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

After fighting through injuries and problems, SLB finished the Bulldog 25K Trail Race. He talks about it here:

• Quadrathon: Bulldog 25k Trail Race

His descriptions of the race trail make this an enjoyable read.

The first miles took us along the side of a dried out creek bed and then along the appropriately named Crags Road, so called due its “cragginess”, basically a it’s a dry river bed complete with the prerequisite jagged rocks at every turn, beaten down over the years into a trail but pretty gnarly at best.

Remember, losing weight and exercising isn’t only about looking good. It’s about doing things that you could never even imagine doing before. You can go places and achieve things when you are healthy that you can’t do right now. That’s yet another reason to keep eating well and exercising.

Our friend, Tom Mangan, who writes my favorite Two-Heel Drive blog has started a new blog called Hike Hacker. He tells you all the things you need to know about hiking. Here is a good article about hiking for weight loss from him.

• Hiking for weight loss | Hike Hacker

He lost 37 pounds in three months by hiking and here are the three things he did:

• He cut out Cokes and cookies
• He walked on hills for an hour a day
• He took long hikes on the weekends

Even if you don’t live next door to beautiful woods that are accessible all year ’round, you can still follow his plan for hiking your way to fitness.

If you don’t have access to hills for your daily workouts, you can do a similar workout on your treadmill. To do a hill workout on your treadmill, turn up your incline to the highest setting, walk on it for two minutes, then turn it down to the lowest setting and walk on it for one minute. Repeat for an hour each day.

Even in the cold and snow of winter, some of the Utah trails are still open, so make sure you check with your local parks to see what trails are available to you.

Hiking to get in shape seems like a perfect escape to me because you get to enjoy yourself while you’re out there. There is no drudgery when you have beautiful scenery to distract you!

Driving through Oregon along the back roads to Mount Hood, we saw tons of little fruit stands and markets. It seemed like every swath of land was offering to sell us ripe and delicious fruits and vegetables.

Compared to what I can get at a supermarket, however, their choices were limited. There is a lot of talk about buying your produce at farmers’ markets lately, but not all communities have access to such great fare locally and in the coming winter months, it’s impossible to get local produce.

Why should I buy local?

When I can walk to my nearest grocery store and get whatever fruit I want, why should I go to the trouble of going to the farmers’ market once a week to get produce?

It Saves the Environment

This reason is the the least supported of them all for me. Sure, it takes less oil to transport the apples from Young Family Farm in Mona, Utah than it would to transport an apple from Venezuela, but that’s only if both farms are run with the same energy efficiency. Maybe the farm in Venezuela uses more human labor than machine labor. How does that affect the equation?

Honestly, all of the factors are many and varied. Accounting for all of them is difficult and I’m not convinced that buying locally grown produce will make a significant improvement on the environment. There are figures thrown around about how much oil eating one locally grown meal a week could save, but I want to see the data to support them. It’s surprisingly scant.

It Tastes Better

The best vegetables and fruit I have ever eaten have been from my grandfather’s garden when I was a teenager. Compared to that, nothing else tastes right. The closest I’ve ever come to truly delicious fruit and veggies has been food that I’ve gotten at the farmers’ market. Supermarket fruit and veggies just don’t compare.

It’s Usually Cheaper

I know that sounds crazy that better food might be cheaper, but from what I’ve noticed at the farmers’ market here in Salt Lake City, it is. I have compared the prices of what is available to what is in the grocery stores and it costs less every time. Of course, the variety isn’t as wide at our farmers’ market as it is in the grocery store. I’ll never be able to buy a locally grown orange or mango unless it was raised in a hot house, but if I want the juiciest apple picked ripe off the tree, then there is no beating the farmers’ market in price.

It Doesn’t Last Forever

I don’t know about more temperate climates like California, but our farmers’ market closes up the minute the weather turns cold. With frost, comes the end of fresh produce from Utah and I suspect it’s the same in all areas of the states that actually have all four seasons instead of the perpetual spring of the warmer climates.

Whatever your reason for going to a farmers’ market, the food that gives you the most bang for your calories are fruits and vegetables. Whether you buy them in a grocery store or a farmers’ market, they will help you stay within your requirements and fill you full of fiber and vitamins.

The other day, I read this article on Diet Blog:

• How To: Make Nutritious Smoothies

Michael bought a new blender last week, so we have been using it to create a wide variety of smoothies. I had never put cottage cheese in a smoothie, however, so the suggestion from the Diet Blog was surprising to me. I immediately ran into the kitchen to try it out and this is what I created:

Strawberry Cottage Cheese Smoothie

• 1/2 cup cottage cheese
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup frozen strawberries
• 1 TBSP honey
• 1 TBSP ground flaxseed

I was pleased with the different flavor that the cottage cheese added. The nutrition facts are approximate. I used 1% milkfat on the cottage cheese and the milk, so if you use skim or full fat, the nutrition facts will change accordingly.

There are so many variations that you can use for fruit smoothies and they are an easy way to eat your dairy and fruit requirements every day. Try this one and then experiment with your own!

I never thought of this technique for getting my favorite geek to take a walk with me. You can see the joke at Joy of Tech here:

• The Joy of Tech comic – How To Get A Geek To Take A Walk

I am constantly trying to figure out ways to “fool” myself into exercising. Going on errands is one way that I have achieved that. Any grocery errand I like to dole out a little every day so I can take a walk to the store, get a few things and walk home. That way my walk feels like it means something besides just exercise.

How do you fool yourself into exercising?

Today is the day that a lot of schools are starting up again. Will more of the students be driven to school or walk to school?

Well, back in MY day…

I used Google Maps Pedometer to check the mileage I walked to each of the schools I went to as a kid and pre-teen.

• Academy Park Elementary: 0.70 miles
• Hunter Elementary: 0.68 miles
• Kennedy Junior High: 0.30 miles
• Kearns High: 2.03 miles

I was expected to walk to Academy Park, Hunter and Kennedy, but I had a bus to take me to Kearns High. At only two miles, it doesn’t seem like all that much anymore. I only walked it once in the three years that I went to Kearns and it felt like a million miles. Now, I walk two miles every day without even thinking about it. How can I be in better shape now than when I was a teenager and be fatter? It makes no sense to me.

Should kids walk to school? I think most of them are driven to school because parents are scared of child abductions. I have no statistics about the likeliness of a child to be abducted, but I know that a parent who walks their child to school kills two birds with one stone. Your kids arrive at school with a little exercise and safe and you get your workout done.

I never had to walk two miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. Maybe that’s why I’m overweight as an adult.

If you are one of the many people who have bought a Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, then you know that the quote of the month is about health. You can see the quote here:

As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.

Adelle Davis , 1904-1974

Adelle Davis was a nutritionist who proposed that vitamins and minerals are essential to health. before then, science was unsure about macronutrients of food. There had been some inkling to these connections, such as citrus fruits prevented scurvy, but narrowing the search down to Vitamin C was a new science. Adelle Davis brought these concepts to the general public with her books. Her most famous book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, was originally published in 1954 and changed the way we look at food.

Next time you eat something because you think it’s good for you, send a tiny burst of good karma out to Adelle Davis who brought that idea down to its most basic level.

If you would like to order your own Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, you can do so here:

• Starling Fitness » Order Your Starling Fitness Yearly Journal

If you order it now, you can choose the month you want it to start and it will last you a year from that date. You won’t have to throw away any unused days from the first of the year. You can start fresh now.

No matter how bad your workout was today, at least your treadmill didn’t beat you up.

I was worried that this girl might be hurt, but she was laughing so hard that she must have just gotten a little tread burn.

When was the last time you laughed this hard when you were running on the treadmill? Next time your workout feels like a drudgery, remember these two girls just playing with the treadmill like it’s a toy instead of a tool.

I found this photo on Flickr a long time ago. I checked it as a favorite and then promptly forgot about writing about it. You can see the full image here:

• Modesty Ain’t A Virtue by Antarix from Flickr

I love this pile of race medals hanging on a doorknob. They are tarnished with age, but they are an easy way to measure how much has been accomplished.

How do you measure your accomplishments?

Unlike race medals, I find it hard to measure my accomplishments in the marathons of my life. If I weigh less today than I did last week, is that an accomplishment? If I go on a binge this week and gain that weight back, does that invalidate my success of last week? How do I measure my achievements?

The Scale

The scale is a pretty undeniable measure of where I am at any particular moment. It doesn’t lie to me as often as I’d like to imagine that it does. Sure there are fluctuations, but over the course of dedicated weeks, I almost ALWAYS see results. When I haven’t seen results on the scale, I have been able to track what I’ve been doing wrong, even though they seem pretty hidden to me.

• Starling Fitness » The Hidden Plateau – Part 1

• Starling Fitness » The Hidden Plateau – Part 2

Clothing

When my clothing is tighter, it’s pretty obvious that I haven’t achieved my goals, but when it gets loose and baggy, it’s an incredible motivator.

Daily Achievements

Setting goals every day and week help me notice when I’m doing well. Sometimes it takes weeks for the scale to tip or for my clothing to get looser, but if I track my daily achievements, I can feel a sense of accomplishment regularly. Here are the forms that I use to track my daily and weekly goals:

• Starling Fitness » Weight Watchers Form

• Starling Fitness » Bribe Yourself

External Validation

This can come in the form of compliments from people. It can also be as subtle as a look from a stranger. I recommend writing down every inkling you have of a compliment in a journal so you can go back and remember them when you are feeling down or when things feel hopeless.

External validation can also come in a more structured form. That is part of the reason that Weight Watchers (and other weight loss programs) are so successful. There are little goals to strive for and when you achieve them, you get a little reward. When I was attending Weight Watchers, they gave out these award star magnets.

The Dark Side

The dark side to these measurements of achievement is failure. If you slip back to a higher weight, those stars from Weight Watchers are a reminder of how heavy you have become. If your clothes start to get tighter, they are a constant disturbance that are hard to ignore. Even those running medals can feel like a stain if you can no longer run as fast or as well as you did in the past.

Don’t let these symbols of your past achievements haunt you. Instead let them remind you that you did it before and you can do it again. Cling to the knowledge that you can achieve this and all it takes are simple and steady actions every day.

I bet this postcard from PostSecret hits a nerve with a lot of people.

It reads:

I told my doctor I had ADD to get Adderall so I could lose weight. It turns out I DID have ADD. I went from a D average to straight A’s.

I didn’t lose any weight.

When Phen-Fen was first banned, I knew of a lot of women that told their doctors that they had ADD just to get half of the prescription. I think the most important thing from this secret is the last sentence, “I didn’t lose any weight.” Neither did any of my friends. They just ended up nervous and shaky and worrying about heart valve problems.

Don’t submit to the pressure of being thin by trying weight loss drugs. Even the ones that get FDA approval have been dangerous in the past. Don’t trust them now.

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.