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May
31
Yay! 30 subscriptions!
Filed Under Announcement, Web Site | 4 Comments
I just added my little feedburner count at the top left and noticed that I now have 30 subscribers. Thank you all very much for reading this blog. I never expected a big crowd, but I was hoping to build a little community where we could exchange health tips and fitness advice. If you would like to comment on any of my articles or send me questions, please feel free. My contact info is in the contact form and I always enjoy talking to readers and other fitness minded people.
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May
31
Healthy Eating Habits, Part 4 - Stop drinking your calories
Filed Under Eating Healthy, Health, Weight Loss | 4 Comments
We’re going through some healthy eating habits this week. Today’s topic is something we’ve already discussed in the past, liquid calories.
Liquid calories
When I first started changing my eating habits, I took a week to measure my calorie intake. I wrote down everything I ate in a little notebook. I put it all in there, from the biggest lunch to the smallest snack. I even included the vitamin supplement I was taking with its zero calories.
At the end of the week, I added everything up and calculated my average daily calories. They came out to about 3000. That’s high, but it’s not that high. For a man in his late 20’s, who is physically active and is around 5′11″, 3000 calories is going to add some fat, but it’s not going to make you obese. Yet here I was, 90lbs overweight and not losing anything.
I was a bit frustrated. Why was I overweight when clearly my diet indicated that I was doing reasonably well. So I did more research online and found an article about sodas juices and other sources of liquid calories. Turns out, I had completely ignored these. For some reason, I thought of these as water substitutes which therefore had no calories.
Simple math
So then I started writing down my liquid calories. Here’s a small sample:
- Lunch - Glass of coke with two refills. That’s about 315 calories.
- Afternoon - Two cans of Nestea ice tea. That’s about 180 calories.
- Evening - One giant big gulp from 7-11 full of coke or Mountain Dew. About 400 calories.
LIST 1
Now let’s do the math. That’s 900 calories a day or 6300 calories a week. In other words, I was drinking an extra two lbs of fat every week and not even noticing it. Even worse, these are completely empty liquid calories. My body does not consider these food, so even if I fill it up with these calories, it still tells me I’m hungry. The 315 calories I drank with lunch did nothing for my satiety. I still felt as hungry as if I had drank water.
More bad choices
Coffee, fruit juices and some teas are just as bad. That mocha frappuccino you had at Starbucks this morning? It had somewhere between 200 and 300 calories and possibly as high as 500 calories. That delicious fruit juice you had at Jamba juice at lunch? Somewhere between 200 and 400 calories depending on the size you picked and possibly as high as 600 if you went with a smoothie rather than a juice. Check out these links for more information:
By the way, I don’t mean to pick out these two companies. All juices and coffees are essentially the same. So don’t run out to Peet’s coffee thinking that you’re getting a healthier choice. The healthiest choice you can make is to simply avoid drinking calories.
Summary
If you’re thirsty, drink water. Water is still the best option when it comes to liquids. If you can’t stay away from nonwater drinks, at least be aware of the number of calories you’re consuming. These are calories you will need to keep in mind when you’re looking at your overall daily goals.
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May
30
This special edition of 60 in 3 is brought to you from El Camino Hospital where I’m sitting waiting for my fiancé to get out of surgery. Just a minor procedure, in and out in under two hours we hope, although it’s been an hour so far and she hasn’t even seen the doctor yet. Anyway, we’re talking about healthy eating habits this week, so let’s find one more thing I used to do which was really bad.
Childhood advice
Do you remember what your mom told you when you were little? Well, besides “clean your room” and “wash your hands” that is. Go back to when you were at the dinner table and your mother (or your dad) would give you some advice about your meal. You’d hear “eat your vegetables” a lot, but you’d also hear the following “clean your plate, there are kids in
Unfortunately, things that were good when you were young, are no longer so beneficial to an adult. When you were a child, your parents controlled the size of your portions. Hopefully, they made sure you were eating kid sized meals. As an adult, you’re cooking for yourself and eating out a lot. Home cooking gives you a bit of control over portion size, but restaurants do not. When you’re at a restaurant, you receive whatever amount of food the restaurant sees fit to serve you with.
That wouldn’t be an issue if restaurants tried to serve healthy meals, but here in the
Why do they do it?
Why do restaurants serve such unhealthy food in large quantities? Well, because it’s cheap and draws people in. As consumers, we’re drawn to places that provide us with a good deal, and a restaurant that gives us a lot of food for our money seems like a good deal. Unfortunately, it’s not a good deal for our health. Restaurant food is bad enough due to its quality and high reliance on fat, it gets even worse when you consume too much of it.
The solution
Here’s the easy way to avoid it. Use yesterday’s tip of eating slower. Make sure to drink plenty of water as you eat. Then, when you get about half way through your grand slam dinner, stop. It’s that easy. Stop eating and ask the waiter to box up your food. It sounds easy but it’s actually relatively hard. That childhood advice you’re your parents is now an ingrained habit. You’ve been taught to finish the food on your plate and it’s difficult to change your ways now. So think of it this way. You’re still finishing your food, you’re still getting a good deal and no food is going to waste. You’re just spreading out this good deal over two meals instead of one. In fact, you’re getting an even better deal out of it since you just got two meals for the price of one.
If you’re eating at home, serve your food on smaller plates. The plate will still look full but you’ll be consuming less food per serving. When you’re finished with a plate of food, wait. Don’t immediately go back for seconds. Remember, it takes your stomach a while before it can tell your brain that you’re full. So give your body time to talk to you. 20 to 30 minutes later, if you’re still feeling hungry then eat a small portion. If you’re not feeling hungry, you shouldn’t be eating.
Summary
You’re not a kid anymore and you’re not dealing with kid sized portions. You do not have to finish everything on your plate. You don’t have to finish everything you prepared. You’re much better off saving some for later. If you can’t save it for later, you’re still better off not eating some of it. That extra food is not a bargain, it’s extra calories you don’t need.
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May
29
Healthy Eating Habits, Part 2 - Slow and steady wins the race
Filed Under Eating Healthy | 2 Comments
We’re discussing healthy eating habits this week, and using me as an example of things not to do 
So in the spirit of learning from my own mistakes, here’s another simple habit you should try to pick up.
Until the age of 7, my father had me convinced that my stomach was divided into compartments. Each of these compartments was dedicated to a different kind of food and there was a whole crew of people down there who sorted out the food and put it into the right compartments. I have no clue where this story came from, but I believed it.
Oddly enough, this little story ended up shaping my eating habits. To this day I still don’t mix the food on my plate and eat each component separately. However, there was one unhealthy eating habit that I’ve tried to change, and it brings us to today’s tip.
Eat slow
Yep, that’s it. That’s the whole tip. Sounds a little meaningless, but it can have a huge impact on your waistline. You see, our bodies and don’t communicate very well. In many cases, the communication is slow and hard to understand. That’s especially true of hunger and satiety signals.
When we eat, our body signals us when we’re full. Our stomach tells us “no more!” Unfortunately, our stomach’s communication methods are not the best or the fastest. So it takes a little bit before those signals reach our brain. In fact, it takes an average of 20 minutes between our stomach being full and our brain knowing about it. You can consume a lot of extra calories that you didn’t really need in those 20 minutes.
Back to personal history
Even after I outgrew the compartment story, I still loved eating fast. I ate so fast, my friends used to joke that I didn’t even chew my food. If we went out to eat, I would be done before anyone else and then of course I would order seconds. At a buffet, I was working on my third plate while most people were still clearing their first.
Problem solved
These days I slowed down a bit. I take smaller bites, I chew a bit more and I actually enjoy my food more. I’ve also realized that pausing every few bites and taking a drink of water will fill me up in a healthy way. I feel just as full as I used to when I would quickly gorge at the buffet, but I’m eating a lot less. I’m giving my stomach the time it needs to tell my brain “stop!”
So put down your fork, or that giant burrito, and take a break. Stop for a minute and give your body a chance to catch up and communicate with you. Take a drink of water, talk to whoever is with you. If you can, do that after each small bite. You’ll find yourself becoming full after a lot less food than usual.
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May
28
Healthy Eating Habits, Part 1 - Many small meals are better than one big meal
Filed Under Eating Healthy, Nutrition, Weight Loss | 2 Comments
This week we’re going to be talking about healthy eating habits.
The Problem - Big lunch, no other food.
One of the worst eating habits I used to have is eating a single large meal a day. At lunch, I would eat a very large amount of food and then nothing else for the rest of the day. I became known as a big eater even though I really didn’t eat that much over an entire day. My daily calorie intake was about 3000 calories, but almost all of it was coming in one large helping at noon, with a bit more coming in sodas and snacks spread through out the day.
There were times when I would eat a large pizza all by myself and then order another. For my birthday, my coworkers got me 30 McDonald’s hamburgers and cheeseburgers for lunch, and yes, I ate them. Even with these isolated incidents, I still thought I was being healthy because I wasn’t eating all that much.
Get your motor running…
When I started changing things and trying to be a bit healthier, I talked to a doctor who gave me a great explanation of how my eating habit was wrong. She told me to imagine my body as an engine. When I feed that engine a lot of fuel it revves up and spends that fuel. When you feed the engine no fuel it idles at a low level. If you feed the engine too much fuel at the same time, things break.
Now that’s not a perfect analogy, but it works. When you feed your body, you rev up your metabolism. When you don’t get food, the metabolism slows down in order to conserve energy. What I was doing was stuffing my body with so much food that my metabolism was overloaded.
Translating the problem into numbers
The large amount of food I was taking in was in fact revving up my metabolism, but there was simply too much of it. So my body was taking the leftovers and storing them as fat. Now in a perfect system, that fat would have been spent later in the day when I wasn’t eating. Unfortunately, our bodies are not perfect systems. Rather than waste the reserve it had built up during lunch, my metabolism would simply slow down during other parts of the day.
I was also having a problem in the morning time. My body was literally trying to recover from a famine of 8 hours during which I slept. It’s looking for food but it’s not getting it. So my body would slow down at the same time that it was sending signals to my brain “FOOD! EAT NOW!” This would cause me to spend less calories at the same time it would make me binge at lunch time.
| Morning | Noon | Afternoon | Evening | Night | |
| Consume |
0 | 2500 | 250 | 250 | 0 |
| Spend |
300 | 1700 | 400 | 400 | 200 |
TABLE 1
Take a look at this simple chart. The amounts aren’t exact but they get my point across. If you add up the amounts consumed you’ll see that I was eating around 3000 calories a day. That’s a large amount but it’s not incredibly excessive. However, if you look at the amount I spent, you can see the issue. My metabolism would spike around noon time and then spend very little the rest of the day. So the total calories I would spend would be 2400. That’s 600 calories a day my body would store away in fat.
Making Changes
So after listening to my doctor I decided to change. Most health experts would recommend five or six small meals throughout the day. However, this was unrealistic for me. I simply don’t have the time to stop and eat that many times a day. Since I was determined to make realistic changes to my body, I decided to go with the following plan:
- Breakfast - 1/6 of my calories.
- Lunch - 1/3 of my calories
- Afternoon snack - 1/6 of my calories
- Dinner - 1/3 of my calories
LIST 1
So if we look at that chart now, it looks like this:
| Morning | Noon | Afternoon | Evening | Night | |
| Consume |
500 | 1000 | 500 | 1000 | 0 |
| Spend |
700 | 700 | 700 | 700 | 200 |
TABLE 2
I split my food intake to even it out throughout the day. I also added a bit of a workout in the morning and in the afternoon to increase my metabolism at times when my food intake was a bit low. So now I’m spending 3000 and bringing in 3000. However, since I wanted to lose weight, I adjusted my calorie intake a bit to be around 2400.
| Morning | Noon | Afternoon | Evening | Night | |
| Consume |
400 | 800 | 400 | 800 | 0 |
| Spend |
700 | 700 | 700 | 700 | 200 |
TABLE 3
Summary
And there you go. I eat 2400 calories a day and spend 3000. I went from a net gain of 600 calories a day to a net loss of 600 calories a day. However, I only cut out around 600 calories from my diet. The other 600 calories loss came from properly spacing out my meals and keeping my metabolism from slowing down due to lack of food. Now that’s just a rough example. I also made some other changes such as working out that added to my weight loss, but you can see how spacing out your meals can have a positive impact on your health even without cutting out a lot of calories. Just make sure you don’t end up overeating at each of these meals. You’re trying to take the same amount of calories and space it over multiple meals, not eat the same large amount of calories at each and every meal!
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May
27
Weekend Roundup - Weigh in edition!
Filed Under Weekend Roundup, Weight Loss | 5 Comments
I decided to add a little feature to my weekend roundup, and that’s my current weight. When I first started changing my life around, I weighed 280lbs. My goal weight is 190lbs. That’s about right for someone who is 5′11″ and works out relatively frequently. I was 220 at the beginning of this year. Today, when I weighed in, I was 217.6lbs.
Normally, I wouldn’t be concerned about my weight. That’s something I learned a few months into my new life. Weight doesn’t really matter, it’s just one indicator of your overall health. However, I know that I’ve slipped a bit over the past few months. I’ve missed some workouts due to a busy work schedule and I’ve gone back a bit to binging on candy and caffeine. Nothing too serious, but enough set me back. This is a bit frustrating since I really want to lose a bit more weight and see if it makes a bigger impact on my snoring.
So I’m going to start posting my weekly weight on Sundays, just as a reminder myself that there are things in life more important than candy and diet coke
And with that, here are this week’s links:
Article - From the Diet blog, we have an article about how thin doesn’t quite equal being healthy. This is why I don’t pay a lot of attention to my weight and something you shoud keep this in mind next time you step on the scale. Health and weight are related, but it’s not as direct of a relationship as you might think.
Article - From FitnessFixation, a note about BMI. BMI is another weight related measure that a lot of people put too much faith in. Similar in theme to the first article. Basically, pay more attention to your health than you do to your weight. Plus a hobo name generator!
Article - And finally, from That’s Fit, a little device that can help you workout while you work. If you’re too busy to go to the gym, but spend a lot of time in front of a desk, this might be good for you.
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May
25
We’ve been building a workout together over the past few days. We’ve gone over weight training and cardio. Today, we’re going to cover all the small details that you may not be aware of but which should make your workout experience a bit better.
Stretching
Stretching is important both before and after a workout. I try to do five minutes of general stretching before I start my workout. I then finish my weight workout with five minutes of stretching specific to the area I just worked out. I find that I avoid many of the aches and pains associated with a hard workout when I do this.
Warm up and cool down
This is sort of like stretching before and after your cardio. You really shouldn’t just start running at full speed. There should be a warm up period before your cardio where you go a bit slow, to let your body get used to the movement. Then cool down period after your cardio to let your body have a chance to slowly return to normal. I usually spend five minutes walking before and after my treadmill running workout.
Increasing intensity
We all like making progress, but how do we make progress at the gym? Well, by increasing intensity. You can do it by increasing difficulty or increasing quantity. With weights, increasing difficulty means increasing the weight while increasing the quantity means increasing the number of reps or sets. With cardio, increasing difficulty means increasing speed or resistance while increasing quantity means increasing time. I have a little spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my workout numbers. It’s not very sophisticated, but it helps me remember what I did last week so I can try to match that or beat it this week.
Just remember that this isn’t some kind of competition. You don’t have to improve everything every week. An easy goal to try for is to make one improvement every other week. That means every two weeks you will take one of the components of your workout and improve it. That could mean an extra minute on the elliptical, 5 more lbs on your biceps curls, 1 more rep of squats and so on. Just go for little improvements. Believe me, they add up over time.
Hydrate
Don’t forget to drink water. No, you don’t need a gallon bottle to drag with you everywhere you go. Just stop at the water fountain every 15 to 20 minutes or so.
Change It Up
Don’t be afraid of changing your routine. I see a lot of people who get stuck in a workout and never change it. Your body will adjust to this workout and stop improving over time. So make some differences. Just like I try to improve something every two weeks, I also try to change something every two weeks. Try a different exercise, do your legs workout on Monday instead of Wednesday, try the stationary bike for a day or take a spinning class for an hour. All of these things will keep your body engaged and they’ll keep you interested.
Safety
Remember that you’re trying to be healthy here, which means avoiding injury. This means be safety conscious. Don’t use machines that look broken. Ask someone to spot you if you’re not sure you can lift the weight. If you feel a pain somewhere, stop your workout. Try to walk it off. Does it seem like something temporary? Is it coming back every time you make a certain motion? If you have a chronic pain, something that comes back every time you work out, go to a doctor.
Make Friends
This is the best part of a gym, there’s people around you who are all interested in the same thing you are. Think about that for a second. You’ve just decided that health and fitness are important, and so has everyone else in the gym. Don’t think of them as people to ignore or obstacles on your way to the treadmill, these are valuable resources. They’re potential friends and workout partners. They’re people you can ask for advice. They’ll help encourage you, motivate and challenge you.
That’s it. Every tip I have for a successful workout. Next week we go over some tips on eating healthy. Until then, be healthy!
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