The Life Ledger

Fitness is a way of life.

I’m not too hip on multivitamins. Not only do we take on faith what’s in them, we take on faith they’re healthy. My own personal opinion - get your vitamins the way they’re meant to be processed, from food.

There’s a new study out that makes me even more wary of multivitamins. The U.S. News and World Report recently ran an article about a study from the National Cancer Institute that indicates taking more than 7 multivitamin pills a week could increase mens’ risk of “advanced and fatal” prostate cancer:

Researchers followed 295,344 men for five years and found that while high multivitamin use did not correlate with higher rates of localized cancer, it increased the risk of advanced cancer by 30 percent and nearly doubled the risk of fatal prostate cancer. Taking additional beta carotene and zinc supplements increased the risk even more.

…

Goran Bjelakovic, a researcher at the University of Nis in Serbia who has looked at the impact of nutritional supplements and wrote an editorial accompanying the study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, points out that the average American diet provides 120 percent of the beta carotene and vitamins A and C needed, suggesting that additional vitamins could upset the body’s balance of micronutrients.

Wow, the average American gets 120% of the body’s required beta carotene, vitamin A and vitamin C from diet, before even taking the multivitamin? The National Institute of Health has this to say about taking too much vitamin A:

Hypervitaminosis A refers to high storage levels of vitamin A in the body that can lead to toxic symptoms. There are four major adverse effects of hypervitaminosis A: birth defects, liver abnormalities, reduced bone mineral density that may result in osteoporosis (see the previous section), and central nervous system disorders [1,48-49].

Toxic symptoms can also arise after consuming very large amounts of preformed vitamin A over a short period of time. Signs of acute toxicity include nausea and vomiting, headache, dizziness, blurred vision, and muscular uncoordination [1,48-49]. Although hypervitaminosis A can occur when large amounts of liver are regularly consumed, most cases result from taking excess amounts of the nutrient in supplements.

Makes me wonder about the other vitamins and minerals we take “for health” without thinking about the damage we might be doing to ourselves.

Fast food burgers, fast food vitamins, fast food money - before long, we’ll be driving up to McDonalds and purchase hamburgers enriched with E. coli and vitamin A with our credit cards. All we’re missing is the vitamin A.

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A huge life change going on now, and I’m happy I’ve been maintaining my weight through it. A little emotional eating here and there, which led to a little over-eating, but I’m still within my alarm weight. I’m actually kind of surprised, to be honest. I chalk it up to food choices - even though I’m over-eating, I’m stuffing myself with salads (I’ve stopped using dressings, even), local-raised chicken, grilled vegetables, etc. Sit me in front of a pizza, and I don’t want more than one slice. It’s amazing how strongly life changes become ingrained habit over time and with awareness and practice.

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.

I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about Joost lately, so I was anxious to give it a whirl. I received my invite (did you get yours?) and fired it up for the first time yesterday, fully expecting an underwhelming experience. Boy was I wrong - this is the future of TV.

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.

Thanks to Stumbleupon (wikipedia entry), I’m discovering a slew of useful sites hidden in the “invisible web”, which comprises an estimated 90% of all Internet sites. Here’s the latest interesting sites I’ve discovered:

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.

I graduated from my Optifast program and I thought I was hard-core. I didn’t crave sweets, chocolate, chips, any of that crap I used to unconsciously stuff my face with. I identified my trigger foods (like Chex Mix) and removed them from the house. I practiced being aware of my food choices including what, when and how much. I thought I was hard-core.

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.