Health Kick: Diet, exercise, fitness, and life

Apologies for the lack of updates here. I have been all over the place since getting back from Egypt – including a quick trip to Paris – and getting back into the swing of work and domestic life.

Yes, I’m still doing well in terms of my health progress. I’m still seeing Tracy for our three hours a week (though this week, due to unavoidable personal matters, we can only see each other twice). I’ve been eating well, with the occasional restaurant trip (the hummus pictured was consumed at a Turkish restaurant a couple of Fridays ago) and the efforts to be sensible that go along with that. I’m trying to create an affection for Guinness, because I read it’s the most nutritious alcoholic drink one can choose (gin and slimline tonics just don’t do it for me) – and no, I can’t just give up alcohol completely. I only drink once every two weeks or so, though, so I’m not going to beat myself up for it.

I’ve also signed up for an Open University nutrition course, which should be interesting. I find that so much of what I read about ‘healthful’ food – and I read a lot about it – is contradictory. One study says chillies are great to fight off colds, another says they wreak havoc on the digestive system. One nutrition guru says that juices are devoid of fiber and so should be avoided in favor of whole fruit, and another recommends lots of smoothies and glasses of vegetable juice. I want to be better able to evaluate such claims accurately, and make the best decisions about what I put in my body. The course might end up being a bit of a letdown, as it’s based on the (deeply flawed) USDA food pyramid, but I should learn some solid basics of food chemistry.

Oh, and last night I saw some friends for the first time since July, and they were gawking over how much weight they think I’ve lost. I mean, I know I have lost a lot of weight since they last saw me, but it’s hard for me to believe the difference is that drastic to other people. That’s one other difference I’ve noticed: I am much more interested in my overall health now, instead of just being purely focused on losing weight. I think that’s a good thing.

vegemite.

Originally uploaded by misscaro.

This is what you get when you allow the state a stake in the public’s health, and give it the thumbs-up to legislate what it considers ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods: The United States government is cracking down on the import of Vegemite, which is banned in America. Why? It contains folate, which by US law can only be added to breads and cereals.

We happen to have a jar of Vegemite in the kitchen right now (Antoine’s Australian relatives were visiting us recently), so I think this calls for a round of toast smeared with sticky brown goo. Knowing the American government, that might just be grounds for an arrest warrant.

Driving from central Cairo to Giza
Originally uploaded by dynamist.

Wow, check out the bounty of healthful food one can buy so easily and cheaply in Egypt! What a shame that I did not partake of more of it.

Here’s the deal: Our hotel, the most excellent Le Méridien Pyramids, had five restaurants. Two of those restaurants were really, really good. One was Mediterranean, which sounds deceptively healthy, but that’s before you help yourself to the free, pizza-like bread (served with yummy tapenade) and the free, after-dinner chocolates. The other was Tex-Mex, which…Yeah, nothing healthy about that. (Actually, the salsa was probably fat-free, but the tortillas and enchiladas underneath it definitely were not.)

What’s funny is that the reason I didn’t do so great, health-wise, is that the holiday achieved what I thought was impossible: I relaxed. This is not something that comes easily to me, and even my version of relaxed involves a certain amount of anxiety, but our hotel was so perfect that I couldn’t help but chill out. It was simply wonderful to have so much free time – no schedules, no demands, no domestic drudgery – with my guy. For the first few days, we left the hotel complex only once.

Here’s the positive: I drank at least four liters of water a day, and did some swimming. I also had a Swedish massage, my first, which revealed to me just how much I did need some relaxation. (The masseuse ordered me to eat one banana a day – no more – and to take lots of Jacuzzis in order to loosen up my super-tight muscles. I haven’t got a hot tub, so I’ve taken the advice of beauty blog commenter Liz, who’s a nutrition geek and told me to take magnesium supplements, too.)

The day after we got home, I had a workout session with Tracy, my trainer, first thing in the morning. I was afraid to tell her how lax I’d been on holiday, but also very much looking forward to getting back to what I’ve – thankfully – come to think of as ‘normal’.

Tracy was very forgiving. “Did you relax? Did you enjoy yourself? Did you really savor the food you ate?” Yes, yes, and yes. “Well, then, good. Now you’re back into the swing of things. That’s what counts.” A great reminder, which I needed, that my usual perfectionism and all-or-nothing attitude is what will get me into serious trouble, not the occasional lapse.

I’m leaving for a week in Egypt today, and have been fretting about being away from my regular workout schedule for so long. I had no reason to fear, though, because Tracy, my awesome personal trainer, designed a holiday workout schedule for me to use while I’m away. Isn’t she great?

Many of the exercises incorporate the use of a Dyna-Band, which I just purchased last weekend. I’ve used the Dyna-Band with Tracy, and find it pretty difficult (I’m using the purple Dyna-Band, which provides the third highest level of resistance out of the four varieties offered). But it’s supposed to be difficult, so I can’t really complain (though I do when I’m on seven out of 25 expected reps and my muscles are burning like hell).

Between Tracy’s workout recommendations, the amount of walking we’ll be doing (in the desert!), and the swimming I plan to do, I’m hoping to return from Egypt having lost weight. We’ll see.

This morning, I headed up to the beautiful parkland of Parliament Hill, part of Hampstead Heath, which is some of the most stunning green space you will see in the world. The top of Parliament Hill offers breathtaking views of London. At the foot of the hill, there is a newly refurbished athletics track.

I had decided to try out the get-started schedule from Runner’s World magazine and see how I felt about it. It is only when referring to the schedule for the purposes of writing this post that I realized that I actually could have been a bit easier on myself; instead of running for a minute and walking for 90 seconds, I ran for a minute and then walked for a minute. I also mis-remembered the number of repetitions of this routine, so did it ten times in a row instead of the suggested eight.

Oh, well. I found it a definite sweat-breaking workout, but also felt as if I could be pushing myself harder. I resisted the urge, as I need to see how my knees and other joints cope with the very tiniest effort before I start to do more. I was damn sweaty when I finished, then walked home, which was about 30 minutes – much of it uphill.

I know I was only doing the most remedial routine possible, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I’d completed it. First, I only had about five hours sleep last night, which isn’t enough for me. I woke up very tired, and was yawning the whole time I was preparing to leave the house. Second, it’s a bit of a trek to get up to Parliament Hill, which might easily have put me off doing so. But I’d read Runner’s World while having a hot bath last night, and it really motivated me to try to see what progress I can make towards becoming a proper runner. (It’s £2.40 – about $4.50 US – per day to use the track, or you can buy a year’s ticket for only £48. I’ll be getting a year’s ticket on my next visit.)

If I follow the magazine’s get-started schedule, I should in eight weeks be able to run 30 minutes without stopping. That’s two months from now, and I find it hard to believe I could make such progress. But, just for now, I’m going to forget about what I believe and pretend I believe something else.

Photo of Parliament Hill Fields track from Tim Grose’s excellent www.runtrackdir.com. Thank you, Tim.

I’ve now been training with Tracy Ballarini, my fantastic personal trainer, for three weeks now. In addition to the results noted in my two week results update, the following outcomes stand out to me:

1) I’m down a dress size. With a lot of formerly snug clothes feeling loose on me, I suspected I might have gone down a full size, but confirmed it today by trying on lots of clothes in three different shops. (I am badly in need of a new pair of all-purpose black trousers, as my existing pair – which my fiancé’s mother has already altered for me three times – are now hanging off my backside in a rather unflattering way. I have other pairs of black trousers, but those were my favorite. Sadly, I can find no trousers in all of London which both fit my ass the right way and don’t measure an inch too short in the leg.)

2) I think about exercising all the time. I read about it quite a lot, and I talk about it a lot with my fiancé, and if you were to ask me at any point in the day what I’m thinking about, I’d probably answer: “Exercising!” I remember a friend of mine who was really into bodybuilding in high school (he went on to play football for Army) telling me that he thought of weightlifting almost non-stop, and at the time, I thought that was pretty sad. But I need to be intensely focused on a goal in order to attack it with enthusiasm, so I’m not feeling too pathetic for my pre-occupation just yet.

3) The cardio aspect of exercising is not as tough for me as it was at the beginning. As soon as Tracy and I leave my house, we’re heading uphill for a good five minutes, and there’s still the killer hill in the middle of our route. At the beginning, I’d often be hating the uphill stuff like you wouldn’t believe. Over the last week, I’ve noticed that it’s not as bad as I remember.

4) I’m doing a lot more reps of my exercises. It probably doesn’t seem like a lot to a seasoned athlete, but I’m now doing 45 tricep dips, 45 push-ups/press-ups, God knows how many crunches (Tracy never counts them until my last five, but I’ve got to the point where I actually cry out in relief as I finish the last crunch of my set), and a wider variety of other exercises in my toning routine. At the beginning, I was doing just 16 tricep dips and 16 push-ups/press-ups. I hadn’t done any sort of non-cardio or resistance work since I was in high school, so I would have had no idea where to start if not for Tracy’s expert guidance.

5) I look forward to exercising. Man, I never believed that would happen. The days I don’t see Tracy (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), I feel like a huge slacker. I know my body needs rest, but I’ve been looking into what I can do on my non-Tracy days to make me progress faster and feel less lazy.

6) I’m getting very intrigued by the idea of training for a running race next year. I’ve found some good beginners’ training programs on the Runner’s World website, and have started reading the magazine, which makes me feel all fired up to get started. I want to be careful not to demand more of myself than I can manage at this point, but I’m also going to try and see what I can do to work towards the goal of running an actual race next year.

7) My focus on exercise means that I’m not really thinking a lot about food. I’m still eating as healthfully as ever, but I’m also a little less hard on myself when I have my weekly day or night off-plan. I just don’t want to have a life where I can’t go out for some beers and a curry and not beat myself up about it for days afterwards, so I’ve decided I’m simply not going to do that to myself. There are still pangs of guilt, but they’re not as strong as they once were. (That said, I’ve had no such day or night off this week. Yet.)

To sum up, I just can’t believe I waited so long to get my own trainer and take a more head-on approach to getting fit. Then again, I still can’t believe I waited so long to try to lose all the weight that I already have. We do these things in our own time, I guess, and my one goal now is never to turn back.

I’ve subscribed to a magazine for the first time since high school. That magazine is Men’s Health.

You can’t tell from the website, but it’s really good! I always read it when I’m waiting at the place where I get overpriced skin treatments, because their other magazines are all about real estate (which is weird), and I always get annoyed at having to put it down when it’s my turn to be treated. MH has tons of really useful nutrition information and pointers, plus exercises you can do easily (in the September issue, ones which help you avoid knee injuries), and tips on which shop-bought foods are the best-tasting and best nutritionally. Even the sex and relationships articles are interesting and – despite the laddish tone – not totally dumbed down, which I can’t say for the ones in women’s magazines. Nice photography, too.

Even the ads are less annoying. Reebok has a full page one which pointed me to this, which I must explore further.

Now that I’ve subscribed, I get access to the magazine’s archives. This is pretty backward; the archives should be free, with the newest stuff (if anything) costing money. Whatever, I’ve paid, so I get it all now.

…and it wasn’t her first, it was her eighth! I just saw Nancy in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, where we got to play slumber party for a few nights, and I don’t think she mentioned she had a marathon coming up. By which I mean: If I had had a marathon on the horizon, you bet your sweet ass I would have mentioned it. She’s just that laidback about this accomplishment. Also:

[I] am of course glad I did it, and that I finished, and while it sounds hackneyed, there were so many people out there more deserving of praise: the elderly man who ran bent at a 60-degree angle. The wheelchair racers. The group that had “Team Ben” on their backs, and a photo of a baby boy, and while I don’t know the story, the chances are, this is a sick child. There was the woman I met who said her 30-year-old daughter ran, pushing a friend in a wheelchair, but that she was also running in memory of her husband, who died three years ago at the age of 27. During the last LA marathon I ran, a little boy, maybe five years old, ran a short stretch right at the end, a photo of a woman on his shirt, and the words, “In memory of my mom.”

It’s a race, right? But not only. It’s all these people out there doing something that’s sort of hard, and for all different reasons. I feel honored to be part of it, and want to do it again. Also, my time was a personal best. Next goal: four hours.

Between Nancy and Pamie, I’m thinking of aiming for…no, not a marathon, not yet, anyway. But maybe a 5k first, and see how it goes? I mentioned the idea to Tracy during this morning’s session, and she was supportive. For now, I’m going to concentrate on losing more weight and getting my overall fitness up, but I can definitely imagine getting obsessive enough to aim for a concrete goal like that.

After two weeks of training with Tracy, here are the main changes I have noticed:

1) Days when I’m not doing an hourlong workout seem like a huge treat.

2) That said, I look forward to exercising now, which I never before did. I have learned a lot from Tracy, I never get bored, and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment after our sessions.

3) I am much more conscious of my abs, and although I have been in the habit of ‘engaging’ them for many years, can now feel how much tighter they are whenever I am so much as sitting up in bed.

4) I have lost weight. I am able to wear clothes which, a couple of weeks ago, I would not have been able to wear. (The jacket I’m wearing in the picture up there is one such item of clothing. Two weeks ago, I could button it, but it was totally uncomfortable and didn’t look right. Now it’s fine.)

5) I can’t imagine going back to the I’ll-exercise-when-I-get-round-to-it mentality. Structure can set you free, and I’m finding that is true with regularly scheduled workouts.

6) According to Tracy, I now do tricep dips “perfectly”. Considering that, the first time I tried them, I was saying that I’d never be able to do them properly, this is a good reminder for me that just because I can’t do something perfectly the first time, it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep trying.