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

In this month’s issue of Allure magazine, there was an advertisement for a product called Vysera-CLS. It looked like something that I should avoid, but I catch myself fascinated by these things.

I have been writing for Starling Fitness for so long that I KNOW that diet pills don’t work. There isn’t one product that I’ve tried that has worked. Half the time, I can just look at the ingredients and tell that it’s just the same thing, so why do I even care about this Vysera stuff? Isn’t just going to be the same old stuff?

Despite all that, I wanted to know. What are the ingredients?

According to Consumer Health Answers, here are the ingredients. Click on the image to see them full-sized:

Somehow, reading the ingredients made me not care about it anymore. It’s just that same combination of theobroma and chromium picolinate that diet pills have been using since the 90s. It’s especially not worth 99 bucks a month!

The reviews on the website were even more telling:

Have almost finished a month’s supply. Haven’t lost an ounce. Don’t waste your money or time. Don’t believe the hype. Suckerd again.

The most useless product ever. Complete waste of money!

I don’t know why I am still attracted to diet pill ads. You’d think after over ten years of research, I’d realize that there is NO pill that will do what I need to do. It’s not even about the food. It’s about the reasons I want to eat the food. No diet pill can give me the peace of mind that I need to keep from bingeing. I don’t know why I need to keep learning that lesson over and over.

Just a few days ago, Samsung showed the world their Gear Fit. It’s a watch, heart rate monitor, fitness tracker and mp3 player. Here is a video showing it here:

It has customizable screens and bands that are easy to change out.

It looks awesome, doesn’t it? In fact, it almost becomes the watch of my dreams that I’ve spoken about on The Gadgets Page:

• Gadgets Page – I Hate the Watch Designers of the World

It’s the watch I’ve been waiting for almost a DECADE. So, what’s the catch?

The catch is that it doesn’t work with my iPhone. The catch is that it only communicates with 20 Samsung devices. The catch is that I would have to figure out how to get music on the damn thing because it doesn’t work with iTunes. The catch is that it is so integrated into the Samsung world that it is completely useless to me.

It’s pretty, Samsung, and you did a good impression of the Apple presentation style, but it’s not going to fly.

It’s National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. I has been this week every year for the last ten years I have been writing this blog.

I have struggled with binge eating since I was about nine years old. I have been struggling with binge eating since I started this blog over ten years ago. You’d think that I’d be over it now. You’d think I’d have a handle on it.

I think eating disorders cause permanent changes to our brain chemistry. Just like a cucumber that has turned into a pickle, you can never go back to being a cucumber ever again. Oh, and the longer you sit stewing in the brine of eating disorders, the harder it is to escape.

Eating disorders feel like a disease to me. A disease that none of us can be blamed for. It’s a change in brain chemistry and there should be no shame, but I have felt an incredible amount of shame about it. In fact, this PostSecret card reminded me of so many promises that I have made to myself.

I have abstained from binge-eating for the last couple of months and I feel a lot better, but the specter of it will haunt me for the rest of my life. The biggest, scariest part of this disease for me is that if my health insurance company would find out about it, my premiums would go through the roof and I wouldn’t be able to afford insurance. So, I have never gone in for professional treatment.

There ARE options out there from twelve-step programs like Overeater’s Anonymous, so if you are feeling lost, please turn to someone for help, whether it be professional or a group program.

Eating disorders are just suicide in slow motion.

Don’t give up without a fight.

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.

We were at Trader Joe’s the other day and at the sample station, they had a DELICIOUS salad that both Mike and I adored. I usually have a prejudice against lentils, so I didn’t think I’d like the salad when they offered it to me. Then, I thought that it would be too difficult to make, but it was hilariously easy.

Lentil Salad Ingredients (more…)

The newest song to add to my workout playlist is “The World Can Be Better” by Kid President and The Gregory Brothers. You can hear it here:

This is a songified version of Kid President’s Pep Talk. You can see it in full here:

This is a long journey and we all need a pep talk sometimes.

So, a crazy woman bought out PacSun store’s ‘indecent’ T-shirts in Orem, Utah this week. Since I live in Utah, this sort of embarrassment is appalling to me and I wanted to see exactly HOW indecent they were. I went to the PacSun website. They weren’t indecent, but that’s another story.

I wanted to buy some clothes from them just in a sort of counter-protest to the crazy Utah woman, but they don’t sell any in my size right now. But that’s yet another story.

Today’s story is about this tshirt that I found while looking for the “indecent” ones.

It just shows a drawing of french fries with the word, “death” under it. Is it true? Does every fast food restaurant serve Death Fries with that?

Part of me railed against the idea. It’s an over-simplification that just perpetuates the idea of “good” food and “bad” food. It makes the french fries feel forbidden and makes them a tad more appealing in the process. A serving of french fries every once and a while will not kill you. Our bodies are extremely adaptive and can recover from the greasy, salty and starchy combination.

Then again, for me, french fries DO represent death in some respects. I only eat them when I’m in the middle of a binge. I only crave them when I am feeling emotionally damaged and slightly suicidal. So, are they Death Fries? For me, yes.

This video from TED-Ed is brilliant!

It’s especially helpful at the 3:12 mark. It was so helpful to me that I transcribed it:

Speaking of healthy foods, let’s say you’re hungry and decide to eat a balanced meal. You do and dopamine levels spike in the reward hot spots. But if you eat that same dish many days in a row, dopamine levels will spike less and less, eventually leveling out.

That’s because, when it comes to food, the brain evolved to pay special attention to new or different tastes. Why? Two reasons: first, to detect food that has gone bad, and second, because the more variety we have in our diet, the more likely we are to get all the nutrients we need. To keep that variety up, we need to be able to recognize a new food and, more importantly, we need to want to keep eating new foods, and that’s why the dopamine levels off when a food becomes boring.

Now back to that meal. What happens if in place of the healthy, balanced dish, you eat sugar-rich food instead? If you rarely eat sugar, or don’t eat much at a time, the affect is similar to that of the balanced meal. But, if you eat too much, the dopamine response does NOT level out. In other words, eating lots of sugar will continue to feel rewarding. In this way, sugar behaves a little bit like a drug.

THIS is why I have a harder time with wanting to binge about a month after eating healthy! I tend to go a little obsessive and eat the same stupid thing for breakfast every day. The same stupid thing for snacks. The same stupid thing for lunch. The only variety I get regularly is at dinnertime.

THIS is why I get all excited about a new recipe! Because my brain is telling me it’s AWESOME! But if I eat it too often, my brain will think it’s boring and urge me to eat other foods instead, especially those ones that feel REALLY good.

THIS is why I need to be vigilant. I need to give my brain lots of different taste adventures that are HEALTHY. I need to read recipes and try them. I need to watch out for my obsessive behaviors and not eat the same thing every day for months at a time until I don’t want to eat them anymore.

THIS changes EVERYTHING for me!

I found this animated GIF on MotiveWeight. How do you use it? Click and drag on the image to find out which one you get.

I’m a big believer in “The Random.” You get the quote you need for the day. It’s the one that will help you on today’s journey. Remember it. Repeat it. Write it down. It will help you today. When tomorrow comes, you can come back here and get another chance.

A couple of weeks ago, I found this recipe online:

• Low Carb Diet Tips for Busy People – Low Carb Cheddar Tuna Biscuits w/Creamy Spread

I was wanting something very low carb because my cravings were going out of control, so I remembered parts of the recipe and tried to make it from memory. It probably would have helped had I read the whole recipe, but I hadn’t.

So, I created Tuna Patties, which are a little different and WAY easier to make because they don’t require parchment paper, heating up the oven or almond flour.

Tuna Patties Ingredients (more…)

This song popped up on my Workout playlist and I realized that I had forgotten to tell you about it. It’s called “It’s Okay, Try Again” by Yo Gabba Gabba and The Shins [iTunes link].

Sometimes I just need to hear positive songs like this to make myself feel better.