Steve Madden rip-off billboard characters look strangely thin with sunken in eyes and jutting cheekbones. Should painfully thin kids lay off the video games as well?

In the end , it seems that Intermountain Healthcare is sick of paying for health claims that deal with obesity, so it looks like they are trying to stop the problem early. Unfortunately, preventative care isn’t something you can just throw up a few billboards and cure. It’s an entire philosophy, not a bandaid.

It has taken three years, but the scales of exergaming just tipped. Fisher Price is working on a product called Smart Cycle that fuses exercise with video games. Even though it’s not available yet, Amazon.com has a listing for it on its website. You can find out more about it here:

• The Smart Cycle From Fisher Price – Learning Cycle

This product is completely useless for adults, but the idea of exercising while playing video games has become so ubiquitous that the toy producer behemoth, Fisher Price, has joined the exergaming ranks.

If you’re an adult and you want to play PS2 or Xbox games with your exercise bike, try the Qmotions Fun Fitness. It connects to your exercise bike or regular bike on a trainer and lets you play racing games. The faster you pedal, the faster your car/bike/etc. goes. It actually works really well and there have been more than one time that I have gotten off my bike wobbly-legged because I played too long.

Via: Rudd Sound Bites: No Child Left Outside

What if I could convince myself that I’m just that kind of person? You know what I mean. That kind of person that just eats whatever she wants and somehow stays thin. There are people like that everywhere. Medical science conjectures that it has something to do with genes, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s a decision?

If you could decide today what kind of person you could be, who would you be?

Would you be a thin person who wants to eat healthy?

Would you be an athletic person who likes to go for runs and bike rides?

Would you be a creative cook in the kitchen who can concoct delicious and healthy recipes?

Would you be a naturally simple eater, choosing only the healthiest foods?

What if all you had to do was believe it enough and you would become that person?

What if it’s not genes, it’s belief?

What would you do to change your belief about yourself?

I don’t know if I believe the idea that I have no control over my body’s ability to gain weight, but I do believe that part of the equation is my beliefs in myself.

The summer between eighth grade and ninth grade was the worst. My grandma was determined to bring my sister and me back home to my mom as thin and svelte girls. I was also pretty determined to get thin. Puberty was hitting hard and I really wanted to finally be the cute girl that all the guys liked.

As grown up as I wanted to feel, I still was a kid and I loved to collect stickers. I remember the conversation I had with Stacey very vividly:

Me: Listen, Stacey. If you buy these scratch n’ sniff stickers, you can just smell them when you want to eat.

Stacey: If I buy candy, I can just eat the candy.

She hadn’t bought into the constant pressure to be thin and was hoarding her allowance to eat candy when we were out of sight of Grandma.

Just seeing those stickers right now can almost bring back the memory of how they smelled. My particular favorites were the pizza and the popcorn, but the pickle and the cinnamon roll helped at times as well. I remember being so hungry that I would start to black out when I stood up. It wasn’t all Grandma’s fault by then. I was starving myself as well.

Whenever I wanted to eat, I would go into my room and smell my scratch n’ sniff stickers. I would look at the pizza sticker. “Hot Stuff,” it said. “Yeah, I’m going to be hot stuff when I go back to school this year,” I would think to myself.

Seeing them now makes me want to eat everything in sight…

Images via:

• Hi-ReS! Feed: Scratch ‘n Sniff

• Bubbledog’s TREND Scratch ‘n Sniff Sticker Collection

Via: Confession: I collected stickers when I was a kid. Put them… (kottke.org)

My introduction to Molecular Gastronomy consisted of some blurry pictures from the inside of Alinea. My sister and her husband raved about concoctions that were freeze dried, laser fried or pulverized beyond recognition. They described round popping balls of flavor that burst all over your face if you didn’t close your lips fast enough. I was interested, but the price tag of a visit to Alinea was enough to keep me watching from the sidelines.

Now, it seems that I can’t read my RSS feeds without hearing about some exclusive restaurant that specializes in molecular gastronomy. What is it? According to Wikipedia:

Molecular Gastronomy is the application of science to culinary practice and more generally gastronomical phenomena.

The chefs use scientific techniques to create food, thus the liquid nitrogen, lasers and pulverizers.

This concoction, called Whim 03 was served at L’Enclume in Cartmel, Great Britain.

Here is the description from That’s How It Happened:

It was the first dish that absolutely knocked me into a cocked hat for technical brilliance. The white block was an impossibly light, and yet completely sturdy marscapone foam, topped with salmon roe, on a bed of parsley puree. The pink powder was grated frozen tuna, which reminded me of freeze dried astronaut food. The white puree was grapefruit foam, with passion fruit seeds. This was a riot of contrasting textures, with absolutely surprising complementary flavours.

Marscapone foam, salmon fish eggs, parsley puree, grated frozen tuna and grapefruit foam. It sounds like a good mixture for the “I’ll eat anything and you pay me money if I don’t barf” game. The diner at L’Enclume was quite pleased with the food, but it all smacks of the Emperor’s New Clothes to me. Sure, the tuna fish is frozen and pulverized, but in the end, it’s still tuna.

Has eating hit such a pinnacle that it is no longer about sustenance but extreme diversity in tastes and textures?

When an egg is no longer an egg, what is the point anymore?

According to Slashfood, this is not an egg:

It looks like an egg – maybe poached, maybe fried – right? You’re close, but…not really. That’s Marcel Vigneron’s Cyber Egg, made with no egg whatsoever. Rather, it’s a dollop of carrot-cardamom puree that has been mixed with sodium alginate into calcium chloride to create the appearance of a “yolk,” and coconut milk mixed with agar hardened in a ring-shaped dish.

Eating at one of these restaurants is said to be an experience that is beyond the food, but I’m having a hard time believing it. I’m waiting for the next food fad: simple and whole food served fresh, and I’m not talking about that Raw Food fad either.

For more information:

• Molecular gastronomy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• A La Cuisine!: Molecular Gastronomy Resources

I read an online article the other day about how to make Chinese Food healthier:

• Back in skinny jeans: 5 ways to make Chinese take-out healthier

I was unimpressed with it. I argued with every suggestion:

• They said: Order the Sweet & Sour Pork/Chicken or any other meat dish without the fried breading. I said: I don’t want to have to order it without the breading. That’s a pain in the butt for the restaurant staff.

• They said: Eliminate the soy sauce or ask for low sodium sauce. I said: Sodium only causes temporary weight gain and can be flushed out by drinking more water. It has nothing to do with weight gain and is only a health issue if you have high blood pressure.

• They said: Ask for brown rice instead of white rice. I said: I’m not believing the brown rice fad. I know they say that it’s a whole grain as opposed to white rice, but I want to see the facts. How much extra fiber? Brown rice is a fad right now and I’m not really wanting to jump on that bandwagon.

• They said: Order Rice or Chow Mein/Chow Fun but not both. I said: I never order Chow Mein. That stuff is FRIED in oil. Carbo-loading isn’t the issue.

• They said: Order Wonton soup instead of the Wonton appetizer. I said: The wonton in Wonton Soup taste NOTHING like the fried Wontons. That warm soup feeling is not a good substitute.

After arguing with everything that Skinny Jeans had to say, I realized something. I only eat Chinese food when I want to binge. I know how to eat healthy at a Chinese restaurant, so if it is chosen by the group I can eat without ruining my day, but if I have a choice, I only choose Chinese when I want to binge. Wonton Soup isn’t going to cut it when I want to eat friend wontons because it wasn’t about eating healthy for me. It was about feeding the starving child inside of me.

How do I eat healthy when the group chooses Chinese food? I order a single serving of steamed rice and a cup of hot sour soup. It’s easy for the restaurant staff, cheap, and pretty filling. I count about 200 calories for a half cup of the rice and about 100 calories for the soup. When I’m forced to go to a Chinese restaurant when I’m eating healthy, that’s what I choose.

When I’m tempted to binge, no simple list will ever get me past it.

Via: Food: Make that Chinese take-out more healthy – Lifehacker