Update
Got back on the exercise path this past week. Besides all the walking at work, I also started walking in the evening. I found a nice pond with a 1/2 mile sidewalk circling it on some … ahem… ‘private’ property. There’s an industrial park near my hotel, so it’s pretty empty when I get there in the evening.
Oh well, all they’ll do is tell me to leave. Anything else would mean paperwork for someone. I count on the world’s laziness when making marginal decisions.
I picked up a lot of meat and not much in the way of carbs at the store this week. Probably 80% of the dollars were spent on protein. It remains to be seen if it goes into my body in the same proportion.
I’m moving to an apartment from my extended-stay hotel this week. So, I’ll have a fitness center. Hopefully I can be more consistent and get some kind of exercise on those evenings when the legs are too tired from work to go walking.
Tags: diet, exercise, fitnessAdjusting to life in Huntsville
Well, I’m back, none the worse for wear.
I started my new job in Huntsville last week. I’m pretty homesick and missing my family, and yes, there has been some emotional eating. Luckily, this has been offset by a huge increase in physical activity due simply to the size of the plant. The walk from the parking lot to my office takes about 6 minutes, around a 1/4 mile. The cafeteria is on the opposite side of the plant and takes about 5 minutes to reach. Along with normal pit stops and chasing people down for face time, it has all added up to some pretty sore legs and feet. I’m going to need to evaluate getting some new shoes for work soon.
I actually put my gps on some of these walks to get some accurate measurements, and it looks like I get between two and three miles of walking in each day at work. One of my coworkers estimates she gets in 4-5 miles a day. That will probably increase and be more consistent as I ramp up my responsibilities.
I’m also exercising when I get back to my hotel each night. It’s a cheap-o extended-stay place so there’s no fitness center, unless you count holding your breath and sprinting in the hallways to reduce your exposure to the fumes from the meth labs.
Ahem. I keed, I keed..
But, I found a nice pond with a sidewalk circling it, nearby. And I’m doing my core exercises a couple times per week. Unfotunately, I left the scale at home, so it will be a few weeks before I get an update on the weight.
Tags: exercise, fitness, huntsville, life, workWiiFit just around the corner
I’ve written about how I really like the Wii for a substitute exercise from time to time. Yesterday, Diet-Blog posted about the upcoming WiiFit, which promises to extend the exercise and fitness options to Wii owners.
The base games provided with the Wii is the WiiSports package, which includes tennis, boxing, baseball, golf, and bowling. Most are just fun, but boxing will kick your butt, assuming you do it right - actually ‘throw’ punches, bounce, and duck. It’s something I’ll do on a rainy day, or if I get home late and don’t want to go for a walk in the dark. Plus, it’s just different, which helps body and mind.
I wouldn’t want a video game to replace the exercise options for myself or my kids, but having a tool like this to substitute and shake things up from time to time is a big help. Having more options in WiiFit will help even more. Can’t wait for May to get here!
Tags: diet, exercise, fitness, kids, substitute exercise, WiiExercise and Kids: Preparing the brain to learn
This one hit my mailbox this morning: Exercise Seen as Priming Pump for Students’ Academic Strides
Seven or eight years ago, studies offered mixed results on the question of whether exercise can boost brain function in children and adolescents. Experts are beginning to contend, however, that the case is getting stronger.
“There’s sort of no question about it now,” said Dr. John J. Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The exercise itself doesn’t make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn.”…
I see this in myself. When I’m exercising, I find I focus better. I haven’t studied it, but I probably ought to - I have a hobby that requires intense concentration and decision-making, and I saw immediate improvements in the past two weeks. Thinking back two years to when I was exercising every day, I was participating in this hobby successfully with some of the best participants in the world.
A couple of you know my hobby. I prefer not to get into THAT over here - this is my diet and exercise blog.
Reading on:
With his university colleague Darla M. Castelli, Mr. Hillman assessed the physical-fitness levels of 239 3rd and 5th graders from four Illinois elementary schools. Their findings, published last year in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, show that children who got good marks on two measures of physical fitness—those that gauge aerobic fitness and body-mass index—tended also to have higher scores on state exams in reading and mathematics. That relationship also held true regardless of children’s gender or socieconomic differences….
…Another study published last year, involving 163 overweight children in Augusta, Ga., found, in addition, that the cognitive and academic benefits of exercise seemed to increase with the size of the dose.
For that study, a cross-disciplinary research team randomly assigned children to one of three groups. One group received 20 minutes of physical activity every day after school. Another group got a 40-minute daily workout, and the third group got no special exercise sessions.
After 14 weeks, the children who made the greatest improvement, as measured by both a standardized academic test and a test that measured their level of executive function—thinking processes, in other words, that involve planning, organizing, abstract thought, or self-control—were those who spent 40 minutes a day playing tag and taking part in other active games designed by the researchers. The cognitive and academic gains for the 20-minutes-a-day group were half as large.
“I was frankly bowled over by the results,” said Catherine L. Davis, the lead author of the study, a preliminary version of which was published in December in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. “It’s like a staircase, which is considered strong evidence for causation,” added Ms. Davis, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
So, they’re saying that exercise gets the brain ready to learn. What they didn’t say was that exercise made you smarter. Just like buying a pair of dumbbells doesn’t give you big biceps. It just enables those muscles to becoming stronger through consistent work. Sounds like the same is true for the brain - exercise prepares the brain to process information better.
I’m no scientist, but I think they’re on the right track.
Tags: brain, children, diet, exercise, fitness, kids, learningDealing with a tough day
I feel pretty good about how I handled yesterday. I didn’t eat enough calories, again (less than 1200), but I only had two and a half hours sleep the night before. Normally, I’d load up on caffeine and sugar, but I listened to my stomach and not my tired brain.
I’m working towards eating smaller meals more often. What I really like about the food diary at MyFitnessPal is that there are 6 “buckets” for entering meals, rather than just a single list or a breakfast-lunch-dinner breakdown. This is helping me think in 3-hour blocks of time, making sure I get a couple hundred calories every couple hours. I’m also working toward getting my carbs in prior to 6 pm, so this tool is helping me with the mental shift required.
Between the exhaustion and a rainstorm, there was no walking yesterday. I had to pick up the little one from dance on my way home from work, so I stopped at the grocery store and picked up a ready-made chicken caesar salad, swapped the creamy dressing for a fat-free balsamic vinaigrette, and grabbed a pack of protein drinks. Ate in the car while waiting for the class to end. Then it was home and in bed by 8 p.m.
Tags: diet, fitness, food journalGood source of information about fiber-rich foods
You may have noticed that weight loss badge in the sidebar - it’s from myfitnesspal.com, where I’m tracking my diet. I am seeing that I eat too little fiber, so I went on a hunt for a list of fiber-rich foods. Found a good one with a couple dozen foods that you’ll find in a grocery store:
The full chart and article explaining it is at WHFoods.
Tags: diet, fiber, fitness, food journal, tipsMy journey with Sleep Apnea
Just got home from a sleep study, and I am tired.
Like many obese people, I have sleep apnea. I was first diagnosed 8 years ago and sleep wearing a CPAP machine, which provides a continuous column of air to keep my airways open during the night. Last night was a long-overdue follow-up study to determine if any adjustments need to be made.
Because it had been so long, they had to re-baseline me, meaning they had to do a “split-study”. During a split-study, they make you go to sleep without any machines and measure your sleep interruptions. I could not stay asleep. I’d grown so accustomed to sleeping with a CPAP that I felt the way other people might feel trying to sleep with the lights on and music blaring.
Even with the fractured sleep, they managed to measure enough sleep interruptions to warrant the second half of the study, measuring my sleep interruptions with their CPAP. The purpose is to determine the appropriate settings for my machine. Had I not had at 30 interruptions in two hours of sleep, I would not have taken the second half of the study.
It will be several weeks before the results are analyzed and any adjustments made. The first time I went through the study, I was measured with 114 interruptions per hour, or one about every 40 seconds. Obviously, this was considered very severe, and there was an immediate improvement in some aspects of my health once I started sleeping with a CPAP:
- More energy.
- Better memory.
- Less cravings for sugar and caffeine.
- Complete elimination of daytime sleepiness.
In the past year, I’ve noticed more sleepiness in the afternoon. I try to combat this with sugar and caffeine, which exacerbates my weight problem. I’ve also noticed that I’m forgetting details at work. My wife also told me I’ve started snoring again, even with the CPAP. For these reasons, I felt it was time to get checked out again.
So, even though I’m fairly miserable from last night’s lack of quality sleep, I feel good about getting the information I’ll need to take care of my apnea. Hopefully, I’ll see the same results this around.
Tags: CPAP, fitness, sleep apneaHow do we diet during the holidays?
iVillage UK has some common sense diet tips. We all know a lot of these, but it doesn’t hurt to review from time to time, especially a few weeks into a diet when focus and discipline begin to wane:
- Plan Ahead (I’m not doing a good job with this.)
- Choose wisely
- Drink a glass of water
- Sugar free gum (I’ve not tried this - has anyone tried gum? Perhaps just to have that chewing sensation?)
- Stock up on dried fruits (You favorites?)
- Out of sight, out of mind
- Watch the alcohol
- Be ruthless
- Make your own
- Don’t waste calories
Really, these are great tips as you head into the holiday season - Halloween, Thanksgiving, and all of those Christmas parties. Planning and discipline will be the key to getting all of us through this time.
Tags: diet, fitness, tipsWhere do I go from here?
Now that the walking is out for the next 3 to 6 weeks, I need to come up with other hundred day head start challenges. Because that’s the POINT of all this, isn’t it? Not waiting until after some event or date to get started improving my health?
There are still things I can do. For one, I can pay MUCH closer attention to what goes into my mouth. I popped over to myfitnesspal.com, a website I wrote about on myother diet blog a few weeks ago. After plugging in my height, weight, goals, etc, it gave a recommendation of 1890 calories/day to reach my weight loss goal of 2 lbs/week, along with exercising every day for at least 20 minutes.
So, here are the new challenges:
1. For the next 100 days, I will not eat more than 2,000 calories/day, and will average below 1,890 by the 100th day.
2. I will exercise every day for 20 minutes, minimum, for the next 100 days.
How will I exercise? Obviously, for the first couple of weeks I will be limited to exercises that don’t require me to bear weight on my right foot. That leaves a whole bunch of upper body and core strength exercises. Here’s a starter list, to which I will be adding:
- Chick-pushups (on my knees - I know it’s a sexist name, but my gym teacher used a much more graphic term, so live with it)
- Crunches - a whole variety of standard and raised-leg crunches.
- Block-hauling - tie a rope to a cinder block, then sit down and drag it in to you. I can also spin around and pull it over my shoulders.
- Supermans
- Leg lifts - variety of 6-inch and scissors
- Leg extensions - on back and on all fours
- Bridge form knees
- Chair March
- Balanced twist - site on but with legs in the air and back at 45 degree angle, then swing arms from side to side slowly.
Alot of stuff comes from my past experience, but some of it also comes from Ron Jones bodyweight exercise site. If you are a beginner, or have physical modifications, this is a great resource. Tons of exercises, and many can be modified around limitations.
I’m going to try to keep track of what I do and how long I do it and post the results here for accountability.
Tags: ankle brace, diet, exercise, fitness, InjuryY’all ain’t gonna believe this…
Out walking Saturday evening, ’round about twilight, and stepped on a rock, in a hole, on the gravel road to my house. Rolled the ankle. Severe sprain, much pain and swelling.
This ankle has been a problem for me since I was 18 yrs old, and in fact was a direct contributor to the end of my competitive running. I first rolled it while home from Vanderbilt for Thanksgiving, where I had a NROTC scholarship while running as a walk-on for the cross country team. So, that was over.
I suspect that was actually a broken ankle that went undiagnosed since I just went to a chiropractor for treatment. Anyway, I wound up with 3 more severe sprains and one diagnosed break of the same ankle over the next 10 yrs. I’ve been relatively un-clumsy for the last 15 yrs or so, until Saturday night.
Gloom, despair, and agony on me,
Deep dark depression, excessive misery,
If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all,
Gloom, despair, and agony on me.
Later today, I expect to be back with a few idea I have for some different hundred day head starts that will hopefully achieve the same goal. weight loss and fitness.
Tags: fitness