Giving up quickly? Check.
I’ll start tomorrow? Check.
Setting unrealistic goals? Check.

This is good stuff! I’ve used her titles and applied them to healthy eating, weight loss and emotional eating. Instead of copying her discussion, I encourage you to read her original list – it’s a great read and applies to life in general.

Lie 1: Expect Quick Results.
When starting out, it’s important to remember and prepare yourself (constantly) you will not have instant gratification. It took months or years of unhealthy eating habits to gain your weight; it will take months or years of practicing new habits and eating healthier before it comes off. Instead of focusing just on the scale, pay attention to other weight loss indicators as well – less fat around high-profile areas like the face and armpits, increased endurance, successfully ending a meal before getting stuffed, dropping clothes sizes. Focusing on all your successes, small or large, helps maintain a positive attitude and feeling of power.

Lie 2: Complaining is OK.
Complaining is addictive and harmful. While it can be comforting to place blame for being overweight on circumstances “out of your control,” it also reinforces a negative attitude and infects your support network like a plague. No matter how resolved and committed you are to losing weight and changing your lifestyle, hard times will come for the rest of your life. Even if you don’t talk to your support group members, sometimes the simple thought of how proud your friend would be with your choice to resist the ice cream cone is enough positive reinforcement. Maintaining focus on your accomplishments and discussing hard times objectively as hurdles to overcome is like Miracle Gro for your support network – everyone feels proud and positive to be a party to your success. Complain about all the crappy stuff you’re eating or doing and your support network will either begin to pull away or will reinforce your negative outlook. Think negatively enough about weight loss, and you may just convince yourself it’s easier and better to just live life the way you want, healthy or not.

Lie 3: Fix It Later.
Tomorrow is the worst day to begin losing weight. Start today, right now, by making small changes – drink 32oz more water a day, leave some food on your plate, and park your car further away from your building at work or use stairs instead of an elevator. By starting with small changes, you begin to practice evaluating your choices based on their impact on your health instead of any satisfaction or emotional comfort you may get. Practice those small changes for a week, and it becomes easier to take the next step. Before you know it, you’re eating salads with no dressing and actually enjoying plain water.

Lie 4: Having an *Idea* Instead of a Plan.
No matter how hard or often you think about eating less and exercising more, it doesn’t become a reality until you formulated a plan and set goals. Thinking about losing weight is daunting and overwhelming – you focus on the total amount of weight and life changes to be made. Formulating plans and setting goals is positive and actionable – by splitting the ultimate goal into small tasks, you establish a concrete plan for success. Working towards an ultimate plan gives you a higher sense of purpose – it’s comforting to know today, tomorrow and next week you have specific tasks planned ahead of time that lead to weight loss and lifestyle change.

Lie 5: Ignoring Your Talents.
Weight loss and lifestyle change isn’t about denying yourself things you love or pushing yourself to limits – it’s about choosing to live a healthy lifestyle, and you’re not going to live the healthy lifestyle if you don’t enjoy living the healthy lifestyle. Incorporate your talents or passions into your healthy lifestyle to make it fun. Enjoy blogging? Join Jason Calacanis’ started the “fatblogging” meme and have fun joining an active weight loss support network. Enjoy surfing the Internet and discovering interesting sites? Sign up for Internet-themed podcasts and listen to them while walking. Learn a new language, listen to an audiobook, find a local dance club. Wherever your passions and talents lie, use them to energize your weight loss.

Lie 6: Elusive Goals Instead of Do-able Goals.
Set yourself up for success – make your goals achievable. Specifically for weight loss, I recommend making three types of goals: a goal weight, daily goals and “dream” goals. Your goal weight should be practical and realistic – best case scenario, you’ll work with your health care provider to establish one. Daily goals should be easily achievable and designed to slowly modify your lifestyle through constant practice – examples could include drinking 64oz of water, walking one mile and maintaining a certain daily caloric intake. “Dream” goals are inspirational and should be activities and events you would love to participate in but never could, like running a 10k race at Walt Disney World (a personal dream goal of mine). I talked more about these types of goals, and setting goals in general, in a previous article.

Lie 7: Adopting a “What I Do Doesn’t Matter” Attitude.
Looking down at the scale and considering the total amount of weight to lose can be daunting and overwhelming – it’s easy to think no matter what you do you still don’t lose weight fast enough, so you may as well stop trying. To prevent being overwhelmed, set small daily goals you can easily measure, surround yourself with positive people, recognize every pound lost slowly is a pound kept off, and concentrate on making healthy lifestyle changes and shifting habits versus dieting the weight off and denying pleasures.

When you live an honest, practical and healthy lifestyle, I can’t promise you’ll never fight the “unhealthy food choice” impulse battle ever again, but you will have won the war.

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Even though I’ve been maintaining my weight, I’ve been noticing a couple spots on my body that are collecting fat again – that must be huge drop in exercising lately. I biked 6.5 miles last week one day, but that was about all I did. Not good, as my 5k race is coming up quickly – June 1st. I don’t think I can even run that entire distance yet, let alone competitively. Fortunately, this is more a fun race than anything, so it shouldn’t be too embarrassing.

Hopefully things will calm down quite a bit soon. I’ve been enjoying blogging, and I have a lot of plans for this and a couple other sites that I’d love to get running. It’ll all come together with time – I’m just an impatient sort of person.

I also have to say – I literally have no time. I work two jobs, one full-time and one part-time. My day starts at 5:30am and goes full-bore ’til 10pm. I usually don’t even have time to take a lunch. I don’t mention that for pity’s sake, but rather for inspiration – I have no time, yet I am maintaining my weight. I am living proof the common “I don’t have time to lose weight” excuse is a cop-out – there is always a healthy food choice alternative to “fast food” and “unhealthy” foods. Sometimes it takes a little pre-planning – I buy a week’s worth of bars at the grocery store every weekend and store them both at home and my full-time job, for instance. But with a little pre-planning and foresight, you never have to eat unhealthy; rather, you choose to.

Besides, why would I want to victimize myself and claim I have to eat fast food because I don’t have the time to eat healthy, therefore my weight gain is not my fault? Displacing fault and blame on a situation that is not immediately fixable (and usually “isn’t my fault” either) is disempowering and causes a vicious downward cycle of despair. Taking responsibility for my choices and recognizing how my choices impact my life, however, was the first step to successfully living healthy and losing weight.

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First I tried running it on the laptop over the wireless network. I never properly negotiated a connection, but that makes since – Joost is P2P-based, and must be pushing a large amount of information both up and down. After installing it on my main machine, I selected a user name and password, and began experiencing the brave new world of video.

This is, after all, a fitness-related blog, so I began looking for fitness-related video content and found three of note – HealthiNation, The Fit Show and The Recipe Channel. You can see the entire lineup at Joost’s channel page.

HealthiNation is a collection of videos hosted by medical professionals (or, at least, claiming to be medical professionals) providing basic information on a wide range of topics, including asthma, blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, healthy eating and more. The videos are short enough to keep my attention, yet long enough to cover the basic information about a topic fairly thoroughly. I also appreciate the powerpoint-like timeline at the bottom showing upcoming topics within a video segment. I could see this becoming an excellent resource to accompany searches on Wikipedia or health-dedicated sites like MedlinePlus.

I didn’t spend much time watching The Fit Show, but I was intrigued with what I saw. The channel hosts a wide array of videos, spanning from training videos, event coverage, fitness news and topical instructional videos. Chapman Media Group, who runs this channel and the channel’s website at http://thefitshow.tv/ (where you can watch some episodes through a flash player), states “The Fitness Network’s mission is to provide fitness content in an entertaining, educational, and inspirational style who’s voice resonates with the diverse fitness enthusiast demographic.” Buzz-word-speak aside, I was impressed with the videos on offer – training videos were shot using live trainers demonstrating the use of equipment and exercises, individual episodes contained news and training segments, and the professional quality of all videos matched or exceeded what I would expect from a cable TV fitness show. I will definitely be exploring this channel more. Right after watching another episode of GI Joe.

I have to admit, I had high expectations after watching the first two channels. Unfortunately, The Recipe Channel was a little disappointing – I expected a cooking show like something I’d see on the Food network, with a host cooking and talking during the show. Instead, this channel hosts several videos (not yet the hundreds claimed in the description) that appear to be hand-held cameras swooping over ingredients, hovering over cooking bowls and accompanied by new-agey hokie music. While I don’t personally care for the videos, I do appreciate the thoroughness of the video example and the short video lengths. I see this channel being a great accompanying resource for a searchable recipe directory website, but not a channel I would regularly browse.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed with what Joost has to offer so far. It can only get better from here – as Joost adds channels and interactive widgets (which add features like chatting with others viewing the same channel, channel ratings and more), TV will move from a static armchair channel-surfing affair to a serious web2.0-esque overhaul. I can’t wait to see what Joost has up its sleeves.

Now, for more Transformers.

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If the deal is finalized it’s an interesting move by eBay. Paypal was core to eBay’s Auction business. Skype could be justified as a tie into the Auction business as well. So where does StumbleUpon sit? People “stumbling” from site to site with a business model the revolves around selling page views seems like an odd fit. A sign that eBay is looking to expand into new markets perhaps? Time will tell.

The blogosphere seems to echo the sentiment – what’s up eBay’s sleeve? At a glance, StumbleUpon doesn’t seem to add anything to eBay’s core business. Look a little closer though, and I find two reasons eBay has a lot to gain from StumbleUpon – retention and navigation.

eBay has become a morass of auctions, barely navigable through search tools and categories. Auctions are mistakenly placed in incorrect categories, people mis-spell or don’t use the right keywords and title words, search results depend on words used in title and description – it’s a mess. What eBay needs is a way for its community members to select favorite keywords or categories and rate auctions, then use that information to weight and correct searches. As an added benefit, providing such community rating and commenting tools would give community members something else to do on eBay’s site, where they may possibly stumble across an auction or two that inspires a bid. Enter StumbleThru.

StumbleUpon’s new feature StumbleThru could very well be the feature that pushes eBay to new community-centered heights. Improved searches, randomly discovering auctions based on user preferences, a comment and product rating system, tagging – eBay appears to be purchasing in one fell swoop an entire community of people already enjoying and familiar with the process of rating and commenting on sites who would likely gladly do the same for eBay auctions – after all, who doesn’t like rating and commenting? eBay could even further expose auctions by offering a “stumble this on eBay” option in browsers and an official eBay widget or “blog this” feature. Once this core group of current StumbleUpon users builds visible content, I imagine more eBay users will get swept up in the excitement of rating and voicing opinions, using these new features to improve navigation and randomly discover new auctions. Amazon has shown us that adding community features is a great way to increase visibility and user-retention; with StumbleUpon, eBay could leapfrog into the community game and improve its existing technology at the same time. It’s a win-win.

GigaOM has something similar to say:

Look at this from the toolbar-and-Skype lens. StumbleUpon makes a toolbar that provides collaborative serendipity to find web sites. The toolbar, if you ask StumbleUpon users provides more useful and productive results, than say Google.

By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor.

I don’t know about the whole Skype thing, but I agree with what Om says without saying it – marrying the StumbleUpon community to eBay’s auction-centered site will improve searching, increase the amount of time people spend on eBay’s site and promote auctions. Surely that’s worth $75 million?

Anyway, if I haven’t bored you, here’s some more health-related items I’ve stumbled recently:

Better Ideal Weight Body Calculations (stumble reviews) – interesting calculator that discusses BMI & People’s Choice (new one for me) methods of establishing a goal weight. While I’m not fond of calculators that don’t expose the math, I really dig this line: “Women tend to imagine their ideal weight is unrealistically low, so they diet unnecessarily. Men tend to allow their ideal weight to be higher than medically recommended. Men and Women should learn from each other.”

Sports Fitness Advisor (stumble reviews) – articles and information on a wide array of topics, including workout routines for specific muscle groups, training ideas for specific sports and more.

The World’s 7 Most Potent Disease-Fighting Spices at SixWise.com (stumble reviews) – descriptions and health benefits of 7 herbs and spices, including research citations. The site has other similar articles including nuts and berries.

The World’s Healthiest Foods at whfoods.com (stumble reviews) – HUGE list of foods and their nutrition benefits. Articles include research citations. Great resource – I’ll be consulting this one myself.

ririanproject (stumble reviews) – great “positivity” blog with frequent articles on productivity, positive thinking, self-improvement and related topics. Interesting recent articles include “Ten Commandments for Living a Life Free of Regrets”, “Get Your Soul In Shape With These 11 Most Deeply Held Wisdoms” and “9 Effective Ways To Get 200% More Work Done”.

Eating Fabulous (stumble reviews) – a b5media blog focused on food-related news.

If you’re interested, you can follow all my reviews and join up as a friend at http://charshman.stumbleupon.com/ (soon to be stumbleebay.com?), and I’d love to see interesting links you’ve stumbled or discovered – leave ‘em in the comments.

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How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise (stumble reviews) – while I typically ignore “lose weight fast” type articles, this one by Tim Ferriss was worth reading. I wrote a response, modifying Tim’s rules to be more compatible with lifestyle change.

CalorieConnect (stumble reviews) – nice AJAX-powered calorie lookup for common foods. The list doesn’t seem to contain many restaurant-specific items, but it’s a fast and easy resource for quick food lookups. It appears there might also be a nutrition and exercise journal service – if so, I’ll add it to the list of services I’m reviewing.

The Training Station (stumble reviews) – list of 100+ animated pictures demonstrating different exercises, grouped by muscle group.

The Full FATFREE Recipe Collection (stumble reviews) – huge list of recipes, nutrition information and more.

BrainReady’s Top 5 Brain Health Foods (stumble reviews) – Interesting article; also available at the site – daily puzzle worksheets, podcast and more.

CalorieLab (stumble reviews) – HUGE listing of nutrition information, including restaurant items. Site also has RSS feed for health news, calories burned calculator and more. Great find!

What happens if you drink a can of Coke right now? (stumble reviews) – chronicles how your body reacts to a Coke during the first hour after consumption. Fascinating article, I’d love to find more like it.

Mark’s Daily Apple (stumble reviews) – health blog with interesting, unique articles.

You never know what kind of health and fitness stuff you’re going to stumble across. I’m reviewing every site that inspires me enough to “like” or “dislike” it – you can follow my reviews and join up as a friend at http://charshman.stumbleupon.com/. Stumbling yourself? I’d be interested to see the interesting things you’re finding – leave ‘em in the comments, along with your stumbleupon ID so I can join your friends list.

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And then came yesterday.

I see now, there are going to be times in my life when – no matter what I do, no matter how much awareness I practice, no matter how much I talk to myself, no matter how strongly I have shifted my old behaviors – I am going to stumble. I am going to eat “bad” foods. I am going to mis-gauge portion sizes. I will have channel-surfing days, potato-chip days and second-helping days. And apparently, I will still occasionally seek comfort in food.

Fortunately, just being aware of my emotional eating, even if I don’t stop it, is enough to minimize the impact. When you stumble, the trick is to do it consciously, minimize the impact during the fact, then prevent it from becoming a habit afterward. Here’s 5 tips I used to turn a crisis into a learning experience.

1. Recognize you are responding to an emotional need or impulse.
   Choice is power. You exercise power over a situation by choosing your response instead of allowing something to happen to you. “I can’t believe I just ate that chocolate bar” sets you up for disappointment, shame and embarassment – you are so out-of-control that you couldn’t even make yourself not eat one chocolate bar! “I chose to eat that chocolate bar” removes the emotional hook – it allows you to feel ownership and responsibility without the overwhelming disappointment, and allows you to observe your choice and make changes should you want to choose differently next time. Shed your emotional baggage and empower yourself – recognize the emotional need, make a choice. True success isn’t absolute abstinence – true success is choice.
2. Identify and address the underlying emotional need.
   Of course, we all know – eating comfort food doesn’t help the actual situation. No matter how much fettuccini alfredo you eat, your co-workers will not treat you better and your job won’t be any more satisfying. No matter how many chocolate bars you consume, your teens won’t show you more respect and you won’t win the lottery. Just like alcohol and drugs, any comfort derived from emotional eating is false and temporary. If you choose to indulge in some emotional eating, do some thinking while on your emotional high – identify what is driving you to crave comfort in food, then make a game plan to change or otherwise address that situation.
3. Split your meal into portions.
   Cut your hamburger in half, split your quesedilla into quarters, box half your salad into a to-go box, put half your sushi roll on a separate plate. If you’re still hungry after eating one portion, split the remaining portion in half and eat that. After eating each portion, put your fork down, push the plate away, and pause for a moment. Physically splitting your meal into portions also splits it into choices – each time you eat another portion, you are making a new choice to eat, and with each choice comes the opportunity to access your actual physical hunger.

4. Practice “healthy eating” tips – water, small bites, eat slow, choose healthy foods.
   Use as many “healthy eating” tips as possible to help minimize your caloric intake:

   Cut empty calories – cutting the sour cream, butter, dressing, mayonnaise, free bread/chips/etc and other calorie-filled extras can reduce the overall caloric value of your meal. The sour cream I cut from the burrito I ate yesterday cut 150-ish calories from my meal, and I didn’t miss it. Had I cut the guacamole and chips, I could have cut a further 620 calories without diminishing the emotionally comforting burrito.

   Read the label – reading the exact caloric value and ingredients in the food you’re about to eat can help you find healthier alternatives to the comfort food you’re craving. Today in the grocery store, I figured some Doritos would perfectly complement my mixed-greens salad – makes perfect sense, right? Regular Doritos have 140 calories per 11 chip – and let’s not lie, I’m not going to eat 11 chips, I’ll be lucky to stop at half the bag. I thought the baked ones would be a healthier alternative, but read the ingredients anyway – and put them back when reading MSG figures prominently on the ingredients list. You never know, reading the label may even quash your craving – I walked out with no Doritos.

   Drink water during the meal – this is probably the easiest and best thing you can do to minimize your emotional eating. Ordering water with your meal cuts out beverages with empty calories and helps you reach your daily water intake level. If you take sips during your meal, water will also help you feel full faster and force you to eat slower.

   Eat slowly, take small bites – there’s some lag time after swallowing before your body recognizes fullness, and there’s lag time between your stomach reaching “full” and your mind reaching satiety. Eating slowly and taking small bites helps reduce that lag time, so you feel full and satisfied at the same time you actually are full, so you don’t end up “feeling” full at the end of the meal, but feeling stuffed 20 minutes afterward.

5. Don’t beat yourself up!
   No matter what choices you make or don’t make, no matter what food you eat or how much you consume – don’t beat yourself up over it. Chastising yourself simply invites more emotional baggage, which in turn continues the vicious cycle of emotional eating. Instead, put your energy into identifying and addressing the underlying emotional problem and coming up with a game plan for dealing with the next time you feel the impulse to emotionally eat. Alternatives might be taking a walk, reading a magazine or doing logic problems for 20 minutes, sitting in the grass in a park – something that gives you peace without eating. Each time you decide in favor of your food alternative, you reclaim power over your emotional eating.

Emotional eating doesn’t have to be a falling-off-the-bandwagon event. Rather, view it as an alarm – something in your life is causing enough stress that you crave something physical as satisfaction. Identify and address the underlying stress, and you’ll be one step closer to winning the battle against emotional eating.

Have some tips yourself? I’d love to hear them below.

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Speaking of emotional eating, I’ve noticed something interesting – often I’ll have an emotional crave, but it’s not hooked into eating. It’s like an empty craving – where I used to respond to the crave with “I need a hamburger”, it’s now “Wow, I have a craving for something, but I’m not sure what.” Absolutely fascinating. Until yesterday, I had not responded with eating; even then, I was able to make a conscious choice instead of the habitual impulsive responses I used to have.

Exercise is gearing up – almost every day, I’m either playing racquetball, riding the bike or running. With volleyball season coming up, I’ll have another enjoyable activity. That’s another fascinating change – exercise is actually enjoyable now. I should have done this life change stuff earlier!

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How many of us follow this pattern when making New Year’s resolutions? Who wants to live a life dedicated to a string of failed fitness resolutions? Much better, in my opinion, to make one decision to dedicate your life to fitness, become aware of daily choices you make that prevent fitness and modify those choices, then maintain the new choices until they become habit. The weight still comes off, and as opposed to dieting – it stays off. Instead of bouncing between normal life and “diet life”, you live your diet.

Tim’s article, however, is different – even though it appears to approach eating from a dieting approach, there’s some good information that, with some tweaking, can apply to healthy lifestyle eating as well. Below, I’ll list his rules, a synopsis of how he describes each rule, and my suggested modifications for making each rule a part of your healthy lifestyle.

Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates
Tim suggests avoiding “any carbohydrate that is — or can be — white”, including “bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, and fried food with breading.” I completely agree – no tweaking here.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again
Tim makes several suggestions in this rule, starting with his assertion that “the most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. Mix and match, constructing each meal with one from each of the three following groups: proteins, legumes and vegetables.” He further recommends that you “eat as much as you like of the above food items. Just remember: keep it simple. Pick three or four meals and repeat them”. I both agree and disagree.

When I finally decided to lose weight, I recognized it would take something drastic and shocking to detox my body out of my food addiction. I think stimulus narrowing is a fantastic method of detox – by narrowing down the foods you allow yourself to eat, you make less food-related choices, which in turn helps stop food-related thoughts and impulse cravings. Food becomes less a comfort and more a fuel for your body.

My own personal stimulus-narrowing came in the form of a 3-month liquid diet through Optifast. Before Optifast, my entire eating schedule revolved around satisfying emotional needs, impulses and cravings – celebrating with chocolate, drowning stress or depression in carb-rich comfort foods and tackling boredom with greasy snack foods. Following Optifast, I now plan meals around what nutrients my body needs and satisfy emotional needs in other, more honest ways. I recognize Optifast isn’t for everyone, and neither is any form or duration of fasting. If fasting isn’t for you, Tim provides a great alternative – limit your food to pre-planned meals.

Pre-planning meals not only prevents food choices based on response to emotional cravings and impulses, it also promotes awareness of what you eat – primarily, learning what nutrients your body needs and where to find them. Pre-planned meals also have the fantastic side-effect of cutting out all restaurant and fast-food choices, which prey on emotional and impulse-based eating. However, I disagree with Tim’s recommendation to eat as much as you want – portion control is every bit as important as impulse control. Part of proper stimulus narrowing is learning when your body has consumed sufficient fuel versus when you feel “satisfied” or “full.” Learning suggested portion sizes, the general caloric value of foods and developing an awareness of your body’s physical versus emotional satisfaction – all are important to healthy eating in the real world.

Tim also makes a fantastic observation – “most people who go on “low” carbohydrate diets complain of low energy and quit, not because such diets can’t work, but because they consume insufficient calories.” While I disagree with his recommendation of eating only 4x a day (by eating 5-6 times a day, you prevent hunger and binging), I think his observation is spot-on – calculating and regulating your daily caloric intake is an important part of healthy living. Eating too few calories is just as unhealthy as eating too many, and blindly limiting instead of properly regulating daily caloric intake sets you up for failure.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories
Tim suggests the following:

“Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened iced tea, tea, diet sodas, coffee (without white cream), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk, normal soft drinks, or fruit juice.”

I strongly agree with the need to be aware of what you drink. As Dave mentioned before, weight-loss and weight-gain are simple mathematical equations:

calories consumed < calories expended = weight loss

calories consumed > calories expended = weight gain

This is true no matter where the calories come from - the calories in hamburgers and french fries don't make us any fatter than the calories in Gatorade and Vitamin Water. Unfortunately, we tend to forget or discount the calories in our drinks - the sodas and teas, the cream and sugar in our coffee - and when you can walk out of Starbucks with 720 calories swimming in your coffee cup (the equivelant of 1 and 1/3 Big Macs!), discounting your beverages is a dangerous proposition. Studies are even starting to show that we regularly discount calories consumed through beverages and the weight-gain that results. As an example, here's some commonly consumed beverages and their caloric values:

• Gatorade: 310 calories per 12 fl oz
• Propel: 30 calories per 8 fl oz
• Coke: 97 calories per 8 fl oz
• Vitamin Water: 50 calories per 8 fl oz

Take into account a "serving" is normally 20oz-ish bottle, and that several bottles are consumed a day - those calories quickly add up. In my own opinion, diet drinks aren't any better - there may not be a scientific study that shows artificial sweeteners are harmful, but it doesn't take a chemist to know that loading up on chemicals can't be healthy. Furthermore, diuretic drinks like tea and caffeinated sodas increase the rate of urination, requiring more water consumption. Best case scenario - stick to water. Don't like the "taste" of water? Here's some tips: filtering, flavoring, agave and more.

Rule #4: Take one day off per week
Tim suggests the following:

"I recommend Saturdays as your "Dieters Gone Wild" day. I am allowed to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5, and all of my other vices in excess. I make myself a little sick and don’t want to look at any of it for the rest of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function, etc.) doesn’t downregulate from extended caloric restriction. That’s right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia."

I hear this a lot, and from personal experience I strongly disagree with this point. Nothing screams fad diet or unhealthy eating louder than the phrases "eat what you want" and "take a day off." Healthy eating is a lifestyle, not a job - you don't get days off. You're certainly not likely to eat salads for the rest of your life - I know I make the choice to eat at restaurants or occasionally indulge in dessert. However, by setting aside a "time off" day, you give yourself a reason to eat unhealthily and unconsciously - much better to consciously budget for a dessert in your daily caloric intake by changing your snack foods or exercising more that day. Binging, no matter what the reason, is not healthy eating.

I want to thank Tim for his excellent and informative article - great food for thought.

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Ah yes, running. It’s an odd feeling, running again – I am simultaneously filled with the exhileration of challenge and an overwhelming disappointment. To understand why, you’ve gotta know something about me – I used to run cross country and play soccer and baseball. In those days I enjoyed running, and would run between 6 – 10 miles a day. I wasn’t competitive at long-distance running – I’m built for sprinting, but we didn’t have a track team in high school – but I sure did enjoy it. Running for me was like taking a Sunday afternoon drive through the countryside.

Today, I set my sights on 3.9 miles. I knew I wouldn’t huff my out-of-shape body through the entire distance, but I figured I could make at least a mile before I slowed to a walk. I made it 3/4 of a mile. My high-school self whizzed right by me as my body down-shifted and applied the air-brakes.

I feel exhileration – I’m signed up for a 5k race in the first of June, so I began mapping out in my mind as I walked how to meet the challenge of finishing a 5k race in 5 weeks. I also feel overwhelmingly disappointed – I can’t help but think about how my performance might be today had I never let myself go. Trick is, focus on the challenge. I know once I make it past this beginning hump, I will once again enjoy running.

Just like losing weight, I need to focus on the successes – like the fact I was able to almost make a mile at all – and not set myself up for failures by setting unrealistic goals. So going forward, my goal is to run at least 4 times a week, whatever the distance, and to push myself a little bit further each time – even if it’s only a couple of feet.

I’ll make that 5k yet.

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My wife and I went to North Myrtle Beach for several days. We went with the intention of staying for seven days, but ended up staying only three and driving to Charleston for two more. It’s good we discovered something about ourselves this early in life – we don’t vacation at the beach well. We went with bright ideas of hanging out at the beach, reading books and enjoying the weather. We got bored of that, and visited all the touristy crap Myrtle Beach has to offer inside of a day. It’s obvious we like to vacation a certain way – trundling through touristy and non-touristy areas, people-watching – basically, going to Disney.

I’ll write more about some strategies she and I used for eating while we were there. I was anxious about my tendency to adopt a vacation mentality – traditionally, I decide “why not, I’m on vacation” and let loose with the belt and wallet. While we did make some choices we wouldn’t normally make (like paying to see Ripley’s Aquarium (my God, we were bored) and eating at Senor Frogs), I was pleasantly surprised that my new lifestyle changes survived my first vacation. We’ll have to see if that stands true next time we stride through Disney’s Epcot entrance and make a beeline for the Paris bakery.

So, I’ll write later about what I did right; what I’ll mention now is what I did wrong. Strategies and healthy lifestyle aside, I think three behaviors in particular I adopted during the vacation stood out as sabotaging my healthy eating.

Snacking.
We brought some food with us for the room, particularly for breakfast meals – yogurt, granola, bananas and hard-boiled eggs, along with some ham, cheese and crackers we had in the cupboards for car snacks. This was a great decision, and one that we will continue for future vacations, as it relieves our reliance on restaurant foods for at least one meal a day. However, I have got to find a way to stop snacking on the granola every time I pass by the open bag in the hotel room. Next time we vacation, I’ll hide the food in a crate or something.

Food choice.
I made two types of bad food choices – choice of restaurant and choice of food. Fortunately, my choice of portion wasn’t bad – I felt “full” only once during the trip. When picking places to eat though, we picked based on the experience, not the nutrition value of the food. For instance, we ate at an Italian joint the first night because it was easy and close – it doesn’t matter that I scraped all the cheese off, ate only half the chicken and pasta and stayed away from the bread, the menu was still full of high-calorie foods with no good options. We ate at Senor Frogs one afternoon for the experience of the meal, not because of the food they serve (which, by the way, was pretty tasty) – again, it doesn’t matter I ate only half of what they served, it still had beans, corn shells and tasty greasy/marinated meat. Towards the end of the vacation, I had a serious craving for greens and salads – a good sign, I think, of how my body and behaviors have changed for the better.

Drop in awareness.
Not only did I stop counting calories, but I started assuming the leisurely 4-mile strolls along the beach and through the Charleston historic-district neighborhoods was burning enough to counter-balance my uncounted calories. Clearly, that didn’t work. Frankly, I should know that – being unaware of my actual consumption versus actual output was what led to my obesity in the first place. Being on vacation, I just checked out. Fortunately, I only gained four-ish pounds, and I have an increased incentive for exercise that I lacked pre-vacation (more on that later). I have to realize in the future though – just like alcoholics and crack-users don’t get to let loose and snort a little on vacation, my lifestyle changes persist anytime, anywhere. There are healthy ways to incorporate the foods I want to eat and the meal experiences I want to have – it just takes awareness.

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