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

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 was reading this blog entry from Wil Wheaton and I realized how different normal people are from overeaters.

• With diet and exercise, and a little help from my friends | WIL WHEATON dot NET

I immediately cut down my beer consumption to one pint a day. I reduced #burritowatch to maybe once a week. I started to enter my meals into my app, and after a few days, I started to see that it really wasn’t that difficult to make healthy food choices, once I knew what was going into my body.

I was having a lot of fun, I was starting to feel pretty good, and — here’s the thing that blew me away — when I got back on the scale at the end of the first week, I’d lost almost 6 pounds.

THAT is the difference in a nutshell. He realized he had gained twenty pounds, cut down on the burritos and beer and dropped back where he wanted to be. In that same time period, I have also lost twenty pounds, but it looks VERY different.

I, too, have been adding my food into my app. I, too, bought a Fitbit after Christmas. I set it to go off every two and a half hours and I’m counting the minutes until I get to eat again. Sometimes I eat my snack and I immediately start counting down until the next time I eat, waiting for that silent vibration on my wrist.

My twenty pound weight loss has nothing to do with cutting out the beer and burritos and everything to do with avoiding a plethora of foods that can set off a binge.

And, the only time I’ve earned a badge was when I was in Las Vegas and I had to walk a mile every time I wanted to get to my car from my hotel room. I seriously exercise for thirty minutes each day, but the rest of my life is so sedentary that it’s a struggle to get to 10,000 steps a day.

Just like him, I find the Fitbit motivating. Just like him, I track my food in a food diary app every day. But unlike him, it was a vicious struggle every day. THAT is the difference between normal people and overeaters. Our brains are wired differently for food, so just going easy on the burritos and beer is much harder.

Cartoon Via: Toon Pool

This photo was from Valentine’s Day in 2006. Back then, I didn’t know that I was sensitive to gluten, so this meal LITERALLY made me sick and I didn’t even know it back then.

What other Valentine’s Day advice have I given over the years that is poison instead of medicine?

Order whatever you want: Seriously. Quit trying to tell yourself that you can only have salad or chicken breasts. If you want a steak, order it. If you are dying for some pasta, stop denying yourself.

Nope, again, I can’t eat that pasta. Now, instead of thinking it’s denial, I remember the bloating pain in my abdomen that I suffered with for SEVEN years before we were able to figure it out. Sometimes you MUST deny yourself some foods because they just aren’t good for you, and the worst trick ever played on us is that those foods are different for each person.

Valentine’s Day is just one day. So is the Super Bowl and Thanksgiving and Christmas and your birthday and St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween and the World Series and New Year’s and Mardi Gras and Independence Day and March Madness and… There are enough holidays, sports events and birthdays in your life to warrant an excuse to indulge every week.

Okay, I was spot on with that one. There are so many holidays that having one isn’t an excuse to overeat.

You don’t need to eat the candy to accept the love.

I said that?! How many times in the last few years have I made that mistake? They are just trying to tell you that they love you. Accept the love and leave the candy.

You don’t need to overeat to celebrate.

I may have said this way back in 2005, but I have lived the polar opposite for far too many years. It’s time that I learn how to celebrate without overindulging.

As far as Valentine’s advice goes, I’ve done a pretty good job over the years, but I still can’t get beyond that image of those heart shaped pancakes. I should have posted this image instead. Eggs work much better for me.

This video shows just how food becomes so addictive.

Researchers are working every day to create foods that will taste so good that we physically CAN’T stop eating it. It’s not just marketing, it’s the science of the taste and texture of food.

They quote the author of the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. I was unaware of this book before I saw this video, so I have a bunch of reading in front of me.

If you want to avoid food addiction, MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD. Cook your food from whole ingredients: meat, veggies, fruit, and grains. You will crave their food for a while, but keep eating your own food. You will eventually feel much better.

The Fitbit Flex on my wrist went off at 10 am, but I was trying to write a blog entry. I ignored it. The irony is that I was trying to write an entry for Starling Fitness. I should have just looked at my wrist and realized that I had forgotten the most important thing to keep me eating healthy: I Eat When The Fitbit Tells Me To Eat.

There should be no question about it. I used to want to eat ALL day long without relief from the hunger. It wasn’t until I set alarms every two and a half hours that I found that I could go any amount of time without thinking about food.

Now, I find myself FORGETTING about food and making the alarm go away without bothering to eat. I went a half hour without eating my apple that was already washed and ready to eat. All I had to do was put it in my piehole.

Why? Why do I let myself forget the torment of constant obsession with food and fall into bad habits? As long as I FEED my poor, abused body, it will give me HOURS of time when I won’t even THINK about food. If I had to feed my cat every two and a half hours, I wouldn’t think twice about abandoning my work and jumping up when the alarm went off. Yet, when it comes time to feed MYSELF, I won’t even bother.

And the worst trick of all, is that if I don’t feed myself healthy food every two and a half hours, I get FATTER!! I end up feeling so hungry that I eat an entire day’s worth of calories in one sitting. It’s a paradoxical practical joke that I have played on my body for years, and yet, I still haven’t learned how to do it properly.

Maybe that’s why it’s so hard. I alternately starved and stuffed my body for YEARS and I’ve only been practicing this type of eating for three months. I’m trying to undo YEARS of bad habits, so I guess it’s going to take some time until this is second nature to me. Until then, I am going to jump when that alarm goes off and stick some food in my piehole!

Overeaters Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog.

This season of the Vampire Diaries, has been so enjoyable. One of the “evil” vampires we’ve come to love, Katherine, was made human at the end of the last season and dealing with her humanity has been interesting. This scene, in particular, made me laugh my head off.

“You said you were hungry.”

“For food, not packaged poison.”

I thought to myself, I should make an animated GIF of that, but thankfully, She is electric, can I be electric too? did it for me! Katherine’s descent back to humanity has been coupled with an insatiable desire to EAT.

The scene where she is literally eating her way through the buffet line is priceless:

The truth of the matter is, my hunger response, just like Katherine’s, is BROKEN. I feel hungry all the time, but the more REAL food I eat (with protein, fat and a little carb), the better I feel. Additionally, eating every two and a half hours when my alarms go off (and NOT eating in-between), really helps me beat that out of control hunger. I still may have that hunger, but I tell myself, “I can wait an hour…”

The next time you feel like Katherine in her newly human form and want to eat your way through the buffet line, remember to eat REAL food, not packaged poison.

Via: Fitness, Health, And Confidence

You can survive for a LONG time without food, depending on your fat stores, but you can only last a couple of days without water. What happens when you do? This video from SciShow explains the gory details.

Most diets recommend that you drink 6-8 glasses of water a day to keep hydrated, which is a good idea considering that many people turn to food when they’re actually thirsty. So remember to drink your water so you don’t get dehydrated.

This video from the University of California has been so helpful to me.

This quote from episode four really helped me give up the shame of being fat.

No one can exert willpower over a biochemical drive that goes on every minute of every day of every year.

No one chooses obesity. Obesity chooses them.

The food industry is too powerful to expect a health initiative banning sugar in our food supply. 80% of our food has been laced with sugar. All those companies hold far more power than us, so it falls to us to avoid it.

Here are their four tips on how to help heal your brain and body:

Their recommendations are:

• Get rid of every sugar beverage in the house. There is no such thing as a good sugar beverage.
• Keep insulin down by only eating carbohydrate with fiber, such as fruit.
• Wait twenty minutes for second portions so your body can get the message that you’ve eaten your meal to your brain.
• Buy your screen time with activity. If you are outside for a half hour, you can have a half hour of TV. Exercise has to be consistent and sustained.

These are pretty simplistic ideas and don’t address the addictive nature of highly palatable food. This series is great at explaining the problems with our bodies when we become obese, but fixing those problems are much more complicated than their little four tips make it seem.

“I’m hungry all the time. I think about food all the time.” I was lamenting to Mike, my husband, about why it’s so hard for me to follow my program for more than an hour or so.

“That’s because there is something the matter with your brain. For whatever reason, it tells you that you’re hungry all the time.” He was trying to help me, but his words were anything but consoling. “You’re like an anorexic, except backwards.”

How many times had I wished I could be anorexic? How many times had I wished I could be free of this desire to eat all the time?

Mike continued talking, “What would you do if you WERE anorexic?” I cried and laughed at the same time. “I’d be so damn happy and not eat for a year. I’d finally be skinny.”

He nodded and asked, “And then after you were skinny, what would you do? If you didn’t eat, you’d die, so what would you do?” (more…)