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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I read a great article this morning written by Kathy Gates for Ian’s Messy Desk (found via Lifehack.org). Kathy lists 7 lies we tell ourselves that prevent success in achieving our goals or living our perfect lives. As I read each item on the list, I found myself directly relating it to weight-loss and emotional eating:

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.

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.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that eBay is close to acquiring StumbleUpon, according to a Wall Street Journal report. TechCrunch has this to say about the merger:

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.