Terveys

Weight loss chart 18 Feb - 12 Aug 2008

2008-08-12T12:44:00.006-08:00

Here it is all in one pretty little chart: my weight loss since February 18 this year (41 pounds scale weight to date). The color swatches mark off the diet regimes I was following during each period. Lotsa jaggies during the TKD & PSMF periods: that's due to water weight fluctuations from carbs consumed during free meals. But an obvious & very pleasing downward trend.

TKD stands for Targeted Ketogenic Diet — a low-carb diet in which carbs are consumed around workouts. PSMF stands for Protein Sparing Modified Fast — a very low-carb, low-calorie diet designed for maximum loss of bodyfat while preserving (sparing) the body's protein stores (i.e., muscle). The PSMF regime I follow is from Lyle McDonald's The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook.

The span of time marked "TKD (Start Walking)" marks when I was following a TKD during the last couple of weeks of meeting the major goals of my workplace Start Walking program — because no way could I have sustained the levels of exercise I was doing on a PSMF!

Oh yeah... & the period of "smooth loss" at the beginning was because I wasn't weight myself daily then — I started doing that on Apr. 7 after I got a decent scale. (Also didn't weigh daily during the vacation because I was traveling.) Otherwise, weights were taken daily, so that fluctuations are much more apparent.

Workplace wellness

2008-07-31T12:15:00.003-08:00

My employer, University of Alaska, has been working pretty hard over the past couple of years to encourage its employees' health through various workplace programs, like the Start Walking program I've now participated in twice. (Actually, we're still in the midst of the second one — I'm still recording steps or their equivalent, even though I've already completed the major goal of making a virtual ascent & descent of Mt. Everest.) The other main program they're doing right now is called Get the Point involves earning incentive prizes based on however many points you accumulate through tracking various health activities.

Though frankly I think I've been getting plenty of benefit from it even if I wasn't now in line to win either a $100 gift card or a GPS unit. I'm earning one or the other (which one should I opt for?!!) as a result of having achieved the "Elite Tier" for the amount of points I've earned over six months for such things as exercising regularly, getting health checkups, losing weight, improving cholesterol levels, etc. But of course it was actually doing those things that counts most.

I was motivated to do those things anyway, so I wouldn't say that this program is responsible for me having made the improvements I've made. You've gotta be motivated from the get-go. But most definitely having a program like this in place, which encourages tracking one's progress & suggests different avenues for improving one's health & fitness, really helps one along the way. I haven't found the program to be perfect, by any means, but it's been pretty damn helpful, & I'm grateful to the university for putting it together, & for the outfit (Wellness Initiatives Network for Alaska) that's been actually running it.

Meanwhile, today I entered all the stuff I've done this month. Aside from my pretty GPS-earning point total (currently at 3,539 points — when I get motivated, I get motivated!), since starting this program I have:

Lost 36 lbs. since Feb. 18 (down from 210 to 174).
Improved my BMI from 38.5 to 31.9.
Reduced my waistline by 4.5 inches (from 46 to 41.5).
Improved on some other health indicators such as total & HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.

Still some improvements to make, but hey. Not bad for five & a half months' work.

My four-chambered echo chamber

2008-07-24T14:48:00.004-08:00

Just had my echocardiogram over at Heart Center at Providence Hospital. This is one of the three imaging tests the ER doctor from my pepperoni pizza night ordered up to figure out whether I had a TIA or not — in this case an ultrasound of my heart. The technician, his name was Michael, was really good, & so was the guy (damn did I forget his name?) who set me up with the saline IV for the last part of the test.

And it was also pretty cool, & scary in a weird kinda way, to see those images of my heart pumping away on that black & white screen. Whoa, you've really been doing this job for 49 years plus? And so well, too. Don't stop, please!

Michael is the tech (I guess they call them cardiac sonographers), not the cardiologist, but he said that everything looked pretty good & normal. Nothing in what he saw to indicate that a TIA, if there indeed was one, came about because of any heart stuff.

Good job, heart.

Still a carotid doppler ultrasound & MRI to go, tomorrow.

Um... pepperoni...?

2008-07-23T12:59:00.005-08:00

Last month, on a day that happened to coincide (& undoubtedly not just coincidentally) with a bit of constipation plus an abnormally-for-me high level of sodium intake from eating too many meals in a row that featured ham — well, on that day I had a couple of incidents of a weird visual effect like seeing heat waves all around the peripheral vision of my right eye, couple with a really hard time focusing the two eyes together for reading. Second time it happened, it was followed on by a nagging headache just behind my left eye. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my friend Chris suggested that I'd experienced a migraine headache. Well, duh, Mel — but I've never gotten migraines before, so.... In my case I think it was caused by high blood pressure from water retention do to constipation plus too much ham. ;)

Didn't eat any ham yesterday, but lo! just after work while sitting on the bus reading a book, I started having some visual symptoms that at first had me thinking I was experiencing the same thing. Mostly inability to get my eyes to work together to focus on the page for reading. After I got across town to the restaurant I’d decided to eat at (the Bear Tooth, my fave), I started realizing it was different. First of all — well, the place wasn't crowded, so I knew they had they're "Please Be Seated" sign out. Except when I looked at it, I couldn't make sense of it. It reminded me of when Jesse was learning to read & had big problems with blends — like being unable to connect the B and the L together in BLUE or BLACK (or BLEND). In my case I could read the three individual words PLEASE, SEAT, & YOURSELF, but I couldn't make them make sense together. I only understood what it meant from having been there before & logicking it out.

So went & sat myself, knowing exactly what I wanted to order.— I didn’t even need. to look at the menu — except that I couldn't remember the words for what I wanted. So I got the menu & started researching — again, being able to read individual words, but being able to connect them with each other, except just for the fact that I eat there a lot so logically know what's what. The server came & asked me if I'd like something to drink. By that time I'd managed to puzzle out the beer I wanted (Bear Tooth had great microbrews), so I said IPA. She asked if I was also ready to order food, & I said I was, except that... I wasn't. I couldn't find the words. I said so: I lost the words. She laughed, not unkindly, until she became aware that I was distressed. I think she used the word "aphasia." I said, yes, & ended up asking her to come back in a couple of minutes. I needed to do research in the menu.

It was incredibly weird. I wanted one piece of pepperoni pizza, plus an entree size Caesar salad w/ grilled chicken. But I couldn't remember the words at all. I knew where they were on the menu, though, so I turned to the pizza page, found the word "Pizza" on the top, knew with some intellectual effort that was the right word, but had absolutely emotional sense of it: it was just a data point. Scan down the page... pepperoni?... yes... pepperoni. Memorized it, so that by the time the waitress got back I could order it. I knew how to add in "one piece" without the menu’s coaching, though. Then... salad. This one, the Caesar. With... chicken. And this size — yes the word is... entree. While noting to her again that something pretty darn weird was happening to me.

I was freaking, really... wondering if something had happened such that I wouldn’t be able to hold my job anymore, wouldn't even be able to read a book. Got out my book & studied it — could read words, could even read sentences, none of 'em made sense. The food came, I put the book aside, sat there chomping my pizza all the time trying to remember again what this food was called that I was eating. Pizza...? yes, that seemed right. But what were these round red slices of meat on it called? I spent half the meal trying to remember, before I finally gave up & looked it up again at the back of the menu. Put the words together, repeated them & repeated them, memorizing it. Then worked on the name of the salad. Looked around the place which (as it's part of an establishment including a movie theatre) has several old movie posters, including one from a foreign country of the old Peter Fonda movie "Easy Rider." I had seen that poster enough to have no problem with his name. But what was that last one? Jack. Nicholson. Jack. Nicholson. Is that somebody... is that that guy from [images of “Chinatown” in my mind] — was that the guy? Jack... Nicholson....?

But, I was able to pay my bill without a hitch & even get the tip right. And by the time I'd left the building, put the hood up on my raincoat, stuck my Bluetooth in my ear, & started off home in the rain while talking w/ my friend Marcia, things began getting normal again. I could say, without a hitch, pepperoni pizza & entree-size chicken Caesar salad & Jack Nicholson & Please Seat Yourself without a hitch.

Marcia told me she was coming to pick me up to take me to the emergency room.

Um... you are?—But yes, after some discussion & argument, also with another friend of mine, that's what happened. Spent nearly 4 hours at Providence Hospital ER last night — just across the street from my work, in fact just across the parking lot from the very bus stop where the whole biz began to unfold after work yesterday.

The current theories are either (1) hypgoglycemia, some hours after eating an oatmeal raisin cookie (although I'm low-carbing at the moment, I've been having some depression issues for a couple of days, & carbs help — which was also the point with the... uh... what was that food with the little red slices of meat again?); or (2) a transient ischemic event, TIA -- AKA a "mini-stroke." Which frankly I'd never heard of before last night.

My EKG was fine. Other tests up & coming — an echocardiogram tomorrow, an MRI & carotid doppler ultrasound Friday, a followup "what does this MEAN?!!" with my naturopath the following Friday.

Meantime, nothing like a little cognitive confusion & adrenaline to wipe out the last vestiges of the latest brief venture into depression.

Pepperoni pizza!

Stamina

2008-07-10T12:03:00.002-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Back on April 21 this year, I was proud to complete my first half-marathon (21,097 meters = 13.01 miles) on my erg as a part of Concept 2 Rowing's Global Marathon Challenge. But man was I wiped out afterwards, as I wrote about in detail in the blog post about my stupendous feat & in another post a couple weeks later about how stupendously damn long it took me to recover from it.

My how things have changed. Today, just two days after completing the 1,700,000 steps (or equivalent) of the 2008 Start Walking program, culminating in my second-ever half-marathon, I feel like I'm raring to go. My day of recovery was yesterday, & even so I still got in 14,031 steps, albeit at a slower pace than has lately been my wont. By comparison, the day after my first half-marathon, I couldn't bring myself to do much more than rise briefly up off the couch to use the bathroom or grab something from the fridge. It took me another 10 days to feel real energy for workouts. (I did workouts in between, but they were miserable.) Right now, I feel like I could hop on the erg & accomplish another half-marathon here & now. Except my rower is at home, & I'm not... so it'll have to wait.

How did this come to be? Particularly when you take in the full context of my latest half-marathon:

I'd done over 700,000 steps (or equivalent) in three weeks' time.
In the last 12 days of this period, I did at least 30,000 steps or equivalent every day, with four of those days going over 40,000 & three of the last four days at over 50,000.
Each of the last six days I rowed like crazy — 11K on one day, all the others 17K or more. Remember when even 10K was a major achievement for me? Now I can do it several days on end.
My final day (July 8) was at 55,274 steps in walking, dancing, & the half-marathon row.
I was mainly eating a reduced calorie, low-carb diet, except for preworkout carbs. (I also ate additional higher-carb meals on the last two weekends, when I was doing 40,000 to 50,000 steps/day).

I did feel pretty tired those last few days, especially in the mornings, & think with trepidation of how much I felt I needed to do — if only because of a stubborn & foolish sense of competitiveness. By afternoons, somehow the will would seep into me to overcome the trepidation just enough to get me on the rower, which, while taking less time than walking to run up the steps, is also much harder work. Funnily enough, though, once I'd put in maybe 3–4K on the erg, it was surprisingly easy to continue to greater distances — the worst problem being my sore bum which even bubble wrap can only inadequately ameliorate.

But the plain fact is, I was working through exhaustion. Overtraining, I'd say. Not the way I normally want to do things. I don't want to have that muscle fatigue dragging at me through the day, especially when I full well know that it harms rather than helps my fat loss goals.

But even as it was foolish to overtrain, out of a competitive spirit or whatever, it was valuable to discover the stamina I seem to have acquired. And with it, quicker recovery.

Better recovery undoubtedly has something to do with the better attention I've been paying to peri-workout nutrition, mainly through having preworkout carbs & higher-carb/higher calorie meals on days that are going to overall be workout days — you just can't power that much work without more calories & carbs. Stamina is, I guess, just as a result of all the training I've done over the past few months.

I'm not an athlete, I've never been one. I'm just an overweight, middle-aged couch potato. I started slowly, just like anyone. But look what I can do now.

Adverse weather conditions

2008-07-09T16:18:00.003-08:00

Per the UPS tracking site, my Xvest underwent adverse weather conditions in Anchorage at 8:09 PM last night. But today, it's officially been arrival-scanned into Anchorage. Hope they deliver it tomorrow early enough for the kid to sign for it before he heads to work.

Down from Everest

2008-07-09T07:30:00.005-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

I dunnit. As of last night — with, as my grand finalé, a half-marathon row (actually three meters more than that 21,097 meters that make up a half-marathon) — I came to a total step equivalent of 1,710,673, thereby completing my virtual ascent & descent of Mt. Everest.

I'm knackered.

But also just a teensy bit proud of myself. Back in May, as a result of going on the protein-sparing modified fast (PSMF), I slowed down quite a bit as I became acclimated to a very low-carb diet — a style of diet that doesn't support high intensity exercise. Then I went on a 12-day vacation to Seattle & Eugene, which for various reasons didn't accommodate itself to a lot of exercise. (Sitting in a plane, train, car, or visiting relatives... etc.). Then, when I returned to Anchorage, I was pretty slow to get myself up & going again. When I finally updated my steps, on June 17, whoa — I found I'd fallen way behind. There's my little competitive urges coming to the fore: why, I was nearly 233,000 steps behind my coworker Amy! So I started catching up. Since June 18, just three weeks ago, I've clocked in over 700,000 steps. (Or their equivalent.) (Don't worry: I increased my calorie/carb intake too.)

And I'm glad to say Amy finished too, coming third in under the wire for UAA (eighth overall), with me dashing in just after her.

What next? Well, Start Walking 2008 still has 84 days to go, through September 30. So I'll keep on walking (& rowing, dancing, lifting weights). But not quite at the pace I've been keeping the past three weeks (over 50,000 steps/day three of the past four days alone!). I need some recovery. And because fat loss & health are still top priorities for me, I'm ratcheting back to the PSMF-level eating as of today (low calorie, low carb).

I'll also be populating this blog with more posts, including some written post-date, to kinda fill in the gaps since my last posts in May (based on stuff I've written in discussion lists, etc.). That's probably more for my own sense of chronology than anything, since I don't know if anyone even reads this blog, really, besides me. I haven't been writing blogs mainly for two reasons: (1) I've been exercising so much I haven't had a lot of time or energy to spare for the blog; & (2) I've been so busy shoveling new info into myself, in a process a teacher I had used to call "front-end loading," about diet/nutrition, but writing about it in an intelligent way takes a more organized process, again requireing more time/energy than I've had to spare. So I figure that postdated posts will fill in gaps with things I've actually already written on the fly in discussion groups, & hopefully with new posts I can begin to integrate the info I've been learning, which has changed my thinking a lot about the stuff this blog is intended to be about.

I'll also be cheering other Start Walking participants on. You can do it!

Meanwhile, congratulations to Amy! And congratulations to me!

More on d-chiro inositol

2008-05-22T14:59:00.001-08:00

DCI has been shown to work orally at least in PCOS, Type 2 diabetes, & general insulin resistance, both in human studies & anecdotally. Anecdotally, d-pinitol (Inzitol) is getting some attention in athletic/bodybuilder circles.

d-chiro-inositol

One of the central studies seems to be one in the New England Journal of Medicine (Nester, et al. Ovulatory and metabolic effects of d-chiro-inositol in the polycystic ovary syndrome. New England Journal of Medicine 340 (1999): 1314-1320). They used 1200 mg. oral doses of D-chiro-inositol in the form of a product-in-development called INS-1 from Insmed Pharmaceuticals. 22 women with PCOS were matched against a placebo group of 22 women also with PCOS. Conclusions: "D-Chiro-inositol increases the action of insulin in patients with the polycystic ovary syndrome, thereby improving ovulatory function and decreasing serum androgen concentrations, blood pressure, and plasma triglyceride concentrations."

More research: Insmed was developing INS-2 for use in PCOS, diabetes, & dyslipidemia (high blood lipids) & ran Phase II clinical trials in 2001-2002. But they discontinued development of INS-2 in Sept. 2002, saying that "INS-1 was safe and well tolerated but did not achieve statistical significance on its primary efficacy measures" -- in spite of earlier press releases about the same trials that said there were statistically significant improvements (in Type 2 diabetes; in obese women w/ PCOS & nondiabetics with dyslipidemia). Anecdotally, women on the Soulcysters PCOS board reported participating in the clinical trials & experiencing big improvements on INS-1 — for example, regular periods (which sometimes go by the slang term "AF" meaning "Aunt Flo") & ovulation, lower hirsutism, better skin, no more hypoglycemia — improvements that disappeared after the trials ended & they were no longer getting the INS-1. People have also reported better weight loss. All of which makes me think that Insmed's decision to discontinue was premature. It sure was from the POV of PCOS-sufferers. (I'm not trying to get preggers myself, but a lot of women with PCOS are, & inability to have periods or to ovulate creates a problem.)

Anecdotally, women at Soulcysters say that eating food sources of d-chiro-inositol such as "PCOS-blaster" muffins containing buckwheat bran brings improvements, & so do the oral DCI supplements from the company Chiral Balance. Chiral Balance is a small company run, I gather, by a couple of biochemists who seem to be approaching DCI supplementation from a nutritional supplement rather than drug/pharmaceutical angle. Unfortunately, it's still expensive, & nutritional supplements aren't usually covered by health insurance.

Other studies in humans with related to DCI — Iuorno et al. 2002 (DCI supplementation in PCOS); Baillargeon et al. 2004 (metformin for PCOS seems to increase DCI-containing inositolphosphoglycan). There still seems to be a lot of study of DCI's mechanisms in insulin metabolism in mice & other animals too.

D-pinitol

An alternative oral supplement is d-pinitol (3-O-methyl-chiroinositol) — which it seems d-chiro-inositol can easily be made from, possibly even in insulin resistant people. (I'm still trying to understand the science — I'm smart enough I guess, but not a biochemist.) Pinitol is found in high concentrations in some legumes (such as soy), plants, fruits, and parts of pine trees like the sugar pine. Two manufactured supplements containing it: Inzitol & ViTAL Nutrients d-Pinitol 600. (About $120 per 60-cap bottle on Amazon — just about as expensive as Chiral Balance's DCI. But $79.95/bottle at this point from this source.)

Inzitol is found in a product called Meta-Cel, which also contained creatine & is aimed at bodybuilders. Also apparently in another bodybuilder supplement called Nitro-Tech that makes all kinds of (who knows if they're valid) claims. Also apparently in some products from PVL Nutrients, but it's not readily apparent which ones. A Google search on Inzitol brings up a lot of hits about the use of Inzitol in athletics, including bodybuilding, where it's alleged to help with creatine utilization. E.g., this interview with someone at the New Zealand company that makes Inzitol.

In one human study on pinitol I found in PubMed, pinitol was found to increase levels of d-chiro-inositol in the body (14-fold increase in DCI levels with 20 mg pinitol per kg of body weight per day for four weeks in diabetic patients), but not to improve insulin sensitivity (Davis et al. 2000). Another found it didn't help insulin sensitivity in nondiabetic older people (Campbell et al. 2004). On the other hand, Kim et al. 2007, in a study of poorly controlled Type 2 diabetics, found "fasting glucose, post-prandial glucose levels, and hemoglobin A1c were significantly decreased." Similarly, Kang et al. 2006. (Both these latter two studies uses pinitol from soy sources, not sure what the other studies used. I believe Inzitol is manufactured from pine tree sources.)

Mechanism

From the best I understand, the proven low levels of d-chiro-inositol in Type 2 diabetics & women w/ PCOS (& other insulin resistant people) appears to be a deficiency caused by an inability to transform myo-inositol into d-chiro-inositol within the body. Whether that's from some sort of genetic problem or due to environment (hyperglycemia &/or hyperinsulinemia, perhaps) isn't clear. But I'm thinking it's quite similar to how we as human beings are supposed to be able to change the omega-3 DHA found in flax seed into the essential omega-3s EPA & DHA. But, we're pretty inefficient at it, & many people can't seem to do it at all, so therefore we eat fish oil in order to get enough EPA/DHA. Most people can make DCI in their own bodies, but insulin resistant people's bodies are lousy at it; so we need supplementation.

So... this might not have that much utility as I thought it might for insulin sensitive dieters, who probably don't have this deficiency... but for those of us who are insulin resistant, & eating moderate to high-carb diets, it might be very helpful indeed. Meantime, the bodybuilder supplement industry seems to be embracing Inzitol, though whether it's anything more than something else to make money with — in an industry that sells all kinds of expensive supplements that may or may not be beneficial for the purposes advertised — is a question.

At any rate, for anyone who wants to experiment, seems that both DCI & pinitol are different from Metformin (glucophage) as insulin-sensitizers in that they are naturally found in the human body, & all reports seem to be that oral supplementation is well-tolerated & doesn't give the nasty side effects Metformin sometimes does.

According to Joseph Larner, who's been studying d-chiro-inositol for a couple of decades, DCI was "originally discovered as a component of a putative mediator of intracellular insulin action, where as a putative mediator, it accelerates the dephosphorylation of glycogen synthase and pyruvate dehydrogenase, rate limiting enzymes of non-oxidative and oxidative glucose disposal." Further explained, most of it understandable even to non-biochemist-me, in the journal article of his I posted yesterday, D-chiro-inositol – its functional role in insulin action and its deficit in insulin resistance. International Journal of Experimental Diabetes Research 3(1) (2002): 47-60.

D-chiro inositol

2008-05-21T17:01:00.006-08:00

Yesterday on an email list I'm on, someone mentioned d-chiro-inositol (DCI) (part of the B-vitamin group), which I'd never heard of before, but which plays a part in carbohydrate metabolism as some sort of helper to insulin. It turns out insulin resistant/Type 2 diabetic people in general, & women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) in particular (which affects about 10% of all women, including me), have been found to have deficient levels of DCI in their bodies.

It's theorized that this is due to an impairment in whatever it takes for the closely related myo-inositol to be changed into d-chiro-inositol in the body. Furthermore, studies have shown that women with PCOS & Type 2 diabetics who are given supplements of DCI have improvements in insulin sensitivity, blood sugar levels, blood insulin levels, etc. -- as well as improvement of the additional symptoms (high androgen levels, irregular to nonexistent menstrual periods, infertility) that tend to accompany PCOS. On an anecdotal level, there are a number of women at the forums at Soulcysters.com (a major PCOS support site) who report having successfully regulated their menstrual cycles & achieving pregnancy (as well as other improvements) through supplementation with DCI. The word "miracle" tends to show up. (Well, I guess miracles do happen when deficiencies are addressed. That's how sailors must've felt when they learned all they had to keep from getting scurvy was to eat citrus fruits.)

Here's some relevant studies. All of these have full-text available online:

Ostlund, et al.D-chiro-inositol metabolism in diabetes mellitus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 90 (1993), 9988-9992.
Nester, et al. Ovulatory and metabolic effects of d-chiro-inositol in the polycystic ovary syndrome. New England Journal of Medicine 340 (1999): 1314-1320.

This is a really central study related to PCOS. Obese PCOS-affected women on doses of 1200mg/day showed marked improvements on a bunch of different things when compared with controls on placebo.
Larner, Joseph. D-chiro-inositol – its functional role in insulin action and its deficit in insulin resistance. International Journal of Experimental Diabetes Research 3(1) (2002): 47-60.

Larner has apparently been involved in the investigation of d-chiro-inositol in carbohydrate metabolism in mice for a couple of decades, per his 2005 press release from UVa.
Shashkin, et al. Fasting decreases the content of d-chiroinositol in human skeletal muscle. International Journal of Experimental Diabetes Research 3(3) (2002): 163-169.

I'm wondering from this if DCI is one of the substances mentioned in Lyle McDonald's The Ketogenic Diet that gets downregulated during fasting & ketogenic diets. [Later: I asked Lyle, who answered that "arguably the primary effector for the fasting issue is PDH downregulation" — PDH is pyruvate dehydrogenase.]

Unfortunately there are few sources of DCI supplements, & they tend to be expensive (e.g., Chiral Balance). Apparently the mega-pharmaceutical companies haven't found it worth their while to bring their own versions to market. Less expensive supplements called simply inositol or myo-inositol seem to be helpful for some people, but since the problem insulin resistant people seem to have is in changing myo-inositol to DCI, it's really DCI that needs to be supplemented. Another supplement that might work, though, is d-pinitol (aka D-chiro (+)-o-methyl inositol), which is available under the trade name Inizitol (New Zealand company, but there are distributors in the U.S. & Canada); this is also recommended as a possible supplement for PCOS by Richard Bernstein in Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. Apparently d-pinitol is also used a lot by athletes and affects whole-body creatine retention. More info on d-pinitol & DCI from a PCOS-suppement supplier here.

The food source with the highest level of DCI is buckwheat (which is actually a rhubarb relative, not a grain), especially in buckwheat bran (farinetta) (available in quantity from Minndak.com). Apparently some other legumes (e.g., garbanzo beans) also contain small quantities of DCI. People at Soulcysters, who have become quite expert at creating recipes containing these foods, have also mentioned carob syrup & soy lecithin -- I think those are supposed to be sources of pinitol. Carob syrup is something of a problem since it's got a lot of sugar.

... Since I'm insulin resistant & have PCOS, I probably have this deficiency in d-chiro-inositol, so I am likely going to get some of this stuff no matter how expensive & experiment with it when I get back from my trip.

Rapid weight loss & the gall bladder

2008-05-12T19:17:00.012-08:00

I decided a few days ago to follow Lyle McDonald's version of a Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF) (as detailed in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook). This diet is designed to "spare protein" — that is, loss of lean body mass–by giving an adequate amount of calories from protein, plus 10 grams daily of omega 3 fats through fish oils, plus nonstarchy veggies. Versions of PSMF programs seem to be used a lot for safe rapid fat loss among obese people (which I qualify as). There are a number of references at PubMed to therapeutic use of PSMF diets.

When I decided to embark on it, I'd forgotten all about the relationship between rapid weight loss & gall bladder issues — in spite of having had some rather nasty gall bladder attacks 10 years ago after fairly rapid weight loss (due to loss of appetite from grief & stress about a personal situation). One of those attacks even resulted in my being taken to the emergency room, mostly because one of my coworkers thought it might be a heart attack. An ultrasound the following day found I had no gallstones (possibly I passed one) but my gall bladder was larger than usual.

In any case, I did a bit of research at the time, & opted against a gall bladder removal, for which I'm glad. But my doctor told me to eat "low fat" which seems to be the standard medical advice. Now I think that rather the opposite is true — that low-fat diets (at least the extreme ones) are at least part of what sets one up for gall bladder attacks. Turns out that one of the fundamental issues with gall bladder health is eating enough dietary fat so that your gall bladder empties.

The short version of what I've just researched in the last couple days: if you're going on a rapid weight loss diet or will be undergoing gastric bypass surgery or some other bariatric surgery which will have the same effect, make sure that you are eating at least 10 grams of healthy dietary fats a day to reduce your risk of gall stones.

Now here's the long version:

Turns out that there is a really really high percentage of gastric bypass patients who get gallstones or sludge in the gall bladder (which can also lead to gall bladder attacks). See, for example:

Shiffman, et al. Gallstone formation after rapid weight loss: a prospective study in patients undergoing gastric bypass surgery for treatment of morbid obesity. Am J Gastroenterol. 1991 Aug;86(8):1000-5.

Al-Jiffry, et al. Changes in gallbladder motility and gallstone formation following laparoscopic gastric banding for morbid obesity. Can J Gastroenterol. 2003 Mar;17(3):169-74.

From a little research, it seems one of the biggest contributor to gall bladder issues is low fat diets which prevent gall bladder emptying. In a blog post called "Oh the gall of it", Mary Eades (wife of & coauthor with Michael Eades of the low-carb diet Protein Power), criticizing the laughable notice that low-fat diets prevent gall bladder disease, explains:

What makes the gall bladder empty? As any basic human physiology text will you, it’s fat entering the first portion of the small intestine. When saturated, monounsaturated, or even polyunsaturated fat reaches this area, its entry triggers the release of cholecystokinin (CCK) which is the hormone that causes the gall bladder to squeeze and squirt bile into the intestine to emulsify the fat.

This is what the gall bladder is supposed to do, for crying out loud; it’s its raison d’etre.

Basically, if you eat hardly any dietary fats, your gall bladder sits around doing nothing, & gets sludgy from bile that never gets do to its job & just sits there getting blechy. Inactive gall bladders are also more likely to form gallstones. Then, if you do eat a meal high in dietary fat, boom! gall bladder attack. All the g.b. attacks I had in 1998 were immediately after eating a high fat meal (Wendy's burgers in one case, a crapload of M&Ms in another), after having lost a lot of weight during my aforementioned Official Grief & Dumbfoundedness Weight Loss Diet. The medical advice I got at the time was to eat a very low fat diet. Thank gods I learned differently later down the road.

Since the PSMF diet I'm following includes 10 grams daily of omega 3 fatty acids distributed among the meals throughout the day, as well as whatever amounts of fat come packaged with the protein foods I'm eating, I should be okay. Some of the studies at PubMed indicate the low calorie diets that include fat are successful at preventing gall bladder problems; but low fat (say, less than 10 g/day) dieters are much more likely to develop gallstones.

Another strike against ultra low-fat dieting.

Some of the studies showing this:

Festi D, et al. Gallbladder motility and gallstone formation in obese patients following very low calorie diets. Use it (fat) to lose it (well). Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 1998 Jun;22(6):592-600.

In the obese during rapid weight loss from a very low calorie diet, a relatively high fat intake could prevent gallstone formation, probably by maintaining an adequate gallbladder emptying, which could counterbalance lithogenic mechanisms acting during weight loss.

In this case, "relatively high fat intake" involved daily 12 grams of dietary fat (108 calories) on a 577 calorie diet during the first three months of the diet. By comparison, the people on the low-fat diet were eating 3 grams of fat (27 calories) on a 535.2 calorie diet for the first three months. Both groups had higher calorie diets for the second three months. 54.5% of the low fat dieters developed (nonsymptomatic) gallstones; none of the higher fat dieters did.

Festi, et al. Review: low caloric intake and gall-bladder motor function. Ailment Pharmacol Ther 2000: 14 (Suppl. 2): 51—53.

A threshold quantity of fat (10 g) has been documented to obtain efficient gall-bladder emptying.... Adequate fat content of the VLCD [very low calorie diet] may prevent gallstone formation, maintaining adequate motility and may be more economic and physiologically acceptable than administration of an pharmacalogical agent.

This appears to be based on the same study as the prior document.

Gebhard, et al. The role of gallbladder emptying in gallstone formation during diet-induced rapid weight loss. Hepatology. 1996 Sep;24(3):544-8.

The findings suggest that gallstone risk during rapid weight loss may be reduced by maintenance of gallbladder emptying with a small amount of dietary fat. Ultimately, weight loss reduced bile cholesterol saturation and improved highdensity lipoprotein (HDL) levels.

But it's not foolproof. This study showed lower levels of gallstone formation for people on 30 g/day of fat than for 16 g/day of fat on liquid 900 cal/day diets, but a few people on each diet developed gallstones over 13 weeks on the diet.

Vezina, et al. "Similarity in gallstone formation from 900 kcal/day diets containing 16 g vs 30 g of daily fat: evidence that fat restriction is not the main culprit of cholelithiasis during rapid weight reduction." Dig Dis Sci. 1998 Mar;43(3):554-61.

Substantial fat for rapid weight-reducing diets resulted in gallstone formation. Since experiments have shown that our higher fat diet, containing 10 g fat per meal, results in maximal gallbladder emptying, cholelithiasis from rapid weight loss may not be solely attributable to gallbladder stasis.

So something else was also going on. Might it have to do also with pre-diet nutrition? I.e., maybe those who formed gallstones had low-fat diets prior to this diet... just speculating here. Mary Eades ties gall bladder disease squarely to insulin resistance, so maybe it has something to do with that.

Adequate protein — & a protein-sparing crash diet

2008-05-08T23:58:00.008-08:00

Two additional things I've learned from Lyle McDonald & his Body Recomposition website so far, that are having a pretty immediate effect on my nutritional planning:

First, he's convinced me that "dieting by percentages" — that is, figuring out my nutrition based on macronutrient percentages — doesn't really make a whole lotta sense (see "Dieting by Percentages, part 2"). Mainly because if I'm going only by the percentages of carbs, fats, & protein I'm eating, I can really screw up on how much protein I should really be eating. Too little protein is bad, too much protein is bad too. Basically, what I need (or anybody else needs) is adequate protein. I don't think I was probably getting quite enough before I started doing any meal tracking; but I've also got to be careful that I'm not getting too much. So my protein intake should be defined more by my overall activity level than by its percentage of my diet — it should for the most part be a constant. Which is why the real changes are between low-carb/high-carb & hence also between high-fat/low-fat (or moderate levels of each). Since I'm going low-carb, that by definition means that I'm going to be eating, percentagewise, a "high-fat diet" (healthy fats, of course). Okay, now, doesn't that go against the long-lived "fat is evil" propaganda that's been going around the past three or so decades? And a fat lot of good its done for us too. (Literally. The dominance of the "low fat" mantra has correlated quite closely to the rise of the obesity epidemic that we hear so much about these days.)

Second, & more radically, McDonald has convinced me that it is possible to do crash dieting in a safe, healthy way. The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook: A Scientific Approach to Crash Dieting. I've already have this book in hand (or rather, computer), since it was available for purchase via electronic download at McDonald's website. With all the reading about nutrition I've done over the past couple of years — this stuff makes sense. Basically, this diet is his version of a protein-sparing modified fast (PSMF) — a low calorie "crash" diet which avoids muscle wasting by providing those calories that are eaten mostly in the form of dietary protein, with the addition of essential fatty acids (omega 3s) & nonstarchy carbs. How exactly to do it depends on one's body fat percentage — obese people with high body fat percentages (which I qualify as) can afford to use this diet for a longer period of time than people of middling body fat percentages or people who are fairly lean (e.g., bodybuilders on a pre-contest diet). (This accords with stuff that Tom Venuto has said: that people with high body fat percentages can afford much higher calorie deficits than people who are leaner, though Venuto overall would not recommend a PSMF diet.) McDonald's got built in free meals, refeeds, & two to three-week diet breaks in order to prevent metabolic slowdown & boredom.

I think what I'm coming to is an understanding that:

(1) Yes, my overall changes in how I eat — which started with my dietary overhaul two years ago after my mother's death — must by necessity be a permanent, lifestyles changes in how I eat. No way will I will ever go back to the vending machine diet I was on before). But —

(2) There is also a certain science to "dieting" that I can make use of — techniques, like this protein-sparing modified fasting "crash" diet, that of course are not sustainable over the long haul, that by their nature must be limited in duration & scope, but which can nonetheless be extremely helpful for the shorter term.

So, yeah. I'm gonna give a try to this over the next two or three weeks. Actually, someone with my body fat % can, according to McDonald, go for as long as 10 or 12 weeks on this diet before a two-week break from it (including two "free" meals per week during the diet itself), but I think it's better to try it out for a shorter time first, especially since I'll be traveling down to Seattle & Eugene for ten days at the end of the month & will need more flexibility about what I'm eating then.

One of the effects this will have on workouts is that because the PSMF diet is by its nature ketogenic, it cannot sustain too much cardio & definitely not high intensity intervals — because there won't be enough glucose in my system to turbocharge my muscles for those kinds of workouts. So, Turbulence Training is on hold for the moment. What I can do is moderate straight cardio, & I can do traditional strength workouts.

So that's basically the plan through about May 21 or 22. I fly down to Seattle on the evening of May 23, so on the 22nd or 23rd I'll start increasing my caloric intake to more "maintenance" levels, chiefly by adding more healthy fats into my diet but also probably some low glycemic carbs.

I'm not actually fully on the PSMF diet yet, but approaching it — eating very few carbs, & lower amounts of fats. I do want to make use of the apples I've got at home so they don't go bad. But after they're eaten... well, we'll see how it goes.

I've considered this pretty carefully, & will be watching myself carefully too to see how it goes. Please believe me that I will up my intake if anything seems to be going wrong. I expect by the nature of ketogenic diets that my energy levels will go down a bit as I transition from burning glucose to burning ketones, & also that I'll initially have some hunger; but hunger pangs are reported to disappear in the absence of carbs, & my energy should improve after a few days too (except not to the point of sustaining high intensity workouts, which require the turbocharging provided by glucose).

Learning about ketosis

2008-05-05T23:32:00.003-08:00

Rather to my surprise over the past few months, I've become convinced that eating a ketogenic diet (in which body energy is mostly supplied by free fatty acids & ketones derived from body fat, rather than glucose from carbs), at least for a time, might be exactly the route I need to go. But I needed to know more, because most of the info I've seen on ketosis is warped by the epic battle between low-carb cheerleaders who consider ketosis the be-all & high-carb cheerleaders who consider ketosis the great evil that will lead without inevitably to kidney disease (which, best I can tell, is absolutely not the case, unless one's kidneys are already compromised).

So, I plugged the word "ketosis" into the Search field at Amazon.com, & low & behold came upon the book that I think can absolutely answer my questions, not only about ketosis itself but also about how to still have kick-ass powerhouse workouts (whether cardio or strength training) through targeted nutrition around a workout(i.e., having carbs pre, during, & post-workout, because otherwise your workout will really really suck).

The book is by Lyle McDonald, The Ketogenic Diet: A Complete Guide for the Dieter and Practitioner. Amazon is out of stock at the moment, so I ordered it directly from McDonald's website. Since coming across this book, I've seen references to it elsewhere, which agree with McDonald's own assessment that it's a thoroughly researched from the scientific literature, at least to the point of its publication in 1998, along with being the best "bible" out there about how to do a ketogenic diet, including support for workout-related nutrition. So.

I might add that an ultra-low carb (ketogenic) diet is pretty much what is prescribed by Dr. Richard Bernstein for his Type 1 & Type 2 diabetic patients (Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution) which I think is arguably the best single source on diabetes treatment through nutrition & medicine. It's more restrictive on carbs than what I may need for my metabolic state — I'm insulin resistant but not, at this point, diabetic — but it's a damn good starting point. Bernstein is all about making diabetics as healthy as they possibly can be, which is a damn site healthier than the American Diabetes Association has ever remotely imagined: Bernstein's methods lead to (1) normal blood sugars; (2) the remission/reversal of virtually all diabetic complications except for those that have already led to irreparable damage; & (3) diabetics who are overall more healthy than most nondiabetics. Bernstein doesn't talk about ketosis in his book, but it's obvious from the low levels of carbs that his way of eating includes that it is ketogenic. Bernstein himself has been eating that way since around the mid-1970s.

From moderate-carb to low-carb

2008-05-05T19:48:00.005-08:00

Being who I am, I have continually been mucking over the past few months with my nutrition. In this context, "being who I am" means that I can go geek with just about anything that interests me. So, when I was pursuing my master's degree (Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, earned Dec. 1997), focusing on poetry, I became a prosody geek. (Prosody is the technical stuff in poetry having to do with rhythm, rhyme, etc.) When I became interested in family history, I became a genealogy geek. Now, as I try to improve my health, I am a nutrition geek.

I demonstrated that recently in some conversations I participated in with Tom Venuto at his Burn the Fat Inner Circle membership site about Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories... & since my participation in that conversation ended (or went into abeyance, or whatever) I've been continuing to read & learn. I find that I agree with Tom about some stuff, but not about other stuff. For example, I agree with him that fat loss requires a caloric deficit. But I seem to disagree with him about how exactly the energy balance business works — i.e., is a calorie just a calorie, regardless of what kind of nutrient it is? Well, yes; but also no. That is, it’s a lot more complex than simply “calories in = calories out,” due to the complexities of how metabolism works inside the body. Being a geek, I am trying to learn more about how it all actually works.

Okay, well Tom has tended to focus in those conversations on the weight, specifically fat loss, aspects of energy balance (calories in/calories out). But for me, an insulin resistant prediabetic, I'm concerned about the health aspects of what I’m eating even more, so whether the calories are carb calories, protein calories, or fat calories is absolutely critical to me. And because of the emphasis of Burn the Fat Inner Circle is much more on fat loss than on metabolic health, it has appeared personally to me that there is a reluctance there to attend in much more than a (relatively) cursory fashion to the problems of insulin resistance. At least, relative to what I feel I need. Really, I think the deal is that while BFIC absolutely recognizes that insulin resistant (or, as they call it there, carb sensitive) people need a different diet than the moderately high carb diet recommended there for people who are insulin sensitive... there’s a wariness there of providing a any possible platform there for low-carb cheerleaders who make bigger claims for low-carb eating than what's actually warranted. That’s a reasonable fear, given that "one size fits all" approaches only ever really work for just some people. Evidence seems to show that while low-carb works very well for some people, it doesn’t work so well for many others.

Problem is that the overall skew in our culture about nutrition comes from the high-carb cheerleaders, led by organizations such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture with its food pyramid & the American Diabetes Association with its "let's make diabetics even sicker than they already are" high-carb diets. These diets, again, only work for some people. They definitely do not work for diabetics or prediabetics. Unless, of course, you're a pharmaceutical company for whom the sickness of diabetes is a perennial cash cow.

Given that many people who are trying to burn off the fat are insulin resistant, & the overwhelming evidence that high-carb diets are absolutely disastrous for us — well, I’ll just say that while BFIC continues to be a crucial part of my “fat loss” support system, that I’m also on the lookout for other resources as well, which are more natural supports for the kind of nutrition that I as an insulin resistant person need.

Am I a low-carb cheerleader? Well, no. In fact, two years ago, when I first began to overhaul my way of eating, I was quite wary, one might say suspicious, of low-carb approaches. After I read The Schwarzbein Principle, which provided what seemed the perfect model for me of how I should be eating, I was always at pains to refer to what I did as “moderate carb.”

But I’ve been undergoing a slow change of consciousness, especially over the past three months after diving back into nutrition geek mode. Especially after reading some of Richard K. Bernstein’s important work Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution. It comes down to this: if it makes my blood sugar go above normal levels, then I shouldn’t eat it.

And by normal levels, I mean normal levels. Not “what’s normal for a diabetic” or “what’s normal for a prediabetic.” I mean normal. And at this point in the game, that means eating fewer carbohydrates than what I was eating “moderate carb” level. And so, much to my surprise, I’m turning into a low-carber. Not because I think “low carb is for everyone.” But because it will work better for me. And yes, probably for most diabetics & prediabetics.

A new resource I found last week sums it up quite nicely for me:
My general experience has been that individuals who respond very well to high-carbohydrate/lower fat diets tend to do very poorly on low-carb/higher-fat diets. They feel terrible (low energy and a mental fog that never goes away), don't seem to lean out very effectively and it just doesn't work.

This cuts both ways: folks who don't respond well to higher carbs do better by lowering carbs and increasing dietary fat. Sometimes that means a moderate carb/moderate fat diet, sometimes it means a full blown ketogenic diet. I should also note that some people seem to do just as well on one diet as another.

— from "Insulin Sensitivity and Fat Loss" by Lyle McDonald
I think Tom Venuto would actually agree with most of that, though perhaps not the part about ketogenic diets, which he seems quite wary of. But me...well, in fact, I ran into Lyle McDonald because rather to my surprise over the past few months, I've become convinced that eating a ketogenic diet (in which body energy is mostly supplied by free fatty acids & ketones from body fat, rather than glucose from carbs), at least for a time, might be exactly the route I need to go.

But more on that in another post.

Recovery

2008-05-05T18:32:00.007-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Oh boy do I need to update my blog.

I learned a few lessons from my half-marathon row on April 18. Live & learn, indeed. Considering that the prior week I'd done 15,266 meters in one sitting, with no ill effects, it's pretty incredible that the addition of just another 5k was enough to mess me up as badly as it did. Or atleast, I'm guessing that something about that row is behind the effects I experienced, mainly having to do with energy levels.

Well, it was to be expected I'd be a bit wiped out the day following a 13-mile row. So on that following day (a Sunday) I did nothing exercise-wise, just hung about my apartment & enjoyed a well-earned vege-out (complete with the consumption of plenty of veggies). After that — let's see, I'm looking at my little spreadsheet on my Palm — I got the equivalent of 9K to 15K steps over the next five days, but rowed on only three of those days, & that at fairly low levels — a max of 3k meters. And I felt kinda yucky every time. Which is, of course, why I didn't row more. Nor did I have the oomph to do any of my Turbulence Training workouts. All of this was accompanied by an abrupt increase in daytime sleepiness, that whole falling into a drowse mid-typing at my computer, which was remedied only through influxes of caffeine. This in spite of actually succeeding, for once, in getting at least 7 hours of sleep every night that week.

The following weekend (i.e., Apr. 26-27) I couldn't bring myself to do a damn thing. Slept in, vegged. I was able to pick up the last week, including an increase in rowing workouts, but I didn't really feel good doing a row until Thursday, May 1. That was a 10K row, a fitting beginning to the new rowing season. (On the Concept 2 website, seasons run from May to April, so even though we still have most of 2008 yet to go, in rowing terms we're now in the "2009 season.") I even put myself at the very front of the pack in the rankings for a 10K row in my class (women aged 40- to 49 heavyweight)! Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that I was the only person in my class to record a 10K row for the 2009 season to that point. (As of this morning, I'm now 5th out of 8.)

So, my energy levels seem to have returned, & the daytime sleepies seem to be improving slightly. I also finally got the weight bench & dumbbell stand for the Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells I purchased a few weeks ago put together over the past weekend, so I'm set to get back on the weight training workouts.

Here's what I think led to all this: I screwed up in how I set up the half-marathon row. First, I did it way too late at night. When it got that late, I should have just gone to bed, & saved the row for the following day or even put it off to the following weekend. (To meet the challenge, I had until April 30). Second, I had inadequate nutrition around the workout itself -- preworkout, during workout, postworkout. I did have a protein/carb drink (more protein than carbs) that I sipped at during brief rest periods (such as when I had to stop to give my poor sore bum a break), but that wasn't enough. You can sure bet that I've been doing some research on pre, during, & post-workout nutrition since then. In any case, between the poor timing of the workout & the poor workout-related nutrition, I sabotaged my recovery. That's what I think, anyway.

Good to have the energy back, though. Starting on May 1, I've done four long straight cardio (i.e., not HIIT) rows, & have felt good both during & afterwards, with no ill effects.

Weight-wise — well, it's been fluctuating a bit up & down by about two or three lbs., but no further weight lost. I'm not too worried about that, though; I think it goes with the absence of HIIT & weight training these past two weeks, & at least there hasn't been a precipitate weight increase. Now that my energy's back up, things should improve again.

I have, in virtual "ascent of Everest" terms, reached Everest Base Camp. So that's pretty cool.

5-HTP & depression

2008-05-01T12:04:00.007-08:00

I learned recently that 5-HTP is an intermediate between the amino acid tryptophan (oh ye of post-Thanksgiving turkey dinner sleepiness fame) & the neurotransmitter serotonin, whose activity is targeted by a lot of antidepressants. Thus, 5-HTP is alternative to antidepressants–& from my standpoint, a superior one. This is important to me given my history of problems with depression. Since I'm also insulin resistant (prediabetic), the metabolism of carbs & their intimate relationship with tryptophan & hence serotonin levels is crucial.

When I overhauled my diet to a low glycemic/moderate carb diet a couple of years ago, I discovered that I was just as prone to fall into depression if I went too low in carbs as I did when I was my carb intake was too high. I don't seem to be having that problem so much now, as I go to a lower carb diet. Maybe I've adapted. But I'm now also supplementing now with 5-HTP.

Here's how I understand the mechanism relating carbs & insulin to tryptophan > 5-HTP > serotonin to mood disorders like depression (& probably other things like road rage, anxiety, etc.).

Low serotonin levels frequently (especially in insulin resistant people whose blood sugars are all over the map) lead to carb cravings because intake of carbs brings (as most of use here will know) increase in insulin secretion. The insulin works not only to control blood glucose (as best it can), but also to cause various amino acids to be absorbed into body tissues -- except apparently tryptophan isn't absorbed as much. This then leads to tryptophan to have less competition from other amino acids for riding the carrier molecule they use to get through the blood-brain barrier, where the tryptophan is synthesized into 5-HTP & from 5-HTP into serotonin. The effect of eating carbs for the depressed person is, thus, to increase serotonin levels into the brain -- but at a cost (higher blood sugars, higher blood insulin, increase in insulin resistance & obesity, etc.).

The reason it might be better to supplement with 5-HTP than tryptophan is because: (1) tryptophan is also used in the body to synthesize other products, which might not hold as much advantage for mood issues, whereas (I think) 5-HTP is used mainly to synthesize serotonin; & (2) 5-HTP has a much easier time getting through the blood/brain barrier than tryptophan -- apparently doesn't require the carrier molecule that tryptophan does (in which tryptophan competes with other amino acids).

My source for this info is the book Hunger Free Forever: The New Science of Appetite Control by Michael T. Murray, N.D. and Michael R. Lyon, M.D. Murray has also written a book specifically about 5-HTP. I'll see if I can find actual scientific cites. In any case, so far it's working well for me.

Update 12 May 2008: I finally got around to finding a reference. Here is is, with its abstract.

Birdsall TC.. 5-Hydroxytryptophan: a clinically-effective serotonin precursor. Altern Med Rev. 1998 Aug;3(4):271-80.

(Full article with references is available at http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/3/4/271.pdf.)

5-Hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP) is the intermediate metabolite of the essential amino acid L-tryptophan (LT) in the biosynthesis of serotonin. Intestinal absorption of 5-HTP does not require the presence of a transport molecule, and is not affected by the presence of other amino acids; therefore it may be taken with meals without reducing its effectiveness. Unlike LT, 5-HTP cannot be shunted into niacin or protein production. Therapeutic use of 5-HTP bypasses the conversion of LT into 5-HTP by the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase, which is the rate-limiting step in the synthesis of serotonin. 5-HTP is well absorbed from an oral dose, with about 70 percent ending up in the bloodstream. It easily crosses the blood-brain barrier and effectively increases central nervous system (CNS) synthesis of serotonin. In the CNS, serotonin levels have been implicated in the regulation of sleep, depression, anxiety, aggression, appetite, temperature, sexual behaviour, and pain sensation. Therapeutic administration of 5-HTP has been shown to be effective in treating a wide variety of conditions, including depression, fibromyalgia, binge eating associated with obesity, chronic headaches, and insomnia.

Half-marathoner

2008-04-21T12:10:00.011-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

I did it.

In answer to Concept 2's Global Marathon Challenge, I rowed a half-marathon (21,097 meters = 13.01 miles) on Saturday night.

Boy did it make my tush sore. This in spite of having followed Concept 2's advice, on its Training for a Marathon page, to lay in a supply of bubble wrap. I started with one sheet, & it really helped, too — for about the first hour. But then me bum got progressively more & more sore, & I had to pop on another sheet. But me bum was still sore, poor me. I think I could have put in a better time if it weren't for the stops I was making just to stand up & give me poor sore bum a break. I finished with a time of 2:21:28.6, which put me at the bottom (how appropriate!) of the rankings for women in my weight/age range.

But I did it!

The top-ranked women's heavyweight age 40 to 49 class has a time of 1:27:35.2. Wow, it would've been nice to have sat nearly an hour less than what I did! There was some recompense. I was accompanied in my effort by three & one-quarter episodes of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" spinoff series "Angel". Thank you, Joss Whedon, for creating something to keep my mind occupied whilst I rowed me poor sore bum off.

Thanks to having also rowed a set of high intensity intervals on Saturday morning, plus a deensy amount of walking in between, I accumulated a total of 40,867 steps (or their equivalent) for the day. In our virtual ascent of Mt. Everest, this brought me into the village of Dughla.

Where I gave myself a Good. Long. Rest. Couldn't do much else: I was completely wiped out. My Sunday went like this: I got something to eat, went & sat on the couch & read a bit, dozed off, woke up, read a bit, got something to eat, came back to the couch with it, ate & read, dozed... that was the whole day. My cat came & sat on my lap or on the back of the couch behind my head — that was nice. I intended to do at least a brief walk around the neighborhood, but when I checked on my energy levels all I found was nada. Zip. Zilch. Null.

Well, that's to be expected, I supposed. I'm doing better today, already got some dancing in & I think I'll be able to get 10,000 steps in actual walking in. I still feel a bit of residual wipe-out from Saturday night.

But I bet I'll do a whole lot better next time.

Into Dingboche

2008-04-17T22:39:00.003-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Well, good, today in the Everest Challenge I made it "virtually" into Dingboche. That requires an accumulation of 320,300 steps or equivalent; as of tonight, I'm at 330,275 — just barely in there.

I've gotta say I'm really impressed with how some of the other "climbers" are doing, especially a certain fellow at University of Alaska Southeast whose recorded steps are at over 947,000 steps. That puts him "virtually" on the mountain (Everest, that is; not our own beloved Denali) at Camp 2. And since he doesn't seem to always record his steps every day, I'm betting that he's a good clip further along even than that. I don't have much doubt he's going to summit (1,291,300 steps or equivalent) before I've even made it to Camp 1 (798,300), which I'm not even halfway to yet. Good on ya, mate.

But I'm impressed beyond that. This is a great program, & it's good to see so many people participating. It's daily a topic of conversation between me & my two coworkers who are also participating; every day we're encouraging each other & reminding each other to do the extra stuff (drink water, do pushups & situps, be appreciative of the people we see in our daily lives) that will get us the daily 500 bonus points. And it's good to see people walking & doing other things to increase their daily fitness. May every participant make it all the way up the mountain, & down again, safely.

This week has continued to be a little screwy for me in terms of what's become my normal schedule of workouts. Tuesday, of course, was one such day — as discussed in previous post, Tax Day gunk prevented me from getting in the second half (high intensity interval training) of my Turbulence Training workout. But at least I got the strength portion in, which is equally important. But you just pick up & keep going. Wednesday morning I started the day with a 30-minute row & also got over 8,000 steps walking done during the workday, most of them during my lunchtime. This morning's row was shorter, just 16 minutes, but I did quite well with the walking, over 11,000 steps, most of them at work. This included a walk over to Admin to participate in one of the WIN events — a reading of my body comp (body fat percentage) & blood pressure — & back again, & a lunchtime walk through the spine across to Rasmusson Hall (former BEB) & back. I put my normal Thursday TT workout off until tomorrow because I had a writing even tonight which didn't leave me time for an evening workout.

All told, Wednesday got me 17,496 steps or their equivalent, & today got me 16,579.

Between Tengboche & Dingboche

2008-04-16T12:51:00.005-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Steady progress. Pretty steady anyway: yesterday was tax day, which had an impact on my workout because, typically, I waited until the last day to do anything about it. Filed my own online at lunchtime, & in the evening gave the boy (now 20) a crash course in preparing a federal tax return online. The upshot was that I only had time for half my three-days-a-week Turbulence Training workout.

But it hasn't all been that way. I had a really huge day last Friday. That's the day I generally take a break from rowing. Instead, I did a lot of dancing (60 minutes' worth over all) & a lot of walking — during lunchtime at work, shopping for groceries after work, & then, after putting the groceries away at home, another walk. This one took me up C Street — or rather, down, since I was descending into Chester Creek valley — from Fireweed to 15th Avenue (up a hill), then over to E Street & down a hill, turning to walk along Valley of the Moon Park, & up Arctic to Fireweed again, & then home. I picked this walk partly to avoid the snowy bike trails along Chester Creek that I'd walked the week before, & partly in order to get hills both coming & going, including that hill up Arctic that I used to walk almost every workday during the Start Walking program two years ago, when we lived down in that valley. At any rate, by the time the day ended, I'd put in 16,655 steps of actual walking, & with the dancing an equivalent of a total of 25,015 steps, which is thus far the highest I've done in any one day.

That's the day I came into Tengboche.

Saturday was a different kind of achievement. I got involved in a book I'm reading (Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes) & the day kinda passsed, & I didn't get the row I usually do in the morning, & followup in the evening with a TT workout. So, I thought, why not do the 10K row I've been doing on Sundays tonight instead? & I'll do the normal Saturday routine on Sunday? So I popped a movie into my laptop DVD player & hopped on the rower & rowed. Well, a 10K row takes me just under an hour, & the movie was an hour & a half, so when I got done with the 10K I thought, well, why not just keep rowing until the movie's over? So I did. That bought me another 5,266 meters — and new confidence that I am up to the challenge that I've been using these 10K rows to train for: a half-marathon (21,097 meters), which is just 5K more than I did that day. I will probably do it this coming weekend. Just have to have a long enough movie. (And maybe alternate padding for my tush, which did get a tad sore. On it's "Training for a Marathon" page, Concept 2 recommends bubble wrap, so I've laid in a supply.) My Saturday row, plus the paltry number of walking steps I did, brought me the equivalent of 24,546 steps.

The other days have been a bit more routine — morning row & evening TT workout on Sunday (17,252 steps or equivalent), morning 15-minute row & evening 30-minute row on Monday (18,479 steps or equivalent)— until Tuesday which I've already mentioned got messed up by also being Tax Day, & so got just 13,145 steps or equivalent. Still, I feel pretty darn good at what I'm accomplishing with my exercise as well as nutrition, especially after my "official weekly weigh-in" on Sunday found I'd lost another 3 pounds in the past week.

Erging away

2008-04-10T23:45:00.005-08:00

The March Madness rowing challenge I did last month got me on a rowing schedule that feels pretty good to me, & don't want to give up. So, on most days, I'm getting from 5000 to 6000 meters in, usually split between a morning workout & an evening workout (including the high intensity intervals portion of my TT workouts). Fridays I'm reserving as "break from rowing" days, & on those days instead I'm doing more dancing & walking. Sundays are big rowing days: on those days, at least this month, I'm doing 10K meters in preparation for the half-marathon I'm going to try for in the latter half of the month (another Concept 2 challenge).

My rowing has gotten noticeably stronger. I seem finally to have gotten the trick of getting really fast speeds, if only for brief bursts: to really kick off with my feet on the drive, then follow through with a full, strong pull on the handle (the erg version of oars). I've gotten as fast as 2:02.0/500m for three or four strokes, & can actually sustain speeds of 2:08.0 or 2:09.0/500m for up to a full minute when doing intervals. It's not sustainable for longer rows — my legs get tired really fast — but its perfect for high intensity intervals.

In her beginner-level training program for women, personal trainer Krista Scott-Dixon has described the alternating high intensity/low intensity of intervals like this: "High intensity should be a maximal or near-maximal effort like a crazy guy with an axe is chasing you. Low intensity is about the equivalent of walking as if a 105 year old guy with an axe is shuffling after you using a walker while dragging an oxygen tank." That's pretty much how it is for me — I go so hard for the one or two minutes of high intensity that by the time I arrive at the two-minute low intensity "rest" portion that my current workouts call for, I have no choice but to row as feebly as that guy with the walker & oxygen tank, because I've wiped myself out. Until I catch my breath, my heart slows down, & then after a minute & a half or so I can row at a nice moderate rate again — for about 30 seconds, until the next manic near-maximal interval is upon me. Wow, it's hard. But afterwards, when I'm all done with my intervals & my cooldown row — & especially after my shower! — I feel great.

My longer rows are progressing, too. Yesterday morning's 30-minute row of 5934 meters (ave. speed 2:31.7/500m) got me exactly 300 meters more than my next best 30-minute row, just a month ago (2:39.7/500m). Compare either of those with my very first 30-minute row (actually, 30:37.3) on October 13 last year: just 4,695 meters (average speed 3:15.7/500m). Last Sunday's 10K was three minutes faster than the previous Sunday's.

My recovery is a lot better too. As in, even when wiped out after a hard effort, a few minutes later I feel pretty darn good, like I could do it all over again. (But I don't!) This might have somewhat to do with my dietary changes — I figured out last week that I wasn't eating quite enough calories, but now that I fixed that, I have more energy for the workouts I'm doing, & am not quite so exhausted afterwards. Maybe also my sleep: I've been making efforts to get enough sleep every night (which habitually I don't). But I think it's also that I'm simply getting stronger. It feels pretty good. It'll be interesting to see where I'll be a month from now, or two. Especially now that I've got that trick of kicking off at the start of the drive: my legs will get stronger, & when they do, look out.

Somewhere past Namche Bazaar

2008-04-10T23:22:00.003-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

I haven't kept up my posts the last couple days, but that's fine; I'll just omnibus 'em in here. I arrived "virtually" in Namche Bazaar on Tuesday, thanks to a pretty hefty day especially of rowing & my Tuesday Turbulence Training workout, along with a bit of dancing & walking. Wednesday was a very intense 30-minute row in the morning, my best distance for that time at 5934 meters, & I my heart was beating hard enough at the end of that session that I thought it wise to do another five minutes at a more moderate pace as a cooldown — another 905 meters. Besides the normal "laps" around the second floor of the library (where our office is now located) after trips to the bathroom, I also did a lunchtime walk across campus, inside using skywalks in deference to the big dump of snow we'd had during the morning. Today, Thursday, I did a morning row (3390 meters), enough "laps" of the library plus other walking to get me just over 5000 steps, & an evening Turbulence Training workout.

Progress in the last three days: Tuesday, 19,231 steps or equivalent. Wednesday, 18,784 or equivalent. Thursday, 21,356 or equivalent.

"Fluffy Folks Factually Feel Fit"

2008-04-07T13:59:00.005-08:00

At work I've usually KSKA, my local public radio station, playing all day. Just now I heard a segment on a show called The Health Show in which they were talking with their diet & lifestyle consultant Dr. Stephanie Beling about exercise among the overweight & obese. Really encouraging stuff! The upshot is that exercise is really beneficial for overweight/obese people even if they don't lose much weight from it. "As a matter of fact," Beling says, "Fitness may trump fatness." Beling discussed a study of 2600 people over 60 years old, examining how their weight & fitness affected their death rate. They found that fitness — measured in the study by their ability to walk on a treadmill — provides protection against mortality regardless of their weight. Even just three ten-minute walks a day can have this beneficial effect. Beling also had a couple of anecdotes about obese men she met who greatly reduced their weight & need for medications, & greatly improved their health, simply from walking.

You can hear the entire story (8:51) from this page at the Health Show (scroll to bottom). It's in Real Audio format.

I did a little checking on ScienceDaily, & found a story about the study Dr. Beling was referring to: "Fitness Level, Not Body Fat, May Be Stronger Predictor Of Longevity For Older Adults" (Dec. 7, 2007).

Another 10K row

2008-04-06T12:40:00.002-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Besides doing measurements, my big thing for the day was a 10K row in one sitting. This is the fourth time I've done a row of this distance or better, & today was my best time for 10K: 54:31.5, a good three minutes better than I'd done it before. Mainly, I think, due to fewer interruptions, but I think I'm also getting better at pacing myself. All to the good: I'm planning on participating in the Concept 2 Global Marathon Challenge between April 16 & April 30. I'm not going to be prepared for a full marathon, which is for the same distance as a running marathon (42,195 meters), but I'm quite sure I can complete a half marathon (21,097 meters), which at my current pace should take me in the area of two hours.

Progress today: The 10K row, a minor bit of walking, & a cool glass of water got me 17,112 steps or their equivalent. My cumulative steps (or equivalent) for this first week of the 2008 Start Walking program total to 121,072.

Errands & TT

2008-04-05T22:09:00.004-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

After 10 minutes of dancing & a morning row (5x500m/1:00r) & breakfast, today was all about errands, mainly food shopping with eye towards protein sources, having figured out midweek that I needed more calories per day & more protein than what I'd been eating. So, Natural Pantry, then Costco, where I also got some test strips for my glucometer so I can start checking my blood sugars again. I got a few extra steps (& some panic) by dropping my ATM card by the pharmacy counter & having to go back & find it later. (All came out well.)

And then in the evening, I completed the second week of the Beginner's level of Turbulence Training. As usual, that meant about 30 minutes of strength training (bodyweight & dumbbell exercises) followed up by HIIT intervals on the erg (3x2:00/2:00r).

I see from reading Richard's blog for today that Fairbanks got a new dump of snow that layered over recent signs of spring. So did we! — it was spitting snow most of the day, & the temps have gone down a bit as well.

Progress today: Dancing, rowing, walking, strength training, & the bonus 500 points from drinking a glass of water got me 20,236 steps or their equivalent, my best day so far.

A walking day

2008-04-04T22:38:00.002-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Today was a break from rowing, but that didn't stop me from dancing a half hour in the morning & walking, including a half hour or so at lunchtime back & forth across the UAA campus & then, in the evening, a longer walk with Jesse & his dog Sweetheart along the bike trails by Chester Creek.

We live just off Fireweed & C Street, which is advantageous for walking because any walk we take down into the Chester Creek valley means we've got to walk up a hill to get home. Not to mention the Chester Creek greenbelt is right down there. The bike trails of course are pretty full of snow, still, just as the one around Goose Lake is, but the walking wasn't too bad so long as you had the right footwear for it. I was trying out the new light hikers that I bought last weekend, & they were perfect for conditions. Worst bit was going through the culvert tunnels under roads — pretty wet & icy down in those tunnels, but my footwear was up to it, didn't even get my feet wet. Nor, more importantly, did I fall flat on my hiney or face.

We went as far as Minnesota & followed the bike trail up the hill overlooking Westchester Lagoon, up to West High, during which a bald eagle flew over us. And then along Spenard & Fireweed towards home, where we arrived in time for me to fix myself something to eat before plopping down for the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica.

Great way to start a weekend.

Progress today: Dancing & walking & a cool drink of water worth 18,544 steps or their equivalent.

On the way to Namche Bazaar

2008-04-04T10:30:00.003-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Kate, the designer of the Start Walking program, has thoughtfully provided information about the locations & sights along the way during our virtual climb up Mt. Everest. This video, from YouTube member TheHappyHobo, illustrates crossing a suspension bridge just outside Phakding on the trail to Namche Bazaar, where I'm "virtually" headed next.

Into Phakding

2008-04-03T21:42:00.014-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

I've presumably got a goal this week & this month to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night, but I've not been doing too well with it. Especially last night. Thus, I slept just a teensy bit later than usual — no dancing, but I did my 15-minute row though finishing with a good couple hundred meters less than two mornings ago.

Perhaps the most important thing I did today healthwise was to sign up for Individualized Health Planning (IHP) sessions, which is part of the university's Health in Action program. I'd been reluctant to after my experience two years ago with the over-the-phone "wellness consultants" that came out of having filled out the health questionnaires we'd been sent the prior winter. The over-the-phone folks were well-meaning & enthusiastic, but they also seemed to be going from a script that I wasn't quite adhering to. For example, I'd tell them I was prediabetic, they'd start telling me the conventional American Diabetes Association-style advice about nutrition, I'd counter with the information that in my opinion that the ADA is making people sicker with that advice because of its emphasis on high carbs high carb high carbs, & the phone consultant at that point wouldn't quite know what to do. Basically, I was doing a lot of research on my own about what I should be eating & when (as can be seen from this blog), & how I should be exercising, & they weren't quite able to keep up with me. I didn't get the impression that they were knowledgeable beyond a very basic course on standard conventional health/nutrition advice. They had the demeanor of college kids doing a job for extra pocket money. The calls became chores for me more than anything that actually helped me.

But the IHPs are face-to-face with people with names & qualifications that we can actually read about. The person I'll be seeing, for example, is a nutritional educator with a Masters in nutrition from Bastyr University. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, she's someone my naturopath suggested to me a couple of years ago when I ran into her at Natural Pantry — someone who knows a lot about nutrition for diabetes & insulin resistance, & something tells me it won't be the standard ADA high carb advice. Aside from that, other people who've already been to IHP's have said some pretty good things about it. I've got to give credit to the university for working to get it right for employee health.

So I feel pretty good about signing up. My initial session will be in a couple of weeks.

When I got home tonight, I knew I'd find waiting for me the Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells & weight bench I'd ordered, which Jesse (my partner's nephew) had accepted delivery on earlier today. But seeing as I needed sleep, I intended not to unpack them until I got done with my scheduled Turbulence Training workout. Alas, I had no choice, because the boxes filled my bedroom. No choice but to open 'em, get the stuff out & move it out of the way, & take the stryofoam packing material to the garbage & the broken-down boxes out to my car for a trip to the Recycling Center this weekend. Okay, so it got me a few extra steps.

And then the workout (30 minutes bodyweight & dumbbell exercises, rowing warmup, rowing HIIT intervals 3x1:00/1:00r, rowing cooldown). And then dinner. And in a minute, to bed.

Progress today: With rowing, walking, & strength training (& my cool drink of water), I accumulated 17,834 steps or their equivalent. Cumulatively, I've done 65,180 steps or their equivalent, bringing my on my expedition to Everest into the village of Phakding.

Why You May Need To Eat More Protein by Dr. John M Berardi, CSCS

2008-04-03T12:46:00.013-08:00

I just figured out a couple of days ago that I'm eating far too little protein for my current state & goals, & am adjusting my eating accordingly. And then happened across this article that explains just why protein is so important, especially for someone who, like me, is trying to get rid of body fat. Used with permission.

Why You May Need To Eat More Protein
by Dr John M Berardi, CSCS

Nowadays there are a lot of misconceptions with respect to protein intake. Should one take in 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight? Or is it 1 gram per kilogram? And, to the non-scientist, just how much is that?

Well, before discussing this issue, I think it’s important to explore the difference between protein need and protein optimization. When someone asks the question – how much protein should I eat – they are usually trying to figure out how much protein they need to optimize body composition and performance. But the question, "How much protein does an athlete need?" is a very different one from "How much protein should an athlete consume to improve body composition and athletic performance?"

Reason #1
Increased Thermic Effect of Feeding — While all macronutrients require metabolic processing for digestion, absorption, and storage or oxidation, the thermic effect of protein is significantly higher than that of carbohydrates and fat. In fact, protein requires 25-30% of the energy it provides just for digestion, absorption, and assimilation while carbs only require 6-8% and fat requires 2-3%. That means that eating protein is actually thermogenic and can lead to a higher metabolic rate. This means greater fat loss when dieting and less fat gain during hypercaloric diets.

Reason #2
Increased Glucagon — Protein consumption increases plasma concentrations of the hormone glucagon. Glucagon is responsible for antagonizing the effects of insulin in adipose tissue, leading to greater fat mobilization. In addition, glucagon also decreases the amounts and activities of the enzymes responsible for making and storing fat in adipose and liver cells. Again, this leads to greater fat loss during dieting and less fat gain during overfeeding.

Reason #3
Increased IGF-1 — Protein and amino-acid supplementation has been shown to increase the IGF-1 response to both exercise and feeding. Since IGF-1 is an anabolic hormone that's related to muscle growth, another advantage associated with consuming more protein is more muscle growth when overfeeding and/or muscle sparing when dieting.

Reason #4
Reduction in Cardiovascular Risk — Several studies have shown that increasing the percentage of protein in the diet (from 11% to 23%) while decreasing the percentage of carbohydrate (from 63% to 48%) lowers LDL cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations with concomitant increases in HDL cholesterol concentrations.

Reason #5
Improved Weight-Loss Profile — Research from Layman and colleagues has demonstrated that reducing the carbohydrate ratio from 3.5 - 1 to 1.4 - 1 increases body fat loss, spares muscle mass, reduces triglyceride concentrations, improves satiety, and improves blood glucose management.

Reason #6
Increased Protein Turnover — All tissues of the body, including muscle, go through a regular program of turnover. Since the balance between protein breakdown and protein synthesis governs muscle protein turnover, you need to increase your protein turnover rates in order to best improve your muscle quality. A high protein diet does just this. By increasing both protein synthesis and protein breakdown, a high protein diet helps you get rid of the old muscle more quickly and build up new, more functional muscle to take its place.

Reason #7
Increased Nitrogen Status — Earlier I indicated that a positive nitrogen status means that more protein is entering the body than is leaving the body. High protein diets cause a strong positive protein status and when this increased protein availability is coupled with an exercise program that increases the body's anabolic efficiency, the growth process may be accelerated.

Reason #8
Increased Provision of Auxiliary Nutrients — Although the benefits mentioned above have related specifically to protein and amino acids, it's important to recognize that we don't just eat protein and amino acids — we eat food. Therefore, high protein diets often provide auxiliary nutrients that could enhance performance and/or muscle growth. These nutrients include creatine, branched chain amino acids, conjugated linoleic acids, and/or additional nutrients that are important but remain to be discovered. This illustrates the need to get most of your protein from food, rather than supplements alone.

So, looking over this list of benefits, isn't it clear that for many individuals, an increase in protein intake would be advantageous for most people’s training goals? Since a high protein diet can lead to a better health profile, an increased metabolism, improved body composition, and an improved training response, why would anyone ever try to limit their protein intake to the bare minimum necessary to stave off malnutrition?

It seems to me that whether someone's on a hypoenergetic diet or a hyperenergetic diet, the one macronutrient they would want to be sure to overeat would be protein. Instead, by limiting protein intake, most individuals look for what they consider the bare minimum of protein, and then overeat carbohydrates and fats instead. That's a big performance and body composition mistake.

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A walk around Goose Lake

2008-04-02T22:39:00.006-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

It couldn't have been a finer day for walking. Which I'd determined I wanted to do today, a good lunchtime walk to get me out in that fresh air &, as luck would have it, sunshine. I've been itching for such a walk for awhile. Helped also that, with the end of the March Madness rowing challenge on Monday, I no longer felt obligated to make nearly every day a 5K rowing day.

Which isn't to say I don't row even on a walking day. It was still the first thing, after a bit of dancing to warm up, that I did after getting up. This morning my rowing workout was, in rower's shorthand (which I speak only in pidgin, just enough to get by): 5x500m/1:00r, which means 5 intervals of 500 meters followed by 1 minutes at a "resting" pace. The way I do these is usually to use the first interval as a warmup, then build up my speed with each succeeding interval as best I can, then to use the last interval as a cooldown. But I'm not usually rowing even the more intense intervals as intensely as the ones for my Turbulence Training workouts. The workout this morning got me 3,380 meters (equivalent to 5,293 steps) with a time of 18:14.1 (13:14.1 for the intervals, 5 minutes for the "resting" pace).

But now to the meat of the day: the walk. Back in 2006, I used to walk around Goose Lake quite often. Can you believe that today is the first time I've done it since then? That's how bad the funk I fell into messed me up, that I hardly got outside at all last year, even on a beautiful day such as today was. Warm enough even that I didn't need the second layering of jacket that I had on, or my gloves.

Although most of the streets & sidewalks around town have melted off, the bike trail around the lake is still covered with snow, but fortunately of a kind that could be walked pretty easily as long as you had the right kind of footwear. I wouldn't want to walk it in, for example, a pair of sneakers or loafers. But what I had on was a pair of Doc Martens, & the walking was fine. Helped no doubt by the fact that the bike path pushes through woods, so there are needles & specks of leaves fallen down on the snow to help with traction, & the snow, while firm, is more snow than ice. The worst conditions were around the parking lot near the swimming area on the opposite side of the lake from the campus, & that was mostly just because it had melted more & was slushy & wet. But that was just a matter of walking around it.

Well, what can you say elsewise about such a walk? Just that it was beautiful out, the lake still covered with ice & a layer of snow atop it, a lot of the woods still snowy but melting, the Chugach Mountains as a backdrop during some portions of the walk also still snowy, but all of it under a blue sky & a warm sun. I've missed this so much. I'm so glad to be out walking again.

(I had my camera along & took some pics; I'll add a couple to this blog entry when I get them downloaded to my laptop.)

Progress today: Through dancing, rowing, & walking, I got 15,584 steps (or their equivalent). I should make it into Phakding tomorrow.

BFFM Week 7 goals

2008-04-02T22:05:00.000-08:00

Now that I've worked out the meal tracking stuff, I can finish setting my goals for this week.

Progress so far

Since Feb. 18, I've lost about 12 lbs. (according to my less than completely accurate "caveat" scale).
Since Mar. 17 I've lost 3 inches around my waist, 1 to 1.5 around my hips, & about half an inch around my neck. Belt is now two notches tighter without discomfort.

Goals for (the remainder of) Week 7

(I'm sometimes using abbreviations for days of the week. R is Thursday, b/c T is already taken up by Tuesday; Sa is Saturday & Su is Sunday.)

Fitness

Turbulence Training: Three full TT workouts (combined strength/circuit training with HIIT cardio on rower) (TRSa).
Core (optional): TT core workouts on alternate days (WFSu).
Cardio: A minimum of 10,000 walking steps of their equivalent each day (per my workplace's Start Walking program). On most days, this will include 5000m rowed, including at least one 10,000m row (training for late April half-marathon challenge).
Flexibility: Stretch after warmup on all rowing days.

Nutrition

Eat on modified eating program of 30% carbs, 40% protein, 30% health fats for a total of about 1550 calories per day, as outlined in a previous post.

Evaluation

Continue recording meals using meal tracking Excel spreadsheet.
"Official" weigh-in & measurements Sunday morning. (My nephew informs me that the new scale arrived at my doorstep today, yay. It includes a body fat measurement (not as good as the calipers, but it'll do until I can get good enough skinfolds to be able to use the calipers accurately.)
Take another set of "progress" pics.
Based on all of the above, establish goals for Week 8.

Motivation & accountability

Continue tracking progress at Concept 2 online log, workplace "health activities" tracker, & Start Walking tracker, etc.
Continue making use of online forums & discussion lists.
Keep up the blog.
Keep up with accountability partner!

Other

Continue reread of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle & Precision Nutrition.
Get at least seven hours of sleep each night as many nights as I can.

TDEE, meal tracking, & macronutrient levels

2008-04-02T21:14:00.001-08:00

Well, here's a couple of good reasons for meal tracking. After overhauling my diet two years ago, I got into a new set of habits for eating that are healthy overall. But meal tracking over the past week or so has turned up a few major issues that are in serious need of fixing.

Although I figured this out last, I'm going to start out with Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). I tried out both the calculators on the Burn The Fat Inner Circle website, & came up with this ("caveat" relates to my innacurate "caveat emptor" bathroom scale, which is about to be replaced; I'm also estimating my body fat% has come down slightly after losing 3 inches around my waist since Feb. 18):

Katch-McArdle calculator

Body fat % (est.).........36%
Weight (caveat)..........188 lbs
Body fat mass............67.68 lbs (30.8 kg)
Lean body mass.......120.32 lbs (54.7 kg)
Basal metabolic rate..1552 cal/day

____________TDEE___15%___20%___25%___30%_
Sedentary..............1863....1584....1490....1397....1304
Moderately active...2406....1814....1708....1601....1494

Harris-Benedict calculator

Age in years..............49 years
Height in inches..........62 in
Weight (caveat).........188 lbs
Basal metabolic rate..1529 cal/day

_____________TDEE___15%___20%___25%___30%_
Sedentary..............1835....1560....1468....1377....1285
Moderately active...2370....2015....1896....1778....1659

The two calculators come to pretty close agreement on my TDEE, & also in the calorie deficits for a "sedentary" level of activity (where I've spent a good part of my life). But they get pretty divergent for "moderately active," which is about where I am now given the rowing, strength training, etc. I'm doing.

Now, comparing that with my meal tracking for the past week, I find that I'm undereating, sometimes by as much as a couple of hundred calories. That's without feeling hungry, either -- apparently I eat enough nonstarchy veggies that usually they fill me up just fine. But still: not enough calories.

Second thing is, my macronutrient ratios are all off. In particular, while the fats that I eat are overall health fats (fish oils, extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil for high temp cooking, etc.), I'm eating too much of them. I'm not eating enough protein, & my carb levels change day by day, though overall are within appropriate ranges given my insulin resistance (carb sensitivity).

For the time being, I've decided to opt for an average between what the two calculators say for the 30% caloric deficit for moderate activity. I'm picking the 30% deficit because:

My caloric intake is as low as it's been, & I've still been getting some results.
I also have a high body fat percentage (per Tom, people with high body fat %s can afford higher deficits than people with lower body fat %s, & will still preferentially burn fat rather than lose muscle).

So, at this point, I'm establishing a goal to eat about 1550 calories per day.

As an insulin resistant (carb-sensitive) person, the BFFM low carb plan for macronutrient levels that is most appropriate for me is the low-carb plan (what I'd actually call moderate carb): 30% carbs, 40% protein, 30% fats. So, I should be eating, on average:

_________Per day_________Per meal____
Carbs.....116g (645 cal).....23.2g (93 cal)
Protein....155g (620 cal).....31 g (124 cal)
Fats.........51g (465 cal).....10.2g (93 cal)
——————————————————————
TOTAL.....322g (1550 cal)....64.4g (310 cal)

The biggest things I have to do to bring this about is to slightly lower my fat intake, greatly increase my protein intake, & stabilize the amount of carbs per day so that I'm consistent. I'm already having some success using my meal tracking chart (my customization of one originally designed by my accountability partner, Eva — thanks, Eva!) to balance my meals today.

Naturally this program is subject to modification. I will especially be depending on feedback from my actual results in fat loss etc. from week to week, & adjusting my eating program when necessary. I will probably be doing meal tracking for awhile, in order to continue monitoring myself & compare them with my results.

Maybe I should call it Start Rowing...

2008-04-01T23:01:00.004-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Maybe I should call it Start Rowing...since that's how I'm starting most of my mornings nowadays. Actually, usually I start off with a bit of iPod dancing to warm me up, then some rowing. Sometimes I'll do a half-hour row or a 5000 meter row (nearly equivalent), but more often — especially when I have Turbulence Training workout scheduled in the evening, as I did tonight — I do about 15 minutes' worth, which this morning netted me 3021 meters at an average speed of 2:29.0 minutes/seconds per 500 meters. (Turns out, as I learned in October when I bought my erg, that measuring one's performance by the time it takes to row 500 meters is pretty standard in the world of rowing, both on the water & indoors on a machine. For me personally, about the best speed I have ever been able to do is in the area of 2:10.0/500m, & that only for a very short time.) According to the formula I've worked out for step equivalences for rowing (which I will explain in another post), my 3021 meters were equivalent to 4,731 steps. (My ten minutes of dancing to warm up & 5 more to assist in cooling down after the row came out to 1,965 steps.)

My morning routine follows that up with a shower (that rowing makes one awful sweaty!), getting my daytime meals put together, & getting out the door to go to work. Two years ago when I took part in the first Start Walking program, I usually was walking to the bus, but when I went into my bad funk that fall & laid off the exercise, I also started driving to work again. I want to get back to bus riding & all the extra walking that comes with it, but before I can do that I've gotta work on (1) getting to bed at a reasonable hour so that (2) I can get up in time to get all my morning stuff done in time to get out to the bus, which leaves the nearest bus stop a good half hour earlier than I usually leave the apartment when I'm driving to work. Trying to get more sleep is one of my goals this month.

Okay, so I hop in the car & go to work. Here's where the next bit of exercise comes in, then: our office moved at the start of the year from the Social Sciences Building on the UAA campus to the Consortium Library right next door (& attached). I park in the same lot as I used to, but the walk from the parking lot to the office is enough longer that it makes a significant difference in how much I & my coworkers (at least two of whom are also doing Start Walking) walk even if we weren't doing this program.

And so to work.

There's another advantage to having an office inside the Consortium Library: it's made for walking. Okay, it's made for books — but you've gotta walk around to find 'em. In other words, instead of being on a hallway that you could only pace up & down to walk in, which would get boring pretty fast, in the library you can actually walk in various routes. All three of us Start Walking participants in my office have taken to at least occasionally taking little walks all around the second floor of the library after a trip "down the hall" (i.e., to the bathroom). Today I did that three times.

And then when I got off work, instead of making a beeline to my car, I walked around the Consortium Library & SSB the long way 'round. After going to my polling place to vote in the municipal election, & then walking from the parking lot at the end of my building to my apartment, I'd managed to accumulate 4,268 actual walking steps.

Then my Turbulence Training workout, which I won't go into great detail about except to say that for 30 minutes I sweated over an assortment of dumbbell & bodyweight exercises done as supersets (all sets for two different exercises done without a stop until completed; a one-minute rest, then the next superset, etc.), followed by a five-minute warmup on the rower followed by HIIT (high intensity interval training) on the rower, followed by a five-minute cooldown. (And then the second shower of the day!) In this case, my HIIT involved 3 sets in which I rowed pretty darn hard for 2 minutes to get my heart beating really fast, followed by rowing for another 2 minutes at a more sedate "resting" page that permitted my heart rate to slow; then to the next set (or interval); & then the next. The shorthand for this HIIT workout is 3x2:00/2:00r — i.e., three times 2 minutes hard followed by 2 minutes "rest," for a total of 12 minutes. Add that to the five-minute warmup & the five-minute cooldown, & the entire rowing session got me another 3,987 meters (equivalent to 6,244 steps). The 30 minute weight training portion of the TT workout, meantime, came out to 2,010 steps.

You can see how it adds up. These days when I do TT workouts are the really high-step days for me, with the closest competition being those days when I do really long rows, like the 10K rows I've so far done three times (two of them in March).

This is what happens when I get motivated. This is why my name has started showing up pretty high in the standings. Not because I'm an athlete, but because I'm an overweight late-40s woman who is insulin resistant & prediabetic, & wants to finally see myself through to getting insulin sensitive & healthy — as I probably have never been all my life long. Two years ago, with the first Start Walking program, I got partway there & then I went into the bleak spaces in my head & crapped out, & lost all my gains. Or should I say, regained all my losses.

That's not going to happen this time. I am arming myself against it.

Progress today: through dancing, rowing, walking, & strength training, I came another 19,718 steps or their equivalent.

The start of Start Walking

2008-03-31T22:08:00.011-08:00

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Today was the beginning of my workplace's Start Walking program for this year. This year participants are metaphorically on an expedition up Mount Everest, & back again. May all of us make it safely & successfully, as in real life some don't.

I owe a lot to Start Walking: in 2006, it was the first program I took part in that encouraged participants to track their daily exercise in order to get fit. It did a lot for me in 2006. Unfortunately, I went into a bit of a funk that fall & didn't continue. But that's not going to stop me from doing it now!

The emphasis is, of course, on walking, but there's a step equivalent chart to go with other exercises. In 2006, most of my exercise was walking, supplemented mainly by dancing to playlists on my iPod & riding my bike, with a touch of strength training. This year my main components will be rowing on my Concept 2 Model D indoor rower (also called an "erg," which is short for ergometer, which means "work measurer) & strength training. But of course supplemented by walking, dancing, biking.

In fact, in a sense I've already been doing Start Walking for over a month already. In mid-February, I brushed off the old Excel spreadsheet that I'd used to track my Start Walking progress in 2006, updated it to 2008 — including coming up with a better calculation for converting meters rowed to step equivalencies; got a new battery for my extremely reliable Omron HJ-112 pedometer, and, on February 18, got started. For the most part I just danced to begin with, just to get myself back in exercise mode, but on March 4 I added rowing into the equation. I was especially interested in rowing in March because of Concept 2's March Madness rowing challenge, to row 5,000 meters for at least 25 days of the month.

And in fact today, the start of Stark Walking, also marks the final day of the March Madness challenge. And I did it! I rowed 5000 meters or better on exactly 25 days in March (including two 10K rows), logging a total of 148,219 meters in that time — that's 148.2 kilometers, or 92 miles!

Part way through all of this, I also added in a strength training/high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout program called Turbulence Training for Fat Loss. I'm now doing those workouts three times a week; the HIIT portion also takes place on the erg. On days that I do those workouts, whoa — the equivalent steps go up!

I don't consider myself an athlete. Not by a long shot. I was your proverbial "last kid picked" for team sports in junior high & high school gym classes. In a college gym class, I was so poor at tennis that my partner, who was right-handed, still beat me when she handicapped herself by holding her racket in her left hand. But I did enjoy rowing dorm crew for the one season I did it, & when I came to Alaska I did some weight training & enjoyed that too. I also lost a lot of weight one summer by going out dancing & drinking at a smoky bar four & five nights of the week. (Note: it was the dancing that burned off the weight, I'm pretty sure, not the drinking!) But I wasn't consistent, at least about exercise. I was, consistently, a sedentary couch potato.

But it's incumbent upon me to change, for the same reasons I worked so hard two years ago: my health. I am insulin resistant & prediabetic. My mother died in November 2005 of complications of diabetes. She would not want me to follow in her path; & nor do I.

So thank you to the University of Alaska for the Start Walking program, & also for the related Health in Action/Wellness Incentive Program, which is also helping me towards my health goals this year.

As for my progress today: 5293 meters rowed, 5 minutes danced (as a cooldown from the rowing), 3059 steps walked, & a cool glass of water in the morning, for a total of 12,044 steps or their equivalent. I've made it to the Himalayan village of Lukla.

Week 6 BFFM evaluation

2008-03-31T22:05:00.001-08:00

As the end of my BFFM weeks, Sundays are also turning into my "official measurement" day. This week yielded some good results:

2 lbs lost, according to the "caveat" scale, bringing me to a supposed 188 lbs., for a total of 12 lbs lost since Feb. 18. (I call it my "caveat" scale because of I know it's somewhat inaccurate. A new one is on its way.)

However, the tape measure doesn't depend on where exactly on the floor I happen to be standing, & it said:

another inch lost around my waist since last week, bringing me to 42". (I was at 45" when this whole thing began).

As an aside, the day prior to measuring day, I'd picked up some new trousers as Costco as I was badly in need. I looked for ones in 42" waist, but when I brought them home, they were too loose a fit. Well, of course, some manufacturers are a little liberal in their sizing, so... but all the same, it was a nice surprise to have to take them back so i could trade them in for a couple of pairs at 40" & a couple at 38". All of them fit comfortably. I reckon that when all of the above grow too loose on me, I'll give them to Boys & Girls Club & go get myself some new pairs. Meanwhile, I have more pairs of pants that (1) fit and (2) don't make me look like a bum (as some of my long-lived jeans do).

I did all my planned workouts except two of the alternate-day http://terveys.turbulence.hop.clickbank.net" >TT "core" workouts, which are more or less optional anyway. But did do all three full TT workouts, which involved both strength stuff & HIIT, & rowing on all days except one rest day. Rowed 10K today.

Although I got all my eating from Tuesday on recorded, I didn't finish getting all the macronutrient values for them looked up, so I was unable to evaluate my eating program yet.

Accountability & goals

2008-03-26T13:16:00.011-08:00

So yesterday I made a deal with a new friend at Burn the Fat Inner Circle (which has rapidly become a central community for me) to become accountability partners (hey Eva!) — & already this is providing benefits. Yesterday she was willing to share an excellent meal tracking spreadsheet she'd designed in Excel, which saves me a lot of work in designing my own from scratch. I already had decided I needed to get a better sense of how I'm actually doing at the moment with caloric intake & macronutrient ratios — this helps a lot. Then today, she wrote & suggested writing out my goals for the week just a little more specifically & more quantifiably than before.

So here it is.

As I wrote earlier, I'm dating my startup as Feb. 18, 2008 (a Monday). That makes today the third day of Week 6.

Progress so far

Since Feb. 18, I've lost about 10 lbs. (though of course it's an inaccurate scale).
Since Mar. 17 I've lost 2 inches around my waist & 1 inch around my hips; belt is one notch tighter.

Goals for Week 6

(I'm sometimes using abbreviations for days of the week. R is Thursday, because T is already taken up by Tuesday; Sa is Saturday & Su is Sunday.)

Fitness

Turbulence Training: Three full TT workouts (combined strength/circuit training with HIIT cardio on rower) (TRSa).
Core: Three TT core workouts on alternate days (WFSu).
Cardio: A minimum of 5000m rowed on at least 6 days. Of these, at least one 10,000m row (training for late April half-marathon challenge).
Flexibility: Stretch after warmup on all rowing days.
Incidental exercise (walking, dancing, etc.). Get out in the sun, now that it's getting warmer!

Nutrition

Continue on current eating program.

Evaluation

Record all meals using meal tracking Excel spreadsheet in order to evaluate my current caloric intake & macronutrient ratios, with a summary of results by Sunday evening (March 30). Summary will include a rundown of estimated TDEE & other info from the various calculators at BF Inner Circle.
"Official" weigh-in & measurements Sunday morning.
Take another set of "progress" pics.
Based on all of the above, establish goals for Week 7.

Motivation & accountability

Continue tracking progress at Concept 2 online log, workplace "health activities" tracker, etc.
Continue making use of online forums & discussion lists.
Keep up the blog.
Keep up with my accountability partner!

Other

Purchase or order a more accurate scale, already.
Complete reread of BFFM & Precision Nutrition.

A Turbulence Training workout

2008-03-25T23:52:00.003-08:00

Just as an example of where I'm at in my workout program, here's the TT workout I did tonight. It comes from Turbulence Training for Fat Loss by Craig Ballantyne, Beginner Level TT, Workout A.

Strength training

(For each exercise, first number is weight in pounds or duration in seconds; second number is reps per set.)

Warmup

[2 circuits]
Prisoner squat 0x10x10
Pushup 0x10x10
Split squat 0x10x10

[2 circuits]
Dumbbell squat 2.5x10; 5x10
Kneeling pushup 0x10x10

Workout A

[Superset A, 2 circuits]
Dumbbell squat 15x10x10
Pushup 0x10; [kneeling] 0x10

[Superset B, 2 circuits]
Dumbbell row 15x10x10 (per side)
Stability ball leg curl 0x12x12

[Superset C, 2 circuits]
Ab curl-up 5 secsx6x6
Side plank 6 secs x4x4

Cardio/high intensity interval training
(on Concept 2 Model D indoor rower)

5 minute warmup (842 meters) followed by stretches.

Intervals: 3x1:00/2:00r
(meaning 3 intervals of 1minute at subjective intensity of 8 out of 10, followed by 2 minute "rest" rowing)
for a total of 680 meters working + 1029 meters "resting" = 1709 meters

5 minute cooldown (853 meters) followed by a shower!

Notes

The full workout from "strength" warmup to rowing cooldown took me an hour. It was preceded by me figuring out how to do the stability ball leg curl, which I'd never done before, as I didn't manage to acquire a stability ball (balance ball, Pilates ball, Swedish ball -- what have you) until a few days ago. (It turned out to be a lot easier technique-wise than I'd thought.)

Oh yeah I also preceded the workout by a teensy bit of dancing just because of the song that happened to be up on my randomized "dance" playlist on my iPod: Bette Midler doing "I'm Beautiful." I love that song, fastpaced & campy with a great message, which makes a perfect BBFM affirmation too: "I'm beautiful / I'm beautiful / I'm beautiful, dammit!" Hahaaaaaha. There's a limit to just how random the iPod shuffles it though -- all the rest of the music it happened on tonight came from the danceable Nordic music I've got, so no Blondie or Heart or Laura Love or Queer as Folk soundtrack, but plenty of Värttinä, Wimme, Hednigarna, & Garmarna as I sweated away. That's no complaint though, really. I love that music. Just... well, the randomizing isn't as random as it thinks it is, that's all.

I'm pretty scrupulous about warmups & cooldowns for TT workouts, as Ballantyne asks people to be. His warmups for the strength stuff always ask for two circuits of the same three initial exercises (prisoner squat, pushup or kneeling pushup, split squats) followed by two circuits of the first regular superset done at 50% and then 75% of the "full" weight to be used.

It just happened that in this case, that meant one heckuva lot of pushups in close proximity. For the first time, I did the initial warmup pushups as full (not kneeling) pushups, but for the 50% & 75% (by which time my arms were getting set to crap out on me), I opted for kneeling; then returned to full pushups for the first go-round on Superset A, & back to kneeling pushups on the second go-round. I imagine I'll get stronger -- as indeed I already have to have done the full pushups at all today (in fact, three sets of 10).

The "50% & 75%" warmup for the dumbbell squats were a bit less than 50/75%, owing mainly to what a pain in the butt it is to try to change the weights on my old dumbbells. It'll be lots easier to switch between different weighted dumbbells when I get the SelectTech dumbbells I ordered from Bowflex in a couple of weeks or so. Meanwhile, I just used 2.5 lb & 5 lb. plates for the warmup. That's 2.5 and 5 lbs (& eventually 15 lbs) held in each hand.

By the time I got to Superset B, I was sweating freely, with sweat running down my nose & dripping on the floor when I was standing. Getting all over the lenses of my glasses too, annoying. But it was a great workout. I'm still on the piddly stuff, but it was working me, & at the same time as I was working hard & sweating like crazy, I could tell how much just a couple of prior weeks of the "intro level" of this TT had strengthened me, even with a week skipped between those workouts & this. (Though I had done some basic dumbbell squats & dumbbell military presses in the intervening week, just no TT.) Right now, though, typing, my arms feel all those pushups. More the pushups than the dumbbell rows, which went fine (& nice to have another exercise that's a bit more familiar to me.)

The stability ball leg curl was interesting exercise: it has you on your back on the floor, the soles of your feet on the ball. You bridge your hips up, then roll the ball away from you so your legs are more or less straight, then roll it back in again -- in & out, keeping yourself bridged up in the air the whole time -- & having to maintain a balance with the ball rolling around.

I noticed with the side plank also that I have a lot more endurance for that exercise than I used to. So yeah, I'm coming along, slowly but surely.

When I hopped on my erg for the warmup row, wow, it felt so easy & drifty to me. The pace was pretty standard for me for a warmup or cooldown -- I usually get from about 820 to 860 meters in for those five minutes. The intervals of course were a bit more intense. I always work 'em hard enough that by the time I'm done with the working part, & into the "resting" meters, I'm about ready to stop altogether & call it a night. But of course I don't.

The working intervals broke down as follows:
1) 235m -- ave. speed 2:07.6 sec/500m, 34 strokes/min.
2) 226m -- ave. speed 2:12.7 sec/500m, 31 strokes/min.
3) 220m -- ave, speed 2:16.3 sec/500m, 30 strokes/min.

You can see how I slowed down as I got tireder. But I've gotten a bit faster with these in the several workouts I've done 3x1:00/2:00r. Even without TT workouts, I do intervals sometimes -- usually however many intervals of 500 meters followed by 1:00 minute "resting," which in practice for me usually means a little more than 2 minutes working with 1 minute resting. Someday maybe I'll get to being able to do 500m in less than 2 minutes, but it hasn't happened yet.

I totaled 3404m during this TT workout (warmup + intervals + cooldown). But I also did a 15-minute row in the morning of 2883m (ave. speed 2:36.1/500m), making my total for the day 6112m -- well over the 5000m/day I've been trying to row for Concept 2's March Madness challenge.

I really enjoyed my shower afterwards. And my meal, with a DVD episode of "Angel." And now this.... & now to bed.

Visual progress

2008-03-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

Had a visual check-in last night with a friend who comes over to my house weekly: she felt that I'd lost some fat around my face, my abdomen, & my thighs just above my knees. The "thighs" was a surprise, but the rest matches my own sense of what I've been seeing in the mirror re: my face, & with waist measurements (I seem to have lost a couple of inches since about March 14, down to 43" from 45") & with how my abdomen feels, like there's still quite a bit of flab there but it's getting pretty solid underneath. I attribute that to rowing, which amongst other things is a great core muscle exerciser.

Got some dancing (which I'm now using as something of a warm-up) in this morning, along with stretching & a 15-minute row to the tune of 2708 meters. Today's a Tuesday, which is an open night for me: which means TT. Having missed it last week, I'm looking forward to getting back on it tonight.

Start Walking 2008

2008-03-24T12:24:00.002-08:00

My workplace is getting set to start a new Start Walking program, like the one I participated in two years ago. This one is set to begin on March 31, & follows the metaphor of an expedition to Mt. Everest, with distances logged applying to distances up & down the mountain. The basic idea is to walk 10,000 steps, or do the equivalent in other exercises, during the program period — with hopefully the exercise becoming habitual thereafter. This year also the program is somewhat tied into a "health in action" program that's been already running since beginning of February, which I've already been participating in — another incentive challenge for overall health.

I found awhile ago that challenges are really good motivators for me. It doesn't always work, but it did with Start Walking over the summer of 2006, last fall with Concept 2's Skeleton Crew challenge (to row 31,000 meters in the week leading up to Halloween), Concept 2's current March Madness challenge (to row 5000 meters each of at least 25 days in March), & (in writing) National Novel Writing Month (write 50,000 words over the course of November).

So of course I've signed up.

Actually, in a sense I've already been following it. The spreadsheet I use to track my daily rowing, strength training, dancing, & other exercise is basically an updated version of the spreadsheet I originally designed for the 2006 Start Walking program. Particularly on days I row (so far 19 days this month, including today), I'm always able to achieve the equivalent of 10,000 steps or more. (I'll write a post about my formula to convert meters rowed to steps later.) And I still have the pedometer I bought back then, & have been tracking actual steps walked since getting back on my own fitness track on Feb. 18.

Oh, & while I was at it, I also registered for the National Presidents Challenge that started March 20. What the heck. All of this stuff will help me towards my personal goals.

BBFM week 5 rundown (17-23 March 2008)

2008-03-23T22:08:00.003-08:00

I'm still not sure that the 10 lbs. my scale says I've lost is the real deal or not — the scale is frustrating, readings change by as much as 5 or 6 lbs. if the position of the scale on the floor changes by a millimeter. But I think I've lost an inch or so around the waist. Who knows. I'm just keeping at it, is all.

I started the week out by doing a morning 5000 meter row, my personal best to that date, a good minute faster than my previous personal best at that distance (26:10.5). And then the next morning I bettered it yet again by another half-minute (25:39.3). But was unable to do my TT workout that evening because of a prior engagement with a friend, which also involved the drinking of beer. Uh oh. Plus I was pretty wiped out, that nasty feeling in the muscles that lets you know "You better take a day off for recovery, sweetie."

And so I did. Well, I did dance that next morning, but that's not as intense to me as the rowing is. And the succeeding days I did my 5K rows (still going after that March Madness challenge, after all), but didn't push myself quite as hard. And somehow didn't get to the TT workouts. Though I did figure out that yes, indeed, watching a DVD on my laptop while rowing makes a long row far less of a bore.

Meantime, in the world of knowledge gathering, I decided that it's about time I got Richard K. Bernstein's book, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars. Again, I'm not a diabetic but a prediabetic — but I also know that there's a wealth of info here I need. Back at home, I've already started to lower the amount of grains (even low-GI grains) that I eat, along with any other starchy carbs. Of course, last night I ate Easter dinner at my brother's — which involved mashed potatoes, the first time I've eaten potatoes in a very loooooong time, it being a high-GI starchy carb. But back to clean eating today.

Goals for the coming week: Back to TT & other strength-training, as well as HITT. Using the calculators at Burn the Fat Inner Circle to tighten down on what my caloric intake should be, given my current metabolic state & level of activity. Keeping a food diary for the next couple of weeks. Rereading the rest of the way through BFFM & rereading the Precision Nutrition manual I last looked at a year & a half ago.

Nearing the end of Week 4

2008-03-14T18:18:00.002-08:00

Workouts.. I did another Turbulence Training — henceforth TT — workout on Tuesday, which felt pretty intense to me, for all that I am still in the "intro" workouts. There's one exercise in particular that seems dead easy, that isn't. It's called the Stick-Up -- you just stand with your shoulders, back, and butt against the wall, with your feet about 4 inches from the wall; raise your hands up like you're being held up, and with your wrists, elbows, & shoulders held against the wall, slowly slide your arms down to tuck them in a bit at your side; then move them slowly upwards to the stick-up position, again being careful to keep wrists, elbows, & shoulders always in contact with the wall. — 2 reps per set, two sets in a superset. About the 8th rep in, this think would be killing me. Related to the repetitive stress injury stuff I've been dealing with since '94 b/c I'm always sitting at a computer? Maybe....

At any rate, I got pretty wiped out that night, & made the decision about midway through the rowing intervals (3x2:00/2:00r, for a total of 1291m "work" & 968m "resting" = 2259m) that I was going to have an exercise rest the following day. At that point I had rowed a minimum of 5000m for 8 days running, & it seemed like some rest for recovery was in order. I could also afford a day off from rowing & still expect to get at least 25 days at 5000m+ this month, to meet the Concept 2 March Madness challenge.

Indeed, I woke Wednesday still feeling somewhat wiped out, so I think it was a wise decision. Thursday I was back on it, & the day went well. I did a basic morning cardio workout (a little dancing, followed by 3x5:00m/1:00r on the erg), & in the evening after work another TT workout including the intro strength stuff (still mostly bodyweight) plus HIIT intervals in the erg — 3x1:00/2:00r. The HIIT intervals of course always are preceded by a warmup row (5 mins.) & followed by a cooldown (another 5 mins.). So the combination of morning/evening always gets me to my March Madness goal of 5000m for the day as well. My energy was pretty good throughout the TT workout — intense but not exhausting — & I felt pretty good the rest of the evening too. Given how wiped out I was after the earlier TT workouts, I think this means that my muscles/body are beginning to adapt to the greater demands I'm putting on them. Good thing, since future workouts are even more demanding!

Today (Friday 14 March) is a day off for me (I'm staff at a university, & we get one of the Spring Break days off as a paid holiday). Part of how I chose to use it was to do a longer row, which I've just completed: 10,000m, only the second time I've done such a distance. For company as I rowed, I decided to give a second listen to an interview by Kyle Battis' with a Burn the Fat Inner Circle member named Rhonda called "Creating a No Excuse Environment." This is a fantastic interview, with some great advice about setting oneself up for success for fat loss over the long haul. I need to remember, though, to put the water bottle next to the erg before I row, & also to put some socks on the handle against my hand sweat (or find my weightlifting gloves), because I had to stop a couple of times to get off the erg & get these things, even as the clock continued to run. All the same, did the row in 57:57.0, under an hour, but I know I can better my time. My average pace of 2:53.8/500m is slower than I was actually rowing, because of those little breaks. Oh well, next time: I'm probably going to be doing a 10K every weekend to build up endurance & work towards a half-marathon in late April (another Concept 2 challenge).

Info & planning. Meanwhile, I'm starting to go a bit more in-depth in refreshing myself on info I learned two years ago. I've started rereading BFFM & will also be rereading my Precision Nutrition materials. I am going to start recording my food intake for awhile to spot for any weaknesses in my nutritional program. I also spend some time researching equipment for strength training. I'm considering getting a Bowflex for that purpose, but not sure I have the room in my apartment for it, nor am I sure it would be wise financially at the moment -- having just gotten out of credit debt, I'm wary of putting myself back into it too far. So I'm holding off on that.

But I did order a set of Bowflex SelectTech 1090 dumbbells, which will be an improvement over my present dumbbells because of their "dialup" capacity to change the weight on them quickly for different dumbbell exercises -- from 10 lbs to 90 lbs per dumbbell in 2.5 lb increments. That'll be enough weight also to keep me in good squats for awhile. Along with the dumbbells, a SelectTech 5.1 series bench & a dumbbell rack. A great investment to match my commitment to better health.

Hunger pangs & satiety

2008-03-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

I don't really have problems much with food cravings, not after two years of eating a low-glycemic diet & being sure I don't skip breakfast. And I haven't had a big sweet tooth for even longer than that. Nor have I ever been an insomniac. But I still sometimes slide into the pit, & while I know how to get out of it, it'd be nice to avoid it altogether. So for the past couple of weeks I've been supplementing with 5-HTP, & have noticed that I do feel a slight elevation of mood even from what my normal "good mood" feels like.

Not so much related to depression, but still related to food cravings: I also learned some interesting stuff recently through a book called Hunger Free Forever: The New Science of Appetite Control by Michael T. Murray, N.D. and Michael R. Lyon, M.D. about some relevant scientific findings about the relationship between food cravings & what they call blood sugar (glycemic) volatility. In essence, through studies using some new types of glucometers that permit researchers to monitor an individual's blood glucose readings 24/7, they've learned that inappropriate hunger pangs come on most frequently when there is a rapid fall in blood glucose. So for example: you eat a large meal that includes a lot of high-GI carbs, which causes your blood sugar to spike fast. That's followed by a large influx of insulin from your pancreas to deal with the sugars, which leads then to a fairly rapid lowering of your blood sugar. If you're insulin resistant, especially, this lowering might be really rapid, & you may experience symptoms of hypoglycemia (sweatiness, shakiness, etc.) even if you your blood sugar doesn't go down to hypoglycemic levels (defined as <= 70 mg/dL blood glucose). And you may then have hunger pangs, even if that meal you just ate was high in calories.

This adds to the reasoning behind low-glycemic eating being a reaaaaaaaally good idea for people who are insulin resistant. You want to reduce your blood sugar volatility as much as possible, & low GI is a way to do that. Besides it's other bad effects, high blood sugar volatility leads to hunger pangs & overeating. It's especially helpful to eat low GI diets that are high in fiber (lets hear it for nonstarchy high fiber veggies all over again! & many wonderful fruits as well), because fiber will fill up your stomach so you feel full for longer, & it also slows stomach emptying, which both promotes a long-lasting sense of satiety and slows the rate at which carbohydrates in your meal are transformed & transported into blood glucose in your blood.

I firmly believe that it is completely unnecessary for anyone to feel hungry simply because they are working do reduce the amount of fat on their bodies. It is possible to burn off fat & feel happily satiated doing it. I know it is, because I'm doing it myself.

(I am gonna try to find some of the actual studies these guys cite that show the relationship between blood glucose volatility & hunger pangs vs. satiety. Hugely relevant to me.)

Depression & despair

2008-03-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

I've had lifelong issues with depression & despair — though I've never really thought about how they might be related to PCOS or insulin resistance. I have, over time, learned the things I need to do to take care of myself when the pit starts encroaching on me. I've never done antidepressants. Someone mentioned to me taking birth control pills (for PCOS) as masking a serious issue — I agree! — I also haven't wanted to take antidepressants to mask the issues there, or to take on additional health problems because of so-called "side"-effects.

(Also known as: effects, without the trivializing qualification side-. Rant mode on: Side- effects are just the effects the pharmaceutical company wants to think aren't significant so you'll buy their drug. Sorta like how Eli Lilly's antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, intended for people with schizophrenia & bipolar, is said to have a side-effect of weight gain & increased diabetes risk. Eli Lilly is in court right now in Anchorage, sued by the State of Alaska for how it minimized these health risks so that all kinds of Alaskans who might otherwise not have been are now Type 2 diabetics as a result of having been prescribed Zyprexa. There's a bunch of other states that have filed suit as well. End rant mode.)

How I deal when I feel depression coming on: some of it is attention to an old Twelve-Step program acronym, HALT: Hungry Angry Lonely Tired. So I focus on getting enough healthy stuff to eat; taking care of my emotional & personal issues, especially interpersonal issues that involve resentments & anger; not getting isolated & having a good social network of family & friends; & getting enough sleep. Beside that, I know to make sure I'm not taking on too much, which I have frequently done in the past; that I'm getting good exercise, which elevates my mood; & that I'm not confusing my depressing thoughts with reality: thoughts are just like clouds, & I don't have to attach myself to them. Hence, I have never attempted suicide, though I've had suicidal thoughts oh just lots & lots of times. Although I follow the news, I avoid going too deeply into it especially on items that really make me feel angry or helpless, because that hits all my despair-buttons. (I do what I can to improve the world in my own little neck of it, but I don't put myself in the way anymore of helpless feelings about not being able to save the whole world all by myself.)

Most recently I learned about 5-HTP. Can't believe I didn't know about it before. It's a complex that is one of the products your body synthesizes out of the amino acid tryptophan (of Thanksgiving post-dinner turkey sleepiness fame), & which in turn your body synthesizes into the neurotransmitter serotonin. Which is the neurotransmitter whose activity most of the later antidepressants, such as the SSRIs (selective serotonin uptake inhibitors) like Prozac & Zoloft are designed to manipulate. Well, why use an SSRI because you don't have enough serotonin in your brain, when you can just manufacture more serotonin itself, by having adequate supplies of 5-HTP to manufacture it with? Besides that, 5-HTP also has been shown to help reduce food cravings & hence is an aid in fighting obesity (for reasons having to do with the relationship between carbohydrate consumption & how tryptophan gets past the blood/brain barrier into the brain) & also in helping reduce insomnia.

Week 4 begins

2008-03-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

I'm calling Feb. 18 this year the start of my fat loss program this year, & as that was a Monday & so is today, that makes this the first day of my 4th week. I don't know that I'm going to be posting every day, but I'm posting today anyway.

As mentioned in the last post, I started the 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout program yesterday — at least, started in the sense of doing a full workout, rather than just the warmups, which I'd done the week before (if only to get myself used to doing squats again). Because TT workouts are structured for only two or three workouts per week, with days off in between, I won't be doing one tonight. Which is as it needs to be anyway, because Monday evenings are reserved for spending time with a friend (as are all Wednesday evenings).

But, I'm still doing the March Madness rowing challenge — 5000 meters a day keeps March Madness at bay! — so I got up this morning early enough to put in my erg time. Errrrrggggg. I chose a 30-minute workout, which at my current level of fitness & rowing expertise would get me my 5000m & then some. Hadn't done a 30-minuter in awhile, & wanted to see if I could better my previous ranked distance for that duration.

And indeed! a personal best: 5634 meters, with an average per 500m of 2:39.7, which puts me now at 198th ranking of 257 (77%) of in the women's heavyweight aged 40-49 rankings. Hahaaaaa... I'm slowly getting better. And this was with the first 5 minutes being done at a slow "warmup" rate too.

But I was pretty wiped out most of this morning, leading me to believe that perhaps I'd been overdoing it over the weekend. However, now I think my wiped out feeling might be due rather to not having eaten enough yesterday, because with each additional meal today (I'm now on number 3), I've been feeling gradually better & more energetic.

Tonight's for relaxation, & to bed at a reasonable hour. I sleep pretty poorly last night — got to bed late, & kept having to get up to use the bathroom. I've been doing my best to do get more sleep this month, in part because insufficient sleep is bad for fat loss, & in part because I'm more prone to getting rundown & especially getting depressed without enough. Hard thing for me, because historically I'm a night owl.

A progress report

2008-03-09T23:10:00.000-08:00

Restart & progress since February 18. I started up again on getting exercise again just two & a half weeks ago, on Monday, February 18, doing about 30 minutes dancing with my iPod each morning before I went to work.

Incredible how even that little bitty bit improved things. I felt more energy throughout the day — even though I had to get up earlier in the morning to do it. I even lost some weight: 1 pound by that Friday (Feb. 22) &, incredibly, another 3 lbs. by two days after that. A lot of that was water weight, I'm thinking — because I'd been having ongoing problems with edema, & all of a sudden it was gone: I could see the veins in my feet again! A sign that my circulation is improving as a result of exercise — I had a similar experience in 2006. So it was a very good kind of water weight loss, that.

Last week (March 4) I kicked things up a notch or two by hopping back on my erg to do some daily rowing. It helps to have a challenge — in this case, Concept 2's March Madness challenge to see how many days in the month of March I can row 5000 meters or more.

On top of that, I've at long last started on Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training program, starting with his 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workouts. This involves three 45-minute workouts per week combining high-weight/low-rep strength training with interval training — in my case, done on my rower. Because I'm still on the lower end of fitness, I've chosen to start with the "introductory" workouts even in advance of the beginner level, so my program will be a couple of weeks longer. Last week (Tuesday March 4 and Thursday March 6) I did only the warmup exercises plus the "beginner intervals": this amounted to

* 2 circuits of prisoner squats (10 reps per circuit), kneeling pushups (10 reps), and split squats (10 reps)
* intervals on the erg. In both cases, I began by rowing a 5-minute warmup & rowed another 5 minutes of cooldown after the intervals themselves (usually about 830-840 meters per 5 mins.) The intervals on Tuesday were 4x1:00/2:00r, which got me 904 meters at high intensity & 1278 meters "resting." On Thursday, the routine I followed was 3x2:00/2:00r, which got me 1277m + 947m rest.

This amount of exercise, in combination with tightening up my nutrition (i.e., excluding all cheats) has me now supposedly 8 pounds down from when I started three weeks ago, according to my not-completely-accurate-but-internally-consistent scale (down to 192 from 200). (For those of you who think in kilograms, that's a 3.6 kilo loss — 87.1 kilos down from 90.7.)

Today I did my first full Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout: Workout A of the Introductory Level, for anyone familiar with that program. That means the warmup bodyweight exercise, plus four supersets mostly of bodyweight, plus beginner intervals on the erg (this time 3x1:00/2:00r), with warmup before & cooldown after, a total of 3356m for the entire erg workout. (Earlier in the day I had done a lighter rowing workout totaling 2042m so I could reach my daily "March Madness Challenge" distance of 5000m. I also danced for 15 minutes just cuz it's fun).

So, I have now officially begun Turbulence Training, which is right now the most important of the cardio & strength training legs of my overall fat-burning program.

My nutritional approach (state of my art)

2008-03-09T22:53:00.007-08:00

Originally written for my Burn the Fat Inner Circle progress journal.

My nutritional approach

History. On December 21, 2005 (winter solstice), I made the crucial decision to heed the warning brought to me through the grief of my mother's death the prior month from complications of diabetes. Because I was (& so far as I know, am) prediabetic, the first sources I went to in order to figure out how to follow through on that decision were sources about prediabetes & insulin resistance.

I'm not a great believer in doing everything with drugs -- I knew that the best first thing for me to do was to revamp my diet & become more active with exercise -- & I got lucky in the very first source I found on diabetes prevention: How to Prevent and Treat Diabetes with Natural Medicine by Michael T. Murray, N.D. and Michael R. Lyon, M.D. Besides learning a thing or two about the metabolic issues that lead to insulin resistance & eventually (unless it's brought under control) diabetes, this book is where I first learned about the glycemic index (GI), which measures how quickly various carbohydrates turn into blood glucose. Thus, GI is also somewhat predictive of how much insulin will need to turn out in the blood to deal with the glucose. The upshot of it is: an insulin resistant person would be well advised to choose their carbs from the low glycemic end of the scale. Murray & Lyon also advised that insulin resistant people should snack between meals -- healthy snacks, of course -- in order to keep blood sugars level (& also to help prevent eating too much at regular meals).

As a result of reading this book & learning more about the glycemic index from websites & books specifically about GI, I pretty immediately threw out of my diet some of the bad habits I'd accumulated over my four decades of existence. No more vending machine food. No more boxed cereals. Indeed, very little boxed or prepackaged anything -- refined carbs had to go. Instead: fruit (but not fruit juice), whole grains (but not too many of them), & lots & lots of nonstarchy vegetables.

When I ran into Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle in February 2006, Tom Venuto's nutritional advice immediately made a great deal of sense to me, & what's more, it pretty much squared with the best advice from Murray & Lyon & other people on the more enlightened end of diabetes prevention & treatment. (Note that I do not personally consider the American Diabetes Association as being among the "enlightened.") Instead of three meals & a couple of healthy between meals snacks, simply turn them into five or six small meals -- that made a great deal of sense to me. But even then I had a sense that the baseline diet of "50-55% carbs, 30% protein, and 15-20% fat" that Tom Venuto recommended on p. 149 seemed to me a little high on the carb end for a prediabetic. I didn't want a low-carb, Atkins-style diet, because I wasn't convinced they were all that healthy.

(Since then I've since met many diabetics online who swear by low-carb diets, especially that of Dr. Bernstein, but I'm still not entirely convinced. Besides, I find that if I personally eat too few carbs, I am too easily depressed. Since depression is already a lifelong issue with me, I'm not about to go down that path, thanks. BTW, I don't use drugs for depression either, & never have. I've learned to deal with it in other ways, esp. through watching my stress levels, getting enough sleep, eating healthily, exercise, & often -- just time alone.)

I floundered around for a bit figuring out just what my macronutrient ratios ought to be, until finally reading a book that had been, in fact, recommended to me on the night I made the decision to revamp my diet: The Schwarzbein Principle by Diana Schwarzbein. From whom I learned a heckuva lot about how insulin & other hormones -- especially cortisol -- function to put on the fat. Schwarzbein, in fact, refers to the adipose tissue around an insulin resistant person's midriff as the "insulin meter."

Although some classify Schwarzbein's recommendations as "low carb," I would characterize them as moderate carb. While I have some disagreement with her in regards to length of workout & also about which should come first, muscle building or fat loss, I'm very much on her side when it comes to dietary recommendations.

Basically, then, you could say that the nutritional approach I found that works best for me came out of a process of balancing between the best advice from doctors treating insulin resistant/diabetic people -- Murray, Lyon, & Schwarzbein -- with the best advice I could find from those I regard as the most experienced experts on fat loss & muscle gain -- bodybuilders & personal trainers like Tom Venuto, & those who work with them, like John Berardi.

What I'm eating now. My standard eating approach, then, since about March or April 2006 is to eat five small meals per day, each meal comprising:

* About 20-25 grams of low glycemic carbohydrates.
* About the same amount of protein, including lots of fish — sardines, kippered herring, salmon, tuna. Also: chicken (white meat, usually boneless skinless chicken breasts), bison meat, & beans/legumes.
* Healthy fats — extra virgin olive oil, fish oils or the oils in the fish I'm already eating, occasionally flax seed or its oil, coconut oil, nuts & seeds.
* Lots & lots of nonstarchy vegetables.

I don't really count carbs, or anything else, for that matter, though I did in early 2006. But I got to know how much was enough, & because I avoided packaged foods & mostly prepared my own food, I felt it was pretty successful. Even when I got offtrack somewhat, I have never yet gone back to the vending machines or packaged refined carbs that use to comprise the staples of my diet.

I will add that as of about a week ago, I've modified my diet a little by adding in a meal replacement drink, SlimStyles brand by the company Natural Factors. This is the first time I've used a meal replacement supplement, & so far results have been pretty good. This brand in particular because of another book by Michael Murray and Michael Lyon called Hunger Free Forever: The New Science of Appetite Control, which touts a proprietary superfiber called PGX (PolyGlycoplex) that has been clinically proven to promote satiation, reduce cravings, regulate blood glucose, & help obese people including those with diabetes & other forms of insulin resistance to successfully lose weight. SlimStyles meal replacement drinks are basically whey protein & PGX plus some other added nutrients. Now, I don't particularly suffer from carb cravings myself, & because I eat lots of nonstarchy veggies & a fair amount of fruit, I have a pretty fibrous diet; the main effect of using these drinks for me has been to help me lower my caloric intake without causing me to feel too hungry. I use the drink to replace one, sometimes two meals, but continue to eat what I've come to call second breakfast, second lunch, and dinner.

Tweaking. As of fall 2006, when my exercise fell away, I was just getting set to tweak my diet further with the help of John Berardi & his Precision Nutrition program. Well, I haven't done that yet, but in due course as I continue revitalizing my path towards health, I will. I need the time to read first. When it comes time to do that, I will probably also keep a food diary for a week or more & actually count up my calories & which of them come from which macronutrient category. But right now, I'm satisfied that I have a pretty reasonable & health eating style, & my efforts at the moment are mainly directed at getting my workouts well-integrated into my daily life.

Motivation & goals

2008-03-09T20:18:00.011-08:00

Because one of the keys to motivation with me is keeping track of what I'm learning & doing & also writing about it (hence this blog), & doing so within a community of other people who are doing the same thing, I decided today to keep a progress journal in the membership forums at Burn the Fat Inner Circle, which is one of the primary communities for people following the Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle (BFFM) program. But of course the only people who can read the stuff there are members, so of course I'm gonna post most of that stuff here as well.

Here's what I just wrote there about my goals:

My goals

My ultimate goal is to be healthy, insulin sensitive, fit, & to look good according to my own esthetic criteria. I summed this up a couple of years ago in the affirmation (stated in present tense as Tom Venuto recommends): I am lean, muscular, healthy, & hot! Practically speaking, this goal includes:

Weight in the area of 130 to 140 lbs. with a body composition of no more than ~15% fat (which is considered a slightly above average lean for women). At present I'm having a hard time getting an accurate body fat measurement, but I estimate I'm at 35% to 40% body fat.
Blood glucose readings consistently in the area of 80 to 90 mg/dL. Currently I hover in the prediabetic range -- 100 mg/dL. [Note: Actually I'm not totally sure of this, as I haven't done a blood glucose reading for a long time. But that's where my fasting b.g. readings tended to be back in 2006. I should be getting some more test strips after next pay day, & then will be monitoring myself again.]

12-month goal. I think I can reasonable expect, with consistent practice, to reach the weight & perhaps even the body composition goal within 12 months, perhaps even in time for my 50th birthday in February 2008.

3-month goal. I've already lost about 8 lbs. since starting up again on February 18. That's three weeks, & consistent with the info that people with higher than 30% or so body fat can often lost more than 1-2 lbs. a week in the early stages of their program. From now to say the end of May, my goal is to have lost a minimum of 12 more lbs. of fat, which would bring me to about 180 lbs. (give or take adding muscle). Complete or be near completion of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout program (Craig Ballantyne).

Weekly goals. To lose 1-2 lbs. of fat per week consistently through healthy diet and exercise. To do a weekly weigh-in & measure how many inches I've lost around my waist, hips, bust, etc. to help evaluate body fat loss. (At some point, then, I'll have lost enough fat around my abdomen to be able to do a fairly accurate body fat reading with skinfold calipers. Can't do that now.)

Daily goals: (1)To consistently follow my workout program. For cardio & interval training, I'm using a Concept 2 Model D rowing machine (erg). I also dance, walk, & in the summer will be biking. For weights, I'm mainly depending on bodyweight & barbell/dumbbell exercises, with plans to get a fitness ball & resistance bands. For the first three or four months dating from today, I am using Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training for Fat Loss program, which combines strength training & high intensity intervals. (2) To consistently eat healthily with a minimum of "cheat" meals or meal skipping. (3) To get enough sleep!

Refresher

2008-03-07T16:17:00.027-09:00

I started up again on getting exercise again just two & a half weeks ago, on Monday, February 18, doing about 30 minutes each morning before I went to work.

Incredible how even that little bitty bit improved things. I felt more energy throughout the day — even though I had to get up earlier in the morning to do it. I even lost some weight: 1 pound by that Friday (Feb. 22) &, incredibly, another 3 lbs. by two days after that. A lot of that water weight, I'm thinking — because I'd been having ongoing problems with edema, & all of a sudden it was gone: I could see the veins in my feet again! A sign that my circulation is improving as a result of exercise — I had a similar experience in 2006. So it was a very good kind of water weight loss, that.

This week I kicked things up a notch or two by hopping back on my erg to do some daily rowing. It helps to have a challenge — in this case, Concept 2's March Madness challenge to see how many days in the month of March I can row 5000 meters or more. On top of that, I've at long last started on Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training program, starting with his 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workouts. This involves three 45-minute workouts per week combining high-weight/low-rep strength training with interval training — in my case, done on my rower. Because I'm still on the lower end of fitness, I've chosen to start with the "introductory" workouts even in advance of the beginner level, so my program will be a couple of weeks longer.

Dietarily speaking, I've been cutting most of the occasional cheats out of my eating (less cheese, less rosemary garlic pistachios, less beer, fewer steak & portabello mushroom burritos from the Bear Tooth, &, of course, no pizza at all), & ensuring I don't skip meals. Over the past week I've also been trying out a high fiber meal replacement drink, with great results. I'll have more to say about that in another post, but I can say here that this, in combination with the notch-up in exercise this week, has resulted in further weight loss. Supposedly 8 pounds now since I started, according to my not-completely-accurate-but-internally-consistent scale (down to 192 from 200). (For those of you who think in kilograms, that's a 3.6 kilo loss — 87.1 kilos down from 90.7.)

The other big thing I've been working on is refreshing my knowledge. I learned a lot from a variety of sources back in 2006, but one begins to forget this & that. So I've been making the rounds of some of the books & websites that helped me so much two years ago. I'm not nearly done, but so far I've been revisiting:

Diet & nutrition

GI News, updated monthly, gives the latest news & research about the glycemic index, which every person who is looking to lose weight — especially those who are insulin resistant or have actually developed Type 2 diabetes — should be paying attention to.
The LowGlycemicEating discussion list at Yahoo Groups is support forum for people who are giving up the highly refined carbs-out-of-a-box that most people who eat Western-style diets are eating, in favor of whole grains, fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, & the other "good carbs" that don't send you blood glucose sky high & make you really fat. I'd been nomail oin this list for awhile, but not anymore.
Precision Nutrition is a nutrition system designed by Dr. John Berardi, an expert on exercise nutrition. PN includes "7 guidebooks, a gourmet cookbook, our online digital audio/video library, an online membership" — a permanent membership, without annual membership fees, that itself is worth the price of the program because of the forums & numerous articles, with new articles added regularly & frequently. I have hardly even tapped this.

Fitness

Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle, or BFFM to its many fans. One of the things I learned two years ago is that if you want to lose unwanted fat, the best experts aren't all those stupid fad diets all over the place: the biggest fat loss experts in the world are bodybuilders & personal trainers. Tom Venuto is one of them — a natural bodybuilder who's never used drugs or steroids to get his great physique, & for several years now he's been teaching countless people, including overweight middle-aged women like me, how to take off the tub to get healthier. I first wrote about him in February 2006. Venuto also has a Burn the Fat blog, but for the best of the best of what BFFM has to offer, the Burn the Fat Inner Circle is well worth a membership.
Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training. I discovered TT in July 2006, & what I wrote about it then is a great overview of what the TT program has to offer. Namely, lots of well-designed workouts that are geared towards maximum fat loss & muscle gain in just three 45-minute workouts per week, & just as suitable for everyday overweight people like me as they are for professional bodybuilders & other athletes. Ballantyne also writes a Turbulence Training blog which is updated frequently, usually every day. He also has a TT program designed especially for women.

I'll have more to say about what I'm learning or relearning at these sites, & also through other books, blogs, websites, etc. as I continue to improve my own health & fitness.

Reactivation

2008-03-05T12:29:00.028-09:00

Reactivation in the sense of getting off my duff & getting active again.

Reactivation in the sense of writing this blog again.

It's been nearly a year & a half since I've done either with any consistency — not since mid- to late October 2006 when I posted the last blog I wrote about my participation in the second iteration of my workplace's Start Walking program. I'd done pretty well with the first iteration of the program overall, & thought I was geared up for the second go-'round too (I'm pretty sure I did it all the way through the Bioneers weekend recounted in that last Start Walking blog, at least) — but then a number of circumstances conspired within my mind to bring me to a . . . well, not a screeching halt, exactly. Just a slump into the grey, one of the several forms that my old demon depression takes with me. And even after it kinda sorta dissolved, I found myself still in some kind of energy-less limbo, another of depression's manifestations in my life.

Morning at the bus stop, 30 October 2006.

And so I kinda sat around on my couch a lot, feeling the dark of an Anchorage winter close all around me, along with all the looming huge crapload of boxes from the move we had just made, that for awhile there I was the only person present to deal with. Or not deal with. And even after my mood picked up a bit, I didn't pick my body up & do much exercising of it. Plus, I found these really tasty pistachios seasoned with rosemary & garlic sold at the Natural Pantry (the store I do most of my grocery shopping at), & ate way too many of 'em, ate too much of the tasty raw cheddar cheese there too, & occasionally had a pizza or one of the refined-carb-heavy snacks someone brought in to work, & managed thereby to gain back all the 18 lbs. I'd lost over the course of my 2006 activities.

But there's good news too.

I didn't gain back more than that 18 lbs. Gaining back more than you lost is pretty typical with a lot of "diets," but that didn't happen with me. That's because of the second piece of good news:

I didn't go back to my old, pre-2006 style of eating. Sure, a few more pistachios or pieces of cheese than I should have had (both healthy foods, but too much of a good thing, y'know?); sure, the occasional pizza with it's refined carb crust & greasy pepperoni — but overall I lived by what I'd learned about how to eat. I didn't return to the vending machines (haven't eaten anything out of one in over two years now), I didn't go back to boxed cereals & other heavily refined carbs as a daily part of my diet. I continued to eat lots & lots of veggies, low glycemic index carbs, lean meats, coldwater fish, nuts & seeds, etc., just as I'd learned.

I didn't lose my knowledge of what works. I know how to lose fat (not just weight, but fat, especially the nasty adipose tissue that lingers around the waistline): I just have to do the work.

And now that I'm doing the work again, well — piece of . . . . Hmmm. Not piece of cake, for cake is so very high-refined-carbohydraty. Nor, really, is the work quite "piece of cakey" anyway: rowing 5,000 meters on an indoor rower takes a bit of sweat, you see.

Skeleton Crew challenge: met.

Oh yeah, & I made some good gains in the interim, too. For example, last October, with my Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, I bought myself an erg — a Concept 2 Model D indoor rower — something I'd had my greedy-for-fitness eyes on since the year before. I even got myself going on it quickly enough that I was able to meet the first of the online rowing challenges that Concept 2 sponsors every year, to row 31,000 meters over the week leading up to Hallowe'en, & got myself this cool Skeleton Crew challenge certificate. (I still need to order my t-shirt.)

And I started making some really good kick-ass soups, full of legume & vegetable goodness, like the lentil soup I posted about in January. Nowadays I typically make a big enough pot on Sunday evenings to cover maybe half my meals from Sunday night through Wednesday lunch — & all low-GI & healthy.

But came time to be a bit more organized about it all. Fat loss, exercise, nutrition, diabetes prevention — & yeah, given I've had a couple of bad bouts in the past year with old demon depression, that too. Health — which if I haven't mentioned before, is what terveys means. (In Finnish.)

So a couple of weeks ago I broke out my iPod & started dancing in the morning again, as I did of yore. And I broke out my old Excel spreadsheet (now done in OpenOffice Calc) that I used to use for keeping track of my Start Walking stuff, updated it to 2008, & started keeping track again of my walking, rowing, dancing, strength training, & come spring probably biking too. Started participating in another workplace health program that, come March 31, will also include Start Walking round 4 (I missed round 3 altogether). And dusted off my Turbulence Training program materials that I had barely started tapping a year & a half ago, to pursue it in earnest this time.

And started, as of this post, to write this blog with some regularity again. Which also helps me toward my health goals.

Lentil soup

2008-01-08T19:30:00.001-09:00

Lentil soup

Some lentil soup I made tonight, with onions, carrots, celery, carrots, pickles, & kale.

Recipe

Okay, here's how I cooked it:

2 cups uncooked lentils
1 cup brown basmati rice
8 cups water
1 onion chopped
2 carrots chopped
2 celery stalks chopped
2-3 large leaves of kale chopped
3-4 large dill pickles chopped
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 bay leaves
1-2 teaspoons salt (I use Celtic sea salt)
~ 2 teaspoons white vinegar

Mix all ingredients except the vinegar in a large pot & bring to a boil, then simmer covered until the lentils are soft, about an hour usually. Then add the vinegar. This makes enough of a very thick soup to feed several people, or several meals for one or two people.

This is based on a recipe for Greek lentil soup I learned long ago from Laurel's Kitchen (famous vegetarian cookbook originally published 1976); main differences is I tend to use about twice as much veggies as the original called for, & I added in the rice & the kale (or any other dark leafy green), & I leave out the potato b/c I seldom have any on hand (I don't eat much potato b/c it's high glycemic). I also added the pickles, which I use a lot to add a flavor variation to various dishes.

Note that by the end of cooking, the kale will be quite a different shade of green than in the photo above, which was taken at a fairly early stage of the cooking. You can keep it closer to this bright shade of green by adding it closer to the end, but don't wait until the very last minute: some of the good (nutritional) stuff in kale (& some other leafy greens) isn't fully bioavailable when it's too uncooked.

Variations: Add more water if you want a thinner soup (or lower the amount of veggies). You can skip the rice or use a different kind of rice if you want, or use different vegetables or different quantities of vegetables. For example, potato, turnip, any dark leafy greens. Fresh tomatoes (which I like best added near the end, so they aren't as cooked). If you're not a vegetarian, you can also add some meat -- my favorites are well-browned bison stew meat or precooked boneless ham. Tofu might be good in there too, but I've never tried it.

Like most soups made with beans/legumes, this (1) easy to make -- most of the work is just chopping up the veggies; & (2) you can vary it a lot based on what you have on hand in the way of vegetables or type of beans/legumes. Just be aware that some types of beans/legumes take a lot longer to cook than lentils, & may need to be soaked overnight before cooking. But lentils are really fast; blackeyed peas are pretty fast too.

10,533 meters

2007-12-04T22:23:00.000-09:00

My first go at a really long row: 60 minutes, in which I rowed 10,533 meters (that's 10.5 km, folks) with an average time per 500 meters of 2:50.9. I'll probably want to give 10,000m rows a few more tries before trying anything even more ambitious, such as a half-marathon.

Skeleton Crew challenge: met

2007-11-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

I bought a Concept 2 Model D indoor rower with my Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend last month, & got started using it right away, just in time to participate in Concept 2's annual Skeleton Crew challenge to row over 31,000 meters during the week leading up to Halloween.

Bioneers

2006-10-19T22:05:00.002-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Thursday, 19 Oct 2006: Bioneers

Seeing as tonight was going to be the start of the third annual Bioneers in Alaska conference, which is all about sustainability, it seemed another good reason (besides exercise) to take the bus instead of my car today. So, 20 minutes of dancing, the 1000-step walk to the bus, a sustained pacing up & down the sidewalk in front of the bus stop until the bus arrived which got me another 1500 steps... a lunchtime walk around Goose Lake (no swans or rain this time, but several mallards & a mirror-smooth lake)... & after work, a walk over to the Arts building to attend the beginning of the Bioneers conference. This included speeches by Mike Driscoll, UAA's new provost, & Mayor Mark Begich, & the keynote address by Jeffrey M. Smith, the author of Seeds of Change about genetically modified (GMO) foods.

(What a great thing to have gone to: I was very aware of the dangers of GMO foods, having seen the documentary "The Future of Food" earlier this year; but what Smith did was to give me hope that we could put a stop to it before it completely wrecks our food supply!)

And then a quick walk back to the nearest bus stop to get myself home, the walk home from my final stop, & a little wander down the street for the benefit of the dog, as Jesse is spending the night at a friend's.

And count it up: I did great today, & would've achieved my 10,000+ even without the dancing!

Day total: 13,060 steps (or equivalent).

University Lake

2006-10-18T22:40:00.002-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Wednesday, 18 Oct 2006: University Lake

Today was a car day. But 31 minutes dancing this morning, a lunchtime walk around University Lake during my lunch hour, & incidental steps still got me over my 10,000. I find that I'm able to walk more steps in an hour than I could in the early summer, even when I stop to take pictures. (Of course, I used to stop to take pictures in June, too.) Lots of ducks & dogs with their owners, since University Lake is one of the places in Anchorage where dogs are permitted to run leash-free. The trail was quite muddy in places -- good thing I was wearing my Doc Martens, not just a pair of sneakers.

Day total: 11,502 steps (or equivalent).

Swan on Goose Lake

2006-10-17T22:23:00.002-08:00

Swan on Goose Lake

Today's Start Walking blog:

Tuesday, 17 Oct 2006: Swan on Goose Lake

I drove today because I had an after-work errand that had to be completed before 6:00 PM... & that's a problem. As mentioned yesterday, driving is always a problem in terms of getting enough exercise -- during my doldrum weeks I was driving a lot, but I was also wearing my pedometer, & I was averaging no more than about 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day even though I was walking the dog all the time. But now Jesse's back from his King Salmon job, so I don't even have that.

I made up for it by taking another walk at lunchtime today, again around Goose Lake. It was raining very lightly, & was chilly -- but what the heck, I live in Alaska, just dress for the weather I reckon. And I'm very glad I did! -- because over on the other side of the lake where there are lots of lily pads (Wendy Withrow knows the place I'm talking about, she's mentioned it in her blog a few times during Start Walking I) I saw two loons, still hanging about for awhile before things freeze up. There actually used to be a pair of Pacific loons that nested on Goose Lake every year -- I don't know if they still do, but this is the second time I've seen loons on the lake this year.

And then as I came around the west side of the lake, just before the bike trail leads out to UAA Drive, I saw a big flash of white coming down onto the lake, & I thought, That's too big to be a seagull. Sure enough, it was a swan. Well, of course that means a little less walking for me, because I had to pull out my digital camera that was hanging around my neck & take several pictures.

Well worth a little rain for that!

By the time work & after-work errands were done, I still had a bit to do if I wanted to make 10,000 steps today. So, I pulled out my iPod & danced -- one of my favorite alternative exercises to walking. Worked up a nice sweat, too -- 41 minutes. Only then could I afford to pull out the DVD of "Battlestar Galactica" that we'd rented & vedge out on the couch for a bit.

Day total: 11,495 steps (or equivalent).

Base camp

2006-10-16T22:08:00.002-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Monday, 16 Oct 2006: Base camp

As noted at the tail end of Start Walking I, I went into some doldrums in the last few weeks of the programs, what with my partner departing for three years at acupuncture school in Seattle (three 3-week breaks per year), & having an apartment full of boxes yet to deal with after our recent Move From Hell. But I am doing my best to dust myself off & pick myself up, & I feel really good about what I accomplished today simply by moving back into habits I'd developed during Start Walking I, like taking the bus, pacing back & forth at the bus stop while waiting, getting off at early stops, walking at lunchtime (today, all the way around Goose Lake), & so on. It's a lot harder to get enough exercise when I drive, so I'm not sure I'll do so well tomorrow.

It was great going around the lake today. The air is crisp, but this kind of chill feels good to me, nothing so hot & sweaty as some of my walks over the summer.

Day total: 12,259 steps.

Start Walking I: Last weeks

2006-09-29T22:23:00.003-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Friday, 29 Sep 2006

I'm sorry to say that I pretty much fell down on the job in these last weeks, beginning with the last week in August, which was my partner's last week in Anchorage before commencing three years in acupuncture school. (She'll have three three-week breaks a year -- I'll next see in December.) It was incredibly busy that week, helping her prepare to travel; & since then I seem to have been in the doldrums, & am just now beginning to emerge from them.

So for anyone who'd been reading my blog, sorry for not keeping it up. Though I have still worn my pedometer every day -- but sometimes forgot to record the steps on it. My steps have been lower than before, as I've been not getting to bed early enough & have thus been sleeping later, which means driving the car to work instead of taking the bus.

Though I did slack off at the end here, I want to express my deep appreciation to my workplace for instituting this program, because it really has had a serious positive impact not just on my walking but on my overall health. Thanks also to K.W., who did a tremendous job putting this program together & keeping it going.

I've gotten such a lot out of this program that it's a no-brainer: yes, I intend to participate in Start Walking Phase 2, which was announced today. It begins October 16. I plan to be there: I hope y'all will be too.

Start Walking, week 16 (August 15–27): Summary

2006-08-27T23:00:00.002-08:00

See this post to learn more about the Start Walking program in which I'm participating.

August 21-27, 2008. My goals this week included organizing the new apartment; getting a routine of training at the gym established; & maintaining at least 10,000+ steps four days a week, if not more.

Mon: Sun. 5,727.
Tue: Revenge of Soddenday. 12,295.
Wed: Fall in the air. 10,462.
Thu: Rowing. 13,775.
Fri: Bride of Soddenday. 6,108.
Sat: Workout. 11,748.
Sun: Alaska State Fair. 7,455.

Summary: Not quite a regular gym schedule yet, but I did get to the gym once. I don't think I'll get a regular schedule established until after Rozz leaves for acupuncture school on Sep. 1. I did meet the goal of 10,000+ on four days this week, & had a seven-day average of 9,653 steps (or equivalent).

Alaska State Fair

2006-08-27T22:08:00.003-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Sunday, 27 August 2006: Alaska State Fair

We picked a good day to go to the fair: sunny & warm. The worst part of it was, as usual, the drive there, as everyone else in Anchorage seems to have decided it was a good day to go to the fair too. It took about an hour just to get from the turnoff on Inner Springer Loop to the gate, & that was after already a considerable period of very slow movement from the junction with the Parks Highway into Palmer.

We were there about four hours, got to see most of the exhibits & quite a few of the booths, & I felt good about not eating all kinds of junky fair food. In fact, the only fair food I ate was a beef pastie from the Pastie Shack, which I like to do every year, a few of Rozz's fries, & some kettle corn we bought on the way out. Most of my food was stuff we brought with us.

Considering how long we were on our feet, I nonetheless didn't make 10,000 steps. But a lot of being on your feet at the fair anyway is standing around.

Day total: 7,455 steps.

Workout

2006-08-26T22:40:00.004-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Saturday, 26 August 2006: Workout

Time at last to get started with the Turbulence Training workout program I'd decided to adopt. As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, this is a workout progam designed by a Canadian trainer named Craig Ballantyne which combines high intensity strength training (lower reps/higher weight) with high intensity interval training. Nothing new or revolutionary, really: just that it's set up with variations in advance, so that I don't have to try to figure out how to best design my workouts on my own. (Though I expect I will design them myself eventually, after I've gained lost more experience.)

My focus was on the strength training part, & I began — at home — with the "introductory level" workout, which I'll be following for two weeks before I advance to the "beginner level" for four weeks. The program advises intro level for people who are "sedentary" — which, given my experience since May in the Start Walking program, I wouldn't say I am any more, but walking is also a heckuva lot different from strength training too, so I figured best to do introductory anyway. And I'm glad I did, because I'm starting by getting myself into good habits like doing proper warmups, & I'm also learning new exercises. The intro level workouts consist primarily of bodyweight exercises, that is, exercises in which the resistance is provided by the weight of your own body instead of by dumbbells or barbells, like pushups. It took me about 30 minutes, or at least that's what I counted, to go through the warmup & the six additional exercises. Lots of squats.

Normally speaking I should follow that up with an interval training workout, but since I wasn't at the gym with a machine, & I wasn't going to have a chance to go today, I just danced instead. For a half hour.

Then walked down to the old place to help Rozz shovel the compost into a couple of containers for transfer to the garden of a friend, then to CompUSA to get her a digital camera, then to our friends to drop off the compost & visit. A bit more walking there too: down to a small lake in their neighborhood & back.

So, I got a fair amount of exercise today.

Not a lot of rain, except the occasional sprinkle. But cool & overcast.

Day total: 11,748 (or equivalent).

Bride of Soddenday

2006-08-25T22:23:00.003-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Friday, 25 August 2006: Bride of Soddenday

It did rain a bit yesterday, but not hard enough to rate much mention. But today: the monster was back. At least this morning, & as I still have sneakers that leak & didn't want to be damp all day, I allowed it to discourage me from doing the normal cross-campus walk on the way in. By the time I got off work, however, the rain had ended, so on the way home I hopped off the bus early & got a good long walk home. Not enough to get to 10,000 steps for the day, but better than nothing.

Day total: 6,108 steps.

Rowing

2006-08-24T22:21:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Thursday, 24 August 2006: Rowing

I can feel it in my arms & shoulders: I went to the gym I lately joined, & did 25 minutes of rowing. Not in a real shell, of course, but on a rowing machine — I wanted to try rowing because #1 I rowed dorm crew in college one semester & really liked it & #2 I'd read a couple of things about its value as a cardio exercise because it works more areas of the body than anything else except maybe cross country skiing & swimming. I did enough research to learn it could also be used for interval training, though the technique seems to differ a little from how intervals are done with walking/running or with biking (whether on the street or on machines). At any rate, its given a pleasant "I've been working out" ache to my shoulders & arms... wonder how I'll feel tomorrow?

I had my heart rate monitor on & tried doing it in an interval-training kinda way: slower for a couple of minutes, then picking up my pace (& heart rate) for one minute, then going back to the "recovery/rest" level again, & so on through about 20 minutes of the workout (the rest went to warm-up). I have no idea how fast I was rowing, but I calculated the conversion for steps walked by the more conservative rate (3.5 miles per hour) as I rather doubt I was at 12 mph. That converts to 147 steps per minute rowing, for an equivalent of 3,675 steps.

Otherwise, a fairly normal day, with the requisite bus stop & cross-campus walks, plus a lot of walking through Fred Meyers to pick up some shorts for working out in & a padlock for a locker at the gym, & the walk home afterward. Somehow that led me to actually doing over 10,000 steps just in walking, so I had a pretty good exercise total for the day.

Day total: 13,775 steps (or equivalent)

Fall in the air

2006-08-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Wednesday, 23 August 2006: Fall in the air

Feel that crisp in the air? Fall is coming. I don't mind: fall is my favorite season. And it was sunny! And dry!

Did well on walking today, even though the cross-campus walk was sabotaged by my morning bus being so late that it didn't give me the twenty minutes I needed for that route. So I got off at Prov Hospital & did the wide walkaround of SSB/Consortium Library instead. After work was Bus 36 to Spenard & a longer walk to my friend Sylvia's house, & after my visit a walk to the Bus 7 bus stop, & then a walk from Spenard & Northern Lights back home. I was a thousand or so steps short of 10,000 at that point, so I topped up by doing 11 minutes of dancing.

The evening walks were a real treat. On the way to Sylvia's I dicovered some raspberry bushes & grabbed a few tasty raspberries; & on the last walk home the sky, near sunset, was quite beautiful.

After I got home I spent some time downloading & organizing photos from my digital camera — something I hadn't had time to do for quite awhile — so I can again grace my blog with photos.

Day total: 10,462 steps (or equivalent).

[Note: I will be updating some of my older Terveys posts with photos over the next few days.]

Revenge of Soddenday

2006-08-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Tuesday, 22 August 2006: Revenge of Soddenday

Here we are again: lots & lots of rain in the Anchorage bowl, no doubt also in the Mat-Su. Though I was wearing my raincoat, I got soaked walking home from my appointment this afternoon — shoulda been wearing my rainpants too, as the rain sluiced down my raincoat & landed directly on my legs. Something more effective for my feet than leaky sneakers would be in order, too. All the gutters were at flood stage. I had to stop by home & change clothes & dry out before I was willing to make my way to my local precinct to vote in today's primary.

All that came after the unexpected excitement on the bus ride from work to my appointment. I was riding bus route 3 along Northern Lights, & we were just crossing the Seward Highway, just before my stop. when the bus driver brought us to an abrupt halt, in order to make way for a stream of about 10 police cars coming up the highway & turning left onto Northern Lights. I got off at my stop & continued up Northern Lights on foot, & caught a lot of the ruckus of police cars all around Sears Mall [see picture above], & on both sides as well as the middle of Northern Lights. There'd been a shootout between people in two vehicles, a bystander told me, & someone had just been taken away in an ambulance. I learned later from the news that the person in the ambulance was a Murkowski campaign worker who was hit by a ricochet just outside Murkowski campaign headquarters. Thank goodness he will be okay. And I hope they catch the shooters. I guess the shootout happened just moments before my bus arrived.

Otherwise a normal day. Got 20 minutes dancing in this morning, & bus stop walks & the morning cross-campus walk, plus the walk to my appointment & home, took care of my day's exercise. Which was nice, because then I felt fine about taking the car with Rozz to finally do my voting.

Day total: 12,295 steps (or equivalent).

More than 5 percent

2006-08-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

Red currants, walnuts, & cinnamon
on my morning oatmeal (steel-cut oats)

Maybe you've heard that oft-cited statistic that, of all people who go on a weight loss program, 95% regain all that weight. In other words, only 5% succeed at both losing excess weight & keeping it off.

Well, curious about that statistic, the Amazing Shrinking Mom did some investigation, & things look not quite so bleak after all. Looks like that famous 95% stat originated with a particular study of a small sample of dieter in the 1950s, & that it's been cited unquestioningly ever since. But other, later studies are more optimistic.

For details, see the Amazing Shrinking Mom's post, "About That Ninety-Five Percent Failure Rate".

Sun

2006-08-21T21:44:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Monday, 21 August 2006: Sun

The sun was blessedly out today, after several days of rain. I doubt the rain is over, but it's nice to get some respite. The air this morning, as I took my bus stop & cross-campus walks in to work, had that crisp to it that I associate with this time of year. We've seen termination dust a couple of times.

We had errands after work -- Rozz picked me up with the car. So little walking in the latter parts of the day. But we had a good dinner: stir-fry using radish greens, the green leafy tops from celery, & broccoli with bison sirloin. Enough left for lunch tomorrow too.

Day total: 5,727 steps.

Start Walking, week 15 (August 14–20): Summary

2006-08-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

See this post to learn more about the Start Walking program in which I'm participating.

August 14-20, 2006. My goals this week included to complete cleaning the carport at our old place, join a gym, start Turbulence Training (interval training for cardio/aerobics + lower-rep/higher weight supersets for weight training), while returning to a 10,000+ steps (or equivalent) average. Here's how I did; for details, go to the post of that title. (Titles in bold are to posts that are especially significant — discussion of technique, philosophy, etc. related to bettering my health.)

Mon: The Colt gets a new home. 10,034 steps.
Tue: The return of routine. 10,141 steps.
Wed: Slacking off. 4,550 steps.
Thu: Sort out. 4,175 steps.
Fri: Soddenday. 10,338 steps (or equivalent).
Sat: Return of Soddenday. 3,079 steps.
Sun: Pt. Woronzof. 10,023 (or equivalent).

Summary: Finished the carport, including but Rozz needs to finish the garden. Joined the gym, not yet training, but I did get four days of just over 10,000 steps (or equivalent). And it looks like I may be down another couple of pounds, which would make it 20 lbs. lost since late December.

In non-Start Walking news: In prepartion for optimizing my diet with Precision Nutrition & my exercise program with Turbulence Training, it seemed useful to review how I got to where I am now, & where it seems I might need to go:

Starting points (15 Aug 2006). This amounts to being another "State of my art" post.
Tweaking my diet with Precision Nutrition (15 Aug 2006). There are fewer changes to make than I thought to adhere to PN's 10 Habits: PN & Schwarzbein are pretty good matches.

And I also pointed to more info from Craig Ballantyne on interval training:

An interval training primer (16 Aug 2006).

Blogger.com came out with a beta version which adds some cool functionality to blogs — for example, the use of labels to categorize posts into different subject categories. I upgraded immediately, & began adding labels to all my posts. I'm still not done with this, but I've gotten the past couple of months done. Makes it a lot easier to find related older posts, I think, & also helps anyone who chances across this blog to get a better idea of the topics I cover here.

Pt. Woronzof

2006-08-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Sunday, 20 August 2006: Pt. Woronzof

No illusions today about sunshine: the sky all day was firmly grey & overcast. But mostly it didn't rain until evening.

We started the day with breakfast, & I got 20 minutes of dancing in. Then to the Captain Cook Hotel, where my niece is a barrista. She filled us in briefly on what flooding in the Mat-Su, the washout of part of the bridge over Troublesome Creek on the Parks Highway, & the Alaska Railroad cancellations have had on hotel life -- a lot of hotel patrons have had their travel plans messed up.

We had our tea, & did a bit of planning about how to handle things for the remainder of the time before Rozz flies down to Seattle to go to acupuncture school.

And then to Pt. Woronzof for a Flickr meetup. For those who don't know, Flickr is a photography sharing site. Anchorage Flickrites had planned to meet at Hatcher Pass today, but the flooding in the Mat-Su made that impossible, so they changed the meet-up to Pt. Woronzof. Good thing for me, since I couldn't have made it to Hatcher Pass today even if the weather had been cooperative.

Considering that most "beaches" in Anchorage are mudflats, Pt. Woronzof is unusual: it's a good beach for walking, if not for wading. (Especially on a chilly, overcast day.) We had a nice long walk, I took lots of pictures, along with meeting up with the other Flickr folks, & Sweetheart the dog had a great time chasing waves along the beach. Rozz also found a bunch of red currant plants, & did a lot of picking.

Later, a visit to some friends in Chugiak, a drive back home under heavy rain, & some time spent in the kitchen taking care of all the veggies we bought at Anchorage Farmer's Market yesterday.

Day total: 10,023 steps (or equivalent).

Return of Soddenday

2006-08-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Saturday, 19 August 2006: Return of Soddenday

At first I thought it would be a sunshiny day. Becaue it was, when I went outside in the morning just before we headed over to Anchorage Farmer's Market. And it stayed that way while we were there: sunshine, though windy, as we bought scads & scads of fresh, beautiful, locally grown veggies. But the guy who sold us the "Alaska Grown" t-shirts said he thought it might rain, & look to the west: yep, those clouds look like the kind that are carrying a big dump of moisture. And so it was.

Rain, then sun, then rain, then sun, then rain... it went like that all day. And when it rained, it came down hard.

We were at the old place for much of this, me cleaning out the carport, Rozz working on transplanting some of the plants from the garden & preparing to take the garden boxes down. She was wearing a big green poncho & her blue rain pants, so she stayed pretty dry. I was wearing my green raincoat & no rain pants because I couldn't find them (chaos of the move), but I was mostly in the carport so I stayed pretty dry too.

Didn't get much walking in though. But we did what we had to do. Almost quit of the place. Almost.

Day total: 3,079 steps.

Soddenday

2006-08-18T23:10:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Friday, 18 August 2006: Soddenday

Soddenday. That's my new name for a day like today. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Soddenday.

By this you may gather it was wet. Lucky I had my raincoat which, truth be told, I've had to wear every day this week. The first time I wore it against rain, I remember, was in St. Marys, where I stayed overnight on a job-related trip that took me to several Yukon River villages, & in the evening it was raining much as it did today in Anchorage, & I got on my raincoat & tested it out. Worked well. Worked well this morning, too, as I walked to the bus, except for all the rainwater sluicing down the front to land on my right thigh, drenching me.

The Anchorage Daily News had a story today about how the rain we're getting is not at all unusual for August. Yes... I remember how rainy it was when I first came to Alaska: August 1982. Like this. And riding the bus a lot too, because I had no car back then. A real time of change, as this August is for me too. And so no problem for me the rain: I like August, & the rain does me no harm.

My sodden trousers were dried out by lunchtime, so Rozz came over with Sweetheart the dog to finagle me into a walk to get them sodden again. We walked along the bike trail to Goose Lake & back again, training Sweetheart the while on the command "right," the object of which is to teach her not to cross the path with her long retractable leash so that any passing bicyclists don't get tripped up on the line. Not that we saw many bicyclists in the rain: I reckon the command "right" will be as useful in dry weather as in wet.

After work, a bus to midtown & brief walk to the Natural Pantry for our grocery shopping, & thence a drive to the gym in my neighborhood that I've been intending to join. And now I'm joined. Glad to find they have a rowing machine, as well as the other aerobic & lots of weights & weight machines, as I've lately become interested in rowing as a type of aerobic that exercises more of the muscles than just about anything except cross-country skiing. Maybe swimming too. We were hungry, so I'll get orientation later.

And then home. Discovering I had less than 1,000 steps to go to make a 10,000+ day, I did 10 minutes of dancing to make it up.

That was nice. Haven't danced in awhile. We go back on regular work hours next week, so I should start having time to dance again in the morning too.

Day total: 10,338 steps (or equivalent).

Sort out

2006-08-17T22:25:00.001-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Thursday, 17 August 2006: Sort out

Today was another slack day, still taking care of other concerns. For example, we've had a chaotic kitchen in the new place, so we spent a bit of time tonight opening & sorting & putting away a few boxes from the move over, before heading over to Rozz's business for a get together with the other massage therapists there. Heard a lot of interesting massage therapist shop talk, & had a good time — glad I went — then we stopped by the old place on the way home to gather up our houseplants, which had been sitting in the carport the last few days in increasingly chilly night-time weather. And back home for more kitchen sorting & basic houseplant care.

Walking was thus the very basic: just what it took to get to & from work.

I was entertained at the bus stop this morning watching whatever-the-machine-is-called pick up massive scoops of debris from what used to be, last time it was occupied, a family restaurant called Balto's on C Street between Northern Lights & Benson, & dumping it into a truck to be hauled away. The building had been vacant awhile, but as of three days ago it was intact. As of two days ago, it wasn't. Tomorrow I expect even most of the rubble will be gone.

Day total: 4,175 steps.

Slacking off

2006-08-16T22:02:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Wednesday, 16 August 2006: Slacking off

Less walking today: I'm slowing down probably for a couple of days in order to take care for some other concerns that need attention. So, no cross-campus walk in the morning, no big circuits around SSB/Consortium Library, etc. etc. — just the bare minimum to get to/from work. And tonight drove again to my friend Sylvia's for our weekly Wednesday get-together.

But I did eat lots of fruit. This is thanks to some nutritional tweaking. And Friday, being payday, is when I expect to stop by the gym in my new neighborhood & sign up for a membership.

I've been reading other Start Walking blogs, & saw that Richard (blog 6) had been in Bozeman, Montana, & visited the museum at the university there. Lots of dinosaurs! We stopped there back in 2001 on our way back to Denver (my partner's parental home) from visiting my parents in northwest Montana (where I'm originally from). I wished we'd had more time than we had to see everything there was to see in that museum.

Day total: 4,550 steps.

An interval training primer

2006-08-16T12:18:00.003-08:00

Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training blog today had part 1 of an interval training primer, entitled "The Best Cardio Intervals For Fat Loss - part 1". (Full information on Ballantyne's program is at his main Turbulence Training website.)

This is good info for beginners like me, too. Ballantyne writes:

If you are a beginner and you can walk at 3.3mph for 20 minutes, then your intervals will start at a walk at 3.6mph for 30 seconds to a minute. That is interval training.

That's a pretty good match for the experiment in interval training I conducted last week. I've been doing it this week, too.

Part 2 of the primer is promised for next week. Ballantyne says he'll also...

... expose the most ineffective machine in the gym.

Hint - It is also the most common machine these days, yet I've yet to see a single person change their body by using this machine for their cardio and intervals.

My guess: the elliptical.

Update, 17 Aug 2006: Gee, I coulda sworn he said "next week," not "tomorrow." Yet part 2 of his primer is on his blog today: "Best Cardio Intervals for Fat Loss - Part 2".

I seemed to have been right about my guess on the elliptical as being (in Ballantyne's opinion) the least effective machine for training, but he doesn't go into much detail about it. Merely his ranking (his opinion) of the best methods to use for interval training:

Sprinting outdoors (and hills might be the absolute best)
Strongman movements (Farmer's walks, tire flips, car pushing)
Bodyweight interval circuits
Treadmill running
Stationary cycle (upright preferred)
Stairclimber
Rower
Swimming (only works for competent swimmers)
Elliptical & Crosstrainer machines

The return of routine

2006-08-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Tuesday, 15 August 2006: The return of routine

No big suprises today: just routine bus stop walks, except that after work I walked down to the old place instead of the new to meet Rozz to discuss exactly what we're going to do to finish out the carport & garden, & then we walked home (to the new place) together.

Has it occurred to anyone reading this that completing our move is taking an inordinately loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time?

That's it.

Day total: 10,141 steps.

Tweaking my diet with Precision Nutrition

2006-08-15T21:41:00.001-08:00

I received my Precision Nutrition (PN) materials last Friday, & have read through a lot of it. In fact, I read through enough of it that it influenced my grocery shopping on Saturday, mostly be leading me to buy more fruit than I had been previously.

Because of how I've already been eating thanks to the influence of my previous reading & research, especially as influenced by Diana Schwarzbein, I've found that there's not really that much modification that I need to do in order to bring myself in alignment with PN's 10 Habits. I think anyone who is familiar with PN can read my current eating plan as described in my previous post, & see how close I already am to what PN recommends.

Note that Schwarzbein is a practicing endocrinologist. Her Schwarzbein Principle books are very much geared toward metabolic healing, with lots of emphasis on the problems of Type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, & related problems (Syndrome X, aka metabolic syndrome). As an insulin resistant person, I find it a very good sign that John Berardi's 10 Habits in PN are so similar to what Schwarzbein had already influenced me to do. I continue to be impressed by John Berardi's attention to insulin resistance/insulin sensitivity, even as he is careful to claim no particular expertise on Type 2 diabetes or its precursors.

(For those who aren't familiar with the 10 Habits, seven of them are discussed in an article on Berardi's site, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Nutritional Programs". Apparently the habits were expanded to 10 later on; an abbreviated form of the 10 Habits can be found in another article, "Built Like A Neanderthal, Part 2 - Evolution, Diet, and Body Type", about three-quarters of the way down.)

The biggest modifications I need to adhere to the 10 Habits:

Although my 20-25 grams of carb per meal are low GI & come from whole foods, they still come a lot from grains & other non-fruit/non-veggie starchy carbs. By PN's recommendation, I should only be eating those types of carbs in the two hours post workout. Otherwise, my carbs should come from fruit. So, I'll need to start buying & eating more fruit. This means changing some of my standard meals: no more Wasa whole grain crackers or Finn Crisps with my can or sardines or kippers, no more steel-cut oats for breakfast — at least not for the three to five weeks that I intend to give over wholly to the "one size fits all" portion of PN before I being individualization.
I have been eating five small meals per day, beginning at 6:00 AM & then every three hours thereafter. Though sometimes the evening meal (theoretically at 6:00 PM) has often tended to be later. Under PN, I should add in another evening meal, & I will be endeavoring to do so.
I've been consuming lots of omega 3s through fish or fish oil capsules, but looks like I could stand to add in a bit more.
I have been eating two eggs every morning scrambled with onions & mushrooms. Since that's usually the only eggs I eat (though sometimes I might make up for a dearth of other protein in the house by eating hardboiled eggs during the day), I'm not going to worry overmuch about eating "just egg whites." But I think I could probably stand to add a bit more veggie into those morning scrambled eggs.

All these changes will be contingent on a couple of things:

Maintenance of blood glucose control. Now that I've got a bit of cash again, I'll be getting some test strips for my glucometer again, & tracking my blood sugar. But I don't really anticipate any problems. (I'd track my insulin response if I could, but unfortunately there is not such thing as a insulin-meter for use on an individual basis.)
Maintenance of mood. I've already discovered over the past few months that if I go too low in my carb intake, I have real mood problems — irritability & depression (which is already an issue I've had a lot of life experience with). So if my mood starts going down, I may begin to individualize my program a little early by adding back in some grains in non-post-workout breakfasts (as suggested in the individualization manual). Until such an eventuality, though, I'll count on fruit for breakfast for the first three-five (pre-individualizatoin) weeks.

I haven't yet begun on strictly following the PN 10 Habits because of time constraints in meal planning/prep time as we get the last things done with our move. But, I am beginning to eat less starchy carbs & more fruit.

Re: getting with the changes to exercise: I anticipate getting on board that later this week too. Got to print out the first Turbulence Training workout manual for myself. I plan to get a gym membership this Friday with my next paycheck.

Starting points

2006-08-15T21:38:00.006-08:00

As I prepare to optimize my diet with Precision Nutrition & my exercise program with Turbulence Training, it seemed useful to review how I got to where I am now.

Here's where things began for me:

Before I started overhauling my diet & exercise

I was probably born somewhat insulin resistant, as my mother had gestational diabetes when she was pregnant with me. I was born at 11 lbs. 12-1/4 oz. (approx. 5.4 kilos kilos) -- high birthweight is typical for babies born of women with gestational diabetes. When I entered puberty I also showed signs early on of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), though it was not diagnosed as such until 1982, when I was 23. In about 2001, I was diagnosed as prediabetic, & my naturopath told me that PCOS was almost always associated with insulin resistance. I made half-hearted & what proved to be temporary dietary changes at that time, but not until last December, in the aftermath of my mother's death from complications of Type 2 diabetes in November, did I make a wholehearted commitment to permanently changing my diet & overcoming my tendency to be sedentary.

Changes beginning late December 2005

First things I did: purchased a glucometer to measure my blood glucose. Learned from a book called How to Prevent and Treat Diabetes with Natural Medicine about the glycemic index &, upon further research, began to eat low glycemically, with immediate benefits. Began to get daily exercise, averaging about a half hour per day, combination of aerobic & light weight training. Began to lose weight; from late December to about mid-March I came down about 10 lbs (from 200 to 190), & even after going into a weight loss plateau for several months I seem to have been improving body composition through exercise -- didn't test body fat, but did notice my waistline shrinking & my butt & legs especially becoming firmer & more muscular.

My fasting blood glucose was hovering around 95 to 105 mg/dL. By conventional definitions, this is on the low end of prediabetic, which begins at 100 mg/dL. So, I could be in worse shape than I was. I think one factor that's greatly in my favor is that I've never been a dieter. Had I been, I probably would have yo-yo'd my way into a metabolic black hole, as so many people I've talked with about fat loss/weight loss have done, thanks to unfortunate beliefs in every fad diet that comes along.

I listened to Tom Venuto (Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle), Diana Schwarzbein (The Schwarzbein Principle books), & my glucometer, & eventually landed upon a diet plan that I have been following ever since, which has tended to work well for me. On the exercise front, I have been participating in a workplace "Start Walking" program which has the goal of getting us into the habit of walking 10,000 steps or doing equivalent exercise (per a conversion chart) every day. This has greatly increased my levels of exercise. Besides walking, I've also biked, lifted weights, & danced.

Current status

I haven't been able to test blood glucose since mid-March due to being broke in combination to the high cost of test strips, but with a move to a cheaper apartment at the start of this month, I'm beginning to have cash again for such important needs. I will also be purchasing a Swiss ball, body fat calipers, & a gym membership. I'm down to about 182 lbs (18 lbs. lost) since late December, & 2-1/2 inches lost from around my waist. I currently eat as follows:

Five meals per day, each meal comprising:

About 20-25 grams of low glycemic carbohydrates
About the same amount of protein, including lots of fish (sardines, kippered herring, salmon, tuna)
Healthy fats (extra virgin olive oil, fish oils or the oils in the fish I'm already eating, occasionally flax seed or its oil, coconut oil)
Lots & lots of nonstarchy vegetables

This diet plan is pretty much as advised by Diana Schwarzbein. Most food is whole foods, most is organic, locally grown when possible. (Which is really practicable only in the summer: I live in Alaska, & our growing season is short.)

Besides fat loss, (probably) improved blood glucose control, & general better energy & sense of well-being, I've also benefited from no longer having problems with acid reflux, which used to be a problem about 5 to 6 nights of the week. I attribute this to no longer eating refined high GI carbs & unhealthy fats. I feel that since late December, I've very much improved my body composition & probably my insulin sensitivity as well. But I've still got some ways to go.

I believe that by optimizing my diet & exercise with Precision Nutrition & Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training programs, I can expect to make even greater progress.

The Colt gets a new home

2006-08-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Mon, 14 August 2006: The Colt gets a new home

Today is my last short day for the summer, as this is the last week we're using flex-time. Next week we return to normal work hours for the academic year.

A fair amount of walking today: bus stop walks in the morning, & after getting off at 11:00 I had a bus stop walk home to the new place for lunch. Then I got a call from my Glennallen guys: they had reached Anchorage, & it was time for the transfer of ownership of my old Dodge Colt Vista. So I walked down to the old place to meet them.

I'm really pleased with where the car is going. The new owner is a park ranger at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, & lives in Glennallen. He does outreach, including with kids, & his plans for the car are to teach them some auto mechanics as they work to fix my (or rather, formerly my) car. Then, after they fix it, they'll raffle it off to raise funds for some kind of special activity for the kids — maybe even a trip to some cool place in the Lower 48 like Disneyland or something. It feels great to know that my car will be put to such a good use: to teach kids. And both Glenn (the new owner) & his coworker Ken, who came with him, are really fine people that I enjoyed meeting. I stayed for the entire operation of pulling the car out of the carport, loading it up on the trailer behind Ken's pickup, & getting it properly secured, & then waved them a goodbye as they set out for the return to Glennallen.

Then I walked home, taking a longer route up Arctic (up the hill I used to walk every morning on the way to the bus) & east on Fireweed. A nap: & then my friend Chris came over with his pickup & we headed back down to the carport & cleared it of a bunch of dumpster junk. I got a glass cut on my finger on our second trip, so we cut that short & took me home to take care of it. No worries: no stitches necessary, just a good cleaning & a bandaid.

The day's activities took me just over 10,000.

Day total: 10,034 steps.

Start Walking, week 14 (August 7–13): Summary

2006-08-13T22:52:00.000-08:00

See this post to learn more about the Start Walking program in which I'm participating.

August 7–13, 2006. My goal this week was to finish not just cleaning the interior of the old apartment, but also to finish the carport, while still getting enough rest, without completely laxing on my walking. Here's how I did; for details, go to the post of that title. (Titles in bold are to posts that are especially significant — discussion of technique, philosophy, etc. related to bettering my health.)

Mon: I hate oven cleaning. 13,709 steps (or equivalent), plus scrubbing.
Tue: A day of rest, relatively speaking. 9,228 steps, plus book-box unpacking.
Wed: Overslept. 4,731 steps.
Thu: Still catching up on rest. 5,545 steps.
Fri: Picking up the pace again. 9,672 steps.
Sat: Over a million. 13,316 steps.
Sun: Cleaning the carport. 4,935 steps.

Summary: We finished cleaning the interior of our old apartment. We got a start on the carport (didn't finish it), but I did find a new home for my old car. And re: exercise, I did beat baseline this week (11,481 steps as the average for the top four days; 8,734 for all seven days), & also reached an accumulation of 1 million steps walked (or equivalent) since I began the program on May 8.

In non-Start Walking news: I continued to learn about insulin's properties as an anabolic hormone:

Water is wet, & insulin is anabolic (8 Aug 2006)
Anabolism, catabolism, & insulin: The definitions I go by (9 Aug 2006)

I conducted a little experiment in interval training, which had promising results:

A little experiment in interval training (10 Aug 2006)

I've lost about 18 pounds on the scale since late December; another measure of how much fat I've lost is in my waistline:

Two & a half inches (13 Aug 2006)

And I formalized my game plan for optimizing both exercise & nutrition using Craig Ballanytne's Turbulence Training program & John Berardi's Precision Nutrition program, beginning I hope sometime next week.

Tweaking & optimizing (11 Aug 2006)

(I received the Precision Nutrition program via UPS on Friday afternoon.)

Cleaning the carport

2006-08-13T22:46:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Sunday, 13 August 2006: Cleaning the carport

Not much by way of walking today: our principal activity for the day was working in the carport at the old place, both to get started clearing it out, & to prepared for tomorrow, when the Dodge Colt Vista's soon-to-be new owner will arrive with a pickup & trailer from Glennallen to take it home. The only lengthy walk for the day was the 2,500 or so steps from new place to old to meet Rozz there for the work. Good progress on the carport, but not yet done.

Day total: 4,935 steps.

Two & a half inches

2006-08-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago while loading out the junk — er, I mean the stuff — in Jesse's old room, I discovered a belt we'd bought him at some time in the remote past that he has never worn. I know he's never worn it because when I found it, it still had attached the little plastic hanger thingy that they use to hang belts for display in the clothing store.

I absconded with it. And have been wearing it since.

This is a belt that in late December would not have fit me. But a few things have changed since then, including my waistline. Since late December, I had already had to make two new holes in my old belt because the holes that existed weren't tight enough. Now I'm using the third hold in the belt that was formerly Jesse's.

Today I finally got around to measuring my loss by comparing the belt holes & measuring the distance between them.

Since late December, I've lost 2-1/2 inches around my waist.

Over a million

2006-08-12T23:18:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Saturday, 12 August 2006: Over a million

Wendy (blogger 14) had asked a few days ago about where people were in their total step accumulation, as she herself reached a million steps in this program. I made to a million today (counting the many step equivalents that I got for other forms of exercise).

It was also a nearly normal Saturday: the first time I got downtown to Side Street Espresso for writing for three weeks. I got there, of course, by walking, & figured out it takes about 4,000 steps to get from our new place to Side Street. Rozz picked me up afterwards so we could get some grocery shopping done (with consequent walking) at Costco & the Natural Pantry, & after putting away the groceries, we headed over to the Park Strip for the 2nd annual Renewable Energy Fair: more use of my own renewable energy there as I walked around to look at exhibits.

And thence to the home of friends Nancy & Charles up off Rabbit Creek Road for a great dinner, which was a complete match for the way that I normally eat now because Charles is working to control diabetes just as I'm working to prevent diabetes, & we're using following the same basic advice for how to do that (The Schwarzbein Principle). Then, we all took a walk together, which was really great in spite of the rain, thanks to our altitude high in the Chugach foothills, with spectacular long distance views of Anchorage. And a young (perhaps 3 or 4 years old) bull moose, that I got some good pics of.

(Hoping to add some pics back into my blog. With the move, I simply haven't had time to download & organize them.)

Day total: 13,316 steps.

Cumulative total since I began the Start Walking program on May 8: 1,009,138 steps (or equivalent).

Picking up the pace again

2006-08-11T22:41:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Friday, 11 August 2006: Picking up the pace again

Nothing dramatic: now that I'm beginning to recover from the exhaustion & stress of the move from hell, I'm beginning to resume the pre-move habits.

Not that we're completely done with the move. We've still got the carport to
out. Such as the Dodge Colt Vista that we haven't driven since the day before PFD day last October, when it broke down for the umpteenth time just after a major & expensive repair. We chose to use our PFD to buy a good reliable used car instead of sinking more money into the Colt. Today, as a result of a freebie ad on a site called Kaboo, I found a new home for the Colt, so that's soon to be a considerable weight off my mind, plus a major obstacle soon to be cleared from the carport.

Meantime, as stated: I was getting back into the pre-move habits: bus stop walks & more bus stop walks, including making a couple of circuits of SSB/Consortium Library between end of work & taking the bus, just to get in those steps. Didn't make it to 10,000+ today, but got pretty close.

Day total: 9,672 steps.

Precision Nutrition

2006-08-11T17:08:00.001-08:00

Just received my Precision Nutrition package. Will be reading/viewing/listening over the weekend & working out what I need to do.

Still catching up on rest

2006-08-10T21:12:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Thursday, 9 August 2006: Still catching up on rest

Took the bus today, so got bus stop walking in, but I made no effort to get the extra steps I normally get by getting off at early bus stops, or any such thing. I was too tired: I simply have not been getting to bed early enough. So that was my focus today. Unpacked a few boxes in the evening. That was it.

Did, however, find a taker for my Dodge Colt Vista that I gave up on last year after it kept breaking down. It will be going to Glennallen to teach kids how to do auto mechanics. I'm very pleased it will go to such a purpose, & in Glennallen, a town I'd been through with my car many times.

Finally remembered to answer Wendy's question (blogger 14) about my cumulative step total! Wendy, you're doing better than me in that. I haven't made it to a million steps (or equivalent) yet. My total is now 986,150. Assuming the stride length I measured is accurate, that comes to 389 miles I've walked (or done equivalent exercise for) since I started counting on May 8, & 287 miles that I literally walked (instead of danced, weightlifted, biked, or whatevered.)

Day total: 5,545 steps.

Tweaking & optimizing

2006-08-10T17:12:00.002-08:00

I was attracted to Precision Nutrition by John Berardi's discussion at his website of insulin resistance & insulin sensitivity. In my own research on insulin resistance, prediabetes, & Type 2 diabetes, I learned a few months back about how fat loss (not just "weight loss"), muscle-building, & healthy diet are important to increasing insulin resistance. In consequence, I overhauled my diet & got off my sedentary butt to get more exercise: dancing, weights, walking, biking. I've lost 18 pounds this way since late December, but probably even more in fat, as I have also become somewhat more compact & muscular. All of this can be read about in this blog.

But I've still got some ways to go.

Thus, on a search to improve my exercise program, I was glad to get an email from Tom Venuto (whose Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle has been an important guide for me) pointing me in the direction of Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training program. Ballantyne's TT blog in turn referred me to John Berardi's website, & thus to Precision Nutrition: which seems the ideal program for tweaking & optimizing my diet for increased & healthy fat loss & insulin sensitivity.

So I'm entering another stage of my progress toward insulin sensitivity & restored health. My plan from here on out, once we settle down from the Moving Hell we've been in (moving from one apartment to another), I will:

Join the gym a few blocks away
Commence the Turbulence Training program
Commence tweaking & optimizing my nutrition with the Precision Nutrition program

This blog has been scant on direct feedback measurements except for daily counts of steps (or their equivalent) in the workplace "Start Walking" program I've been engaged in. As I begin to implement the TT & PN programs, I plan to include more detail about what I'm eating & what my workouts are like, as well as feedback stats such as body fat percentage, scale weight, & — since I'm insulin resistant & prediabetic — blood glucose measurements. (I'm measure blood insulin too, but unfortunately there are no simple fingerprick tests for that!)

Overslept

2006-08-09T22:44:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Wednesday, 9 August 2006: Overslept

I haven't been getting enough sleep, just haven't. And so this morning I overslept by 15 minutes.

Well, in my world these days, making sure I have the day's meals trumps exercise, so I talked it over with Rozz & it was determined that today I'd have the car. That was I was able to prepare & eat my breakfast, as well as prepare my lunches. (Recall that I'm eating five small meals per day; usually I take three of them at work.) But I got far less walking in than usual. Did have a walk across campus after work, because Rozz needed the car for a brief errand later in the day, & then caught the Route 2 bus from the other end of campus & left the car there for me.

A normal Wednesday is a fount of steps for me, because I usually go to my friend Sylvia's & have these extra bus stop walks. But because I had the car, those steps didn't happen. However, I was able to stop by the Bear Tooth & get my favorite chicken Caesar salad to enjoy as I watched taped episodes of "The Closer" with Sylvia. :)

Day total: 4,731 steps.

A little experiment in interval training

2006-08-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've been in the midst of moving hell, which has caused my regular exercise to suffer somewhat. Though not as badly as I'd feared — it's amazing how much walking one does just carrying boxes from one apartment to the car, & from the car into the other apartment. And if lifting all those boxes full of books (we have lots of them) isn't resistance training, I don't know what is. And so I still went down a couple of pounds over that time.

But now I seem to be seeing results from an experiment that I tried Monday & tried again yesterday. My experiment involved what's called interval training, which (as I wrote three weeks ago) is a way of doing cardio (aerobic) exercise in which you alternate a brief period of really fast, intense exercise with a "recovery" period of doing the same exercise at a slower rate. For example, after first warming up: run as fast & hard as you can (on the street or a treadmill) for 30 seconds so that your heart rate is up really fast, then slow down to a more moderate running pace for a minute or two... & repeat this three or four times. I got interested in interval training because from Craig Ballantyne as well as other sources I've heard a lot about it being probably better for burning off fat than moderate-level aerobic exercise for the same or even longer duration.

My experiment was with walking. Monday morning I got off at an early bus stop, which I often do to get more exercise. The walk from that bus stop to my workplace takes about 20 minutes. During the walk, three times I really intensified how fast I was walking for about a minute each time. I was wearing a heart rate monitor, & was able to get my heart rate up to about 80 percent of my maximum heart rate capacity. When I slowed down during the "recovery" periods, I was still at about 65 percent of maximum.

I tried it again yesterday on my way home — again, getting off at an early bus stop. Wasn't wearing a heart rate monitor this time, but I could feel my legs burn during the one-minute fast walking periods. Again, three fast times at one minute each, slowing down in between.

This morning my scale said I was about 1.5 pounds less. It seems to be verified by the better scale at work too. Not ready to claim that loss quite yet... but it certainly gave me pause.

No, not pause: rather, desire to keep it up. Now that we've got the worst of the move over, I will be joining a gym where there are stationary bikes & other things I can use to help me with the interval workouts. (Not to mention resistance training.)

One more tool toward fat loss & increased insulin sensitivity.

Anabolism, catabolism, & insulin: The definitions I go by

2006-08-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

I just want to provide some basic definitions to illustrate the terms that I'm using & how I understand them, & to try to state my basic understandings as clearly as I know how to.

Anabolism: The phase of metabolism in which simple substances are synthesized into the complex materials of living tissue.

Catabolism: The metabolic breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones, often resulting in a release of energy.

Both of my sources for these definitions (through the clickable links) are worth looking at, because they include dictionary definitions from several sources, as well as Wikipedia articles which explain in more depth.

Basically, anabolism means taking simpler stuff & using it to build more complex stuff within the body: amino acids into protein into muscle, blood glucose into adipose tissue (body fat), etc. Catabolism does the opposite: it breaks larger, more complex molecules into simpler stuff, usually with a release of energy, for example, burning off fat through exercise or going on a low-calorie starvation diet that leads to the loss of lean muscle mass.

Insulin is anabolic in these ways:

Insulin tranfers blood glucose to the liver & to muscle cells to either be burned for energy, or to be synthesized (that is, built into) glycogen. Glycogen is "animal carbohydrate" which can be burnt (catabolized) when quick energy is needed for exercise or an emergency. Insulin is anabolic because it helps build glycogen.

[Edit: I misstated that. Actually, glycogen itself isn't burnt for energy. Rather, it's converted back into glucose (a conversion stimulated by the catabolic hormone glucagon) & the resulting glucose can then be burnt for energy.]
Insulin transfers excess blood glucose, that is more than the body needs for its immediate energy requirements or for replenishment of its glycogen stores, to fat cells for storage as adipose (fat) tissue. Insulin is anabolic because it helps build body fat.
Insulin transfers amino acids in the blood for uptake by the muscle cells to be synthesized into proteins for muscle growth. Insulin is anabolic because it helps build muscle.

(See more about insulin from Answers.com.)

There are other hormones which are catabolic, such as cortisol & glucagon, which specialize in breaking down muscle proteins, glycogen, etc. Cortisol, for example, is a stress hormone that (amongst other things) breaks down muscle proteins, which will lead to an increase of glucose in the blood. Insulin then goes to work to take care of the glucose, & if (as in point 2 above) that's more glucose than you need for energy or glycogen replenishment, insulin will exercise its anabolic function with respect to body fat by dumping that insulin into your fat muscles.

In a healthy person, all these hormones & more act in balance with each other to keep you healthy. But if something is thrown out of whack, your hormones will still keep doing the jobs they were made to do even if doing their jobs might mess you up even further.

That's what happens with insulin resistance. It's not insulin itself that is the problem, but the insulin resistance that comes from eating too many carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbs that are digested quickly. By eating too many carbs, you put your body into a chronic state of too high blood sugar. High blood glucose leads to high insulin levels, because the insulin is trying to take care of all that sugar. You become insulin resistant, high insulin levels in your blood becomes chronic, all that excess blood sugar gets dumped as fat, & as you get fatter you also get more & more unhealthy & begin the progression to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. Not only are the natural, healthy functions of insulin thrown off, but so are the functions of the other hormones & systems in the body.

Unless you do something to change your situation.

Let me put it very clearly: my view is that insulin resistance & chronic high insulin levels are very bad things. That's why I have been working my butt off to increase my insulin sensitivity.

A healthy body is insulin sensitive, & so needs relatively little insulin to take care of the jobs that insulin was made to do, including shuttling blood glucose & amino acids to the places where they're needed to keep on building & maintaining a healthy body. That includes shuttling amino acids to where they're needed — in the muscles — & participating in the anabolic process of muscle-building.

In the body that is unhealthy because of insulin resistance, more & more insulin is required to do the job, not because insulin isn't doing its job, but almost always because the body's owner is making its job very hard for it by eating too much lousy food, not getting enough sleep, not getting enough exercise, & making other bad lifestyle choices. Probably insulin & the other hormones are all having problems doing their job exactly right because of the challenges the bad lifestyle choices are putting to them. Your entire metabolic system goes out of whack, out of balance.

Finally, about insulin's anabolic role in building muscle: I learned of this just last week at John Berardi's website, & have researched it quite a bit since, & based on scientific articles, medical dictionary definitions, & some of the sources I've cited in this message I believe that Berardi is right. But Berardi does not say, nor do I, that high insulin levels are a good way to take advantage of this fact. His approach (as mine) is not to increase insulin levels, but on the contrary: to increase insulin sensitivity so that less insulin is necessary to do the job & do it right.

I learned doing research that there are a lot of bodybuilders who actually take insulin shots in order to take advantage of insulin's anabolic properties re: muscle. This is a stupid & dangerous thing to do. Because of course insulin is also anabolic with respect to body fat, not to mention that high insulin levels leads to insulin resistance. So these abusers of insulin are actually making themselves less healthy. Needless to say, Berardi recommends against this idiotic kind of supplementation.

These are the definitions I'm using, & the understandings I have at the present moment, which are subject to modification as I increase my understanding.

A day of rest, relatively speaking

2006-08-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Tuesday, 8 August 2006: A day of rest, relatively speaking

Normal workday, other than being tired from lack of sleep. (Having not gotten to bed until after midnight.) Answer: coffee. Basic bus stop walks, & then a walk after work... home. Directly home. The new place. And set up a boards & brick bookshelf & unpacked a few boxes.

Did try an experiment, for the second time, in interval training. (First time was yesterday morning on the way to work, with a heart rate monitor.) Basically, all I did was to really speed my walking up as fast as I could go for one minute as I walked home, then walked a normal (but still aerobic) pace for a couple of minutes, then fast-walking again. I did the fast-walking three times for a minute apiece with the more moderate walking in between. Fitness experts say that this kind of interval training will burn up more fat than doing whichever exercise you're doing at the same pace for the entire duration. Will see if this results in anything.

At bedtime: a call from the boy. He's back in King Salmon. Didn't like being on a boat, had gotten little sleep & no food. And gee — he got another job! In another hotel (I hadn't known King Salmon had one) doing the same work he'd done at the Quinnat Landing Hotel before it burned down last week. His estimated time of return to Anchorage is, again, end of October.

Enterprising of him to persist in making his own way with jobs, out on his own. Proud of him.

(Although I did have fun giving him a hard time about the dog bed.)

Day total: 9,228 steps, plus book-box unpacking.

Water is wet, & insulin is anabolic

2006-08-08T17:17:00.003-08:00

So who cares?

Apparently at least one person, who continues to find what I've learned about the anabolic role of insulin with respect to muscle to be downright objectionable.

And thus I came back to my computer after the weekend to find a couple more posts registering this person's objections, not to mention her mischaracterizations of John Berardi & of what I wrote about his approach.

A definition of insulin from The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary, 2nd Edition (2004):

insulin: 1. A polypeptide hormone that is secreted by the islets of Langerhans, helps regulate the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats, especially the conversion of glucose to glycogen, and promotes protein synthesis and the formation and storage of neutral lipids.

Promoting protein synthesis is anabolic. So is "the formation and storage of neutral lipids."

The same dictionary gives the definition of catabolism as follows:

catabolism: the metabolic breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones, often resulting in a release of energy.

But it's not good or healthy to have too much insulin in your blood. No indeed, nor did I ever suggest that it was. Too much insulin leads to insulin resistance & promotes obesity, because of course insulin is anabolic with respect to adipose tissue (body fat) too.

But I was surprised when insulin's anabolic properties became such a bone of contention on the Insulin Resistance list: when I first mentioned insulin as anabolic for protein (muscle) as well as fat, I thought I was just discussing a fact well known to science & medicine that I hadn't known before. Having someone insist that, no — contrary to what is said by science or medicine or numerous research reports in medical journals available for anyone's persusal at PubMed — insulin is "catabolic," has been rather like to having someone insist that no, water is in fact not wet.

The source that I happened to learn from about insulin as a muscle-promoting hormone happened to be that of someone who specializes particularly in nutrition for athletes — John Berardi, Ph.D. in exercise biology & nutrient biochemistry. His credentials can be read here. He's far from ignorant when it comes to matters of nutrition; on the contrary, he consults to or actually designs nutritional programs for numerous athletic teams & individual athletes (as well as lots of sedentary individuals) because what he says works.

I'm not an athlete, just a 47-year-old insulin resistant woman who's been working her butt off to throw off my sedentary ways & become fit & healthy. But his approach has some lessons for me. Maybe it does for other insuiln resistant people, too.

On insulin, by another writer at Berardi's site:

The waters get muddy when we introduce insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone, but it’s one that, if chronically elevated, can lead to diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Therefore, not surprisingly, with insulin we need to perfect the balancing act; just enough to be anabolic but not enough to cause disease. Therefore insulin concentrations should be relatively low. Now, to clarify, I use the term relative when discussing hormones because it is beyond the scope of this essay to get into the details of what these levels should be for individuals of every age or gender. I am speaking in general terms, when I say that for the most part, the levels in healthy individuals should show this pattern.

Human Growth Hormone – relatively high
Testosterone – relatively high
Cortisol – relatively low
Insulin – relatively low

— "The Anabolic Imperative" by George Parigian

[Note: for women, testoserone levels will be lots lower. Part of the reason women can't build the kind of muscle mass that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lou Ferrigno can.]

Insulin in & of itself is not the problem: insulin resistance is. Berardi didn't say different, I didn't say different. Ever. What is new to me in Berardi's approach is that he claims that by proper nutritional timing — which macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats) that you eat when, — you can minimize insulin's storage of fat (one part of its role as an anabolic hormone) while taking advantage of its anabolic properties re: muscle — i.e., when amino acids are in the blood after eating protein, which is another event inducing insulin secretion. This is why I brought this up: not because I think that "too much insulin" is somehow suddenly magically good for us insulin resistant people, but because this approach, based on a more complete picture of what insulin actually does in the body, leads to some dietary strategies that minimize or reduce fat storage while at the same time maintaining or even (with exercise) increasing lean muscle mass: one avenue towards improving insulin sensitivity.

Note also that when this person challenged my initial post last week about insulin's role in muscle anabolism, I quoted from four scientific studies — studies published in medical & scientific journals, most of which are peer-reviewed by other scientists before publication, to be sure they aren't full of nonsense — & the scientists who authored those articles also, every single one of them, said that insulin is anabolic (for muscle as well as body fat). I could have quoted from many more. If anyone wants to look them up for themselves, go to PubMed & search on the terms "protein insulin amino muscle."

I'm done debating whether insulin is anabolic. Just as I wouldn't waste my breath debating someone on the question of whether water is wet.

I hate oven cleaning

2006-08-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Monday, 7 August 2006: I hate oven cleaning

But we do what we must do. By the time I finished with it, it looked damn fine, if I do say so myself. So did the fridge, so did the entire kitchen including the top of the cupboards that you normally never see unless you're cleaning apartments, so did....

Oh well. We got done, that's all. Even got the squooshed-up mosquitoes that Jesse had smeared on his walls when apparently he was entertaining himself some particularly bug-ridden night.

Before that, I got in quite a bit of walking in the morning by doing my normal bus stop walks to work, etc. My short day (flextime), so I walked home (the new place) after work after getting off at an early bus stop, had lunch, did a superset with weights, took a brief nap in my chair, & walked down with the dog to the old place before commencing cleaning. That, plus the walking around the apartment, accrued me a better record today than I've had in awhile.

Had a message from the boy on the phone when I stopped home for lunch. It just said something about things being "edgy" with a promise he'd call us again later. Hope it's nothing to be worried over.

Day total: 13,709 steps (or equivalent), plus scrubbing.

Start Walking, week 13 (July 31-August 6): Summary

2006-08-06T23:59:00.000-08:00

See this post to learn more about the Start Walking program in which I'm participating.

July 31-August 6. My goal this week was to finish moving, but sanely. Here's how I did; for details, go to the post of that title. (Titles in bold are to posts that are especially significant — discussion of technique, philosophy, etc. related to bettering my health.)

Mon: Recombobulating. 7,117.
Tue: Sanity & caffeine. 7,796.
Wed: Sanity & caffeine & a generous friend. 16,762.
Thu: Fire. 9,557.
Fri: I hate moving. 6,981.
Sat: I still hate moving. 7,736.
Sun: Cleaning isn't as bad. 6,162.

Summary: We got everything moved except the stuff in the carport, & got halfway done with cleaning the old apartment. I still managed 10,308 steps (or equivalent) for my top-four-days average (8,873 for all seven days), plus two more pounds lost. That makes it 18 pounds I've lost since starting to travel the health road in late December.

In non-Start Walking news: I came across the website of John Berardi, whose nutritional planning for athletic teams & individual athletes also looks like a really good approach for increasing insulin resistance & promoting fat loss in regular people like me. Through Berardi I also learned that insulin is not only anabolic for adipose tissue — i.e., it helps us get fat — but is also plays an anabolic role with respect to muscle. His nutritional program takes advantage of that. My report on what he taught me about this on the Insulin Resistance list turned out to be controversial with at least one person; but hey, the challenge of responding to that person just led me to a lot more good info. And convinced me to become a customer of Berardi's Precision Nutrition program. Here's the posts I wrote this week about this:

Between John Berardi's Precision Nutrition & Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training, looks like I've got two great programs to tweak both my nutrition and my exercise program.

Cleaning isn't as bad

2006-08-06T10:08:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Sunday, 6 Aug 2006: Cleaning isn't as bad

I really much prefer cleaning out an old apartment than packing & moving. And today I had a lot of good energy for it. So much so that when I discovered the surprise inside of Jesse's home-made dog bed, I laughed instead of cursed.

The dog bed was one of the things we needed to haul out to the carport for later hauling to the dump. It was made out of queen-size air mattress bed that was so leaky that we gave up on it, & then Jesse gave up on it, & then he made a bed out of it. We had wondered vaguely what it was stuffed with, but never enough to find out.

Until today, when I dragged it to the door of his room & couldn't get it through. So I tried to tip it up to get it through, & that didn't work, & then I thought, well, I'll see what's inside, maybe we can pull some of it out & divide the load.

Thus did I discover where all our missing bath towels had gone. Oh yeah, & a dish towel. Oh, and... "Rozz, c'mere, you gotta see this."

She started sorting through the dog bed stuffing. Thereafter, periodically from his room could be heard the words, "I'm gonna kick his butt!" There's that sheet that went missing that Rozz uses for her massage table. There's an almost brand-new pair of trousers -- no wonder Jesse complained about never having anything to wear. There's a bed sheet, & another. And his blanket that we made when he was younger, with each yarn tie in it representing a special wish we made for him. It went on & on.

By the time Rozz was done sorting, there were two large Dell-computer-sized boxes plus a couple of kitchen garbage bags full of stuff that Jesse gets to launder when he gets back to Anchorage. That was besides the bath towels & massage sheet & other things that don't belong to him, that Rozz laundered herself.

When I was a kid we sometimes tried to get around really cleaning our rooms by shoving all our messy junk under the bed. But it never occurred to me to shove it under the dog's bed. Or to raid the linen closet to add to the dog bed.

Went on to get about half the apartment-cleaning done, including a very thorough vacuuming. I figure that hefting a Hoover vacuum cleaner in the air so that the hose will reach the cobwebs up in the corners between the ceiling & the walls counts as some form of weightlifting, but I didn't count it.

Day total: 6,162 steps plus apartment-cleaning, dog-bed hauling, & vacuum-cleaner wielding.

I still hate moving

2006-08-05T10:08:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Saturday, 5 Aug 2006: I still hate moving

But we got a lot of it done today.

In the middle of the day we also went up to Chugiak for our friend Chris' mother's birthday celebration. She actually lives in Eagle River, but the event was being held at the Chugiak Senior Center. Turns out that the main scheduled activity for the party was pulling lots & lots of invasive weeds, namely a whole hillside of cow vetch, which has got to be turning into the kudzu of the north. I see cow vetch around campus a lot, but wow, this stuff was just thick. And I was tired, tired, tired, & didn't pull as much as I could have with a good night's sleep & some of that energy that's been being sucked up away by countless boxes of junk.

But it was a beautiful day, & wonderful people in Chris' large extended family, & his girlfriend up visiting with her daughter from the Lower 48, & good food after we pulled cow vetch only about 2/5 of the hillside. Then lots of pictures of everyone with the bags full of cow vetch -- bags with the caption, "Not all alien invaders come from outer space" that was advertising an Invasive Plants Awareness Week. I don't know how many steps the weed pulling should add up to... I didn't keep track, & didn't include them in my count for the day.

Then back to do more packing & moving. Got done all we need to do for the interior of the apartment, in fact, except for the stuff in Jesse's room that needs to be hauled to the dump or for giveaway. Our landlady is okay with us taking a few days longer to complete the carport & garden.

Day total: 7,736 steps, plus cow-vetch-pulling & moving.

I hate moving

2006-08-04T22:04:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Friday, 4 Aug 2006: I hate moving

Not that I hate walking. Just that I hate moving. This is truly the move from hell, that doesn't ever seem to want to end.

As I said yesterday, I wasn't going to worry about how many steps I got in for the rest of the week, I was just gonna worry about how many boxes & bags full of junk out of the old place. So, basic bus stop walks was pretty much it except for boxing & bagging stuff up & taking down our computer.

We did get a call from the boy: he got another job. On a fishing boat. "What's the boat's name?" I asked. "Uhhhhhh... let me go ask." Ended up talking with the captain & got his satellite phone number & the number to the cannery he fishes for. Sounds like a family fishing operation, which sounds better than the rough crowd our friend Chris worked with when he was on a crab boat years ago. We're proud that Jesse had the initiative to get another job.

Looks like he'll be out another three weeks before coming home. More time to unpack boxes that are stacked up in his room....

Day total: 6,981 steps, plus moving.

Insulin index

2006-08-04T17:46:00.003-08:00

One problem with David Mendosa's article about the insulin index, which I referenced yesterday, is that the insulin index table he gives doesn't tell you very much about the foods contained in it. For example, as a correspondent pointed out to me, is the "beef" listed there ground beef with 25 percent fat? or is it a nice, lean sirloin tip steak with only 3 percent fat?

Luckily, I was able to find the original study that Mendosa was writing about: "An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000-kJ portions of common foods" by SH Holt, JC Miller and P Petocz, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 66, 1264-1276 (1997).

The full article is much more specific than Mendosa's "popularization" of it on the foods used & exactly how they were prepared. For example, what Mendosa listed simply as beef is revealed in the full study to be:

Food: Beef steak

Variety, manufacturer, or place of purchase: Lean topside beef fillets bought in bulk from supermarket, trimmed and stored frozen

Preparation: Grilled the day before serving, cut into standard bite-sized pieces, and stored at 4° C overnight; reheated in microwave oven for 2 mm immediately before serving [Table 1, page 1265]

The nutritional composition of the beef, according to Table 2 (page 1267), was 7.7 grams of fat & 42.0 grams of protein (0.0 carb), in a 158 gram serving. (All the foods were tested in 1000-kilojoule servings.) The white fish used in the study (ling fish fillets) was even leaner: 1.0 grams of fat & 56.3 grams of protein (0.0 carb). The other protein-rich foods chosen (cheese, eggs, lentils, baked beans) all had more fat & at least some carb (esp. the lentils & beans).

That kind of detail is given for all the foods tested in the study, & the article gives a very full methodology of how the study was conducted, who the test subjects were, etc. Their analysis included comparing the insulin score with the glucose score that they also calculated based on the test subjects' blood glucose. (Not the same as glycemic index, but also measuring the test subjects' glycemic response to the test foods).

Things I found most significant:

Overall, glucose and insulin scores were highly correlated.... However, protein-rich foods and bakery products (rich in fat and refined carbohydrate) elicited insulin responses that were disproportionately higher than their glycemic responses. [from the abstract]

*

[C]arbohydrate is not the only stimulus for insulin secretion. Protein-rich foods or the addition of protein to a carbohydrate-rich meal can stimulate a modest rise in insulin secretion without increasing blood glucose concentrations, particularly in subjects with diabetes (20-22). Similarly, adding a large amount of fat to a carbohydrate-rich meal increases insulin secretion even though plasma glucose responses are reduced (23, 24). [page 1266]

The numbers in parentheses are references to other scientific studies — i.e., these facts weren't newly discovered in this study, but were already known. The second fact, about adding fat to a carb-rich meal, is pretty relevant to that well-known phenomenon of the glycemic index where sugar-rich junk food ends up having a low GI because it's also got a lot of fat in it. The fat makes the GI low, but it doesn't lower the insulin response.

The high-protein foods except the baked beans (which had a lot of carbohydrate) all had among the lower insulin scores of the foods tested, most of which in other categories had a lot of carbs in them. But just like the abstract says, the insulin response to the high protein foods was a lot higher than you'd think if you think that insulin is only provoked by carbs or fat. This is especially apparent with the lean beef & the white fish.

Yes: protein provokes insulin response even without sugar or starch or significant fat being present, and "fish, beef, cheese, and eggs still had larger insulin responses per gram than did many of the foods consisting predominantly of carbohydrate" (page 1275).

The important Western staples, bread and potato, were among the most insulinogenic [provoking insulin excretion] foods. Similarly, the highly refined bakery products and snack foods induced substantially more insulin secretion per kilojoule or per gram of food than did the other test foods. In contrast, pasta, oatmeal porridge, and All-Bran cereal produced relatively low insulin responses, despite their high carbohydrate contents. [page 1273]

No big surprise about the bread & potato. Very interesting about the pasta, oatmeal, & All-Bran, especially since I eat steel-cut oats almost every day for breakfast.

However, some protein and fat-rich foods (eggs, beef, fish, lentils, cheese, cake, and doughnuts) induced as much insulin secretion as did some carbohydrate-rich foods (eg, beef was equal to brown rice and fish was equal to grain bread). [pages 1273-1274]

*

Overall, the fiber content did not predict the magnitude of the insulin response. Similar ISs were observed for white and brown pasta, white and brown rice, and white and whole-meal bread. All of these foods are relatively refined compared with their traditional counterparts. Collectively, the findings imply that typical Western diets are likely to be significantly more insulinogenic than more traditional diets based on less refined foods. [page 1274]

In other words, the more refined the diet, the more insulin you're probably going to have in your blood after eating. (And the more fat you're likely to store from any excess carbs you're eating.)

As observed in previous studies, consumption of protein or fat with carbohydrate in creases insulin secretion compared with the insulinogenic effect of these nutrients alone (22, 30-32). This may partly explain the markedly high insulin response to baked beans. Dried hancot beans, which are soaked and boiled, are likely to have a lower IS than commercial baked beans, which are more readily digestible. [page 1275]

Another call for less refined foods. Again, the numbers in parentheses refer to prior scientific studies.

The results confirm that increased insulin secretion does not account for the low glycemic responses produced by low-GI foods such as pasta, porridge, and All-Bran cereal (33). Furthermore, equal-carbohydrate servings of foods do not necessarily stimulate insulin secretion to the same extent. For example, isoenergetic servings of pasta and potatoes both contained ~50g carbohydrate, yet the IS for potatoes was three times greater than that for pasta. [page 1275]

So if you must have pasta, it's at least a better choice re: insulin secretion than potatoes.

Similarly, porridge and yogurt, and whole-grain bread and baked beans, produced disparate ISs [insulin scores] despite their similar carbohydrate contents. These findings, like others, challenge the scientific basis of carbohydrate exchange tables, which assume that portions of different foods containing 10-15g carbohydrate will have equal physiologic effects and will require equal amounts of exogenous insulin to be metabolized. [page 1275]

So much for carbohydrate exchange tables. So much for the ADA & American Association of Diabetes Educators truisms (falsisms) that "the quality of carbohydrate isn't important, the quantity does," which is what my friend Sylvia was told when she was diagnosed with diabetes.

In the end, I think Berardi is right: if you eat, you can't avoid insulin secretion — & that's actually that's a good thing, since insulin is, it turns out, an anabolic hormone for muscle (as well as for fat). But as an insulin resistant person, I can't have too much or I continue to get less healthy, not to mention gaining more fat.

So I've got to keep working to become more insulin sensitive, so that not so much insulin has to be secreted in order to take care of the metabolic functions I need it for.

I think I've already done quite a bit in that direction. I think the programs I've decided to take up — Turbulence Training & Precision Nutrition — will help me even further along my health road.

A new Precision Nutrition customer

2006-08-04T12:47:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, when I discovered Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training program, I thought that the cardio & weigh training parts of my person program for health were the only parts that needed tweaking. But John Berardi's website, especially the new stuff it taught me about the real complexity of insulin's roles in the body, convince me that my nutrition could use some work as well.

So I sent off for his Precision Nutrition program.

(Unlike some of the other stuff I've reviewed here, the Precision Nutrition program comes not in the form of e-books, but actually has to be shipped. Books, CDs, DVDs. So it'll be a week or two before I can start using it, much less review it here. )

Insulin: An anabolic hormone

2006-08-04T12:30:00.001-08:00

Someone on my insulin resistance list took extreme exception to my post there yesterday on insulin response (upon which my blog post yesterday, "Insulin response: It ain't just the carbs" is based).

I'd quoted from "The Anabolic Power of Insulin: An Interview with John Berardi":

The current rage in health and fitness is to manage the hormone insulin. But few people really understand this temperamental hormone. You see, insulin is an anabolic giant.

My correspondent didn't see it at all that way. Insulin, she claimed, is the hormone that "stuffs carbohydrates into fat cells," an action that she deems as catabolic, not anabolic.

Never mind that catabolic means "breaking down," & that building fat cells or stuffing things into fat cells isn't breaking down, but building up -- i.e., is anabolic, albeit of fat cells, not the muscle we care about. So she got her terminology mixed up: I did understand what she meant.

She is essentially claiming that insulin's action is entirely geared toward managing our blood glucose — in ways that aren't very beneficial to the insulin resistant person or any other person who already has too much body fat. Insulin takes those excess carbs we eat — the stuff that goes beyond what we need to give our brains energy, & replenish the glycogen stores in our muscles — & deposits it into our fat cells.

It does do that. And up until two days ago, I would've agreed with her that that's all insulin really did.

But I would've been wrong. And today, I went to PubMed (something she often advises people to do) to back it up.

Several quotations from abstracts of studies located at PubMed based on a search on the terms "protein insulin amino muscle":

Insulin induces protein accretion by stimulating protein synthesis and inhibiting proteolysis. However, the mechanisms of regulation of protein metabolism by insulin are complex and still not completely understood.... Finally, although the role of insulin has been doubtful and has long been considered to be minor in ruminants and in avian species, this hormone clearly regulates protein metabolism in both species.

[Tesseraud S, Metayer S, Duchene S, Bigot K, Grizard J, Dupont J. "Regulation of protein metabolism by insulin: Value of different approaches and animal models." Domest Anim Endocrinol. 2006 Jun 30]

*

Despite being an anabolic hormone in skeletal muscle, insulin's anti-catabolic mechanism in humans remains controversial with contradictory reports showing either stimulation protein synthesis (PS) or inhibition protein breakdown (PB) by insulin.... In conclusion, using amino-acyl tRNA as the precursor pool, it is demonstrated that in healthy humans in the postabsorptive state, insulin does not stimulate muscle protein synthesis and confirmed that insulin achieves muscle protein anabolism by inhibition of muscle protein breakdown.

[Chow LS, Albright RC, Bigelow ML, Toffolo G, Cobelli C, Nair KS. "Mechanism of Insulin's Anabolic Effect on Muscle - Measurements of Muscle Protein Synthesis and Breakdown Using Aminoacyl tRNA and Other Surrogate Measures." Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2006 May 16]

*

Insulin promotes muscle anabolism, but it is still unclear whether it stimulates muscle protein synthesis in humans. We hypothesized that insulin can increase muscle protein synthesis only if it increases muscle amino acid availability.... In conclusion, physiological hyperinsulinemia [high insulin levels] promotes muscle protein synthesis as long as it concomitantly increases muscle blood flow and amino acid availability.

[Fujita S, Rasmussen BB, Cadenas JG, Grady JJ, Volpi E. "The effect of insulin on human skeletal muscle protein synthesis is modulated by insulin-induced changes in muscle blood flow and amino acid availability." Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2006 May 16]

*

A reduced response of older skeletal muscle to anabolic stimuli may contribute to the development of sarcopenia [the degenerative loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength in the aged]. We hypothesized that muscle proteins are resistant to the anabolic action of insulin in the elderly.... In conclusion, skeletal muscle protein synthesis is resistant to the anabolic action of insulin in older subjects, which may be an important contributor to the development of sarcopenia.

[Rasmussen BB, Fujita S, Wolfe RR, Mittendorfer B, Roy M, Rowe VL, Volpi E. "Insulin resistance of muscle protein metabolism in aging." FASEB J. 2006 Apr;20(6):768-9.]

There are others, but this is enough to confirm that the scientific community assumes, as a matter of course, that insulin plays an anabolic (building up) and anti-catabolic (breaking down) role with regard to muscle. A lot of the research has to do with exactly how it does that, & at least one study (the first one above) concludes that it does by preventing by inhibiting the breakdown of muscle proteins, rather than by stimulating the synthesis of new proteins, at least in some states. (I'm sure other studies will be conducted to try to duplicate or refute those results.)

So it turns out that John Berardi is right: insulin is anabolic with regards to muscle. Whether he's right in some of his specific recommendations, I don't know, but I sure feel confirmed in my belief that his stuff is worth checking out further. And in feeling that the whole picture of insulin is a lot more complex than insulin being just "the hormone that stuffs carbohydrates into fat cells."

I don't know yet what this means in terms of what insulin resistant people like me should do about it. I aim to find out.

Fire

2006-08-03T22:03:00.000-08:00

Today's Start Walking blog:

Thursday, 3 Aug 2006: Fire

There I was, nearing completion of my morning cross-campus walk between the bus stop & my office, when my cell phone rang. It was Rozz. "I have some sort of bad news," she said, & I thought, oh no, bad news; & thought, but nobody must have died because she said "sort of" bad.

She told me that Jesse had called with the news that the hotel he's working at in King Salmon had a fire. Nobody hurt, but besides the fire being a real blow to the hotel owner & the local economy in King Salmon, it also means that Jesse is out of a job.

Wasn't it just last night, after I had finished carrying in the last of the boxes that Wendy, Rozz, & I had moved into the room that will be Jesse's, that I thought to myself, "It's a good thing Jesse's in King Salmon for several more weeks, because there's no room for him to sleep here"?

Murphy's Law.

Well, we still don't know when he's coming back, because he didn't call us again last night, & we no longer have a phone number for him. But I imagine it'll be soon. And we'll have to find room in amongst the boxes for him to have a place to sleep. Not to mention we'll need to take him shopping for clothes, since I think he lost them in the fire. I'll bet he's glad he didn't have his X-box with him, though.

Otherwise... a good amount of walking, but not quite 10,000, because I skipped out on the lunchtime walk today. All the same, with all the walking I did yesterday, I'm up to a four-highest-days average of over 10,000/day. I'm not going to worry overmuch about it the rest of the week, in favor of completing the move & cleanup of the old place. I made the mistake of stopping by home last night "before going to the old place," & never got to the old place because I fell asleep on the couch. [sigh]

Day total: 9,557 steps.