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

The Oatmeal is a great comic that has been around for a long time. He wrote about why he runs here:

• The Oatmeal – The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons I Run Long Distances

His most inspiring entry is about The Blerch:

He wrote:

Marathon runners often describe a phenomenon known as “hitting the wall.” They refer to ‘the wall” as the point in a race when they feel physically and emotionally defeated.

I do not believe in the wall. I believe in The Blerch. The Blerch is a fat little cherub who follows me when I run. He is a wretched, lazy beast. He tells me to slow down, to walk, to quit. (more…)

The SciShow has another great show about what happens when you stop eating:

It might sound great to just be burning fat constantly, but the irritability and the inability to think clearly is horrible. I have enough fat stores that I probably could go for a LONG time without food, but every essence of my body is screaming for it when I’ve tried to fast for more than six hours.

In the end, it’s easier to lose weight by feeding myself small quantities of healthy food every two hours. I drop the pounds like crazy when I do it properly and I rarely feel hungry for longer than a few minutes. Just stopping eating isn’t really an option for me.

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…)

I saw this quote on work sweat achieve. It reads:

The hardest battle you will ever have to fight is between who you are now and who you want to be.

I liked it so much that I made a motivational poster of it with Ali from The Biggest Loser, because she is still so inspiring to me.

I absolutely adore Something Positive and I have been reading the online comic since the beginning so many years ago. Every day, Randy writes some pithy remark in the tiny signature line at the bottom of the comic. Today’s comic is no exception, but it made me think hard about things:

• something positive: Casting Call 10-21-13

It reads,

Nothing like a lot of exercise to make you realize that you’d rather be lazy and dead sooner.

Is that really the choice I make every time I blow off my workout? Why can’t I ever remember that when I am tempted to just skip my exercise for the day?

Our health is the accumulation of every decision we’ve made from birth until now (not counting genetics, which may account for a VAST amount of our health). I need to remember that every time I choose to sit out my workout, I choose to be lazy and die sooner.

Apparently, on Twitter the hashtag #FatShamingWeek is trending and a bunch of really mean tweets are associated with them. I could go on an on talking about this and HAVE in the past. You can read some of those entries here:

• Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People?
• Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? REDUX
• Tired of High-Tech Fat Hatred
• Your Chubby Lass Can Be the Belle of her Class
• The Biggest Loser
• Skinny Bitches
• We hate her

This video from Meghan Tonjes, however, is so succinct that I thought I’d share it with you.

I love her:

You have a right to your opinion and you have a right to express that opinion, but you also, within that bundle of rights, have the right to sound like an asshole. Make jokes about whatever it is that you want to make jokes about, but this goes beyond jokes. This goes to a mindset that people have that it’s okay to make people feel that they’re not worthy of respect or love.

I refuse to entertain the notion that publicly shaming people for being big or fat or anything that makes you uncomfortable is anything but completely demeaning, ignorant and disgusting.

If you’re focusing on tearing people down, it’s because you’re miserable and misery loves company.

THE BEST QUOTE:

It’s no one’s job to defend themselves as being worthy of existence.

Here’s some good advice to all those people who think it’s their job to police other people’s bodies.

You’re making the world WORSE. STOP! Why aren’t you making the world BETTER?! The rest of us are fighting to make this world a little better for everyone else, and you’re slowly just fucking it up!

My thoughts about this issue is that these people are STARVING. When they are so hungry and see someone who is fat, they get jealous, thinking that person is eating everything that they’ve denied themselves and they lash out.

The saddest truth of all is that most of the people who are fat are ALSO starving, trying their hardest to get thin. And when they see thin people, they get angry because they think that those people didn’t have to work to get where they are and lash out, calling them skinny bitches and yelling, “Just eat a sandwich.”

How about this radical idea? How about no one starve themselves? When we feed ourselves properly, there is no starvation and no reason to lash out at anyone.

Via: “#FatShamingWeek” Except congress. Seriously… – Hank’s Tumblr

I love this commercial for Planet Fitness.

Here is the guy version:

I don’t know what “No Lunks” means, but I’m pretty damn familiar with gymtimidation. I really have never recovered from the Bosu Ball Incident. It seems crazy to me that I am still shellshocked from something that happened nearly ten YEARS ago! I just feel like I should just get over it already. I’ve been to other gyms and I’ve even been to other exercise classes, but I have never recovered that LOVE for a gym that was destroyed that day.

And that makes me so very sad…

I don’t think Planet Fitness is really my thing, though… This video shows the top 8.3 reasons to join them.

Here are their reasons:

• Free food: Free pizza, bagels and Tootsie Rolls. REALLY?! What are they thinking?!
• Lots of Exercise Equipment
• The Staff
• PF Express: 30 minute Workout
• Free Unlimited Fitness Training
• Lunk Alarm: An alarm that goes off if you drop the weights loudly or grunt. Here’s a video of it:

• Black Card Membership: Bring a friend or use tanning and massage chairs for free.
• Judgment Free Zone: Regular people, no Barbies and Kens, feel comfortable (but apparently it’s okay to judge juice heads, grunters and gym bunnies, that seems wrong somehow)
• No Commitment Membership: $10 a month

Lunk is a trademarked term coined by Planet Fitness that refers to those ‘roided up gym rats who go around taking about their pump or burn. Or maybe it refers to those bimbos who dress up in cutesy matching gym clothes and wear makeup at the gym. I don’t like those people, but I don’t really think making them the subject of ridicule is the answer.

I don’t really know WHAT the answer is, actually, so maybe these guys are onto something.

I think proper gym etiquette is handled MUCH better with this little video:

Don’t be THAT guy at the gym helps people to know when they’re being irritating to others, but they forgot the Sweater, who is the person who sweats all over the equipment and doesn’t clean up after him/herself.

Easier just to workout at home, but only if I workout at home…

This show is brilliant. It takes away all my hope that I will ever be thin, but it is brilliant.

Here is episode 2:

Episode 3: This episode includes a man who has a tube permanently attached to his stomach where he can eat a full meal and then empty out the eaten food into the toilet. It’s a disgusting medical device for bulimia.

Episode 4:

Via: Fat Head » The Men Who Made Us Thin

That ARThletic Girl posted a couple of images (one of which she drew herself) with the motto: Don’t let comparison steal your joy. This is what she said:

This has recently become my life motto. I find that comparing myself and my life to other people is dangerous for my self esteem. Sometimes it does me some good because it makes me appreciate what I am and what I have, but more often than not it leaves me feeling inadequate and a whole bunch of things I’m most probably not.

First, she posted this one, which is beautiful and simple.

But this one really drives home the point.

I have talked about this issue before on my personal blog:

• Pick Me! – The Girl With The Most Cake

Back then, I said:

Does it matter that I’m not the girl with the MOST cake? Nope. All that matters is that I bring it, every day. Time to put down the cake now.

That was back in 2006 and I really have STILL not recovered from that SXSW trip. I am STILL struggling with bingeing and I haven’t gotten back to the weight that I was on that trip. I am still trying to stuff my face with the most cake, when really what I want is…

What do I want?

Maybe that’s the problem…

For seven LONG years, I have been letting comparison steal my joy and stuffing cake down my gullet to compensate for it. I’m printing up that image and plastering it to EVERYTHING until I get over this.