The Life Ledger

Fitness is a way of life.

Weight Watchers ads this year are particularly masterful - they speak truths like “dieting doesn’t work” and show people eating in restaurants and lounging in coffee shops. Their message is eat what you want and still lose weight - and for a lot of people, it works well. However, when you consider the fee, it seems you are simply trading one consumption (eating) for another (spending money). At $17/mo plus the $30 join fee, participants spend a minimum of $235/year. I think it’s possible to reap the benefits Weight Watchers provides without spending a dime and joining the program by making some simple life changes - here’s how.

The lifestyle change - learn portion control.
I personally found the most important lifestyle change I made was portion control - instead of telling my body to eat more because something tasted good, I now listen to my body and stop when it’s full. Food is fuel - when I’ve topped the tank, it’s time to yank the hose. Here’s some strategies I use to help control my portion sizes:

• Drink water during a meal. When you fill up on water, you’re less likely to over-eat.
• Use small plates and start with small portions. You can always get seconds, but you’ll likely eat all your firsts.
• Eat slowly. There’s a slight delay between swallowing and recognizing satiety; slowing down your eating helps you recognize satiety before you over-eat.
• Split your meal in half. When eating out, split your meal in half and have them bag up one half before beginning to eat.

The points system - Learn how to visually recognize caloric values.
Many people succeed with Weight Watchers because it makes counting calories easier with a points system. Some weight-loss programs make counting calories even easier with pre-counted boxed meals. With a little effort, I found I could eyeball the caloric content of most foods by measuring or weighing basic ingredients in 200-calorie segments and remembering what that looked like. Sites like this one demonstrate the basic concept. For example, 200 calories of chicken is about the size of a deck of cards. Remembering how much food equals 200 calories is much easier than measuring caloric content for every meal.

The weekly meetings - Build your “accountability” community.
Eating in our country has become largely emotional - we eat at restaurants to unwind or enjoy family time, we eat as a way to deal with stress and depression, we eat special foods to celebrate holidays. The Weight Watchers program includes weekly meetings, which provides positive emotional support by stressing community and accountability - every week, members weigh-in (accountability) and talk with others struggling with the same weight-loss issues (community). Build your own accountability community by openly talking to your friends and family about your weight changes and weight struggles/accomplishments; start a walking group at work; start a blog and weight changes, struggles and accomplishments - there are many ways to hold yourself accountable to a community without joining Weight Watchers.

How about you - what are your thoughts on running your own Weight Watchers program without paying the fees?

Thank you for visiting The Life Ledger. If you enjoyed this article, check out the related posts below and subscribe to our feed.

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.

Traineo launched in August 2006 with the mission “to create the most effective weight loss and fitness community on the web by combining the latest software technology with sound information and services from the world’s leading health and fitness experts.” It’s been getting a lot of press lately, even earning an article on Arrington’s TechCrunch. Traineo is gaining the reputation as the poster-child for Web 2.0 weight-loss, and serves as a good starting point for reviewing online fitness journals.

First, let’s get that Web 2.0 moniker out of the way - what does it mean, and what can it bring to fitness? Web 2.0 was first coined by O’Reilly, and is a vague, near-meaningless descriptor meant to define the “new web,” an advancement beyond the idea of static, text-based pages. While the Web 2.0 descriptor is difficult to nail down, it’s easier to identify features following Web 2.0 principles - social networking (enabling interaction among users), tagging / folksonomy (enabling interaction between users and the data) and websites as applications are all examples of Web 2.0 features. Traineo is spiced with Web 2.0 principles including a call-in show packaged as a podcast, user-created groups, “motivators,” forums and more. With all these new-age features, how does Traineo do with providing the basic fitness journal features?

Traineo’s developers clearly intended to create a simple, easy-to-use weight-loss service that focuses primarily on community support, secondarily on daily caloric intake and eschews more complicated notions of nutrition. Traineo members share information through forums and support through “motivators” and private messages. Traineo offers several search features for finding like-minded members, and allows members to form groups complete with their own private forums and message areas. Recording data is as simple as choosing a caloric intake and exercise for the day.

The nutshell - If you are looking for a simple, user-friendly service to log only daily caloric intake and exercise, do not care to record or analyze daily nutrition, and are seeking an active support group with several communication features, Traineo is the place for you. If, however, you are interested in learning more about your daily nutrition and the caloric and nutritional value of the particular foods you eat, you will quickly outgrow what Traineo has to offer.

Read the full review after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

During my active weight loss period on Optifast, one member of the medical staff told an interesting story about a species of crab called the Mexican Crab. According to the story, this species of crab has an interesting trait - if you put one two in a bucket, they are more interested in dragging each other back into the bucket than attempting to climb out themselves. Real or not, the anecdote illustrates an important lesson in making lifestyle changes - eliminate the Mexican crabs in your life.

I bring this up because I’ve had some pretty nasty bouts with emotional eating lately. Last night, I got home at 10:00pm from work and immediately started emptying our cabinets - bread, peanut butter, pretzels - the world was my oyster, and I intended to gobble it up. Talking to me didn’t work, as I was aware that I was emotionally eating; making alternative suggestions didn’t work, as I wanted everything. My wife finally had to grab my arms and physically restrain me for a moment to give me a chance to get a grip. Afterward, I put all the crap away and had some peaches. I sure love my wife.

People say a support system is necessary to successful weight loss and lifestyle change, but they don’t mention how you have to be an active participant. You have to be willing to listen to advice and share your dilemmas and struggles. You can be your own Mexican crab, dragging yourself down by giving in to the urges and emotional battles, and not seeking support when you need it.

Not being a Mexican crab also means helping others where possible, even if they don’t necessarily want it. I constantly tell people how many calories are in the foods they’re eating - it’s become a joke among my co-workers, but several now read the label of everything they eat. They may still eat the food, but I’m not trying to change their habits - just their awareness. I also talk about food with my parents - recently, I suggested a hormone-free brand of beef, which they said tasted good enough to warrant the extra price. I constantly discuss the “real cost” of food - the impact on our bodies from eating refined and processed crap, and the impact on the environment from growing and processing corn. I have to keep in mind though - being a Mexican crab can be not listening and sharing, or going overboard and prostletizing.

Thanks to my wife, I satisfied my emotional angst last night without resorting to comfort food. I thank her every day for her awesome, positive presence in my life. Thanks to Dave, who began his weight-loss and lifestyle change journey before I began mine, I saw how achievable lifestyle change is - it’s certainly not easy, but the benefits are innumerable and worth the effort. I thank both Dave and my wife for holding me accountable.

And thanks to you, Life Ledger readers, who knowingly or not also help - if you are reading this, you are a member of my support network, someone I am transparent and accountable to. I appreciate your support, and offer the same.