Small Step Forward

Every so often I have talked about the things I do to try and get into some routine of exercising.  Unfortunately for various reasons, I don't stick with them.  Life tends to get in the way, with things such as events taking place after work or emergency surgery putting me off of my routines.  Of course, it is harder to pick it back up afterward.  Clearly, with the number of failures I have had, a new approach is needed.

I think one reason I do end up falling out of a routine is that I, like most people, try to do too much at once.  Plus then I get this fantasy of being able to do all of this stuff and make all of these changes in a short amount of time, and when it doesn't happen, I subconsciously say "fuck it."  I really can't say that because I should exercise.  I need to do it for health reasons, and I know if I want to continue to be my sexy self, I am going to have to make sure to put the work in.

So this time around, I'm going to start on a smaller scale.  On Tuesday nights when I have gone up to Columbia to hang with friends, it became a routine after the place closed that JG and I would start walking laps around the parking lot.  I am taking that and expanding it into something that I do as soon as I get home from work, but instead of driving up to Columbia, I walk around my neighborhood.  So far it seems to be working, I found a route that is a bit over two miles and that is not entirely flat.  I'll probably make changes and walk other places as I see fit.  

The plan is that I would like to get myself into a routine of exercising after work.  Eventually I'd like to make it a run, and go further.  Once I am sticking with this for a few months, and it turns brutally cold outside, then I can look into investing going into the gym behind my apartment.

Another line of thought is if I worked on getting myself to bed earlier in the evenings and got up early in the morning, I could hit the gym for a few minutes, come home, get cleaned up and ready, and still hit my bus.  Of course, to do that means breaking years of being a night owl, that could take some time.

I also am taking note of my diet more, and being conscious of how much I am eating.  I've debated going back to one of my more extreme measures of doing a completely raw food meal, but I may save that one for a last resort.  I did it about a year and a half ago, and while it did work well at the time, I am just not ready to invest my time in it again.  Besides, I went from the smoothies I was drinking then, to having oatmeal with honey in the morning, which is already fairly healthy, at least for me.

If I start with this, I can stick with it.

Sweet, It's Working

JH took one look at me the other night and said "Your belly is getting smaller."

I took a look in the mirror and I can see he's right. I notice the love handles are smaller than what they were a year or so ago. It looks to me that the investment in the ab workout DVD's are paying off at this point.

What I'm most proud of is that I am accomplishing this through good old-fashioned diet and exercise. No surgery, no pills, and certainly not one of the trendy diets that are out there. I have many good reasons for wanting to get in the habit of a healthy diet and plenty of exercise. The biggest one is for my overall health, especially with the family history of high cholesterol. Last year was a small reminder that it could happen to me when I tested with good overall cholesterol, but low HDL "good" cholesterol" and high triglycerides. The last thing I want to have to do is take drugs to control the cholesterol and destroy my liver in the process so it's all about the lifestyle changes.

There is one place where I will give myself credit, I've basically stayed within my same weight range since high school, between 180-190 lbs. I want to keep it that way, at least in terms of that if I do gain more weight, it's because I gain muscle and not fat.

Between this and the biking, I should be one healthy person by the end of this summer, provided the heat and humidity don't attempt to kill me later on. Thanks to a screaming deal on woot.com, I now own a heart rate monitor, so I can track just how I'm doing.

Back into Routine

This writing is more for my benefit. I admit that I have fallen off the wagon a bit when it comes to the food changes and exercise. I could sit here and beat myself up over it, but that will be counterproductive to actually getting back to where I should be. Besides, I've already dealt with the twinge of guilt I've been feeling for being lazy.

It's mostly the exercise where I have fallen off, for a while it was too cold to go running or biking, and so I moved indoors, but then somewhere along the way I just fell out of habit. Part of it was not changing things up enough, and part of it was allowing me to be distracted by other stuff, such as deciding to watch a movie.

It was good of me to ride my bike yesterday, yeah I was out of breath, but I felt good overall, and there was a pleasure in knowing that I was offsetting some of the calories from the food I was going to consume later at the Superbowl party. That's what I need to focus on, that I can offset what I eat during the day. Of course, that doesn't mean I can just pig out on junk either ;-) I have started reading nutrition labels and ingredient lists closely to decide on what to purchase and how much to have. I think if I were to step on a scale, I would basically be maintaining my weight. Of course the real number I want to check on is whether I have been dropping body fat. The health unit at work is doing the analysis next week, I think I'll schedule myself to go down there.

My ultimate goal is to find that I have improved my triglyceride numbers. I'll know that sometime in April. I just need to stick with this, and I know I can. Once I can make exercise a habit, then I'll join a gym, but not before then.

More young adults on cholesterol drugs

Article Link

Just from reading this article, the first reaction I have is to think "Shouldn't the doctors be telling them to quit eating a cheeseburger, get their fat ass off of the couch, and take a run around the block, and I don't around down to the local Krispy Kreme either" However, one who knows me could also argue that I am a hypocrite for saying that, because I may end up as one of those young people who ends up on those drugs, as much as I hate the idea.

On my father's side of the family, a condition known as Hyperlipidemia type IIb occurs in many of the members. In our case, it's a genetic condition that results in our liver producing too much cholesterol and triglycerides. If it is not controlled, most members died of a massive heart attack in their early 50's. Unfortunately since my father has it, it means I could end up having it as well. It has meant for me that now every year I get bloodwork done to check my levels to make sure I am okay. Last April I had it done and while my overall cholesterol was fine, my triglycerides were high and so was my LDL cholesterol. They weren't high by much, but it was enough for me to notice. However, instead of demanding drugs as a quick fix, I decided I was going to make lifestyle changes. As it is, this reading does not mean I have Hyperlipidemia, there are other factors that could have created the high result.

My dietary habits had become awful over the last two years. I could easily go into a page or two of what went wrong, but it's completely off the subject. When I started dating Joshua he started pushing me towards some better eating habits, which I found made things easier for me to change. Weeks later, I was on IM with Brian and he basically said that he was looking to change his diet because he knew his was not that great either, so we started giving one another feedback on things we had read and things we had tried, and it seems to have worked for the both of us. I have dropped from a 34 inch waist to about a 32-33 inch waist, so that's real progress for me. I was shocked when I realized that on a belt Joshua had given me that I had gone from the third notch to the fifth notch.

So, I am going to continue to watch my diet carefully and start to push up my exercise more, and hopefully the next time I get my bloodwork done, my levels will be more normal. Maybe I will have lucked out and dodged a bullet genetically, but that doesn't give me an excuse to become a fatass either.

Oh, and also, that article doesn't mention the downside to a lot of those cholesterol drugs, which are that they will screw with your liver and even your pancreas, putting you at risk for even worse problems (Diabetes anyone?). That is especially the reason why I do not ever want to go on these drugs, if I do have a problem and I can control it by diet, I'd rather make the effort to control it that way than to just think I can take a pill and make it "go away." I have the discipline to be able to do things the right way.

Food thoughts

I came to a realization today in regard to my previous diet and how I am trying to change things now.

One thing I was doing wrong in one sense was that I had gotten into a long time habit of making only the main course of a meal and eating that, and never pairing any side dishes with it. Since the main dish tends to be the dish that most people (myself included) make that has more of the calories, fats, and other stuff, I would end up eating more of that, and therefore create an imbalance when it came to my nutrition.

A good example would be the turkey feta burgers I created tonight, in the past I would eat only the burgers and I would eat two to three of them. So of course I get plenty of protein, but I also get a bit more fat and calories than I should be eating for just this one meal. So tonight besides the burgers I had a bowl of some steamed corn, and it turned out that I only needed to cook and eat one burger and I was full enough. So not only did I cut calories, I got more nutrition out of the meal as well.

I find that I still think about getting some fast food, but now I really think about if there is something better I could make at home. I was picking up some boxes from a friend tonight and nearby is a Wendys, well I kept thinking that maybe I would go there, but I found myself driving on past and thinking to myself that it would be better to just get something at home. Now because I am getting ready to move and I have packed all of my cooking stuff, it does provide more of a temptation to just eat bad stuff, but I am determined to stick out as much of my lifestyle changing as I can this week.

It's All A Mental Game

It's amazing how much discipline I can have for myself. It gets easier and easier to think towards the goal of eating better. I'm being realistic about just what it is that I want to do.

I'm not just making a goal that I am losing weight. It's broad and unrealistic, especially if I am going to measure just by how much I weigh. We hear over and over again that your weight will go down then up if you exercise because you drop fat and then start gaining muscle. So my more realistic goal is that I want to drop body fat. Currently I sit at 20%, which isn't terrible, but it's not great either, especially because I have risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. I would like to get it down to 15%, which is about what an athletic man should be at.

I find that I am not craving sugar as much as I used to. That was actually something I used to do when I was younger was cut back on the sugar (sodas especially) and I would drop off some of the weight. Well I'm combining that with eating a lower fat diet, and I find that mentally I'm not trying to reach for the cookies, cake, and other sweet stuff. I still crave sometimes after a meal, but a stick of sugar free Orbit gum takes care of it. Anything to trick the body a bit, and I get fresh breath as well, it's a win-win.

I whipped up a great stir fry last night, I took some cooked chicken and threw it into the wok with green peppers, green onions, bean sprouts, some cilantro, and salsa. It was great, especially wrapped up in a tortilla. For a side dish I had some Mac n Cheese. I'm not totally beating myself up over eating the mac and cheese, simply because I treated it like a side dish and did not eat the whole box like I would in the past. I even had some for lunch today, and there's enough leftover for another meal.

That's the one thing that's going to suck about being in the new apartment, the stove is electric, and my wok is for a gas stove. Maybe I'll have to find someone nearby that I can have dinner with often. I do have a propane gas burner that was supposed to be used with a turkey fryer, but obviously I can't use it inside nor anywhere near my apartment.

Besides the nutrition, I am saving money because I'm not eating out as much as I used to. I have started tracking my expenses by using Wesabe. It's easy to put my bank transactions into the system, and I can tag the transactions to see where they're going. They also let you set goals, so I actually have a goal about spending less than $50 a month on eating out, and a goal to spend less than $20 a month in the cafeteria here at work. So far I'm doing well towards meeting those goals.

There's more to say, but this has gone on long enough so I'll leave it here for the moment.

Healthy Snacks...Or Are They?

This Tuesday's Health section of the Washington Post had an article about snacks that they tested on kids that were only 100 calories. The results that came about were interesting, though there are a few other questions raised from these results.

The one thing it ultimately comes down to is that everyone has different tastes and they're going to like different things. Many of the kids didn't care for the hummus, but it's something that I would eat. Looking at some of the portions, they also aren't much for me, but at least these are good suggestions. Then again, is it really going to hurt if you have 150 calories instead of 100? As long as you're not snacking every hour, you will be fine.

I would also be curious to see how some of these items ranked nutritionally. Of course, maybe I'm over analyzing that because again, a few cookies aren't going to hurt you, but a few cookies every hour every day will.

At least it's a guide to things I can look for to eat. I notice that already because I am becoming more aware that I'm starting to avoid the things I really don't need to be eating. At work today they brought up a bunch of leftover donuts from a workshop that had finished, and my immediate thought proces was "I would like a donut, but I don't need a donut" which was true, considering it was just after lunch and who really needs to be eating pure sugar when they're going to be sitting most of the afternoon?

The cravings for some of the worst foods also seem to be going away as well, which is a good thing.

Changing Habits

I got into some really bad dietary habits in the last 2 years, well for once, no more, I'm not doing that again to myself. I've been getting away from eating out lately, and reading the nutrition labels more so that I can figure out what's decent for me. This is what I have figured out so far:

1. Reduced fat can be a myth because often the manufacturers reduce the portion size. I did a comparison of reduced fat Cheez-Its vs Food Lion Cheese Crackers. While the reduced fat Cheez-it's were about 5 percent less in fat compared to Food Lion, their serving size was 27 crackers, while Food Lion's was 32 crackers. So that's about a 19% difference in serving size, and so the reduced fat savings are much less because you have to eat less crackers to achieve that value.

1a. Try to measure out your portions when it comes to snacking. Yes, I have sat and counted out 32 cheese crackers into a bowl and then put the box away so I don't overindulge.

2. Even if making your own versions of popular foods are about the same cost or nutrition value, you can avoid a lot of chemicals and crap in the processed food. Joshua got me hooked on mixing some strawberry preserves into plain yogurt since it makes a good strawberry yogurt. Well in making a comparison using Food Lion Non-fat Plain Yogurt and Food Lion Strawberry Preserves vs Food Lion Non-fat Strawberry Yogurt, nutritionally their serving sizes together are about the same, and the cost is about the same. However, in making my own yogurt, I am basically eating cultured milk, strawberries, high fructose corn syrup (okay so that's bad), sugar, pectin, and citric acid. If I ate the Food Lion Strawberry Yogurt, besides the above ingredients, I'd get a number of chemicals, dyes, and preservatives. Mmmmm, algae or crushed beetles anyone?

3. It's really easy to get decent food and shave off the fat. Case in point is Bush's Vegetarian Baked Beans. They taste great and have no fat, plus they have lots of fiber, which is good for cholesterol. The one problem, it's a bit high in sugar, so not so great for those prone to diabetes.

4. Nayonnaise mixes great with tuna fish, including the fat free version. So you can make a completely fat free tuna fish sandwich if you combine it with a fat free bread. Throw a little hot sauce in the stuff and you've got a great lunch.

I'm sure I'll have more as time goes on, but it's a good start. I'm already developing a better mentality about how to handle myself nutritionally. I'm teaching myself how to take care of my cravings. I can tell I must be doing something right for my body because now I'm craving the worst stuff, yet I'm not touching it right now. Sure I do occasionally indulge, but now it's more of a treat than just a regular meal. Did I make and eat some rice krispies treats? Sure, but I did stretch it out for a few days, and I haven't eaten any for a couple of years, so it was a special treat.

I also do have the occasional bad moment, last night I was starving after getting home from rehearsal, despite having eaten dinner beforehand, and I had cheddar cheese and crackers. That's not something I should be eating, but oh well, as long as I don't start eating it every day. Still, tonight I whipped up some tuna and nayonnaise and had that on crackers...much better for me.