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

Jeremy Zawodny is another blogger who has undergone a startling transformation. He has lost 50 pounds over the last year and he is sharing his tips and tricks this week. Here are the links to the first two entries:

• Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web Site (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• The Diet Plan and The Three Habits (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• The Diet Spreadsheet (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Diet Tips: How To Eat Less (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Diet Plans and Goal Setting: How Many Calories? (by Jeremy Zawodny)

• Closing Diet Tips and Advice (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Over the year, he learned the following things:

• Eat Fewer Calories and Monitor Your Intake

• Weigh Yourself Daily but Don’t Obsess Over It

• Learn the Difference Between “Not Hungry” and “Full”

This is a really simplified list, so you’ll have to go to his weblog to get the full story. Keep reading each day this week to get all of his tips and tricks.

Way to go Jeremy!

There are days when I’ve eaten too much and it comes to dinnertime and I have very few calories left, maybe 150 to 300 calories.

What do you eat when you are in that situation?

What kind of low calorie dinner concoctions have you found that really fill you up and make you feel like you’ve had a real meal?

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.

Lucky for me, Maggie Mason reads Esquire magazine. She found an excellent quote from Tom Hanks.

• Mighty Girl – » Blog Archive » Lack

Tom Hanks spoke frankly about gaining sixty pounds for the movie Castaway:

“Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?”

When I have made my eating far too restrictive, I fantasize about being able to eat anything I want in huge quantities. If I’m not careful, this turns into a huge binge in which I actually do eat whatever I want in huge quantities.

The only solution I’ve been able to find is to eat whatever I want in SMALL quantities to prevent that binge. Tom Hanks is right. Living a life with no boundaries DOES create LESS joy. There are very real consequences to living life with no boundaries and they cause real pain. Learning to control myself has been the most joyful thing I could have ever done.

Chris Pirillo was another one of the amazing group of people that I met at SXSW this year. After evaluating his life, Chris realized that he had gained some weight and topped the scales at 178 pounds. Two months later, he was down to 149. Twenty-five pounds in two months is an amazing weight loss. Here’s how he did it:

• Chris Pirillo – Captain 149

Captain 149 lost his weight by limiting his calorie intake and exercising three times a week. That’s it. No two hour fasts with a tablespoon of olive oil. No silly powders or mixes. He just kept his calories below his expenditure and he lost weight. It works every time.

The hard part is following the program. Chris was motivated to be healthy and was able to get back to a healthy weight and lifestyle. You can do it do. All you need to do is DECIDE to do it, no matter what.

Via: Free Fitness Tips: Weight losing blogger

Yep, it’s true.

You can eat anything you want. You just can’t eat EVERYTHING you want.

You can eat anything you want and still lose weight. You just can’t eat everything you want.

You couldn’t even eat EVERYTHING you wanted if you tried. Believe me, I tried. No matter how much I ate, I still wanted to eat more. Since I can never satisfy my bingeing, it doesn’t matter that I eat light now. I didn’t feel satisfied when I tried to eat everything, so there’s no point in trying that again.

How do I eat anything I want and still lose weight? PORTION CONTROL.

If I want a Big Mac, I get a Big Mac and I eat a quarter of it. That was unheard of for me before I started eating healthy. If I ordered a Big Mac, I ate the whole thing, even if two bites filled me up. I was so disconnected from my body that I never knew when to stop. Now, I eat a few bites and leave it at that. I can buy myself another Big Mac if I’m hungry in two hours. They’re cheap.

Sometimes I eat two bites and bring the rest home. I eat a couple of bites for a snack later and the rest for dinner. Sometimes I don’t even need to eat it. Sometimes knowing that I can have carrot cake and it’s in the fridge for me is enough. Sometimes just buying the dessert is just as fulfilling as eating it ever was.

Next time you’re feeling deprived, remember this:

You can eat anything you want. You just can’t eat EVERYTHING you want.

I’ve heard both sides of the argument. I’ve heard that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a benign sweetener that is less expensive for soda and snack makers to use to sweeten food. I’ve also heard that it is processed differently in our body than cane sugar, causing the so-called “obesity epidemic.” What’s the truth?

The Accidental Hedonist has a write up about the research and the controversy that sums it up pretty well.

• Accidental Hedonist – More on HFCS – Unanswered Questions

“The truth? Well, the truth is that we don’t know the truth. No one can say for certain that HFCS is better or worse than cane sugar. When we look to the Corn folks for information, all they point to is the fact that the FDA has allowed the use of HFCS, so it has to be safe, right?”

“Of course, that’s a bit disengenuous on the Corn folks’ part, because the FDA has NEVER tested HFCS, nor accepted any outsourced test results. The have deemed HFCS as “generally regarded as safe”, which essentially means that No one has been reputed to have died of the stuff.”

“Any excess of sweetener is a bad thing, whether it’s sugar or HFCS. The question that no one seems to be willing to answer is “Which is worse – Too much sugar or too much HFCS?” Until this question is answered, any indictment of HFCS is premature.”

Instead of checking to see whether your soda contains HFCS or cane sugar, limiting your intake of soda is probably the best bet until we are able to find the truth. Fill your glass with water and you won’t go wrong.

Via: Boing Boing: Is high-fructose corn syrup the devil? Yup.

Fast Food Nation was the book that inspired Morgan Spurlock to go on his McDonald’s binge for 30 days. It is a non-fiction book that talks about the fast food industry.

Fast Food Nation has been fictionalized and a movie starring Greg Kinnear is coming out this fall. You can read more about it here:

• Fast Food Nation the Movie

I haven’t seen the movie, so I’m eagerly awaiting it. I know that I was offended by Morgan Spurlock myopic view of McDonald’s. In Super-Size Me, he didn’t even try to eat healthy. He says he ended up eating everything on the menu, but it looked like he concentrated on the most high-calorie items for the bulk of his meals. He was destined to gain weight with a diet like that.

Based on the movie trailer, it looks like Fast Food Nation has the same bias. I guess I just have to wait to see it.

Lofty title, huh? Considering all my struggles with eating healthy, I can understand if you’re skeptical. In fact, I’m sitting here right now thinking, “How can I explain this?!”

The truth is, eating healthy CAN be fun. I KNOW this because I see it in other people all the time. I’m talking about those people that you know. None of us want to admit it, but we hate them sometimes because they purposely make us feel bad about what we’re eating.

I’m talking about vegetarians.

Not the vegetarians that live a quiet life and eat healthy without imposing their beliefs on anyone else. I’m talking about the rabid vegetarians. I’m talking about the vegans. I’m talking about the raw food enthusiasts. These people have made eating healthy like a video game. There are stages for you to achieve and you get to feel more and more justified at each one. Vegans are “better” than vegetarians and raw foodies are “better” than vegans. All of them are “better” than us.

They piss me off and I sometimes wonder if their ideas are truly healthy, but the fact of the matter is, they have made healthy eating fun. Even though it’s not fun for us, it’s obviously quite fun for them. So the question is:

How Can Eating Healthy Be Fun?

What if eating healthy was like a video game? What if each time you checked off a box for vegetables, you got a score? What if you could display your score to the whole world and they would know that you’re a “fifth level eater”? What if being able to announce that you’re a “fifth level eater” felt as good as saying, “I’m a vegetarian”?

There HAS to be some way to quantify eating healthy. There HAS to be some way to get a high score in eating healthy and the scale isn’t it. The scale is a cumulative score. You need a score for every day.

I don’t know the answers yet, but there HAS to be some way to harness the feeling of accomplishment from eating healthy.

If you go into any coffee shop and order a steamer with fat-free milk, they will understand what you’re talking about. If it’s not a Starbucks, they’ll roll their eyes and sneer at you, but they’ll understand.

A steamer is warm milk heated to a frothy goodness using the steam valve on the expresso machine with a shot or two of flavored syrup. Since there are many sugar-free syrups to choose from, you can enjoy a wide variety of steamers for the same calories as a glass of milk.

Since many diets recommend two servings of milk a day, this is an easy way to get in your milk in one fail swoop. One 16 ounce steamer counts as two servings of milk. If you make sure to order the sugar-free syrup, then it’s no more calories than the milk.

You don’t need to shell out two bucks at the coffee shop to get a steamer either. Sugar-free flavored syrups are usually available in the coffee aisle at grocery stores. The selection of syrups is smaller than a coffeehouse, but you’ll be able to create a steamer by microwaving your milk with a shot of syrup for only one minute and much less money.

Torani has a list of steamer recipes that sound delicious. These recipes aren’t specializing in the sugar-free flavors, so make sure you get sugar-free syrups in order to avoid extra calories.

• Torani: Recipe Gallery

I met Kathy Sierra at the South By Southwest convention in March and I’ve been reading her weblog ever since. She usually writes about making websites better, but she diverged from her basic theme the other day and talked about a diet that she has been trying, The Shangri-La Diet.

• Creating Passionate Users: The strangest, easiest way to lose weight

Here is her description of the diet and how it worked for her:

“You must MUST be able to find at least one two-hour time window each day where you have nothing but water. Nothing with any flavor of any kind is allowed–NO EXCEPTIONS–during that period, including brushing your teeth. For most people, two hours is no problem at all… but you have to be extremely careful or you risk not just eliminating the positive effect, but potentially ruining your chance of using it correctly in the future.”

“In the middle of that two hour window, you must ingest one of two things… either a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in water, or a tablespoon of extra light olive oil. If either of those are not do-able for you, you’re out of luck.”

“For me, in two weeks, it’s been working too well. I don’t have a weight problem, so I wasn’t interested in losing weight. I wanted to try it because it’s fascinating, seems impossible to believe, and MAINLY for the claim that by reducing cravings, it helps you make better eating choices. My goal on this “diet” was that when it was time to eat, I wanted to find carrots and broccoli as viable an option as Ben and Jerry’s. That hasn’t completely happened (although cravings have virtually disappeared), but within three days, I was actually forgetting to eat.”

Forgetting to eat is one thing that can trigger a binge, so this doesn’t sound like a good diet for me, but I’m sure there are people who this would work for. Click over to Kathy’s site and read her full review. It contains links to other reviews about the diet and more information.