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

We are coming up on the time when people are planning their summer vacation trips. There have been so many times when I have used vacation as an excuse to overeat.

How do you eat healthy when you’re on vacation?

What tips and tricks do you have to keep on track when you’re out of town?

This week, I’m not writing my own response to this question. I really need your tips and inspiration right now because I’m out of town trying to stay on program.

The Question of the Week is meant to be an Inner Workout for you. Find some time during the week and allow yourself to write the answers to the questions posted. You can write them on paper, on a word processor or here in the comments section. Whatever works for you as long as you do it.

Keep writing until you find out something about yourself that you didn’t know before. I’ve also heard that it works to keep writing until you cry, but that doesn’t really work for me. Whatever works for you. Just keep writing until it feels right.

A new weblog is posting items from a Sears Roebuck Catalog from 1902. Even back then, they were ripping people off with obesity cures.

• The 1902 Sears, Roebuck Catalog: Dr. Rose’s Obesity Powder

The advertisement proclaims all the ills of being fat from sluggish circulation and labored action of the heart. Then it proclaims that Dr. Rose’s Obesity Powder will “reduce corpulency in a safe and agreeable manner.”

It didn’t work then and they don’t work now. The modern day shucksters say the same things and are selling you the same junk. Don’t buy it.

Via: Boing Boing: Funny highlights of the 1902 Sears and Roebuck catalog

Thanks to a watchful reader, Shawn Lea at Everything and Nothing. She left a comment on my entry about Brad Felt’s Treadputer which pointed me to this website about turning your treadmill into a treadputer.

• Walking While Working: How to Take Your Cubicle from ‘Fattening Pen’ to ‘Fitness Center’ – Squidoo Lens

I’m particularly interested in this modification:

It’s Rob Couture’s Treadputer. It looks so tasteful and simple that I wonder how I would modify my treadmill this way. It looks a little low to really work for typing, though. What keeps the laptop from sliding off?

I think I haven’t modified my treadmill is because I’m scared of damaging my laptop, treadmill or both. I just need to move past the fear and try it for myself.

One of the wonderful people that I passed in the halls at SXSW, Colleen Wainwright, writes about feeling deprived on her weblog.

• communicatrix » Not-fat girl

She is painfully skinny at times because Crohn’s Disease has attacked her body, but she intimately knows what it’s like to feel deprived.

“So now I find myself feeling deprived in a way I never have before, having to figure out how to fill up the hole with something other than what I know would fill it. I realize that somewhere down deep, I always felt deprived; I just got to hide it longer. The fat girl, she knows all about this, I think. We’re more alike than I knew, although having walked through the fire, she is probably kinder and less judgmental than I.”

She avoids breads, starches and sugars in order to starve the bacteria in her intestinal track and keep them from causing her harm, but this results in the familiar feeling of deprivation that we all feel when we are on a “diet.”

When we feed ourselves food that will hurt us, what are we feeding?

Cheryl Koch, R.D. has some great tips on how to eat healthy when you are in social situations where you might feel pressured to eat.

• Expert Blogs Eat Right, Stay Fit – Pressured to Eat? on Yahoo! Health

Here is a quick list of her recommendations:

• Plan ahead
• Drink plenty of water at any social occasion featuring food.
• Add some bulk.
• Take a good look before you make a decision.
• Take it slow

The most important of these items is to plan ahead. Asking what will be served so you can save your calories for it or eat at home instead is the key to success. Go over the event in your head before you arrive and visualize yourself eating healthy.

Adding yet another “magic” food to the list, Korean pine nuts are being touted as a weight loss food.

• Pine nut ingredient helps suppress appetite – Yahoo! News

The expert, Dr. Jennifer L. Causey, explains to Reuters why pine nuts are supposed to help manage weight.

“Health ingredients such as pine nut lipids from natural origins can help with a weight management program by producing a feeling of fullness, potentially allowing for one to consume less calories and thus impact weight loss.”

At 150 calories for just a 1/4 cup, pine nuts are full of protein, fat and carbs. They SHOULD reduce your hunger and produce a feeling of fullness, just like a similar serving of anything with the same macronutrients.

Dr. Jennifer L. Causey works for a company in Idaho called Lipid Nutrition. They sell products that are supposed to aid in weight loss, “natural defense”, infant nutrition, cardiovascular health and memory improvement. After looking at their website, it appears that they have more to sell you than just pine nuts from Korea.

• Lipid Nutrition

I don’t believe that Korean pine nuts are any better at curbing your appetite than any other food and I REALLY don’t believe that any pills from Lipid Nutrition are going to help you lose weight any better than just watching your diet and exercising regularly.

Whenever a news story hits the market promising that a “super” food is going to help you lose weight, look behind the glib quotes to see who is sponsoring the research. Who is paying the research scientist to announce the benefits of the super food. I will be surprised if we don’t see a pill coming out from Lipid Nutrition that contains pine nut oil.

Via: Korean pine nuts can help curb appetite – Slashfood

I found an old entry on Kathy Sierra’s weblog called Fitness Hacks for Geeks. She talks about the kinds of gadgets that can keep a computer-obsessed person interested in exercise.

• Creating Passionate Users: Fitness hacks for geeks

Here is her list of items that can make you more excited about exercise.

• Use an iPod
• Use a heart rate monitor
• Use an accelerometer
• Log it and blog it
• Dance Dance Revolution on PlayStation 2 or Xbox

I have never tried exercising with an accelerometer (or a GPS), so I don’t know how inspirational it might be. I also have never really blogged about my daily workouts. When I find a weblog that just lists the daily workouts of the writer, I tend to shove them into the “this is personal and not for me” category and never read them again. I guess I think that no one really cares what I do for exercise.

I don’t know why I assume that people care about what I THINK about exercise, but that’s another story…

If you have been feeling a little unmotivated to get your workouts done, you might want to try one of Kathy’s suggestions. More importantly, what do YOU do to keep motivated and interested in exercise?

If bare-foot running seems a little too extreme for you, these shoes are supposed to give you the same benefits of running barefoot while still giving you some protection from rocks, glass and pinecones.

• Vibramfivefingers

I don’t know if I believe it. It looks like hype to me. I know that barefoot running is supposed to protect some people from injury, but I am still addicted to my running shoes. I love how they feel and I never have any blisters. Of course, I’m running a lot less miles every week than the people who are benefitting from barefoot running, so I don’t have much to say about the stress and trauma that people training for a marathon endure.

Via: A Passion for Running » doctor romanov of pose method endorses vibram five fingers shoe

I buy my tennis shoes from Ryka, so they send me email every once and a while. Mostly it’s just advertisements for more Ryka products, but this time, they announced a series of races they are sponsoring, Iron Girl.

• RYKA – Iron Girl Race Series

The race schedule is as follows:

• July 9 – Boston, MA
• July 23 – Irving, TX
• August 6 – Denver, CO
• August 27 – Columbia, MD
• September 10 – Seattle, WA
• September 24 – Bloomington, MN
• September 30 – Clearwater, FL
• December 2 – Tempe, AZ

The nearest they come to me is Denver, so I won’t be participating in any of these triathlons, but it’s nice to know that Ryka is actually sponsoring events that have something to do with their shoes.

If you have been having trouble with motivation lately, try signing up for a race. I’ve found that knowing that I’m going to have to compete against other people is enough to get me out of bed and onto the treadmill every day.

When I was deciding which gym we should join, I looked at the Salt Lake County Recreation Centers. The fees at our closest facility were $5.00 for a daily pass. As I look at the website right now, it seems that their rates are the same even though it has been three years.

This is the origin of my idea that a workout costs five bucks.

It cost five dollars, to workout at the county recreation sites, so I now judge EVERYTHING by that measure. If I look at a workout video and it costs twenty dollars, I think to myself, “Will I work out with that thing for at least four times?” I usually have a workout video memorized after two repetitions, so usually the answer is NO. Sometimes I force myself to workout with something enough times for it to “pay for itself.”

I would have to workout with a $700 treadmill 140 times for it to “pay for itself.” That would be three workouts a week for a year for it to pay for itself. Of course, if Mike can workout with it also, then it “pays for itself” faster.

I’ve used this judge of workout equipment for the last three years and it has made me feel so much better about my purchases. That stability ball that felt like such a rip-off at $20 has paid for itself at least four times. Yourself! Fitness was $40 when we bought it over a year ago, but Mike and I have exercised with Maya so many times that I couldn’t count. It was worth the cost.

It even makes me feel better about the workout videos that I HAVEN’T used. That DVD that I bought at Fry’s in Las Vegas because I thought it would be great for working out in the hotel room feels like a waste. It cost twenty bucks and I only exercised with it once. It was a $15 mistake. When I phrase it that way, I feel much better.

Next time you’re looking at exercise equipment, try the Five Buck Workout evaluation. If you are positive that you are going to run on that treadmill three times a week for a year, then it’s worth it. If you have some doubts about your ability to be that consistent, then you can pass it by without another thought.