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

Disney has made a decisive change in the food that is served in their amusement parks:

• Treatment Online – Disney Makes Strong Statement on Healthy Eating

By 2008, the following changes will be in place:

• No foods with trans fat

• Place a cap on total calories, which will result in smaller portion for children.

• Limit fat to a maximum of 30 percent of calories for entrees and side dishes, and 35 percent for snacks.

• Cap saturated fat at 10 percent of calories for main dishes, side dishes and snacks.

• Limit sugar to 10 percent of calories for main dishes and side dishes, and 25 percent of calories for snacks.

This is great news for parents whose children are clamoring for the sugary food that is just going to make them bounce off the walls while they wait in line. Treatment online says it best:

“Many companies have been moving to reduce or cut the use of trans fats in their products, but Disney’s announcement is doubly important for the reverberations that it will have throughout the food industry. If Disney, one of the most powerful brands especially among children, won’t do business with companies that make unhealthy products, it should force many of these companies to rethink their own behaviors.”

Now, Disney just needs to make sure that their sugary cereal that they sell follows the same guidelines.

Researchers at BYU must have too much money on their hands. They are working on a test that can detect eating disorders by testing a sample of hair.

• Treatment Online: Hair Test Can Identify Eating Disorders, But How Useful Is It?

The folks at Treatment Online have a good reason why this test might be just an excuse to bill the insurance company.

“A month of growth is necessary for the test to be administered. But often patients in treatment are seen on a much more regular basis, and may fall back on unhealthy eating behaviors after a short time. The scale, used by many therapists in office environments, provides a much more valuable readout in terms of progress. In that way, even if the hair test was refined, it may still only prove to be a beneficial back up.”

More importantly, the fact that poor eating habits can be detected in the hair just shows how damaging diseases like bulimia and anorexia are to the body. Don’t give in to the temptation. Choose life and eat a healthy and balanced diet with moderate exercise.

Valerie at iPortion has an interesting entry about binge dreaming.

• Iportion: Binge Dreaming

Like Valerie, when I am restricting my diet, I have dreams about eating a lot and “blowing” my diet. Whenever I have those dreams, I feel a harbringer of dread, as if I KNOW that I will start bingeing because I had that dream.

I don’t believe the dreams cause the bingeing, however. It’s the other way around. Restricting my diet too much causes the feelings of deprivation and the worry about blowing my diet. That stress comes through loud and clear in my dreams. By the time I have a binge dream, I’ve already made the mistake of restricting my diet too closely.

Instead a harbringer of dread, they should be an indicator that I haven’t been eating enough or haven’t eaten a wide enough variety of foods.

I just keep forgetting that…

I have been playing Animal Crossing to an extreme over the last couple of weeks. It’s the reason there were a couple of days without entries. I’ve played it at home on the sofa and on the treadmill and at my friend’s house, linking to their towns. It is a game in which you create a town. Various talking animal creatures move in with their own personal obsessions.

I have two guys in my town that are obsessed with exercise and body building. Here are some of their quotes:

When you try to visit their homes while they are out, the notes on their door say, “I’ve gone out for a run.”

“My hobby? It’s fossil collecting , of course! See, if I did sit-ups while holding a fossil, it’d ROCK my lower abs!”

“He sounds homesick. I’m gonna invite this kid to my next 5-hour squat session.”

“I’ve got the perfect nickname for you: Dumbell! What?! Then you think of a better nickname!”

I can see these two characters running around the town, even though it’s the other townsfolk walk. What have I learned from them?

• Weight training is good.

• Never call your friend “Dumbell.”

• Why walk when you can run?

There are snooty females in the game as well. One particular character said the following to me:

“Have you gained weight? Oh, that’s right. Since I’ve lost weight everyone else looks so huge to me.”

“Could you return that diet book I lent you? Oh? That wasn’t you?”

What have I learned?

• When I am totally on program, I need to shut up about it to everyone else. It sounds like an insult to them if I talk about it.

Who knew that I was going to learn ANYTHING from this game. I’ve enjoyed myself while playing it AND I learned a couple of important life lessons.

If you were hoping for a sequel to Yourself!Fitness, you probably are going to be disappointed. Because of a lawsuit that has been dragging in the courts for years, Yourself!Fitness isn’t looking at working on a sequel. You can find out the details here:

• The Gadgets Page » Yourself!Fitness Lawsuit

If Yourself!Fitness is dying a slow and painful death, be sure that exergaming isn’t. Konami just released a new version of DDR for Playstation 2 called DDR Supernova and you’ve already heard about the new game, Dance Factory. Exergaming is alive and well. It’s just Yourself!Fitness that is experiencing an implosion.

For more information about Yourself!Fitness:

• Starling Fitness » Yourself! Fitness for the Xbox

I have been playing a game on my Nintendo DS while exercising for the last couple of weeks. I can do it while walking on the treadmill, but I need to turn the incline up pretty steep and keep the speed slow so I can play the game AND keep my heart rate up. It’s easier on the exercise bike. I can do both easily.

Do you multi-task while exercising?

Which workouts work well with multi-tasking?

What do you do (listen to music, read, watch TV, play Animal Crossing…)?

How do you make sure you are getting a good workout?

Do you think that being distracted while exercising is dangerous?

Do you think that being distracted while exercising affects whether it’s a good workout? How?

Some people believe that being “with your body” is the focus of exercising. What do you think about that?

Sometimes having a distraction while exercising is the only way I’m willing to workout. Other times, I really want to feel the workout, so I don’t multi-task at all. I don’t really know how I feel about it. What do you think?

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.

I just received an email verifying that I have been approved to attend CES 2007 with a press pass! I haven’t received my pass yet, but I’m excited to announce that we will be covering CES 2007. If you would like to see the entries of all the cool stuff we saw at CES 2006, here is a list:

• Starling Fitness » CES: Konami and DDR

• Starling Fitness » CES: PowerGrid Fitness

• Starling Fitness » CES: ArcadeMX

• Starling Fitness » CES: GameRunner

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Console System

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Jackie Chan J-Mat Fitness

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Jackie Chan Powerboxing

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Baseball

• Starling Fitness » CES: XaviX Prototypes

• Starling Fitness » CES: Garmin GPS and Heart Rate Monitor

• Starling Fitness » CES: TacX and Intel

• Starling Fitness » CES: Tacx Videos for Your Bike Trainer

• Starling Fitness » CES: NavMan

• Starling Fitness » CES: Journey to the Wild Divine

• Starling Fitness » CES: FitCentric

• Starling Fitness » CES: Wrap Up

I saw a lot of items that are STILL not available for widespread distribution yet. Others are available, but they didn’t work for the machines that they said they would work for. It’s the cutting edge. When they finally DO become available, you can be the one to say you saw it first on Starling Fitness.

Wendy Bumgardener has a great article about how to use walking poles. It’s a lot more complicated than it looks and there are several techniques that I didn’t know about.

• About.com – Using Walking Poles – by Wendy Bumgardener

I have only used walking poles for stability on really steep trails. In fact, they weren’t walking poles. We just used some big sticks that people coming down the trail gave us. “You’re going to need these,” they said, and they were right. We wouldn’t have made it up the Na Pali Trail without them.

Wendy walked her seventh marathon and even after seven events, she is still learning. Read about her thoughts here:

• About.com – Lessons Learned on my 7th Marathon Walk – by Wendy Bumgardener

Most importantly, she had trouble with her Nike+iPod:

“Electronic Failure: I walked with my iPod nano and planned to track it with my Nike+iPod sensor. But I should have turned it on at home and tested it out. Instead, I tried to do it in the portajohn line and, by golly, lots of other people were wearing Nike+iPod sensors and it wouldn’t link to mine. Oh well. I still had my Sportbrain pedometer to track my performance.”

I should have known that there could be interference with other Nike+iPods. I’ve never run into that problem with mine because I always run alone. If I went to a race, however, I’m sure I would. That’s another reason why a Polar system would be better. They have coded transmitters to prevent interference with other devices. Still, for 20 bucks, the Nike+ is a good little device.

Here is yet another article about Spain’s rejection of models that are too thin, but with a twist. It suggests that the United States has an obsession with weight loss and that our energies could be focused elsewhere.

• CITIZEN-TIMES.com: The American obsession with weight loss is unrealistic; moreover, it’s also harmful – by Kim Barto

Kim states that all of our bodies are different and trying to make us all look like super-models is unrealistic.

“In reality, a wide variety of body types are normal, depending on one’s bone structure, metabolism and genetics. It is fruitless and misleading to expect everyone to conform to the same weight. Whether you are naturally muscular, chunky, twiggy, curvy or tiny, trying to change your body can be frustrating and even dangerous. When people try to make the body thinner than it is genetically programmed to be, it retaliates by becoming ravenous and vulnerable to binge eating, according to ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders), a nonprofit organization against eating disorders. “

Kim has a point. The diet industry rakes in at least $30 billion a year. How many museums could we build with 30 billion bucks? Think of that huge number next time you’re tempted to buy some exercise gadget or weight loss pill. What should we do instead?

“Rather than focusing on weight loss at any cost, we should aim for good health at any size. Too many dieters harm their bodies and psyches by skipping meals, purging and popping pills in the quest for skinniness. We should eat for nutrition and well-being, not solely to lose weight. Amidst all the deprivation and guilt associated with eating, we often forget that fresh, simple food is a joy in itself.”

You can have a healthy and strong body and you still may never look like you want. It’s a sad truth, but learning to love your body now is the best way to loving it when you have reached a healthy goal weight.

Via: Big Fat Blog: That’s Not News!