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

I watched a couple of videos last week that really inspired me to eat healthy and exercise right now.

The first video is a talk by Alan Russell about medicine and the upcoming methods of making our bodies healthy again with regenerative medicine.

He said:

The richer we are, the longer we live. The older our population, the more expensive the diseases are to treat.

Diabetes is a debilitating disease. Why can’t we inject the pancreas with something that regenerates the pancreas and cures Diabetes?

We are learning how to switch on feature that our bodies could do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb in the first trimester of pregnancy, will regrow that limb. Our DNA has the capacity to do these sort of wound healing mechanisms.

In the future, medicine will be able to regenerate our bodies. This talk from Aubrey de Grey about how medicine could eventually get to the point where we could actually live forever.

It’s VERY important that we take the BEST care of our bodies now so that we can be the people who are able to take advantage of these technologies when they finally become available to all of us.

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Here is an interesting talk from Ann Cooper, The Renegade Lunch Lady, from Berkley, California.

She says:

We are feeding our kids to death.

The USDA cannot be the be all and end all of what we feed our kids. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart.

We are responsible, but big companies are ALSO responsible for what kids eat.

We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts is not breakfast. If they eat a diet of sugar, then they’ll go up and down like a crack addict.

We have to teach people to cook again.

One gourmet coffee costs more than what we spend on school lunch for kids for a WEEK.

She talks about the Farm to School Project. Here is a link to them to see if they are in your area.

• FarmToSchool.org Home Page

Here is her list of food guidelines for her school district:

Chef Ann Cooper : Food Guidelines

1. Made delicious, nutritious, seasonal and sustainable food a priority
2. Elimination of trans-fats and High Fructose Corn syrup as well as reduced and or eliminated where possible refined sugars and refined flours
3. Cooking non-processed foods from scratch while, eliminating all highly processed menu items
4. Salad Bars with a majority of fresh items in every school
5. Universal Breakfast at every school
6. Fresh fruits and vegetables served every day
7. Antibiotic and Hormone free or Organic milk served daily
8. Elimination of Chocolate milk & desserts
9. All hamburgers and hotdogs are hormone and antibiotic free as well as grass finished
10. Segued to whole wheat or whole grain bread and baked products
11. Segued from pre-packed lunches to buffet style service
12. All recipes in a data-base that tracks nutrition and will track costs
13. Purchasing with a high priority on local, regional and organic foods, as well as foods purchased from small local companies.
14. Swipe Card System installed at every school except B-Tech
15. Financial systems in place to ensure “real-time” accounting
16. Computerized purchasing system in place to ensure best practices in procurement, and the adoption of a Board Policy that allows for local procurement
17. New job descriptions to allow for skilled staff, and Executive Chef and Sous Chef positions added to ensure staff training
18. Reorganization of departments which made CNN part of Nutrition Services
19. Purchased refrigeration and heating equipment for all cafeterias to ensure safe food handling of non-processed foods
20. Worked toward implementation of the dining commons for student meals and as a Central Kitchen for the Middle & High Schools, as well as remodeling of the Central Kitchen

I just found a new webcomic that looks promising. It certainly started out with a bang. Edmund Finney met some aliens on his search for the meaning of life.

• EQComics » Archive » Welcome!

Why are the aliens a little pudgier than we normally envision them? What consists of their very filling diet? Click on the comic to see!

Thank you, D. Long for the fun look at Edmund and his search for the meaning of life.

I loved this BRILLIANT speech by Joachim de Posada at the Ted Conference. This video is less than six minutes long and worth every second, especially the funny clips of four year old children trying their best not to eat a marshmallow.

A study at Stanford put four year old children alone in a room with a marshmallow. They were told that if they could last fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, then they would get to keep it to eat and get ANOTHER one. Two out of three children ate the marshmallow the second the door was closed. One out of three children were able to wait the fifteen minutes in order to get the double reward.

Fourteen years later, Stanford tracked down the children from this study and rated their success at school and socially. The children who were able to last the fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow were FAR more successful in life than the others. They were able to delay gratification to get a better reward.

Delaying gratification is what eating healthy and exercising is all about. We are willing to eat simple and healthy food and sweat a little bit every day so that we can get the better reward of being healthy, slim and strong.

The next time you’re tempted to eat something that you know isn’t healthy for you, think about Joachim de Posada. The next time you’re thinking about blowing off your daily workout, remember that little girl who ate the middle out of the marshmallow to make the researcher think that she hadn’t eaten it. The only way to have a svelte and strong body is to do the things that svelte and strong people do.

Don’t eat the marshmallow. You deserve so much more.

I just saw this commercial for Pepsi Throwback.

The reason why this soda is supposed to be better than normal Pepsi is because it is made with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. They aren’t saying that it’s healthier than normal Pepsi, but there are a lot of people out there who believe it is:

• WikiAnswers – Is sugar healthier than high fructose corn syrup?

Yes, sugar is made up of glucose, which is easier to digest and metabolize. High fructose corn syrup has been altered to increase the fructose and decrease the glucose. The body doesn’t metabolize fructose as easily as glucose; it metabolizes it more like fat. The natural fructose in fruit is counterbalanced by the fiber but this is generally not present in foods with high fructose corn syrup. For this reason the blood sugar level goes much higher, especially if drinking high fructose corn syrup. This can lead to obesity, diabetes and poor digestion.

Authors: Heather Basciano, Lisa Federico and Khosrow Adeli of the Clinical Biochemistry Division, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Published in the journal: “Nutrition & Metabolism”, February 21, 2005.

In the end, however, it all comes down to calories. There are EXACTLY the same amount of calories in a Pepsi Throwback as there are in a regular old Pepsi. Some people might think it tastes better than HCFS, but you can’t get me to believe that 100 calories of regular soda is going to make me fatter than 100 calories of cane sugar soda.

Via: Go Retro!: Throw Back Some Pepsi Throwback

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Yesterday, I talked about The Digital Diet, which is changing your photographs so that you look slimmer. I stated that this technique isn’t a good idea because it clouds our view of reality. If we can’t accept how our bodies are right now, then how can we change them?

But sometimes, we NEED to cloud our view of reality.

Sometimes we can’t remember what it was like to be thin, or in my case, I didn’t ever feel thin, even when I was. In that case, I needed a photograph to tell me what I was shooting for. I needed something to use for visualization for a goal. Now, I could have used an old photograph of myself and slimmed it down using the Digital Diet techniques, but there is another way to create a goal photo and that’s Face Swapping.

This video gives you an example of how face swapping can be done using Photoshop. I suggest you mute the volume unless you like The Beastie Boys.

That video looks great, but it isn’t a very good tutorial. Here are two videos that are GREAT tutorials, but their finished effects weren’t that spectacular.

I used the techniques in the Tom Cruise/Jennifer Aniston video to make this photo of myself. I look at it for a couple of minutes every night before I go to sleep to visualize my perfect body and how I’ll feel when I’m physically fit.

I’m actually incredibly embarrassed to show my goal photograph here. I’ve used this particular one for a few months without mentioning anything here on Starling Fitness, but having something to work toward is really helpful to me. I’m actually MORE embarrassed to show this photo than to show my before pictures. I’ve never gotten to goal, so this photograph gives me an idea of what it will be like to be thin (and about five inches taller).

Using Photoshop techniques to give yourself a Digital Diet is a double edged sword. It can be kind of bad if you are using it for family photos to change history and further keep your head in the sand about your health and fitness. It can, however, be an amazingly powerful tool to help you visualize what you want from all this exercise and healthy eating.

Use your Photoshop Skillz wisely.

Update 05-29-09 3:09 pm: Braidwood has written an excellent entry in response to this one:

• Photoshop Yourself Thinner | Authentic Threads

If you don’t own Photoshop and don’t want to pay the $600 price tag for it, there is a great open source program available that can do almost as much as Photoshop for FREE. You can download it here:

• GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

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Long ago, I wrote about making yourself look thinner with Photoshop techniques.

• Starling Fitness – Make Yourself Thinner With Software

Back then, I said:

In the end, there is no software that can make you look better. You have to do the work to look better. I have never had a better photo taken of me than the quick clicks of friends when I am healthy and strong.

It looks like photography websites are eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of making their subjects look thinner using this technique. Here is a video showing photographers how to make their clients look a little bit thinner in their photos using the Transform Tool in Photoshop. If you are using GIMP, use the Scale Image tool.

There is also a way to do something similar to this using the Liquify Tool. If you are using GIMP, use the iWarp tool. Here is a video tutorial showing those techniques as well.

I think that minor manipulation of photos like this is just a way for us to fool ourselves into not seeing our true selves. Until we are willing to look at our bodies and accept the way they are RIGHT NOW, it’s impossible for us to make the appropriate decisions to change it. If you accept your body the way it is and love it, that’s great! If you accept your body the way it is and want to change it, that’s great, as well. The first thing you have to do, however, is ACCEPT your body the way it is.

There is one exception to this thought and I will talk about that tomorrow.

Via: Pioneer Woman Photography – Ree Drummond

If you don’t own Photoshop and don’t want to pay the $600 price tag for it, there is a great open source program available that can do almost as much as Photoshop for FREE. You can download it here:

• GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

Update 06-25-09: I’ve found another good tutorial that really gives you a clear idea of how to do this: