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

Over the years, I have lost a lot of hair. Unlike most people, I’m a little grateful for the loss. I used to be an afro-freak child. Every trip to get a haircut ended with the statement, “Hey, Buffy, come over hear and get a load of this freak’s hair!” There are probably men out there who fantasize about having the hands of three hairdressers ruffling through their hair, but as a child, it just made me feel like a defective.

My mom said that having children is how she lost her hair, but I don’t think so. At the same age my mom had me and my sister, I lost a considerable amount of hair. I, however, had no babies to blame it on. I guess it’s just an age thing.

Over at Yahoo!, this article claims to be able to help you grow healthy hair:

• Better in ’07: Spring Nutrition Guide on Yahoo! Health

The recommendations are simple:

• Eat plenty of iron-rich protein
• Load up on Vitamin C
• Be sure to get your Bs (folate, vitamin B-6, vitamin B-12)
• Don’t forget the Zinc

I never know what to think about diets like these. Yeah, all those macro-nutrients ARE important for a healthy diet. Will it grow hair? Man, I’m to the point of skepticism with ANYTHING that tells me it will make me lose weight. I’m sure there are people out there who feel the same about promises of hair growth. It all sounds like snake oil to me…

Via: love and hope and sex and dreams: Eat Beef! (it’s good for your hair)

Many thanks to Slashfood for bringing this to my attention:

• Half loaves of bread – Slashfood

Orowheat seems to have released a half loaf of bread. Instead of the nearly two pound loaves of whole wheat and other popular flavors, you can now buy just a handful of slices at a time. These loaves aren’t lacking in anything but the number of slices; the height and width of the bread is the same.

If you have found that you eat less bread now that you’re eating healthy, you probably also have my problem every week. You have to throw away half a loaf of moldy bread. Orowheat is willing to sell me a half a loaf a bread so that I don’t feel guilty for “wasting” food. I’m all for that.

I haven’t seen it in the Salt Lake City grocery stores yet, but I’m eagerly awaiting their arrival!

Laura,

I have a question about Weight Watchers..Do you think the Core Plan works better than the Flex Plan? I am on the Flex Plan right now and i was just wondering if the Core works better.

Thanks!
Leah

Leah,

I have liked the Flex Plan because I can eat ANYTHING as long as I work it into my Points. The minute someone tells me that I can’t eat something (even something as simple as 2% milk, which is restricted on the Core Plan), I am craving it. It’s because I was starved for so many years as a child that my mind goes into famine brain with just the mention of restriction. I have never tried Core because everytime I have even thought about going on the Core Plan, it has caused a binge.

Thank you,
Laura Moncur

I found this video in my Starling Fitness folder, but it doesn’t look like I’ve ever written about it or shown it to you. It sat around because it was such a big file. I tried compressing it, but it was still huge, so I put it up on YouTube. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I found it…

Pretty healthy diet for 1954. I’m interested in the fact that Ralph becomes so popular after eating healthy. When’s that gonna happen to me?

This recipe has been sitting in my queue since August. Something about it looked good, but I didn’t want a warm, soupy kind of dish in the weather that we were having last August, but now, it looks delicious. Fortunutely, you don’t need to depend on the farmer’s market to make this dish.

• A Veggie Venture – Warm Tomato, Corn & Okra Salad

If you use canned okra, tomatoes and corn, this dish is a snap to make. Instead of broiling on a cookie sheet, pour the contents of the cans into a pot and heat them up. I would use a lot more spices than suggested on the recipe including garlic and oregano. If you have been wanting a warm soup for dinner, this is an easy way to enjoy your veggies!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a few entries about Valentine’s Day that I feel still apply today. You can see them here:

• Starling Fitness » Have a Healthy Valentine’s Day

• Starling Fitness » Valentine’s Breakfast In Bed

• Starling Fitness » Choose a Healthy Valentine’s Dinner

This year, I’d like to hear from YOU.

What do you do to keep your Valentine’s Day healthy and still enjoy it?

What do you do with the treats? Do you eat them? Do you you save them? Do you toss them? Do you give them away?

What about dinner? How do you handle eating out?

What about depression? If you don’t have a Valentine in your life, what do you do to prevent wallowing?

I would love to hear everything you have to say about Valentine’s Day. Please tell me all about it in the comments section!

This article from Wired Magazine made me think about binge eating. It’s about Natsuko Sone, a “food fighter” who regularly competes in eating competitions and out eats sumo wrestlers.

• Wired News: Petite Food Fighter Pigs Out

So many “food fighters” or “competitive eaters” are very thin, which has made me consider that overeating may be the way to being thin. Maybe regularly overeating once a month or so and eating healthy the rest of the month trains the body that there will be no famines in the future. Maybe it somehow convinces our bodies that they don’t need to hold on to fat.

I wonder if this has been researched…

Via: Boing Boing: Japan’s tiny food-fighting woman out-eats Sumos

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

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…)

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?