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

Laura,

Are you recommending the Timex Triathlon Digital HRM? If so, how do you like it? I might be in the market for a new one.

Thanks!
Eh… not so much

Eh… not so much,

I’ve had my Timex Ironman Heart Rate Monitor for over six years. It is really accurate and the velcro strap makes it really easy to attach, even though it sticks to my clothes sometimes. I’ve replaced the batteries, but I haven’t had a bit of trouble with it giving me weird readings, now that I learned the KY Jelly trick (see Starling Fitness » How To Get The Most Out of Your Heart Rate Monitor). I bought it because it was cheaper than the Polar heart rate monitors that were around back then. Now, I think Polar makes a bottom of the line monitor that’s close to the Timex in price. I can’t compare because I’ve never used Polar.

I think some exercise machines at my gym will work with Polar Heart Rate Monitors and let me use their cardio programs, but I’ve never tried anything like that. If you go to a gym, that might be a consideration. Talk to the people at your gym and see if they have any recommendations.

I think if I had to buy another heart rate monitor, I would go with the women’s Timex Ironman just because the one I had was so easy to use and it lasted so long. Plus, I have all that 1970’s marketing in my head.

“We buried this watch in the ground for two years. Do you think it will still work? It does! Timex, takes a licking and keeps on ticking!”

How can I escape that?

Seriously, though, heart rate monitors are just tools and they won’t make us any fitter if we don’t use them.

Good Luck, Laura

I was perusing the Weight Watchers website and I found this article about using your heart rate monitor to measure your Exercise Intensity Levels.

• WeightWatchers.com – Exercise Intensity Levels

The levels are surprisingly low. They use the typical calculation for Maximum Heart Rate:

Maximum Heart Rate = 220 – Age

They state you can calculate your activity levels based on the following:

• Light is about 40-54% Maximum Heart Rate.
• Moderate is 55-69% Maximum Heart Rate.
• Heavy is equal to or greater than 70% Maximum Heart Rate.

I used much more vigorous percentages in my estimates, so this bit of news has made things much easier for me.

For more information on the Weight Watchers Flex Points Program, please read the following entry:

• Starling Fitness » What You Need To Know About Weight Watchers

As I was reading this restaurant review, imagine my surprise that the national news was doing a review of a restaurant in my hometown of Salt Lake City. I was even more surprised when I found out that the cafe in question was just down the street from my house.

• Happy News – Raw food and a new life – by Lisa Canape

Of course, Mike and I ate at the restaurant the next day. Mike ordered the Hummus on Romaine Lettuce Leaves and I ordered the Falafel Salad. I was curious to find out how they were going to manage making Falafel without frying it. It turns out that they dehydrate the Falafel until they are like thin crumbly chips. The food was excellent.

The story was repeated within our presence. Mike and I waited at the table for our order and listened to Omar tell the mystical story of his conversion to Raw Food. He made it sound like a religion. He was visited in a dream by a woman he had never known before. In the dream, the woman handed him a book. Later, Omar realized that the woman from his dream was a real live woman. At this point, all of this sounds like an elaborate pick-up line. It went wrong for Omar, however, because the woman was married. She DID hand him a pamphlet on Raw Food, though. That was the moment that changed his life.

He gave up on his geophysicist training and ended up in Salt Lake City, Utah, opening the Living Cuisine, Raw Food Bar. As far as the food goes, it tasted really good, but we didn’t see Omar prepare it. There were two employees in the back making the food. Omar seemed to be the “personality” of the cafe, talking up the customers and telling his story.

Our trip to Living Cuisine was an interesting one. I always find it fascinating when food and religion become so intertwined that they become one jumbled mess. It’s like dinner theater and the Gospel Brunch all mixed in one.

Living Cuisine
Located inside Herbs For Health
2144 South Highland Dr (1100 East)
Salt Lake City, Utah 84106
Phone 801-466-0332

Self Magazine has an online service that helps you track your caloric intake and exercise. It’s free for their subscribers.

• Self Diet Club

It’s pretty cool, actually.

They have a huge list of foods to search from including name brand processed foods and fast food from restaurants. The same is true for exercise. They have choices of everything from cleaning the house to running 10 minute miles.

I especially like the meal planner. You tell it the number of calories that you want to eat every day and it breaks it down into portions of protein, dairy, fruits and grains for you to eat each meal, including suggestions. Once you choose your selections, you can print up your day and even create a shopping list.

After you’ve maintained your food journal for a while, the Self Diet program can analyze your diet habits and tell you where you can optimize things. They shoot for a healthy balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat, so they will analyze what you eat and tell you how your percentages rack up against the recommendations.

This service is free with a subscription to SELF Magazine. For twelve bucks a year, you get the online service AND the magazine. That’s a lot cheaper than the Weight Watchers Online service (not to mention MyFoodPhone) and just as helpful.

I’m shockingly impressed by MTV’s review of the fat suit trend in Hollywood.

• MTV.com – Movies – News – Rewind: Does The Fat Suit Really Fit Anyone In Hollywood?

They were really hard on Shallow Hal, which was one movie that I really thought the fat suit looked more real than any other and had a good moral ending to the “lookism” problem. There were a lot of cheap shot fat jokes in it, but I actually liked the movie a lot.

This article was obviously initiated because of the release of the movie, Just Friends, in which the main character plays a fat kid who loses the weight and goes back to win the heart of his first love. I wish Hollywood would let me write that story. That girl who wouldn’t even consider him dating material when he was fat isn’t worth his time. She was too shallow to love him when he wasn’t “perfect,” why should he try to win her over now that he is?

I want to see the story of the girl who loved him so much for who he was that he eventually believed in her vision of him. He lost the weight because she convinced him that he should take care of himself, live a healthy life and have the body he deserved. That’s the movie that I want to see. Either that, or the revenge scenario where he realizes that she’s not worth winning after he becomes thin (or before, for that matter).

Hollywood doesn’t understand the complicated issues of fat because it’s an industry that surrounds itself with thin. Hollywood understands thin very well. Anyone who has seen The Machinist can attest to that, but they have no comprehension of what fat is like. It’s going to take a movie from an independent to tell the world what fat is really like. Just like Napoleon Dynamite was able to tell the world what a rural teen experiences, there is a director and writer out there who can truly tell Hollywood what it’s like to be fat and when they do, they’ll be a blockbuster because everyone who has ever experienced this will flock to the theaters.

Until then, don’t let Hollywood convince you that being fat means that you have to be lonely. Loneliness is caused by isolating yourself from people, not from your body shape. If you are lonely, it’s not because you’re fat. Promise yourself that you will do something today to alleviate your loneliness (join a club, call an old friend, volunteer your time). Then, when you get to goal weight, you won’t have the shocking discovery that thin people get lonely too.

Via: Big Fat Blog: MTV on Fat Suits

There is a new service out there that is willing to help you journal your food and give you feedback from a registered dietician. It’s called My Food Phone.

• My Food Phone

Here’s how it works:

• Every day, you take pictures of every meal and snack and upload them to your account.
• Once a week, you will receive a video message from their nutritionist with recommendations on how to eat healthier.
• You can keep track of your meals in visual form online along with your weight, BMI, waist to hip ratio and lots of other items that you may want to track.

According to them:

“This is much more fun – and motivating – than pen and paper food journaling!”

It may be, but it typically costs between $99 and $149 a month. At that cost, it’s worth the money to just write down what you eat for the day. At that cost, you could probably hire a personal nutritionist to look over your food journal and give you recommendations once a month.

Don’t lose the good idea with the horrible execution, however.

If you find yourself too busy to write down your meal in your journal and you’re scared that you might forget all that you ate, take a quick photo of it with your camera phone. It will jog your memory when it comes time to write it all down.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but this secret that was posted on PostSecret is a personal fear of mine. Even though I have lost a lot of weight, I haven’t hit PlayBoy Bunny status. Part of the reason is that I stopped wearing makeup and working so hard on my appearance when I lost the weight. Another part is that I’m still 30 pounds away from my goal weight and 45 pounds away from PlayBoy Bunny weight.

What if I get to goal weight and I become vain? Isn’t spending so much time on losing weight just another form of vanity? What if I lose weight and think I’m finally beautiful, but it turns out that I was one of those fat AND ugly people? What if losing weight doesn’t make me pretty? What if losing weight makes me shallow and hollow like a chocolate easter bunny?

All of these worries have plagued me for years. The best that I have been able to do to curb them is quit wearing makeup and concentrate on health. I started this journey because my stomach hurt me all the time. Concentrating on that aspect of eating healthy has been the most helpful to me. I am not losing weight to be a beauty queen. I’m losing weight so I can live on this planet a couple of more years.

If any of you have conquered this fear, leave a comment. I’m sure others are fighting with this issue and I KNOW that it has been interfering with my weight loss for a long time.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

I haven’t worked out with Yourself! Fitness in a long time. I really enjoyed working out with Maya, but playing DDR is a little more fun and running on the treadmill is a little more intense. It appears that Glen at Videogame Workout is more dedicated to working out with Maya than I was.

• Videogame Workout: And Now, a Poem!

I can’t believe that I have owned Yourself! Fitness for over a year. I kind of got sick of it after the first couple of months. There was a lot less repetition than a workout video, but there were still problems with the game. I would have liked to adjust the intensity on the cardio without increasing the intensity on the weight training. I would have liked to be able to say that I wanted to workout with the stability ball or weights. Just because I told Maya that I had those items didn’t mean she would use them. All in all, Yourself! Fitness is an amazing workout program that eclipses anything else on the market, but it still isn’t quite enough to prevent boredom.

The Food Museum weblog had a shocking discovery over the Thanksgiving Holiday. She was looking for whipping cream and could not find one in the grocery store that wasn’t loaded with extra ingredients.

• food museum blog: Eat Well and Be Well–Happy Thanksgiving!

The last few times I purchased cream, I never even thought about looking at the ingredients. Now, I’ll be checking them. If I’m going to spend the calories and fat on whipping cream, I want to have the real stuff, not some fake cream filled with emulsifiers and seaweed.

“Foodie held a small carton of something labeled whipping cream but when she scanned the list of ingredients “cream” was not high among them. The “food gum,” carrageenan, a seaweedish item once only from Ireland but evidently now more likely to come from the Philippines or Chile, was on the list–along with gelatin and diclycerides and so on. Stabilizers and emulsifiers rule in mass produced cream and other milk products.”

Part of eating healthy is knowing what is worth the calories. Once I’ve decided that “real” whipped cream is worth it for this dessert or occasion, I don’t want to have a huge list of alternate ingredients in my cream. I want the real thing.

I just got a CycleOps Bike Trainer so I could exercise inside this winter. It was pretty easy to setup and you can see my review of it on the Gadgets Page:

• The Gadgets Page » First Glance: CycleOps Mag Indoor Bike Trainer

The bike trainer came with a Train Right DVD that you can exercise with. The particular DVD that came with my trainer was called Train Right: Time Trial, which I can’t find on Amazon.com, but they offer Train Right: Climbing. This video is exactly what I need in an exercise video.

Too many workout videos spend too much time talking. There is plenty of talking from the coach, Chris Carmichael, but he isn’t irritating or perky. He sounds like he’s just coaching me through a tough workout. Chris Carmichael was the US Olympic Committee Coach of the Year, so he really knows what he’s talking about.

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