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

This comment showed up on my Treadmill Workout Spreadsheet entry:

I tried the very first of nine programs…since I’m new at this I apologize if I ask things that seem obvious….but is each workout done for a week, for a total of 9 weeks of training? and is the whole idea of varying between hills, intervals etc to simulate outdoor terrain even if the 5k I plan on running is flat land?

Any advice would be extrememly helpful.

Francesca

Francesca,

Interval and hill training make you stronger and faster overall. Here is an entry about it:

Starling Fitness » How To Run Faster

So, even if the 5K is on flat land, you should do one hill training a week and one interval training a week. And don’t forget to taper before the race.

Good luck on your race!

Laura

Running outside in Salt Lake City has become impossible for me because we are experiencing an inversion and the air quality is worse than L.A. on a hot summer’s day, but if you are able to run outdoors, I’m sure you would appreciate these Ear Warmer Headphones from 180s. They look nice and warm and also let you listen to your tunes. I actually like them better than the Walkman Beanies that I saw at CES last month.

My only question is that if this is a “behind the ear” design, how does it stay on your ears? If I run, will it fall off? This is one reason why I hate shopping for headphones. You really can’t know how they’ll work when you exercise unless you take a run with them and get them all sweaty.

Gadgets like these can’t make you thin, but they might make the difference between going for your walk outside and skipping your exercise for the day.

Via: 180s Tec Stretch headphones – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Hi All,

I joined WW on January 1, 2007. I lost 7lbs the first three weeks and now (my 4th week) I only lost 1lb. (weighed in today) I am so discouraged! I do a brisk 2 mile walk 5 days a week and stay within my point range. So, why the 1 lb loss?

Bridget

Bridget,

Go back to Weight Watchers right now and talk to a teacher there. Any time you feel discouraged about your weight loss, you should talk to the teachers at Weight Watchers. That’s what you’re paying for is that individual attention when you need it.

A one pound loss is amazing for the fourth week of Weight Watchers. The program is designed for a loss of 1/2 to 1 pound a week. If you lost a pound this week, you are doing everything exactly right.

Have the Weight Watchers teacher show you what one pound of fat looks like. She should have a model of how big one pound of fat really is. Just think of one pound of butter. Go to the grocery store and look at one pound of butter. You lost that much in only a week. From now on, one pound a week is the most you should be losing. If you’re losing more than that, you need to up your daily points allowance.

Good luck,
Laura Moncur

Via: My Pet Fat

This is about the time people stop working on their New’s Year’s Resolutions. It’s usually because they run into a problem or they have a week where weight loss is slow. It’s very important to have clear criteria to judge whether your week is a success or failure. If you have unclear or unrealistic expectations, it might mean the end of trying altogether.

When you are trying to lose weight, how do you judge success?

How much weight do you have to lose in a week for you to consider it a success?

What if you don’t lose any weight?

How else can you judge your week’s success or failure?

Start thinking about your healthy lifestyle in terms of things you can do. You can monitor your water or vegetable intake, but you can’t necessarily guarantee that you will lose weight every week. Instead of judging your week’s success by the scale, what are you going to judge yourself by?

P.S. I’d like to tell you that you shouldn’t be judging yourself harshly at all, but based on the email I’m getting, I know you are out there doing it right now, so we need to address that issue and find a way to give yourself more positive feedback. Next week, start thinking about how you could stop judging yourself at all.

Mike and I are technically entrepreneurs. We run our own business from our home. I don’t really consider myself an entrepreneur, though. Something about the title makes me think of multi-level marketing and short-lived dreams of making it big. What we do is smaller. In fact, what REAL entrepreneurs do is smaller.

Entrepreneur Magazine put out a diet book called The Entrepreneur Diet, which seems like a recipe for disaster, but instead, it’s an inspiring and HEALTHY way to get your life back in control.

Most importantly, I would say it’s a great diet book for everyone, not just entrepreneurs. Our physical fitness is directly related to how successful we are in our lines of work, whether we are self-employed or not. If you are healthy, strong and fit, you are much more able to deal with the stress of all work situations.

Being healthy will help your career, it’s true. That’s the premise of this book, but it goes beyond it and recommends slow and healthy steps. If you want to lose 25 pounds in 30 days, you might as well go somewhere else. This book gives you down-earth step to change your diet forever.

My only disappointment is that this book uses scare tactics to convince people that they need to lose weight. We all know that obesity aggravates disease. It’s still hard to lose weight, even when we know we should. They didn’t spend enough time talking about the rebel within us that makes us reach for unhealthy food when we have a healthy lunch packed and ready to eat.

The plan that they set out is healthy and very doable. It doesn’t make lofty claims and gives you plenty of ways to follow the diet. If you have ever felt like you didn’t get ahead in the business world because of your weight, this book is for you. It will give you good advice about dieting AND business.

A list of the chapter titles after the break: (more…)

Stop it.

Right now.

Stop beating yourself up. Stop avoiding people you knew. Stop telling yourself that you’re too fat to meet up with old friends. Stop it. Right now.

It’s time to be nice to yourself. It’s time to remember how beautiful you are. It’s time to take a moment with yourself and let love spread over you like a waterfall. Feel it pounding on your head, making it bend down under the weight of it. You deserve to be loved every day and you are the best person to love yourself. You know exactly what you need.

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.

The folks at Motion Lingo were nice enough to send me an Adeo GPS Training Device to review on Starling Fitness. I worked out with it until it got too cold and polluted in Salt Lake City to run outside. I don’t know which will clear up first, the air quality or the freezing temperatures. Either way, I am stuck indoors.

The Adeo is a very simple gadget that you plug your iPod (or ANY MP3 player) into and you plug your headphones into it. You can hear your music, but a voice will give you updates about your run. Similar to the Nike+iPod, it’s actually a very cool gadget. Here is a list of its best features:

• It measures everything, not just running: The disadvantage of gadgets like the Nike+iPod is that they only track your runs. The Adeo can track your runs, your bike rides, your ski runs and your hikes (with elevation tracking). Their software tracks all of your workouts in one place.

• The MotionTrak Software doesn’t need to be online: My biggest beef with the Nike+iPod setup is that all my stuff is online. I can’t just save all those cool graphs and charts on my own computer.

• It gives you updates how YOU want them: Using their MotionTrak software, you tell the Adeo how often you want updates and what kind. If you want to hear how far you’ve run every two minutes, you can set it. I have my demonstration unit set to give me a different update every few minutes: total time, distance run, time of the day, current speed, etc. Also, you can tell it to stop telling you things. I don’t care about my elevation on my runs because it doesn’t change, but if I was skiing or hiking, elevation might be pretty important. You can set up different update modes based on which activity you are doing.

• It works with any MP3 Player: I really like that I can use any MP3 player with the Adeo. I tried it with my Treo, and it worked just as well with it as my Nano. This is not just another iPod accessory. It works with any music player, even your old cassette player or CD player. That’s a far cry from so many products who are jumping on the bandwagon to work with the iPods. The Adeo is completely backward compatible.

• It’s more accurate than accelerometers: Running shoe pods like the Nike+iPod depend on accelerometers and other devices to measure the distance. For some people they can be horribly inaccurate. Once the Adeo locks onto its satellites, you have a perfectly accurate measurement of the distance you ran (or rode your bike, etc.).

• You don’t have to look at anything: Since the totals and the updates are spoken over your music, you never have to check your watch or iPod to see how far you’ve gone. This is especially cool if you are skiing and couldn’t possibly check your watch even if you wanted to.

There are some disadvantages to this unit:

• It’s kind of big: Seriously, it’s amazingly small for what it does, but it is a little big to carry around. I worked out using the Adeo in the fall, so I had a coat with many pockets to stuff it and my Nano into, but during the summer, I’m suddenly pocketless and I would have to carry it in my hands.

• It takes about five minutes or so to lock on to the satellites: You can’t start locking onto the satellites while you’re in your house, so you have to go outside and just stand around waiting for it to fall into its routine. If you start running before it gets a good lock on the satellites, it won’t be an accurate measurement of your workout. I don’t spend five full minutes stretching before my workout. Do you? Even if I did, I don’t like to do those stretches outside. So, I just ended up standing like a fool outside just waiting for it to do its thing with the satellites.

• It doesn’t work on a treadmill: This is a no-brainer. Since GPS systems track how far on the Earth you’ve moved, they really are useless if you’re running on the treadmill. To the Adeo, it just looks like you’re running in place because you are. For some people, this isn’t an issue, but there are a good six months every year where I’m not going to run outside. It’s just not going to happen, especially when I have a comfortable treadmill calling to me. None of those treadmill workouts are recorded on the MotionTrak software.

• You can’t look at anything: You ONLY get updates spoken over the music, so if you want to hurry and check your mileage, you really can’t. You have to wait until the next pre-measured update. It would have been really helpful sometimes to have a screen to glance at. Auditory feedback isn’t enough sometimes.

I didn’t know the cost of this unit when I was testing it. I had assumed it was about three hundred dollars because that’s the going cost for a good GPS tracking device. When I saw that the Adeo was only $150 at Amazon, I was shocked. Suddenly, all those little complaints I had for it went right out the window. At $150, you’re getting way more than your money’s worth.

On the whole, the Adeo is a great gadget. If you already own a iPod Nano, then the Nike+iPod Sport Kit is a cheaper option for you and almost as accurate. If you own ANY other MP3 player, including a Video iPod, then you should definitely go with the Adeo instead of buying a Nano just to run with. It’s not only cheaper, but you get more accurate readings. Just make sure you have running shorts with pockets.

I’ve talked about Stevia before:

• Starling Fitness » Stevia: Is It Safe?

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with it. I like the way it sweetens food. It doesn’t taste too sweet the way Nutrasweet and sacchrine can. I don’t like that it hasn’t gone through the process of becoming a food additive and has slipped in the back door by calling itself a dietary supplement. Most importantly, it’s fake food, but I still like the taste of it.

I have been using Torani syrups to sweeten and flavor my milk, making my own steamer in the microwave. I talked about that here:

• Starling Fitness » Steamer: A Pleasant Way to Drink Milk

Last week, while I was in my local health food store, I noticed a large selection of flavored liquid stevia from Sweet Leaf. I bought the vanilla creme and tried it. I loved it so much, I went back and tried all the flavors they had available. Now, instead of having huge bottles of flavored syrups on my countertop, I have small bottles of liquid stevia in my fridge.

Now, I find myself recommending them to you after going on a tirade about fake food and Z Trim yesterday. What’s the difference? Why didn’t the liquid stevia set off my paranoia again like it did with the Flavor Diet Sprays and Z Trim?

It seems like a double-standard in my mind. Maybe it’s because the package didn’t scream, “Use Stevia! It will make you skinny!” When I went to their website, however, it was everything that makes me angry. Here’s just a glimpse of what it was like:

“Send us your artificial sweeteners, loaded with harmful chemicals and toxins. And in return we’ll send you a safe and even sweeter alternative with absolutely zero calories or chemicals. Hmmm…toxically artificial or naturally superior? You make the choice.”

I think the biggest turning point for Stevia for me was this stevia article in Wikipedia:

• Stevia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone, but if you look at the bottom of the article, they have included all the links to the studies that back up the claims. This phrase was the kicker for me:

“Indeed, millions of Japanese people have been using stevia for over thirty years with no reported or known harmful effects. Similarly, stevia leaves have been used for centuries in South America spanning multiple generations in ethnomedical tradition as a treatment of type II diabetes.”

I read that article a couple of months after writing Stevia: Is It Safe? Since then, I have gone back to using stevia. Is it safe? I don’t know for sure. Is it fake food? Yeah, it is. Do I like it anyway? Yeah, I do.

What do you think?