Stay On Your Toes

After having a discussion with my sister about diet and exercise, I decided to do a post highlighting some of the biggest misconceptions about diet and exercise.

First, lets discuss the whole concept of "dieting". Everybody has a diet, so that means everyone is essentially dieting. Diet is what you eat. When you go on a new diet, you are decidedly changing what you eat to try to cause some sort of change. Some people go on diets to lose weight, others go on diets to gain weight. You can not go on a diet to lose fat nor can you go on a diet to gain muscle. What you eat does not determine how energy is stored or used.

Wait, you say, what do you mean energy? I'm eating food! We all know that food has calories. A calorie is a unit of energy. Humans (and other animals) eat food in order to get the calories it contains. Some food has very little calories, like celery. A cup of diced celery has 19 calories. Some food has a lot of calories, like a chicken burrito from a popular restaurant chain. It has 950 calories. Calories are not bad or good just like watts and volts are not bad or good. Humans tend to prefer those food items with more calories. Unhealthy things often taste good to us because our brain knows it contains a lot of calories. Why? Survival. If cavemen preferred low calorie food, they would not have had enough energy to run from lions and probably would have gotten eaten by them. So now, we still have those preferences, but we are not out running from lions anymore. We are consuming more energy than we need. Not only that, but we are eating processed foods with ingredients that are designed to trick our minds and our bodies. The natural triggers to stop consuming energy are being tampered with. I will go into more depth on that in a later post, first lets just assume that our food is not tricking us.

I am a fairly tall man with a little bit of a belly. According to daily caloric needs calculator, a person my age, height, weight, and exercise level needs to consume an average of 2544 calories a day to maintain my current weight, average 2035 to lose weight gradually, and average 1880 calories for extreme fat loss. First, let me point out a few things about this calculator. One, it's not exact. It asked a few basic questions about me and spit out a number. It is entirely possible that my actual number of calories a day to maintain weight is closer to 2200 or perhaps 2700. Everyone's body operates differently. The only way a person will truly know is by trial and error. For now we'll just assume that its in the right ballpark.  You may have notices that I said "average" in reference to how many calories you take in a day. Humans are experts in adaptation. If you get into a certain eating routine, your body will adapt to it and adjust accordingly. For example, say you decided to try a crash diet and drastically reduce the amount of calories you consume. At first, your body will do what you expect, less calories means less weight so boom, you lose a few pounds and you're really hungry. Then, however, your body starts to make adjustments. It thinks you are starving and that there may be a food shortage, so it slows everything down. The result is that your maintenance number starts to drop and you're still really hungry. So hungry that you cheat on your new crash diet and pig out on a pizza. Guess what? You just ate over your new maintenance amount and now you're on your way to gaining weight again. The best way to avoid having your body adjust a decrease in caloric intake is to vary it up. One day eat 2544, the next eat 10% less, 10% more the next. The idea is to keep your body on your toes.

Not surprisingly, the same goes for exercise. My sister takes an aerobics class three times a week and has been doing so for years now. When she first started, she noticed an immediate difference. She lost some weight and gained some muscle but eventually she hit a wall. Why? Because her body got use to the amount and intensity of exercise she was doing. She thought that switching up her routine would be a good idea, and it generally is, but she switched to a different style of aerobics..at the same intensity. What she probably should have done was either find a harder aerobics class or throw in a different activity like running, biking, or swimming, just as long as is was more intense than the aerobics she was already doing. I suggested that she might start lifting weights and not the 5 pound dumbbells she was using in her aerobics routine. She, like a lot of women I've encountered, was reluctant to give weights a try for fear of bulking up. That's crazy! For one, it is not easy to "bulk up". If it were, every man on earth would look like the Incredible Hulk. Two, women have a natural tendency to not bulk up. Three, many women who bulk up a little after working really hard at it, find that they actually like it. Muscle tends to grow in a way that is very flattering. "But what about those lady bodybuilders? They look weird." Don't worry. You are not going to look like that unless you: work out for at least eight hours a day, five days a week, AND take steroids.

Bottom line: Keep your body on its toes, don't overeat and underwork.

Still At It

For whatever reason, it has been rough getting into a running groove this Spring. Part of the reason is that it's been unseasonable cold and rainy and exceptionally overcast here lately. Not exactly the best environment for getting reacquainted with distance running. I'm going to try to give it another go this evening as part of my workout plan. The muscle-building part of my workout plan comes from this month's Men's Health magazine. It's a 15 minute full body workout. I plan on doing this as a kind of shake-off-the-rust plan until I feel ready to start hitting the weights again.

Cardio:
Couch-to-5k Running Plan Week 2, Day 1:
Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

Adding 5 min. cool down, total time = 30min

Muscle:
Cycle through, doing 10 reps of each and repeat for a total of 15min.
Bodyweight squats
Judo Pushup
Sprinter Situp

Annual Attempt

It finally started to warm up last Saturday and I went for the first run of the season. Because I haven't really done much of anything over the past few months, I decided to take it really slow and do Week 1, Day 1 of the Couch to 5k plan.  Luckily I finished it with no problem and still had gas in the tank after I was done. The only bad part about the run was running into a couple of unfriendly stray dogs. When I came upon them, I immediately stopped, stared at them for a while, and then calmly turned around and walked leisurely in the opposite direction. They followed me for a little bit and then get distracted by another dog that was barking behind a fence. I turned down the next side street just to make sure I lost them.

I decided  to give my legs plenty of rest after the first run and held off going out again until tonight. I will probably stick with the Couch to 5k program for the time being until I think that I can jump ahead a little bit.

Week 1, Day 2
Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes

Hanging On....Barely

It's been hard to get into the swing of things lately. I feel like I had a lot more time to run last year. It's been a busy Spring so far with me taking two classes and work turning into a giant mess on my calendar. Tonight is shot because I leave from work, go straight to class and then stop by an informal b-day celebration for one of my friends. I might be able to squeeze in a short run in-between work and class tomorrow, but then we also have to fit dinner in somewhere.

What should I buy?

I received a $40 gift card to my favorite running store, The Running Spot, from my girlfriend's family this Christmas and I'm itching to spend it. I don't really need shoes right now and I recently stocked up on running apparel like shorts, shirts and pants. The only thing that I don't really have right now is a decent wind breaker, but I do have a couple of old ratty ones that still have some life in them. What should I do...

1. Do nothing. Hold onto the card like a little miser.
2. Put it towards a new windbreaker so I can run in style.
3. By a bunch of smaller items like socks, gels, headbands, etc.

Tax Refund

I filed my taxes using H&R Block online this year. It was relatively painless and took about twenty minutes if you don't count the time it took for me to looks for various pieces of documentation. I don't know why, but there's always at least one stray statement that somehow finds it's way out of the pile where I collect my tax info each year and I spend more time looking for it than I spend filling out my return. I chose to have my federal refund deposited directly into my bank account, which only took about 4 business days. From there, I moved it to the savings account where I'm building my emergency fund. Slowly but surely....

Feelin' Good

Do you ever have those workouts that just feel good? Last night was like that for me. I was able to do the running program with ease and finished with plenty gas in the tank. No side cramps and for some reason I just felt lighter. I also focused on reps rather than weight for my lifting program and am in much less pain today than I was after Monday's workout.

Here's the plan for tonight's session:

Swimming:
50m x 4 at an easy pace with a minute rest in between sets.

Lifting:
Smith Machine Squats 15x?, 12X?

(The ?'s mean I'm not sure what my starting load will be. It's been so long since I've lifted, that I have no idea how weak I've gotten.)