Health Kick: Diet, exercise, fitness, and life

I’ve never been much of a tea or coffee drinker. (When I do have coffee, it’s only the best coffee in the world, from Ristretto Roasters in Portland, Oregon. Nothing else will do.) What I do drink, in vast quantities, is diet soda.

I’d read that caffeine was an appetite stimulant, which obviously is no good thing if it is true. Also, I was interested in getting more – and more restful – sleep. So, gradually, I just stopped drinking caffeine.

This was pretty easy, since I never really heard the siren song of hot caffeinated drinks. At home, I’m now exclusively on Diet Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and 7UP Free. In the outside world, I’m all about sparkling water with lemon wedges.

One day this week, I thought it would do me no harm to have a few Diet Cokes with lunch, and then I drank almost two litres of Diet Pepsi at a friend’s house. That night, despite a pretty full-on day of activity, I could not fall asleep until nearly 4 AM. Yeah, I think I’ll be staying off caffeine for the foreseeable future.

Yes, yesterday’s workout with Tracy was fun and seemed – if not quite effortless – not gruelling.

Today? Gruelling.

I let Tracy know in no uncertain terms that I was struggling. “Well, on the days when you’re loving it, you’ll put more into it, and sometimes that means you’ll be quite tired the next day. It happens,” she said. Which made me feel a lot less horrible about finding it such a hard slog. I’ll have a good day again, hopefully soon.

I’ve also realised, five days in, that I can’t quite imagine my weeks without Tracy’s help. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to get a trainer, but I’m glad I finally did, especially as I’ve landed such a great one.

Today’s workout session with Tracy was a rainy – but very good – one. I put on my boyfriend’s Adidas rain jacket and we trooped through Fortune Green and around my area of London as normal. After a while, I found that I preferred the drizzle to a relentlessly hot and sunny day. (Yeah, check back with me on that after the sun’s stayed away for ten days straight.)

What I also found, to my surprise, is that…I had fun. I had a lot of fun. And I find myself looking forward to tomorrow’s session rather a lot.

Tracy, please do not take this as a sign that you’re not being tough enough on me.

I know, I know: This looks and sounds nothing like the sort of thing you should be allowed to eat on any kind of healthful eating plan, but I assure you, you can. I can also assure you that it tastes even less like something you should be allowed to eat on any kind of healthful eating plan.

This is actually adapted from what is currently the featured recipe on the Slimming World website. We follow Slimming World in this house, for no reason other than that it provides a balanced diet (nothing is forbidden) and we lose weight when we do so.

Here are the basics of this recipe, which is pretty easy to make. We accidentally lost about half the potatoes we used, during a “Whoops, there goes the pan” moment, but this turned out to be a good thing: We had plenty to eat, and the potato-to-everything-else ratio was excellent.

You cut some potatoes (one or two large ones per person – your call) into thick fries (chips), then boil them for 8 minutes. Drain and dry the potatoes with paper towels/kitchen roll, then put them in a roasting tin sprayed liberally with Fry Light or other light cooking spray, and spray the potatoes with the spray, too. Flip them with a spatula every ten minutes or so while baking for 30 – 40 minutes at 425F/220C. While these bake, cook some chopped onion, chopped mushroom, and a small amount of chopped lean bacon (all visible fat removed) until the bacon goes crispy. When the fries have five more minutes left to bake, dump the onion/mushroom/bacon mixture on top, then chuck a load of grated cheddar (about 56g per person if you’re taking your total day’s allowance of milk/cheese for the day, or 28g per person if you’re using half) on top of everything. Give it another five minutes in the oven, or until the cheese goes very melty and maybe a bit brown (if you like).

I made a salsa to go with this, but ended up eating it with a couple of squirts of ketchup. It was awesome. We’ll be having it again, probably on those days when only something a little messy and salty will do. (If you had the room in your day’s allowance, you would probably enjoy the hell out of a beer with this.)

Tech Tags: recipes food diet+recipes healthy+recipes slimming+world green+day red+day original+day fries chips potatoes bacon

Kale has 470 mg of calcium per 100 calories of the curly leaf. I’ve known that it was full of nutritional benefits for a long time, but found it hard to shake my childhood memories of kale as supermarket produce department ‘garnish’. The stuff wasn’t for eating, but for decorating.

I got over that today.

Cooking vegetables depletes their nutritional benefits, so I only wanted to soften the kale a bit. First, I cooked a few tablespoons of chopped onion and a couple of cloves of minced garlic in a bit of Fry Light. Then I whisked up a steaming sauce of one tablespoon soy sauce, three tablespoons naam pla (Thai fish sauce), one tablespoon Dijon mustard, a sprinkling of Tabasco, a scant teaspoon of Splenda, and the juice of half an orange. After the onion and garlic had gone soft, I added four handfuls of kale and poured over the sauce, turning the heat up to medium and covering for a couple of minutes to steam. By the time I lifted the lid, the kale had wilted; I chucked in a load of prawns, cooked everything for a further minute, and then ate with orange segments for squeezing over the dish. Lime would have been better.
This was a really tasty meal, and it would be a breeze to make for a large number of people (if you can find prawns on sale, as good ones are not cheap). You could also make this with spinach, bok choy, or other greens. Kale has a nice flavour, but I can see how it would be very chewy if eaten totally raw. And if I was being especially indulgent, I might swap the Splenda for a tablespoon of brown sugar.

There was lots of garlicky sauce left over, which I put in a small container and stuck in the fridge. I imagine it will keep up to three days there, and I’ll use it with the rest of the kale that’s waiting for me.

Tech Tags: kale prawns shrimp healthy+eating healthy+recipes recipes food diet diet+recipes diet+food recipe+ideas seafood calcium high+calcium

I’ve been reading Pamela Ribon’s online journal for something ridiculous like eight years – probably more, in fact. A few years ago, Pamie started running, lost a lot of weight, and she just ran the Maui Marathon. I am in awe, and now have something to ponder while I’m scaling the hated hill of my sessions with Tracy. (By the way, I was describing the hill to my fiancé last night, and he reminded me that, as a kid, he used to have to scale it every day on his way to school. Gulp.)

If you’re looking for some motivation, I highly recommend reading why Pamie ran the marathon, and then read about miles 1 – 12 and miles 13 – finish.

Four years ago I couldn’t finish a mile. The reservoir near our house was a pretty, peaceful 2.5 mile track, and since I lived right next to it I told myself this was the opportunity to lose some weight and get healthier. That first summer the goal was to finish a mile without having to stop, without wanting to die. I eventually got there. And then I could go all the way around the track. Then I could go around twice.

Then she ran a marathon. Awesome.

Photo copyright Pamela Ribon

Tech Tags: pamela+ribon pamie maui+marathon maui marathon totally+freaking+awesome

You may have noticed a section on the righthand sidebar of this page, headed “Health Kick Web”. There you will find links to various articles, news items, and blog posts which I think are worth reading. (That doesn’t mean I agree with what they say, just that I found them interesting and worth passing along to y’all.) An archive of the links can be found here, and if you want to subscribe directly to updates from the Health Kick Web, you can add the following link to your My Yahoo, My MSN, or other RSS reader:

http://del.icio.us/rss/healthkick

Today was my third session with my new personal trainer, our last work-out of this week. Just like the previous two sessions, I really worked up a sweat and was working much harder than I’d ever push myself if I were exercising alone. There’s a killer hill that I dread every time, and after we’ve got to the top and started to walk on a straight-away, my relief is palpable.

After hitting the park opposite my house and doing some more push-ups and tricep dips, we headed back to the house for some boxing. I am pretty excited to learn how to box, because my fiancé Antoine used to box and was quite good at it.

But a combination of factors – a toasty day, a warm house, a lack of food in my system, and inept breathing on my part – had me ready to pass out after only a couple of minutes of jabbing. Tracy made sure I sat down immediately so that my heart could easily pump oxygenated blood to my brain, and after a cold bottle of water and going through our cool-down stretches, I was fine.

It looks, though, like not eating before exercising is probably not going to work for me. Our sessions start at 10AM, and I usually don’t eat anything until after Tracy’s left at 11, I’ve had a shower, re-applied sunblock, and started catching up with work. It’s not really a smart approach. Tracy advised me to have something to eat an hour or two before we’re due to start, so I’m going to try small amounts of high-protein food (cottage cheese, chicken, fish, cheese) at around 8AM.

I’ll say one thing about boxing: It’s made me totally re-evaluate my opinion of Mike Tyson. I mean, the guy can’t be that stupid if he can remember all of those steps and guidelines. I’m keen to try again, but not optimistic that I’ll be a Million Dollar Baby anytime soon…

Tech Tags: boxing kickboxing exercise exercise+nutrition sports+nutrition personal+trainer

I’m really not a big believer in the scale: I think it can only tell you so much, and that measurements are often a much better yardstick (so to speak) of success. Over the first two years or so when I was losing a substantial amount of weight, I rarely weighed myself.

I also know that, when the scale says what we want it to say, it can provide a great motivational boost.

When I was at the doctor’s office today to get my innoculations for an upcoming trip to Egypt, I couldn’t resist jumping on their scale. I’d only been weighed there last Thursday, and I was curious to see if there’d be a different number.

Yep: I was wearing heavy shoes today (last week the nurse had me slip my sandals off before getting on the scale), but there was still a reduction of 1.5 kilos – that’s 3.3 pounds…if my rusty math is correct.

Tech Tags: weight+loss weigh-in weigh+in losing+weight scale

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I had a constant feeling that I could not get enough. Realizing that I could get enough food – and still lose weight – was a major turning point. If you want to lose weight, you can do it by eating only when you’re hungry and stopping when you’ve had enough. But this thought is frightening to most people, because it means taking responsibility and trusting yourself. It goes against the machinery of the culture – particularly the $33 billion-a-year diet industry. Most people like to be told what to do, especially when it comes to food. That’s part of the lure of diets: they make people feel like children again, because they tell us that we cannot be trusted to handle food; that we are not capable of making up our own minds and having control over how we eat.

So says Geneen Roth, who conducts workshops to help people with ‘food addiction’. I think Geneen talks a lot of sense, and what she has to say about why people eat vast quantities of fattening food makes even more sense when you consider the sort of Western eating habits that have become all too typical despite rampant fat phobia and a multi-billion-dollar diet industry. I don’t believe there is an ‘obesity epidemic,’ but I do believe that a sense of impending deprivation does drive weight gain.

At my workshops, there’s an exercise in which we practice savoring a single chocolate kiss. Once, a man told me that he’d been bingeing on chocolate kisses for twenty years and had never eaten just one. The one in his mouth was always the precursor to the ten that came after it, and the two bags after that. But when he actually allowed himself to have one, and was present while eating it, he didn’t want another one. “It’s when I feel I can’t have one,” he said, “that I want twenty.” In a normal dieting mentality, giving that man chocolate would be like handing an ax to an ax murderer. “I’m supposed to eat chocolate?” people say. “But I’m already forty pounds overweight.” Yes, and you’re forty pounds overweight in part because you’re not allowing yourself to have what you’re having anyway, and you’re not paying attention while you’re having it.

Considering this – and what we already know – does anyone believe that banning what the government deems junk food and/or ads for what the government deems junk food would really help people to eat any more healthfully and more mindfully than we do now?

Tech Tags: geneen+roth overeating compulsive+eating emotional+eating diet health addictive+eating food+addiction weight+loss junk+food+ban junk+food jamie+oliver obesity+epidemic obesity+pandemic