Time and Distance

Time and Distance 

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 

I am not a runner. Once a year, at the end of May, I pretend to be a runner for the Chase Corporate Challenge. That's 3.5 miles, or just a bit longer than a 5K. 

Every year since the first time, my goal has been to be able to run the entire 3.5 mile distance. Every year, I've fallen short of that goal. The reasons are many. I'm busy during tax season, so I don't train then. I don't switch gears naturally at the end of tax season, so I lose too much time there. A couple of times I tried to train, and overdid things. 

Enter SparkPeople. I came here to learn to record and control what I eat. The site also promotes exercise. I know a bit about weight lifting, and I see what SP has to say on the subject is very basic and suitable for people with absolutely no weight lifting experience. I wonder if the same is true about their running programs? 

So I take a look. I can walk forever, but I'm not a runner. The 5K My Way running program starts with walk 1 minute, run 3 minutes. I couldn't do that. Other programs start with walk 4 minutes, run 1 minute. That's a lot more walking than I need between runs. 

So I looked at what the programs had in common. They all are structured in terms of walk X minutes, run Y minutes, repeat Z times, Z increases on day 3 of each week, while X and Y become more challenging each successive week. 

The end point of the 5K running program is to run 30 to 40 minutes. (SP says "jog," but let's be honest. If it's worth breaking out of my walk, it's worth running.) 

So I built myself a two week remedial program that I call weeks negative one and zero of the 5K My Way running program. I'm on Week Zero and it's working. Today I walked 1 minute, ran 2 minutes 10 successive times. Friday I'll go for 11.  Next week I'll start Week 1 at the SP drill of walk 1, run 3 times 8. (They word it clumsily, listing the first cycle then saying "repeat 7 times," but the listed total time makes it clear what is meant.) 

I got into this thinking I needed a formal pattern for a gradual buildup. I knew I needed to not go as hard as I could, in order to increase my capability instead of achieving what I can right now and being sedentary the next two days. But there's something else important going on here. 

SP says they're training for a 5K run. I've always thought in terms of training to run 5k, or 3.5 miles, or 5 miles, or whatever fantasy distance I've never been able to run. But that's not what the training program is doing. 

It's really training me to run 35 minutes. 

That's an important distinction. Historically, I thought in terms of distance. Run 200 paces, walk 200 paces. The real training program works in units of time. Walk 1 minute, run 1 minute. (I still don't get starting out with the walk instead of the run, but I'm following that structure.) The end result is to be able to run consistently for a sustained period of time. 

If I can run continually for 30 minutes, I'll be able to run continually for 3.5 miles. Even on the walk 1, run 2 drill I covered 3.67 miles in 32 and a half minutes (with a 2.5 minute walk at the end, because 10 cycles is where I am in training.) Running nonstop will trim at least 2 and half minutes off that, probably more. 

The other thing I noticed was the step count on the pedometer. When thinking in terms of distance, running artificially looks worse than walking. It's fewer steps to walk/run my 5.2 mile loop than to just walk the same loop. But . . . it's more steps to walk/run 30 minutes than to walk 30 minutes. Greater distance, more steps, same time. 

I'm beginning to get it. To train to run, and to get the fitness benefits of running, how far I run isn't the most important thing. How long a time I run is a better measure to focus on. 

Next May, I want to be able to run at least 30 minutes continually. I'll be willing to stop sooner if it doesn't take that long to cover 3.5 miles. Slightly changed goal, but I think I have a better chance of meeting it than I've ever had in the past.

Feeling Like an Imposter

Feeling Like an Imposter 

Monday, August 29, 2011 

I've been on the SP site for seven weeks now. I track what I eat. I stay in my calorie range, and after the first couple of weeks I started watching the macronutrients and staying in those ranges. 

I climbed back on the fitness bandwagon, walking more regularly, lifting weights, and actually using the gym I'm paying for. Last week I started training to run, with the aspiration of being able to run 3.5 miles nonstop at the end of next May. 

The system is working. In seven weeks, I lost 11 pounds and the clothes that were tight are now comfortably loose. I'm not lifting as much weight as I did at my peak, but the strength is coming back. This weekend I weighed in at a 20 year low, though the weight has since bounced back up a little with rehydration. 

And sometimes I feel like an imposter. What the heck am I doing here, with a lousy 21 pounds to lose (10 now), and fitness that came right back after 3 or 4 weeks of actually doing it? There are people here who have lost 50 or 100 pounds. There are people here who started out so obese that just getting off the couch was exercise, and they managed to turn themselves into runners. There are people here who are losing weight in spite of medical conditions that limit their ability to run, or even to walk. There are people here who work their butts off to lose a half pound a week. 

I have it easy. I may not be young any more; AARP wants me to join. But I'm pretty healthy, and not *that* much overweight. Yes, I desperately need the nutrition tracker. Yes, the stupid motivational tricks are really helping me actually exercise, as opposed to thinking about exercising. But still, I sometimes feel like I'm freeloading on a system that was built for people who need it a lot worse than I do. 

Sometimes I read about a situation that is so far from what I experience that I just can't think of a way to offer support without sounding holier than thou. And then I wonder, what the heck am I doing here? 

Then I take a deep breath and think about it. I'm here to develop habits that will maintain a healthy weight. I'm here because I am going to have to track what I eat for the rest of my life. I'm here because just posting a status that says I will go to the gym commits me, and then I actually DO go to the gym. I'm here because some of the other people here have some pretty good ideas that I can use in my own life. I'm here for pretty much the same reasons the people who look like they belong here are. 

I'm here because my diet and fitness are better when I'm here than they were when I wasn't here. That's enough. If I happen to help anyone else too, that's a bonus.

I Don't Trust My Scale

I Don't Trust My Scale 

Sunday, August 28, 2011 

Oh, I believe it weighs accurately enough. I just don't trust that the my weight is really as low as it says, and will stay that low. 

This morning I weighed in at 185. That matches my low weight for 2010, which I touched last September 12. That was a jiggle down, between the weights of 186.2 and 186.8. It was kind of an artificial low, because I'd fallen off the fitness bandwagon some time earlier. 

I expected to celebrate achieving a weight of 185. Not only was it my low weight for 2010, it was lower than any previous weight going back to 1991. But this morning's 185 doesn't feel like an achievement, because it's a jiggle up from yesterday's weight. 

Yesterday I weighed 184.6. I didn't trust that weight enough to brag about it. It was down more than a pound from the day before, and I'm not normally seeing movement of more than a pound into new low territory these days. Especially not when it's more than a pound lower than a weight that was, itself, a new low for 2011. I figured I was pretty dehydrated, and I should bounce right back up there. 

Well, the weight bounced back up, but not as far as I expected. Maybe this is real. If I weigh about the same tomorrow, I think I'll begin to believe it. 

I just hope I don't blow it with the burritos I made for lunch this week. The nutrition numbers say they should work out just fine, but right now I'm not in a trusting mood.

Philosophical Quibbles with the System

Philosophical Quibbles with the System 

Saturday, August 27, 2011 

The theme for the Spark Diet Stage 2, Week 6 (which starts today for me) is finding the unexpected opportunities. The suggested action steps are a bit problematic: 

 1. "Batch cook a dish that can last 4-5 days." I live alone. I've spent 6 weeks or so learning to fix one meal at a time that fits into the diet. Batch cooking needs a whole different discipline. Batch cooking in general seems a bit silly for my situation, but I think I can do this. Pre-Spark, I made some tasty lentil & rice burritos. Part of the reason they were tasty was that I put on unmeasured amounts of sour cream and shredded cheese. I can measure the cheese with my trusty food scale, been doing that with BBQ chicken wraps and breakfast burritos anyway. And I can try substituting plain Greek yogurt for the sour cream, and measure that. 

I envision doing one burrito at a time on the food scale, instead of my former assembly line of 8. But I'll be able to use the food scale to subdivide my lentil & rice stuffing more accurately. The stuffing is made, and I'll do assembly later this evening or tomorrow. We'll see how they turn out. 

2. "Exercise entirely in 10-15 minute blocks of time this week." Ain't gonna happen. I understand the idea is to encourage people to do something instead of sitting; but I'm in week zero of training for a 5K. Coming up tomorrow is walk 1 minute, run 2 minutes times 9, which equals 27 minutes nonstop exercise. No way am I messing up the 5K training to fit a lame scheme that's supposed to make me think about fitting exercise into odd slots of time. 

I do things like walk around the block on breaks at work; but I don't count that as exercise. And yesterday (end of week 5) I rearranged to fit 5K training into the lunch hour. I think I've got down what this is supposed to teach, and the action step just looks dumb. 

3. "Exercise in one place that you normally wouldn’t (the office, the back yard, the garage)." I suppose I can look for some unusual place to exercise, just to get the 5 spark points. But it doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe take my kettlebells outside to the yard tomorrow, instead of using them inside, just to say I did it. Seems kind of silly. 

One of the things I wrestle with is, what is exercise? I don't like to count mowing the lawn (though I did once, a few weeks ago) because I'd do that anyway. I don't count taking the stairs at work, because I did that all through the period when I was off the fitness wagon. I have counted my lunch walk at work, but I wonder. If "exercise" means getting the heart rate up to 60% - 85% of the max, I don't think those walks count. I don't have a heart rate monitor, but the last two times I stopped to check my pulse was 54% of the max while I was maintaining roughly a 15 minute mile pace. 

Oh, and the exercise tracker keeps telling me to adjust my plan because I'm burning too many calories and need to eat more. I might do that, if I thought the calories burned calculation had any reasonable relationship to reality. But they don't really. They give either too many or too few for cardio exercises, and I can't tell which. They give no calories burned for strength training, when I know I burn more calories in a 30 minute weight lifting session than I would on a 30 minute walk. The basline metabolic rate is a guess based on some average. I'm seeing strength gains and weight loss on what I'm eating and doing; I think I'll keep it up for a while. Time enough to adjust calories if I stop losing weight or start losing it too fast. 

Doing the batch cooking thing brought up another minor frustration. I made a recipe for ground beef substitute, which is lentils and brown rices cooked with beef bouillon. Pre-spark, this was a basic part of several things I did. It should be healthy enough to adapt for cooking on the SP diet. (Yes, the bouillon is high in sodium. I'm not particularly sensitive to sodium, so I don't care.) 

I can't add an existing recipe to a new recipe, or to a food group. #!&^. Ended up adding the spices (which add some sodium) to the ground beef substitute to call it burrito stuffing. Then I took the recipe results, and hand entered them to create a food called burrito stuffing. I'll have to hand enter the results from the ground beef substitute recipe in order to use it to create a spaghetti sauce recipe. 

Three decades ago I noticed the inefficiency of taking numbers generated by one computer and hand entering them into another computer. You'd think a site like SP would address this issue, and let me create a recipe of a type called "ingredient," which could then be included in other recipes. 

Oh, well. For all the minor nuisances, the SP system is working for me. It has got me to eat better, and it has got me to get back on the fitness wagon. In the not too distant future, it's going to get me to move my 36" belts to the back of the closet and start using the 34" belts. I suppose I can work around a few things that don't make sense for results like that.

5K Your Way, Week Minus 1, Day 3

5K Your Way, Week Minus 1, Day 3 

Friday, August 26, 2011 

The 5K Your Way running program starts with walking 1 minutes, running 3 minutes, 8 times in a row. When I decided to start a running program, that was beyond me. So I started last Sunday at week minus one, walking one minute and running one minute. 

Wednesday threw my schedule off. I had a prescription to pick up, so I did that after work. That killed the idea of the gym after work (normally Thursday, but I was feeling like I could handle weights a day early this week.) I didn't want to do the running, because I'd just done Day 2 on Tuesday. So I told myself I'd mow the lawn. 

The lawn didn't get mowed on Wednesday. Instead, I sat inside and dealt with household paperwork. Then I went to bed early. That felt good. A light day was probably called for at that point. 

But that put weights back on Thursday after work. Got home from the gym about 7, with nominally enough daylight to mow. But I was quite hungry, and by the time I'd fed the cat and myself, there wasn't enough daylight left. Summer is waning, even though the grass is growing almost like April. 

That leaves Friday and Saturday. If I put off running till Saturday, I don't want to on Sunday and Monday will start the schedule conflicts with weightlifting all over. So, it's run on Friday. But then there's the lawn. Dang, it's hard to get exercise and real life both in! 

Tried something different. Packed my running clothes in a gym bag and hauled it to the office. Went to the gym at noon, changed, and walked/ran where I normally walk. Did the walk 1, run 1 thing for 10 cycles, then walk 1, run 2 for 2 cycles. Total running, 14 minutes. That prepares for a ramp up to walk 1, run 2, times 9 (total running 18 minutes) for Day 1 of Week 0 on Sunday. 

Came home after work, fed the cat and myself, and mowed the lawn. Without errands between work and dinner, there was enough daylight. We're definitely getting to the time of year when I get really tired of having the grass still grow; but now my weekend is free for other stuff. That's good, because I haven't done very well at getting both the mowing and the vacuuming done on the same Saturday! 

Tomorrow is breakfast at 9 with daughter. I'm about ready to turn in now; if I wake up early, I may try some light running thrown in with walking my 5.2 mile circuit before breakfast. We'll see how it goes.

Hydration at the Gym

Hydration at the Gym 

Thursday, August 25, 2011 

We all know that hydration is important, both in general and in particular when exercising. SP makes tracking water part of the system. 

Historically, I haven't taken a water bottle to the gym. The gym has drinking fountains, and it's been a ritual to walk to the drinking fountain between sets and take a sip. I really didn't know how much water I was getting during a workout, but I was definitely getting some. (A water bottle would be more important for using a treadmill than lifting weights, but mostly I lift weights.) 

Monday I took a 24 oz. water bottle to the gym, and used that instead of migrating to the drinking fountain. The idea was to see how much water I was drinking during the workout. It was an adjustment. I had to figure out what to do with myself while waiting to start the next set. Ended up deciding to pace a little close to the station to use the time. At the end of Monday's workout, I had maybe a half cup of water left in the bottle. 

Today I took the water bottle again. The routine without the drinking fountain is easier, and it allows for better control of the time interval between sets. There's no waiting for the occasional cardio fanatic to drink for 40 seconds, and distance from the weight station to the drinking fountain becomes a non-issue. At the end of the workout, I had maybe a half cup of water left. So I guess 20 ounces is about what I want to drink during a weight lifting session. I'd say that's what I was sipping from the drinking fountain, except for one thing. 

I have a habit of weighing myself in my gym clothes before I go lift. When I'm done, I take off my sweatband, squeeze it out, and then go weigh myself again. Historically, the post-workout weight has been a half pound to two pounds lighter than the pre-workout weight, depending on how fit I am and how much I sweat. 

Monday I chugged the last bit of water before weighing, and weighed a quarter pound more after working out than before. Today I weighed while leaving the last bit of water in the bottle, and was the same weight as before the workout. (Then I drank the rest of the water, so I could transport an empty bottle.) 

I think I've achieved the right hydration level during workouts this week. Turns out that when it's more convenient to get the water, I'll drink more. But my instincts when it's convenient are pretty good. I wasn't loading up on water that I didn't need. 

That water bottle is going to go to the gym with me a lot. If I become very fit and work so long that I run out, I can always refill it at the drinking fountain.

Hunger . . . or not

Hunger . . . or not 

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 

I'm on week 5 of stage 2 of the SP diet. One of the things I'm supposed to do this week is write down why I'm eating, every time I eat. One of the reasons is supposed to be hunger, every time. That sounds really lame, but I'm dutifully writing something in the notes section of the nutrition tracker. 

Today's entry for dinner was, "OMG it's 7 PM and I need to eat 796 calories, 55g carbs, 20g fat, and 54g protein. Maybe I should be hungry?" 

That kind of explains how I lost weight in 2009 and 2010. I wasn't tracking food at all, but I was making an effort to eat only when hungry, to avoid eating for boredom or stress, and to exercise (mostly lifting weights) enough to stay fit. 

Exercise helps with food consumption a couple of ways. It burns calories, and it also suppresses appetite. Probably some of those days in 2009 and 2010 I was eating below what SP says is my minimum calorie requirement. Certainly other days in 2009 and 2010 I was eating well above what SP says is my maximum allowed calories. Let's not think about the macronutrient distribution of those calories. I probably wasn't getting enough protein unless I was also getting far too many total calories.

The second lesson I draw from this is, I can't trust how I feel about how much food I'm eating. Early on with SP, the diet felt doable but restrictive. I had to work to stay in the middle of the range. Then I set a weight loss goal, and the range shifted downward. It was trickier. 

But over time, I figured out how to deal with things. Get the soda out of the house. Buy low fat cottage cheese and chicken breasts so I can get enough protein without blowing fat and total calories. Learn to eat salad, even if it means finding a salad dressing that I like. 

Trimming the total calories did odd things to the calculations. Some days, I'd come in needing a few more grams of fat. That got rid of the bagels in the house, as cream cheese has fat. Later, it was toast and butter. Still later, I realized that it made more sense to eat almonds to make up deficient fat. It takes time, but I do get there. 

Today was day 2 of week negative 1 of my 5K running program. (Negative 1 because I need two remedial weeks to get ready for the real program.) I came home from work planning to do the run 1 minute, walk 1 minute routine 12 times then walk home from wherever I ended up.  Thought about eating something, maybe some whole wheat toast, before running. Then I thought again. Yesterday I lifted weights after work and before dinner; today I can walk/run after work and before dinner. It turned out not to be a problem. 

Then there's that appetite suppression from exercise. All of a sudden, it was 7 PM. I wasn't hungry but need to get the daily requirements in. Got the job done, and I'll be fine. 

But I do need to watch things. While it is more likely that failure to track food would result in overeating than undereating, I can't discount the possibility of undereating if I don't track. In fact, that would explain some rather poor performances in the gym in 2009 and 2010, which contributed to gym burnout. 

I'm probably not going to keep writing down the reasons I eat after this week, but it was a worthwhile exercise. It showed me a side of mindless eating I hadn't thought of, mindless non-eating. 

That's one more reason why I will need to track what I eat for the rest of my life. But that's okay. With tools like SP provides, tracking what I eat forever is nowhere near as dismal as it sounded six and a half weeks ago.

Running and Strength Training

Running and Strength Training 

Monday, August 22, 2011 

The day after I started training for running, my calves are a bit tight. Fair enough. I've seen this before, only worse, when I was trying to train but not doing it right. And I've seen it much worse after running a race without even bad training. 

One of the things that seems to have helped with the calves, even without training to run, is strength training. After I started lifting weights, I'd still get sore calves the day following a race; but they didn't keep me from walking. I concluded that those lowly calf raises, which were mostly rests between major lifts, helped me out. 

Besides being the day after I started a running program, today was a normal weight lifting day. By the time I get out of work, I've walked enough that my calves aren't bothering me. I've talked to a runner I work with, and confirmed that the calf raises are helpful. I realize that when I climbed back on the weight lifting band wagon, I did standing calf raises, which work the gastrocnemius; but I hadn't done seated calf raises, which work the soleus. If I'm going to run, both of those muscles are important. Today I'll add seated calf raises. 

Had a nice session with the weights. Got my seated calf raises in along with the more major lifts. Give up after one set of walking lunges, because I don't have enough gas left in the tank to pull them off. I remember that I used to rotate through three workouts, with walking lunges being on the workout that had neither standing calf raises nor seated calf raises. 

Run through my stretches. Pick a different hamstring stretch, hunting for the elusive hamstring stretch that I won't hate. Meh. I need to keep looking for that one. When I get to the calf stretches, I can feel my soleus. 

It's been a long time since I've really felt my soleus when doing the bent leg calf stretch. I guess running yesterday really did work it. Too bad I didn't get the seated calf raises into my routine before deciding to run. 

Oh, well. I've made some mistakes, but they aren't fatal. I can get the lifting routine arranged so that it supports the running as well as general strength. It is a bit of an eye-opener about the seated calf raises, though. The last time I was doing them, I couldn't tell that they were doing any good. Now, when I'm not doing them but ran a little anyway, I can tell. They're useful. 

I guess this is one of the reasons I'm supposed to take the training to run slow. It's going to take a little time to build those calf muscles up to where they need to be for running continually for a half hour.

5K not quite the SP way

5K not quite the SP way 

Sunday, August 21, 2011 

Last Sunday, I blogged about getting some exercise and steps in spite of the rain. Today, I have the Sunday lack of routine steps again, and it looked like rain early this afternoon. But this time I'm prepared. I've bought more exercise shorts, so I can afford to use them instead of cargo shorts for walking. I've bought a new pair of running shoes, so I can afford to get my old gym shoes wet. I put on the slick running shirt I got at the Chase Corporate Challenge two years ago, because it will handle sweat (and rain) better than a cotton tee shirt. 

Well, I've never really trained methodically to run. Maybe I should look at what SP recommends. There are a variety of running gear up programs. Each of them is structured in terms of walk X minutes, run Y minutes, repeat Z times. The numbers X, Y, and Z vary by program, but it looks like you hold X and Y constant for 3 sessions a week, sometimes increasing Z, then the X and Y numbers get progressively more challenging each week. That's the concept. 

When you get to reality, Week 1 is either walk 4 minutes, run 1 minute or walk 1 minute, run 3 minutes. I'm not sure I like either of those choices. But let's try the walk 1, run 3 thing. Get out, walk a minute, start running, and realize I left my water bottle at home. I'm dumb, but not that dumb. 

I stop running, walk back, and get it. Start again, 4 minutes later. Walk one minute, start running. I'm feeling it at 40 seconds, but keep running for 1 minute. Plan B, walk 1 and run 1. Let's try this 12 times, because I know I managed 12 segments of short running (100 to 120 paces) yesterday during my 5.2 mile mostly walk. 

First mile, 9:33. Second mile, 19:06. I'm shocked at the consistency; I could swear I'm running slower by then. I manage 10 reps of walk 1, run 1, then slow to walk 2, run 1 for two more reps. I'm needing a bit more rest between runs, but more importantly the first 20 minutes got me to the strip mall and I need to avoid pedestrians. By now it is raining steadily, so the pedestrians are congregating on the covered sidewalk and there is more traffic than usual in the close lane as their rides come for them. Two minutes walking was enough to deal with this. 

After 26 minutes, I've run 12 one minute segments. SP would call this the end of a workout, but I'm about 2 and a half miles from home. No, I'm not that dumb; the plan was to take my normal 5.2 mile walk route and just walk all the way when I'm done with running. I shouldn't have any problem walking the rest of this loop, as my legs are very accustomed to walking. 

The rain comes down harder. My natural inclination would be to run, to reduce the time spent in the rain. I resist this inclination, because I can feel in my calves that I've already been running. Been the overdoing it route before, let's try the gradual work up route this time. 

I did run across the one significant intersection, because I hit the light green and didn't want to chance it changing while I was part way across. I don't expect drivers to be looking for pedestrians in the rain.

There's thunder, and a couple of small flashes of lighting. A couple years ago, they closed the course for the Chase Corporate Challenge for weather like this. That was the race where I got the shirt I'm wearing now, LOL. But I was raised in the Great Plains. I'm not intimidated by upstate New York thunderstorms. It's not cold, and it begins to remind me of walking in the rain when I was a kid. 

I get home, after walking almost 3 miles in rain of varying intensity. Hit the restroom, do my stretches, take care of the wet clothes, shower. Now there's sunshine outside. Oh, well. The time to walk/run happened to be when it rained, and it was kind of fun. 

I tentatively think I'll try a shorter walk/run around the neighborhood Tuesday evening. It will be a test of whether the suburban dogs get upset at seeing someone running, and it will leave me closer to home when I get my 12 segments of running in. How I deal with a third session on Thursday or Friday depends on how Tuesday goes. 

It's kind of been a comedy today, but if I can run two minutes at a time next week, perhaps the week after I'll be ready to work on the SP 5K running program. I just need some remedial work first. 

We shall see. I've never been a real runner, but I've never tracked what I eat before either. Don't know that I can't do it unless I try.

Breakfast at McDonald's

Breakfast at McDonald's 

Saturday, August 20, 2011 

New routine, even newer than SP, is to meet my daughter at the local McDonald's for breakfast at 9 on Saturday mornings. It's a time to catch up on her life, spending an hour to 90 minutes before she has to be to work. Today was the third Saturday in a row doing this. 

This has been a learning experience. Before the first breakfast, I went online and found the McDonald's nutrition information, if you can call it nutrition. It looked like the workable breakfast sandwiches were the sausage burrito or the egg McMuffin, each at 300 calories. 

Week one, I ordered off the dollar menu. Got the sausage burrito, a hash brown, and a small decaf. Noticed that this seemed to stimulate my appetite, but I dealt with that. I can work with this level of calories for breakfast. Then late in the day, I saw that I needed an awful lot of grams of carbs to hit minimum, and wasn't that far below minimum calories. Oops. Made my ranges by going higher in the calorie range than I liked. 

Week two, I ordered the egg McMuffin meal and substituted hot tea for the coffee. This is more protein, less fat, and didn't stimulate my appetite like week one did. Ran into a similar carb problem late in the day, but this time I knew it was coming. Had oatmeal for dinner to make my ranges with the calories kind of in mid range. 

This week, I was up early. The plan was to get my 5 mile walk in before breakfast. Five miles on an empty stomach didn't seem like a bright idea, so I had a slice of whole wheat toast with a pat of butter and honey before the walk. Hmm. That's about the same calories as the hash brown, but more fiber, more carbs, more protein, less fat. Okay. Skipped the hash brown at breakfast, just had the egg McMuffin and tea. It was enough, and appetite wasn't a problem before normal lunch time. Had oatmeal at lunch, and went into the afternoon about the same place in the ranges as I do on a typical work day. 

This is doable. Breakfast at McDonalds can be just an egg McMuffin and tea, and it won't be very hard to work it into the daily nutrition. I just had to get past the legacy thinking about breakfast at McD that included hash browns. The point of the exercise is conversation with my daughter, and I don't need to eat the hash brown to have that.

The Boring Diet

The Boring Diet 

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 

I've read the complaint that diets are boring. Usually this is cited in an article about why they don't have to be boring, and followed by details that motivate me to stop reading the article before I get to the end. 

On SP, I've seen evidence that some people go to a bit of effort to avoid culinary boredom. There are the ubiquitous, intimidating recipes. There are blogs that discuss devising this, that or the other treat that fits into the nutritional goals. My sister has posted status about what she has for breakfast indicating more variation in the past 4 weeks than I've had for breakfast in the past year, excluding breakfast eaten away from home. 

I suppose diet boredom must be a real phenomenon, because people put so much effort into avoiding it. I haven't hit it yet, five weeks into SP. Part of that may be because I'm still figuring out what I can fix that fits into the nutrient ranges, but I suspect most of it is because I have a high tolerance for boredom. 

My most common breakfast is oatmeal with raisins, a very simple recipe: 1/3 cup quick oats, sprinkle of salt, 1/3 cup raisins, 2/3 cup milk, alternate stirring and short segments of microwave till done. Serve with a glass of milk, no sugar other than the natural sugar in the raisins. I'm content to eat this five days a week. I know, because I have for years. My concession to dieting has been to replace the 1% milk with skim milk. 

You may ask, what do I do the other two days? About one day a week, I'll eat grits with cheese and spices, usually the same spices, and drink orange juice. On Saturdays, I'm going to McDonald's for breakfast with my daughter and being creative with food the rest of the day to make the nutrients work. Before breakfasts and McD, I might have skipped breakfast on Saturday, or made myself a breakfast burrito (usually a dinner item now), or had oatmeal with raisins. 

Similarly, I pack the same lunch to take to work most work days. Pre-diet, I'd make some burritos to take about one week in 4 or 5; I haven't yet figured out how to make burritos that fit the system well. If I were worried about boredom, figuring out diet-friendly burritos would be a higher priority. 

I do have more variety in my evening meal, but I tend to eat the same stuff two or three days in a row. Sometimes this is because I fix something that is two meals' worth, but more often it's because I found something I liked that worked with the nutrients, and I'm going to do it again. 

Eventually, I'm going to get tired of what I'm eating now. But I'll figure something out when that happens. When I do, I'll probably end up eating a lot of the same thing, only it will be something different than I'm eating a lot of now. 

So . . . maybe diets are boring, and ability to tolerate boredom helps success? Or maybe that's not universally true. In my case, it's more likely that making food *routine* will allow me to define what I eat and spend my non-eating time thinking about other things than food. 

Based on my weight history, I think that would be a Good Thing.

5 weeks in, the evolving diet

5 weeks in, the evolving diet 

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 

Historically, I've had a problem with diets. The problem is, they tell me to eat lots of stuff I don't understand, don't like, is a lot of work to prepare, and/or makes recipes to feed 6 or 8 when I'm a single person. 

Certainly most of the recipes I see on SP fit this mold. They typically call for 3 to 6 ingredients that I've never bought and have no use for other than the unlikely chance of my wanting to make that particular recipe, then make enough that I'd better be OK with eating it every day for a week. 

But the SP diet doesn't have to be that way. The SP diet is simply, eat whatever I like as long as I come in within the daily ranges for calories, carbs, fat, and protein. Okay, for the first couple of weeks I only watched the calories; but I feel a lot better since I started watching the macronutrients. I take a multivitamin, so I'm not worried about too little of the micronutrients; and it's a great blessing that I'm not particularly sensitive to sodium. 

Five weeks into SP, I see changes in what I eat. Some of the changes were fairly predictable, like getting rid of the diet soda. Some were a surprise, like the way concentrating on getting enough water significantly reduced my decaf tea consumption. (Yes, I know decaf tea is a reasonable substitute that some people count the same as water. I thought about that, realized that tea is more of an eating trigger for me than water is, and decided to only count water.) 

And some of the changes are really, far-out, unimaginable a month ago. Like, salad. I've never been fond of salad, unless it had lots of stuff like black olives and cheese on it. I've never liked salad dressing. And there's the whole buy fresh produce and go to a lot of work to fix salad for one problem.

Well, my sister showed me pre-made salad from the grocery store. That fixed the prep effort problem. Got through one bag dry, not having lemon juice in the house. For the second bag, I decided to risk buying some light ranch dressing. Serving size is 2 tbsp. I put 1 tbsp on my first salad, and it was more than enough. 

Hmm. Reminds me of chips and dip, only it's a lot better for me. This is a keeper. 

Then there's the protein. Under the prodding of the macronutrient ranges, I bought low fat cottage cheese and chicken breasts. The cottage cheese is no surprise, I've always liked that. But the chicken breast has opened up new culinary experiences for single servings. 

The routine is, buy the smallest package of chicken breasts at Aldi. Bring them home, and bake covered at 375 F for 50 minutes. Let cool enough to chop, and store the chopped chicken breast in plastic containers. Weigh out how much I want or need as I need it. 

What can you do with chopped chicken breast? For starters, wraps. I started with a chicken burrito, which took a couple tries to get right. But a BBQ chicken wrap was pretty easy--chopped chicken breast, a tablespoon or less of Bullseye, and a half to 3/4 ounce of shredded cheese on a tortilla, and microwave to melt the cheese. (As someone on another forum said, use cheese as a flavoring rather than as a main ingredient.) 

Later, on a day when I needed protein but not carbs, I got the idea of just putting some chicken on a plate, adding a half ounce of cheese, and sprinkling with red pepper and chili powder. Microwave just enough to melt the cheese, and it's pretty tasty. Kind of the same idea I used to do with corn chips, only less cheese, less fat, more protein, and more flavor. 

I'm contemplating eventually figuring out how to make chicken soup, with lentils, rice, pasta or some combination of these for the carbs. No, I'm not going to look for a recipe; I'll figure out something that works to make soup for one. 

I'm still not buying a ton of fresh fruits and vegetables, like all the diet gurus tell you to do. But that's okay. I don't need to do that. I can eat my salad, and my baby carrots, and custom design my solo dinner to round out whatever macronutrients I need to fill out the day. 

I can do this. I don't think I could follow a diet that demanded X servings of vegetables and Y servings of fruit each day, but I can follow a diet that gives me a calorie range and ranges of how many grams of carbs, fat, and protein I need. It may not look like a traditional weight loss diet, but so far it's working pretty well for me.

Deadlifting My Weight

Deadlifting My Weight 

Monday, August 15, 2011 

I was a weakling for my first 49 years of life. I took up weightlifting shortly after my 49th birthday and started out with weights that were comically light. Six months later, I'd conditioned to the point where I thought I could try deadlifts. I started at 125 pounds. 

Some time during that year, it occurred to me that it would be cool to be able to say I could lift my own weight, and the deadlift was the obvious measurement. While gradually lifting more, but still substantially less than my weight, I thought about standards. I decided that, for me, that meant lifting my weight for reps- 3 sets of 8 reps, being able to put the bar down under control. 

I got up to lifting about 180, and I could see it coming. I weighed about 190 then, and it was only a couple of ticks away. (Cue the heroic laughter from offstage.) 

I continued to get stronger, but my weight was a moving target. When I was lifting 190, I weighed 195. When I was lifting 195, I weighed 200. I finally caught up at 205, having gained about 15 pounds from where I first got the idea. 

At that point, I wasn't tracking what I ate. I figured I was working hard, and if I was hungry, I'd eat. Yeah, right. In hindsight, I think I got enough protein at the cost of getting too many calories. 

Fast forward three more years. I've been on and off the fitness wagon, and in 2011 I climb back on. This time, I reluctantly admit that I need to track what I eat. SparkPeople makes this possible for me. I'm no longer tracking historical weightlifting in detail, because those detailed records made me too self-competitive. I'd want to never lift less than I did last week, when sometimes I needed to lift less to avoid injury. Better to lift what feels right and not to think about what I did last week. 

Well, SP got me motivated to go back into the gym. I'd taken close to a year off, and knew I'd lost some strength. So the first time I did deadlifts, I felt around for the right weight. That turned out to be 185, when I weighed 195 in my gym clothes. Lifted a few times, tracked what I ate, lost a few pounds. 

This evening I weighed 190 in my gym clothes. I walked into the weight room, did my warmups, and deadlifted 195, for three sets of eight reps. That's about a two week development period, as opposed to the two and a half years it took me to build up to lifting my weight the first time. 

Okay, I'm still lifting less than I did at my peak strength. But it's a nice psychological boost to walk out of that gym knowing that I could pick up an iron bar that weighed a bit more than I did and lift it off the ground. I hear someone is donating a piano to my church, and that it needs to be moved from its current location to a truck and from the truck to the church. I bet I'll be able to hold up my end when I'm asked to help move it.

Lying to Myself

Lying to Myself

Sunday, August 14, 2011 

I lie to myself. That shouldn't be terribly surprising, as most people lie to themselves. 

Part of learning to manage my weight has been to identify lies I tell myself and to first, stop believing them; then, stop telling them. There are a lot of lies like this. 

"I don't need to keep track of what I eat." Yes, I do. Been the route of not tracking, and it leads to fat.

"I'll work it off." No way, for most of the stuff I say this about. Once I start looking, I see that it's pretty easy to add a gratuitous thousand calories to my diet. Enough exercise to burn a thousand calories takes an awful lot of time. 

"Yeah, I'm over the BMI limit; but it's okay because I have a lot of muscle mass." The mirror aids and abets this lie. But the camera tells me the truth. There's a bunch of fat there. 

"I'll burn more calories because I have more muscle mass. So I can eat more." On a weight lifting forum, the resident guru did some calculations to confirm some numbers commonly tossed around. She concluded that the muscle gains for a typical serious amateur weight lifter would amount to burning an additional 50 calories per day while resting. I don't have to tell folks on SP how little food 50 calories is.

Incidentally, the same guru argues that the reason stronger people burn more calories isn't because muscles burn more than fat while at rest, but because they actually *do more work* with those stronger muscles, but don't notice the effort because of how strong they are. The physics argument is that lifting 50 pounds by 2 feet is the same amount of work whether it's done by someone who has to strain and sweat to accomplish it, or by someone who does it without noticing. (Note that this only addresses calories burned, not cardiovascular conditioning.) 

The preceding examples are all lies I've told myself in the past, but which I no longer believe or tell myself. Today I noticed that I told myself a series of lies and it worked out well. 

"Today's Sunday. It's a day of rest. I should just rest." That was a doozy. But I only had 2500 steps in at 1 PM, and I've got a streak of 10K step days to maintain. 

"It's raining. I don't want to walk in the rain." But I have a little-used golf umbrella, and it wasn't raining very hard.

"I have to leave the e-book at home, because I need one hand for the umbrella and the other for my water bottle." I was actually about a tenth of a mile into the walk before I realized I intended to be out less than half an hour, and I could have left the water bottle. Oh, well. Not going back at that point. 

"I'm still sore from the Romanian Deadlifts last Thursday, so I don't want to walk for exercise. Maybe I'll just take the short walk around the block." Got to the first corner to turn and go the short way. Kept walking. 

"I won't work very hard. Probably won't work up a sweat and then I won't need to shower or change clothes." Got to the normal corner and turned at the usual place. Got to the next two places to turn for a shorter walk and kept going. By this time, my pace had picked up to close to my normal walking pace. It was feeling pretty good. 

"My normal walk around the neighborhood is only good for about 4000 steps. That puts me at 6500, and I don't think I'll make up the other 3500 at home." I'm not sure that one was a lie. Anyway, when I got to the next place to turn on the 2 mile walk, I turned the wrong way, deliberately. I added a chunk to the walk, not knowing how long it would be.

By now, I'm really enjoying the walk. The rain has become harder, but nothing the umbrella can't handle. There is no traffic in the residential area, and the weather is keeping the barking dogs inside. It's really quite pleasant. But I had one last lie to tell myself. 

"If I'm lucky, I'll be to 7500 or 8000 steps. Then maybe I'll have a chance of making it to 10K around the house - after I take a nap." Got home, and the pedometer had 8800 steps. The total route turned out to be 3.2 miles, and I average a 15 minute mile. (How did that happen? I was moving pretty slow at first.) I also felt more like puttering around and doing stuff than like taking a nap. I felt even better after cooling down, showering, and changing to some clean clothes. 

It's still a small house, and there isn't that far to walk while puttering around. As I write this, the pedometer reads a bit over 9900 steps. I'll get my 10K in today but probably won't get 11K. But that's okay; after all, Sunday is a day of rest.

A Day at the Gym

A Day at the Gym 

Friday, August 12, 2011 

Yesterday I went to the gym. That makes two weeks in a row that I've gone to the gym twice. Twice a week lifting weights is good for me. My body complains if I try to lift on alternate days, but it's fine with a three day lag. Seven day weeks being what they are, that means the best I can expect is a Monday-Thursday, Monday-Friday, or Tuesday-Friday lifting schedule. Yesterday's agenda was Romanian deadlifts, lat pulls (because I'm too weak for pullups), dumbbell incline chest presses, and walking lunges.

The owner recognizes me, but there are many new faces in the weight room. I see a few old regulars that I recognize, and a lot of unfamiliar people who have well defined bodies and look like they know what they're doing. Of course, I still see the usual plates left on bars and bars left at abandoned stations, a mute testimony to the fact that clueless n00bs have been here. 

Between sets, I sometimes peek at what other people are doing. Yes, most of them know what they're doing. Some of the young guys with well defined bodies are working on explosive moves that I could not do safely. Most of the ones doing traditional lifts are using good form. Sometimes I see a lift that I haven't done, and I think about incorporating it into my rotation. Right now I'm thinking about dropping the weight on my military press, and instead doing a hang clean and press. I like compound moves that use several major muscles; they're time efficient for me. 

Yesterday while I was doing my warmups (Turkish getup/windmill combos followed by a few kettlebell snatches), I heard a couple of young, well defined body types talking. One was describing a diet theory that cut carbs to almost nothing while overloading on protein and working hard. Apparently that's part of the cutting phase to prepare for a modeling show or body building competition, designed to force the body to burn fat while rebuilding the muscle that the diet also loses. I kept a straight face and didn't say anything. I suspect that kind of diet can't be good for health, and that you need to be young to tolerate it in cycles for that kind of vanity. But if that's what those guys want to do, well, I'm not their trainer.

A bit later, an odd thing happened. I had finished one set of something and was walking toward the drinking fountain. Another guy and I dodged around each other in a perfectly normal maneuver for a crowded gym floor, and he mumbled "excuse me" in a tone that seemed to indicate he was deferring to me. A while after that, I figured it out. Saw the same guy, a younger fellow, doing DB chest presses. He was using 20 pound dumbbells, which isn't very much for a young healthy male to press. The light dawned. 

This guy is a newbie, and he identified me as a regular! Now, there are two major types of newbies. One is the clueless n00b who is going to wash out and is oblivious. The other is the serious newbie who wants to make this work, and is trying to learn without getting in the way of people he sees as more experienced and knowledgeable than he is. This guy was the second kind. I used to be that guy, except I was a lot older when I was at that stage. 

That was a minor ego boost. I don't see myself as a regular at the gym yet. Haven't been doing this consistently long enough. Don't have the well defined body saying I've done this consistently. But to a new lifter, I look like a regular who knows what he's doing. 

 Must be those Turkish getups.  They do look impressive to people who have never done them.

Weighing and Measuring

Weighing and Measuring 

Thursday, August 11, 2011 

Measurement is the fundamental problem of managing diet and exercise for weight loss. We all know that if we expend more calories than we take in, over time we should lose weight. The problem is that there isn't an easy, accurate way to measure either side of the equation. 

For most of us, measuring calories expended is a lost cause. We don't know what our basal metabolism burns for sure, and we have no good way to quantify exercise in excess of basal metabolism. The SP fitness tracker is nice for motivating me to keep doing stuff, but I have no confidence in the calories burned numbers it generates. Bicycling at 13 mph is not any harder for me than walking at 4.2 mph, and in fact is a bit easier. But the fitness tracker gives me an awful lot more calories for the biking than the walking. I have no idea whether the biking is overstated, the walking understated, a bit of both, or they're both off by different amounts in the same direction. And there are no calories added for lifting weights. I know I'm buring a lot more calories doing 3 sets of 8 deadlifts at 185 lbs than I am walking down the street for the time it takes me to do those three sets. 

So how do people know how many calories they're burning? Typically, by seeing how many calories they're consuming and whether this is producing a weight gain or loss. Measuring calories consumed is an inexact science, but at least it's better than measuring calories expended. 

I came across an interesting video about losing weight the other day. Superficially, this is a plug for weighing instead of measuring volume. It seems a bit overblown to me, probably because the real purpose is to sell books from the web site mentioned late in the video. But I do see an element of truth in the video, even if I draw a different lesson from those facts than the folks who made it. 

For those of you who didn't want to go watch the video, or quit in disgust at the overdramatic style, the premise is that the average dieter understates what she eats by using generous volume measurement, and the conclusion is that this is a reason diets can fail. The secondary conclusion is that this can be corrected by using weight measurement instead of volume measurement. 

I look at the same facts, assuming they are actually facts, a bit differently. I see the problem as one of system and attitude. The systemic problem is a diet that says you must eat X servings of defined size. The attitude problem is following the diet but cheating on the serving size, whether consciously or not.

Fortunately, the SP nutrition tracker lets me set up a different system to accommodate a different attitude. The attitude is that I want to accurately record what I eat, and I don't want to be forced into predetermined serving sizes. The system is, if I use foods that are defined as grams or ounces or cups instead of servings, I can measure what I eat and put the real measurement in, then the computer will figure out the nutrition values and tell me what I used and what I have left for the day. 

 It's true that the scale is more accurate than volume measurement, particularly for foods that can be of varying density. A week or so ago, I bought some pre-made salad at Walmart. I found that someone had already put in the nutrition information; but they had recorded the serving size as 3 cups. I put the same information in for myself and recorded the serving size as 85 grams. Why? I don't want to eat 3 cups of salad. I want to pour how much looks right into my bowl and know what I have. That's a lot easier with a food scale than with a measuring cup. 

And the scale is an awful lot more accurate than estimating, for example, a medium potato. I buy russet potatoes. The SP guidelines for small, medium and large russet potatoes tell me diameter in inches. My potatoes aren't even close to being spherical and come in more than three or four different sizes. Fortunately, red potatoes are measured in grams. I think I'm closer to the real value by calling 186 grams of russet potato the same amount of red potato than I would be trying to guess whether the potato was small or medium. 

So I kind of come to the same solution as the video, even if I think the video is overdramatic. I like weighing for the accuracy.  I've come to like grams better than ounces, because the margin of error is smaller. The margin of error when I weigh in grams is so small that it doesn't matter. 

There are still some things I measure by volume, including oatmeal. Why? Because I've been making oatmeal for years, and making it based on volume. One part oatmeal to two parts milk, and if the measuring cup is filled to the same level for the oatmeal as for the milk, it works. I'm going to do this once per day, usually 5 days per week. Oh, and my measurement is 1/3 cup, not the arbitrary 1/2 cup that is the serving size on the package of oatmeal. It's enough. 

Similarly, I'm going to fill my 8 oz. glass to a consistent level and not worry about whether it's really 8.5 oz. or 7.5 oz. The difference a half ounce of milk or orange juice makes just isn't big enough to worry about, and I'm not doing this five times a day. 

 But stuff that's hard to measure by volume - that gets weighed. It's just easier to tell how much I'm eating when I weigh it.

Reminiscence of Weight Loss Efforts Past

Reminiscence of Weight Loss Efforts Past 

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 

My first serious effort to deliberately lose weight was in 2004-2005. I was on a message board that discussed this, though it was pretty primitive by SP standards. Basically, a bunch of people who wanted to lose weight talked to each other. 

I found some of those messages recently, and I'm struck by how naive my attitude was. I spent a lot of time moaning about how poor my dietary control was, and how evil the Snack Days at work were. My strategy was to just try to eat somewhat reasonably, and outwork what I ate. It even worked for a while. I dutifully posted weekly weigh-ins, starting at a bit over 200. Getting below 200 by 12/31/04 was a major accomplishment for me. 

In 2005, I bounced off 188. The record on the message board has gains and losses, and I faded away somewhere around 195 or 196. The support from others evaporated when the numbers stopped going down. 

This morning I weighed in at 190. Yesterday, the dehydrated morning after an evening at the gym, I was at 188.8. But this time, I'm quantifying what I eat instead of just trying to use will power to be reasonable. Somehow, I don't think I'm going to bounce off 188 and keep going back up in 2011. 

I haven't been on SparkPeople long enough to guarantee that I won't have the same failure of motivation here, eventually, as I had in 2005. But some other stuff has changed in my life since 2004 to make the prognosis for longer term stability better. I've picked up some skills since then that are useful to the effort. While I've been on and off the fitness wagon, I haven't been back to the levels of unfitness that I had in the late 1990s; and my climbing back on the wagon deadlift in 2011 was for 10 pounds more than what I wrote about in 2005. Also, now I'm an empty nester and the major stressors in my personal life from 2002 through 2010 have pretty much been resolved favorably. 

I think I can do this, but I need to be realistic. If I'm going to get to a healthy weight and stay there the rest of my life, I'm going to have to record what I eat for the rest of my life. It's just too easy for me to slip into bad habits if I don't have to record it and look at what I'm doing in near real time.

How Fit Do I Need to Be?

How Fit Do I Need to Be? 

Sunday, August 07, 2011 

Thursday evening, I went to the gym. I thought I was holding back, only did four exercises. I try to do, at a minimum, a major leg exercise, a pulling exercise, and a pushing exercise. Did deadlifts for legs, military press for push, and lat pulldowns for pull. Then I wasn't worn out, so I did renegade rows. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL4Ygzz20gk I used the gym's round dumbbells instead of the easy square powerblocks the guy in the video is using. Kettlebells would be more challenging. 

Friday, I skipped my morning Turkish getups, which I normally do with a windmill at the top. 

Skipping these the morning after lifting weights in the evening is normal. 

Then Saturday morning, my shoulders told me that they didn't want to do the TGU/windmill combinations, still. Hmm. Guess I worked harder Thursday than I thought. Okay, gave the shoulders another day of rest. They were fine Sunday morning for the TGU/windmill combo, and I even managed two sets of kettlebell snatches. 

Now, I don't do a whole lot of this stuff. 5 TGU/windmill combos on each side, and one set of 10 KB snatches is generally all I do in a morning. I'm currently working with a 35 lb. kettlebell, and I weighed in at 190.8 this morning; so it's not like a major lift requiring rest on its own merits. But if I'm going to lift weights twice a week and skip the kettlebell stuff the following morning (or worse, the following TWO mornings), I'm close to breaking a habit. Hmm.

Then there's the cardio. I really backed off this weekend, settling for a couple of slower walks and mowing the lawn. That was the right thing to do right now, as my body was telling me this wasn't the time to be pushing. But that does raise a couple of philosophical questions: How fit do I need to be? And how much time do I need to devote to obtaining and maintaining that fitness? 

Fitness is like any other hobby, in that it will suck up however much time I throw at it. I already know I have a tendency to overdo the fitness stuff, then burn out and fall off the wagon. I need to find a balance, where I do enough to stay fit but not so much that I overtrain, injure myself, or psychologically burn out on the time expended.

How fit do I need to be? For all practical purposes, I need to be fit enough to do the things I want to do in life. 

I need to be fit enough to mow the lawn, however many times it needs mowing in the growing season. That's not a terribly high hurdle. I managed to get the lawn mowed even when I weighed 221 and had to come inside for water and cooldown several times in the process. 

I need to be fit enough to park at the far end of the Walmart or Sam's Club parking lot, so I don't have to fight the insane traffic near the door. That's not a very high hurdle, either. I've never come close to needing to park close to the door. 

I want to be fit enough to walk five miles on short notice. That one's a little higher, but not terribly so. There was a time when I was so out of shape that one mile seemed like a very long walk, but that's been quite a while. Even after being off the fitness wagon for a year, I can walk five miles without any thought that it might be too far. 

Beyond that, I'd like to be able to run the 3.5 mile Chase Corporate Challenge the entire way without slowing to a walk. I've never managed that, because it would require training during tax season. I'm busy during tax season, doing stuff that is more important to me than training for a race that happens in late May. And other than the company social aspect of the Corporate Challenge, I'm not particularly interested in being a runner. 

While it was a great ego-boost, at my peak of fitness, to be able to hold up my half of a piano that needed moving, I don't really need to be that strong. If I can lift and carry 100 pounds short distances without undue effort, that's good enough for life activities. 

Then there's the non-fitness goals. I want to spend some time doing maintenance on my house. Some of it will need to be hired out, but some of it really ought to be do it yourself projects. Time spent exercising is time not spent getting this stuff done. I'll have some seasonal commitments that I don't really want to give up. Somehow or other, I'll need to take care of fitness in spite of having more commitments in the fall, winter and spring than I do in the summer. 

It's a puzzle. Ideally, I'd like to find some fitness routine that will maintain a minimum level in not a whole lot of time, so I can do more in the summer and enough the other three seasons to start the summer without a lot of remedial work. 

The one bright spot in the conundrum is, I'm no longer worried about weight or diet. Four weeks on SP have convinced me I can track food and maintain calorie discipline throughout the normal change of seasons and commitment levels. Yeah, I don't have down yet just how I'll navigate the social eating of the holiday season; but there will be a way to navigate it. 

That's kind of an odd thought, because I've been working on the exercise side a lot longer than I've been working on the controlling diet side. But there you have it. Controlling the diet is self-limiting. Get it done, and the time is freed up for other pursuits. But exercise is open ended. It can take up however much time I'm willing to throw at it. 

 So . . . how fit do I want to be, and how hard am I willing to work to be that fit? The answers to those questions will determine how much time I should put into exercise. Finding the right answers could mean the difference between maintaining fitness long term and a cycle of falling off and climbing back on the wagon.

Counting Blessings

Counting Blessings 

Saturday, August 06, 2011 

Last night I was a bit down on the self-improvement thing, and my blog yesterday reflected that. I was clever enough to realize that a good portion of that might be lack of sleep, so I went to bed at a decent hour and tried to sleep in this morning. I don't think I managed to sleep till 7, but it was a good night's sleep. 

I felt more positive in the morning and set out to read some blogs. Oh, my. One sparker has two daughters separated from husbands and moving back in. Another had a 30-year-old son get serious facial injuries skateboarding, and has to let him learn for himself the hard way. Both of them are determined to control their diet and exercise, in spite of Life Happening and the stress they feel. I guess I don't have it so bad after all. 

This morning was the first of my planned weekly breakfasts with my daughter, at a local McDonald's. I had in mind to blog on this subject, after seeing how I had to work around it on the SP system. Turns out that, given two weeks to prepare, it wasn't that big a deal to work around. I'll note in passing that I ate a salad beforehand to try to fill myself up, and some cottage cheese and carrots afterward because I was hungry immediately after getting home. I don't know what there is about the fast food (sausage burrito, hash browns, decaf coffee-black) that stimulates the appetite, but I dealt with it. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that. 

The blessing part of this is, my daughter wanted to have breakfast with me. A couple weeks ago, she specifically called (okay, texted) to set this up, because her work schedule and mine don't leave much common free time. Last week she had to back out because she was sick, but this week was a go. 

In my particular situation, this is a blessing indeed. I went through a stressful divorce when my daughter was 16 and 17. At that time, she was a really troubled teen, and the next few years of being a single parent with custody were, um, challenging. Yeah, that's the word. Challenging. It is a real blessing that my daughter has got her act together so that she could move out on her own last March, and that at the age of 24 she actually wants to see me regularly. Given the nature of the first 16 years of her life, it would be understandable if she wanted nothing to do with me at all. 

So what did I do with my more positive attitude today? I felt like having a nice, relaxing day without doing much of anything. So after breakfast I dug out my e-reader and went for a relaxed 5.2 mile walk while reading The Life of Flavius Josephus. That kept the pace down around 3.5 MPH, which didn't feel like pushing things. Then I had a nap after lunch. I have my 10K steps in, I have my daily exercise in, and I can relax doing laundry and vacuuming and not much else. Life is good. 

Much of my life I've been a glass half empty kind of guy. I can still be that way on occasion, but I'm more positive most of the time now. If I get enough rest, and do an honest assessment, my glass isn't half empty. It's three quarters full. 

Life is good.  

4th Week Blahs

4th Week Blahs 

Friday, August 05, 2011 

I'm nearing the end of my fourth week on SparkPeople, and it isn't exciting any more. 

I'm staying within my calorie and macronutrient ranges. I'm getting more exercise than I did in my immediate pre-spark period, when I was off the exercise bandwagon. I'm tracking what I eat, and using the feedback to fine tune what I eat late in the day. I've lost around 4 pounds, allowing for the imprecision of weighing myself. I'm getting those 10,000 steps per day. 

And it's turned into a routine. I can live with the food tracking routine, as that doesn't take much time. I'm concerned about the exercise routine, long term. The exercise has squeezed out most other forms of entertainment. This is okay for now, but in the fall I'll want to go back to vocal and bell choir rehearsals two evenings a week. Come winter, I'll want to spend some time preparing for volunteer work during tax season. And during tax season, my major focus will be on getting done what I need to in minimum time, because of the extra time I put into the local VITA program. 

I don't think I'll hit goal weight by September. If things go really well in August, I might be back around the lowest I weighed in 2010 by Labor Day. And then, right when other routines gear up to start, further losses will be Uncharted Territory not seen in almost 20 years. 

I guess it comes back to balance. The SP system is working, when it's the major thing I focus on outside of work. I have a month to figure out how to make it work when it's only one of several things I focus on outside of work. 

Put another way, part of why SP is working for me right now is that I'm an empty nester with no life in the summer. Life starts up again in the fall, and I'm not yet seeing how to make the SP system work when life is happening. 

Oh, well. I have a month to figure it out. Maybe I'll be able to let the exercise slide just a little, if I diligently track what I eat and control how much I eat. 

I sure hope that works. It can't do worse than not paying attention to what I eat and letting the exercise go entirely. And I'll probably feel better about it after a good night's sleep. 

That suggests another goal that isn't on my list yet.

Building on Past Experience

Building on Past Experience

Tuesday, August 02, 2011 

In the early stages of one of my earlier attempts at losing weight, I read somewhere that you can't change your whole life at once. The author recommended that you create one good routine, and stick with it until it becomes a habit. Once that routine is fixed, you try changing something else. If the first thing slips, abandon the second change and go back to solidifying the first one. 

I tried that, but I never got to the third good habit. What I did get was a habit of walking on my lunch hour at work. That habit stuck with me for a decade before I became inconsistent. 

 Later on, I noticed that walking on my lunch hour was enough to keep me from gaining weight and even lose weight very slowly; but it's no good losing 5 pounds in 10 months if I put 8 pounds back on in November and December. Walking wasn't enough, so I took up weight lifting. 

Weight lifting, starting from no knowledge, was an interesting challenge. Like most newbie lifters, I made mistakes. I trained too light, and then when I added enough weight I trained too often. I pulled a shoulder and didn't recognize what was happening soon enough, and had to take several months off. Came back to the weights a little smarter, and fell off the wagon a couple more times. 

In 2008, I totally fell off the fitness wagon. Life happened, in the form of significantly increased expenses and no increase in income. I had to learn budgeting, never having maintained a detailed personal budget before in my life. I got it done, and exceeded my initial budgeting goals. I also gained 16 pounds in 2008, and touched my all time high weight in late December. 

2009 was the year of the Rodent Diet. I lost 24 pounds, mostly in the second half of the year. What, you may ask, was the Rodent Diet? There were reports of mice in the building where I work. Efforts to control the mice (which I never saw) included changes to the rules. No food at the desk. All food brought in must be in sealed, hard containers (not just in baggies). All food must be consumed in the cafeteria, on the ground floor. It was really eye-opening how many times I wanted to walk out into the office and grab a piece of chocolate that wasn't there any more. 

After the rodent problem was solved, I tried to keep up the way of life that the Rodent Diet had enforced. That worked, for a while, and coincided with being on the wagon for fitness. In 2010 I achieved my lowest weight since 1991. Then I fell off the wagon, and gained about 10 pounds back over the course of a year from mid-2010 to mid-2011.

Enter SparkPeople. I could see that things weren't working. I knew I needed to eat less and exercise more, but I lacked motivation. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I needed to track what I ate. I'd been avoiding doing that for two decades. So, let's see how long I can follow this web site and if I can learn to put it all together. 

What I've learned in the first three weeks is that success builds from past experiences. I know how to walk, I know how to ride a bike, I know how to lift weights, I know about overtraining. Add a pinch of motivation, and the fitness comes right back without needing very much attention. That's good, because weighing and measuring food is totally new to me and will need a LOT of attention.

So I learn about food tracking, and how much better food scales are now than the last time I looked twenty years ago. I learn about SparkPeople having a lot of nutrition data already there, and entering my own being easy, if a bit tedious. I learn about putting in what I really measured and letting the program calculate calories instead of having to measure to fit arbitrary serving sizes. A lot of the nuisance has gone away, handled by computing power and a large community entering nutrition data. 

The more interesting thing is how much food selection resembles envelope budgeting. There are only so many calories to work with, and I can spend them pretty much as I please; but some choices will be less satisfying than others. I can have a bagel and cream cheese, but it's expensive. Eggs remain a staple. Other former staples get squeezed out, and some new staples come into my kitchen. Most importantly, this follows naturally from the choices I make to get the most satisfying meals I can within the parameters of minimum and maximum calories, carbs, fat, and protein. 

I don't know whether I could have done this without the work I did in 2008 on budgets. If I could have done it, it would have taken longer to figure the food out. There were food surprises--choosing to drink less tea in order to get my water, simply not eating some of the "expensive" stuff because it never fits into the day very well, not missing some of my former treats that got squeezed out, and enjoying the treats that remain more for their being rare. These food surprises feel very much like the results of envelope budgeting, where I end up spending less on things I would have thought couldn't be cut, because there are only so many dollars and other things turned out to be more important to me. 

Yeah, I know. The budget metaphor isn't perfect, and it may not work for a lot of people. But it's working for me. It's part of building on my past efforts, even where those efforts weren't in the area of nutrition or fitness.