Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or because I’ve made it so that my body is now used to clean foods instead of junk all the time. No matter what, it is a verified fact that when I’m eating well and in sensible quantities, I sleep well and am in better shape than when I eat crap. In itself, it is probably a good thing, since it encourages me to give priority to healthy foods. On the other hand, if I really go astray (eating one slice of cake a week is okay, eating one twice a day is not), I seriously regret it, and it can take several days, marked with tiredness and headaches, to completely go away.

I know I’m not the only one who reacts to ‘wrong’ foods this way, by going into some kind of sugar shock. Nevertheless, I still marvel at the way my body got used to having great foods like vegetables and fruits on a daily basis, and same with lean meats and fish or healthy oils. It’s almost like the poor thing had been waiting and starving for years in the dark, and the day I finally gave it what it needed, it started thanking me threefold by making me energized, as well as punishing me threefold by causing me headaches and feelings of sickness.

This means I need to be careful. I wouldn’t be able to indulge at a wedding, for instance, and eat from the buffet and from the huge cake all afternoon and evening long. Not unless I want to be sick, that is. I know it’s not akin to what people who had WLS experience (I can fathom much more than that, from what I’ve read and experienced myself), but it’s still a fact. Fortunately, those aren’t daily occurrences, and I still remember my insulin crash or whatever it was from last summer too vividly to be willing to try eating too much chocolate again. The wrong thing in all of that is that I also know what foods I can stand, meaning I won’t be sick after bingeing on them, but I will still pay the price later on, at night, when I’ll find myself turning and tossing at 3 am, fighting with bad dreams and a very bad quality of sleep.

This said… I like the way things are all the same. It’s one more incentive to do things right. I also don’t doubt that someday, I will learn, and that the really wrong foods will be a scarce occurrence for good. After all, I don’t like being tired, cranky and drugged on painkillers (ah, sugar-induced headaches, you are the worst!). So what other choice do I have left, save from eating properly? (Or reverting to a diet full of junk food, but somehow, this doesn’t really appeal to me… I wonder why.)

When I think of it some more, I realize that my problem with food is twofold, in a much contradictory way:

1) I like food too much.
2) I don’t care about food.

And this might be the very core of all this crap.

1) I like food too much: I don’t think I really self-medicate with food, but I DO place food at the center of quite an amount of my activities. Watching TV, for instance, or reading–although these past months, my biggest problem has indeed been TV. I like having something to graze on while reading, but I like it even more when it’s while watching an episode of a series I like (and I don’t watch TV out of boredom: I don’t have a TV, only a monitor and a DVD player, so whatever I watch, I watch it because I really want it).

On the other hand, since I often eat my meals alone, not having anything to read or watch actually makes me wolf them down so that I’m not bored and can go do something else again. I’m not such a great cook that every meal is a mini-orgasm all by itself, and there’s no point in taking one hour to eat if there’s no one to share my dishes with.

2) I don’t really care about food. Believe it or not, if I’m entrenched within an activity like designing a website, updating a blog, gaming, or whatever else that keeps my mind and hands busy, food is the last thing I’ll think of. It is very weird, because you’d think that with all my talk of being tired of thinking about food so often, skipping meals would never happen to me. Well, it does. It does to such an extent, depending on the moments, that I even almost fainted one morning when getting up, wondered why, then realized I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before because I had been playing a game all evening long and simply forgot to have dinner.

It’s not such a lovely thing, though: it leaves me starving, which means that I’ll be more likely to grab fast-food or pig out on something that will fill me quickly, such as fat-laden foods, bread with cheese or a pizza bought in less than five minutes at the nearest supermarket and popped in the oven. In the same way, even though I’ve started cooking more in the past two years, I cannot say I love cooking, therefore I am not exactly bent on preparing delicious home-made meals, and I still have a tendency to rely on ready-made frozen dinners.

Like I was saying in a comment on Jonathan’s blog, although I am often ‘afraid’ of being hungry, this fear probably stems more from another kind of fear: that of letting genuine hunger allow me to eat foods that aren’t so good for my health. I’m not afraid if I know that a healthy dinner, all ready to be eaten, will welcome me at home after an unexpectedly long day. Of course, this never happens, since I live alone, but you get my drift. It’s all the waiting time that can do me in when I’ve reached the point of being ravenous, if I don’t have anything to distract me.

Ah, well. I guess a lot of us have a somewhat weird relationship with food. At least, being aware of it, and of how exactly this relationship is expressed, might be another key to help us do what needs to be done, instead of doing what’s only ‘convenient’?

Usually, I don’t dwell about it here, because it is not the purpose of this blog, but I also happen to suffer from a mild form of Tourette’s. Which has seemingly nothing to do with weight loss. Or had. Because while biking home yesterday night after having gone to the movies, I was struck by an odd thought.

Tourette’s tics are a compulsive behaviour, in a way. You can control them for a while, but the longer you try to white-knuckle them, the harder they come back with a vengeance at the end of the day. It’s not possible to “make an effort and control yourself!” (parents, please never say that to your child with Tourette’s, it’s destructive). It’s not something you can easily battle. And even once you reach adult age, when symptoms tend to be less noticeable in a good deal of people, it’s still there.

I then noticed a sort of parallel between my tics and my (fortunately not weekly now) binge episodes.

Of course, I am not saying that the two are to be put on the same level of ‘disorder’, so to say. The triggers and the causes are different. Tourette’s in a neural affection. Bingeing disorder is not, as far as I know. You can try to understand why you medicate with food and binge by psychological inquiry, while going to a shrink is seriously of no use when it comes to Tourette’s, because there is nothing to understand. Nevertheless, I still think there are odd parallels between them.

It may be because of the compulsive aspect–that need to have the tic now, the need to have that food now. It may be because of the false feeling that if you can have that tic just one more time, or have that food just one more time, then everything will be okay and you will be at peace, not feeling the urge to make that gesture, not having that craving anymore now that you’re ‘done with it’. This is totally wrong, of course: the craving will come back the day after, and the need to express the tic will come back just as well (usually before one night has passed, to be honest; “within minutes” would be a more appropriate term). And the way I see it, a bout of bingeing, finding oneself unable to stop eating, is strangely akin to having restrained my tics for too long and falling down into a spiral of repeated tics for a few minutes or sometimes more, until I’ve ‘let all that stress out’.

I know I cannot get rid of my binges the same way I try to minimize the tics occurrences. In the latter case, cutting on caffeine, or exercising often, as well as avoiding processed foods, help a lot–the crappier my diet is, the worse my tics become. It’s not so easy with bingeing, because avoiding junk food most of the time doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t get the urge to wolf down a whole pizza all by myself in ten minutes tomorrow morning. And exercising is good to relieve the stress in both cases, but it’s still just a temporary fix to this condition.

I guess that’s the essential difference. With Tourette’s, I don’t need to understand anything about it. It just is, and the only medical solution is out of the question because of the side-effects (being lethargic is not something I want nor can afford), so I have to live with it. Now, self-medicating with food is another matter; there is likely a reason behind it, especially since it has started so suddenly, and I wonder if all the changes in my life–being alone again, without much money, unable to have a rich social life due to work/school, etc–weren’t potential, believable triggers. For the time being, I have to try and fix that all by myself, unfortunately.

Anyway… Thinking about it this way, through such a weird comparison, is somehow helping me. At least, it’s the feeling I get the more I think about it. I don’t mean that I’m going to consider bingeing as fate, something unavoidable like Tourettes; it’s just that it sort of falls down logically into my way of being, my compulsive self. And the same way I can try to keep my neural disorder under socially acceptable check, I can also do my best to find other ways to keep the silly desire for food at bay.

I know, weird ideas tend to cross my mind too often for my own good. But I found that train of thought interesting.

Is it worth it? All these sacrifices, giving up on foods we like, forcing ourselves to exercise, and everything else–is it really worth it?

I had to answer to such a question a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, my answer was: yes, it IS worth it.

Granted, it’s not easy every day, and there are moments when I too feel like whining about how ‘unfair’ it is that I can’t have my cake and eat it, that I’ll gain weight too easily compared to other people, and so on. However, all in all, when looking at the big picture, I won’t say that my attempts are living a healthier life were–are–not worth it.

Is it worth getting tired because I have to exercise after a long day of work/school? Yes. I’d be just as tired if I didn’t exercise, and perhaps even more, because not eliminating stress this way would cause me to get a bad night of sleep.

Is it worth getting rid of foods I like, such as cookies or pizza, to focus on ‘diet foods’? Yes. After all, liking pizza doesn’t mean that I don’t like vegetables either: there are plenty of ways of making the latter even more tasty and enjoyable. Besides, in my opinion, it’s not diet food, it’s just called ‘eating sensibly’.

Is it worth doing those ’sacrifices’? Well, it all depends. If I want to consider these as sacrifices, then I’ll feel deprived. If, on the contrary, I try to consider all the positive aspects first, then it seems more normal and more enjoyable. I wasn’t feeling better when I was out of breath at barely 25 after climbing a flight of stairs, or when I felt sick after eating too much of that ‘favourite’ greasy food of mine. Wanting to think that this was better would be diving deep into an illusion. It wasn’t. It was just another way of being miserable.

My motivations aren’t really of the aesthetic kind. I don’t have even the slightest potential of having a model-like figure. I’m short, stout, with square jaws and shoulders, and no matter how much ‘dieting’ I do, I will never be ‘feminine’ or ‘beautiful’–in terms of society’s current standards. But I can be healthy and athletic, I can have a good night’s sleep every night due to being well-fed and not over-fed, I can keep at bay for just a little longer some illnesses that run rampant in my family. Moreover, by making those efforts, I can be beautiful in MY own eyes, and feel at ease in my body. Isn’t this what’s important, in the end?

So what’s eating a slice of pizza every two months instead of the whole thing twice a week, if it allows me to have that? Not such a sacrifice, I say.

Don’t doubt for a moment that it is worth it. Maybe we have to be a little more selfish and take time for ourselves to do so. Maybe we have to change things for a whole family instead of for just one person. Maybe it’s very hard in the beginning, and gets harder again in difficult periods.

But it is still worth it.

Our lives are worth it.

We are worth it.

I’ll probably come down as snotty or old-fashioned about that, but it needs to be said: I don’t like nor do I trust these things.

You know what they are, I’m sure. Tons of ads pop in our faces on the web, in magazines and on TV about the “new revolutionary machine that will give you the Abs of Death with only 2 minutes of exercising twice a week”. There are countless variations on that theme, hinting that if you haven’t the body of Arnold yet, it’s not because you don’t exercise, but because until now you didn’t had the miracle-machine to allow you to do so.

I’ve come into close-contact in the past with two of these little wonders: the Power Plate and a device that supposedly develops your abs without effort through electric shock. The Power Plate was my sister’s–she wanted to develop muscles in the hopes that it’d give her a round butt, or something like this. The second contraption was in a gym, because I was offered a full week of trials for massages and other well-being sessions.

Well, I didn’t like the Power Plate. Somehow, I still wonder: if I had gone on using it, would my ovaries have ended up falling down all by themselves in my panties? Sure, it vibrates. Sure, you ‘feel it in your muscles’. But I would also ‘feel it in my muscles’ when I was driving my crappy old car which kept on vibrating like mad all the time, and my butt remained as squishy and flabby as before. Not to mention the risk of death by irate neighbours, because that thing would also make the whole story vibrate. Maybe they should market it as ‘get your own earthquake at home NOW’?

Via another blog, I found Grisaffi’s article (see link below) about that. Albeit being not sold on such devices, he considers more than one way of seeing it–for instance, for aged people with osteoporosis, this could indeed help. However:

According to Hofmekler, to achieve the fitness and fat loss claims being made for this device, you have to eliminate poor food choices, decrease estrogen-based food products, and get your butt up and move. Human beings were designed to move. Sitting on a plate “vibrating” goes against every human evolutionary development, not to mention it goes against simple common sense.

I tend to quite agree with that.

As I said, another of those devices I had tried a few years ago was that little machine sending electric shocks through electrodes placed on your thighs, abs, etc. I can’t remember what its name was, but it’s been around for ten years and more, and everybody has probably heard of it. Using that thing was torture; the electrodes would literally hurt me, and I’d keep itchy red patches for hours where they had been placed. Can I get my good old soreness back, please?

So, in the end, when it comes to my own training, I’m still a fierce proponent of good old weight-lifting, in which my limits are those of my body, not those of a machine. And my body, thanks goodness for that, is not a wimpy thing. I don’t care about vibrations or being able to read a magazine while some machine is pumping whatever into my abs–which never were as strong as when I really started lifting, by the way.

I won’t even tap in the endless source of gloating regarding the ropeless jump rope. My French cartesian mind is definitely not adapted to envisioning and understanding that kind of things. (Incidentally, I do own a jumping rope. With an actual rope on it. It rocks.)

Yes, I’m old-school. It’s just that old-school works for me better than ‘revolutionary’ exercise gizmos.

- Kery, not really convinced

• David Grisaffi on the Power Plate

I’ve been telling myself for a long, long time that I should write a post about this website, which has been in my links list on this blog for ages, and is an incredibly useful resource for every woman wishing to seriously start (and go on) lifting weights. Well, in fact, it’s just as useful for any man wishing to do that: muscle is muscle, after all, and develops through the same exercises for both sexes.

On this website, Krista won’t advise you to do long series of lifting light weights, nor will she tell you about being wary of ‘bulking up’. What Krista will hand you out here is how to properly perform a squat, what kind of exercises to start with, how you should eat to maximize the benefits of your workouts, how to get back to fitness after a pregnancy, and many other handy pieces of advice (some of which are worth for women only, some of which are worth for everyone). She also takes great care in debunking the traditional myths of weight-lifting, especially in the case of women, a.k.a. “women don’t bulk up, they tone up”, and others “you don’t want to lift heavy: you’ll look like a man”. Heh. I wish you could dveelop so much muscle so easily; there’s a man lifting with me on Saturday mornings who is certainly wishing the exact same thing.

So, not only is this webpage a great resource for starting as well as more confirmed lifters, it will also help you getting rid of such misconceptions. I’ve started following Krista’s advice in 2005, and in spite of having slacked off along the way and been forced to start again almost from the start (I must admit that I didn’t lift at all in 2006 and part of 2007, silly me!), I can assure you that, as a women, I sure didn’t “bulk up like a man”. I simply gained more definition, along with shedding some of the layer of fat hiding my newlyfound muscles. And I’m not your lithe, ectomorph little woman with a very tiny frame either–in fact, if there’s a type of woman that should be prone to developing Arnold’s silhouette, it would probably be mine.

Link following. Now what are you still doing here? Go check it out!

• Stumptuous.com

You may not have noticed it, because the whole thing, in the end, probably lasted no more than two hours grand, but this blog almost self-destructed through an excess of self-confidence.

Thus, here’s a word of wisdom to all WordPress users: when you perform an upgrade (namely, going from some-really-old-version to the 2.3.2 that I should have installed sooner anyway), do not skip the upgrade instructions given on the WP website. In other words, don’t do like I did, thinking “Pfft! I’ve been upgrading five WP blogs since 2005, I know the drill now”, because you never know when a file upload will go wrong and you’ll be left in the ditch realizing that you’ve crapped your upgrade something major.

Fortunately, I managed to save the day through a complete reinstallation and a rewriting of the needed tables in the database, but this still gave me quite a scare. Yes, I know, “it’s only a blog”. But it’s a blog I’ve been pouring my struggles, impressions and discoveries in for three years now.

As I was venting briefly on the forums about that, while waiting for the new install files to be all uploaded, I realized two things, though:

1) Fighting with a WP install and a database kept me away from munching out of frustration. In fact, it prevented me from even getting hungry (dinner time and all that).

2) An excess of confidence can be a bad thing, and it goes the same way when it comes to weight loss. How many of us, after all, have regained some or all the weight they had lost because they thought they knew everything there was to know about it, knew how to eat well, etc… only to realize that they still had let old, bad habits creep back in, due to this faulty thinking of ‘nothing can happen to me, it only happens to others’?

It may seem silly to associate these two things–crapping a blog upgrade and failing at maintenance–but when I find associations that teach me a lesson, well, I don’t spit on them, as idiotic as they may seem at first. And I’ve learnt my lesson today. There are things you can never be sure of, especially when you don’t have much control over them. Therefore, the little control you have (doing your backups before upgrading to files the coding of which you don’t even understand… or eating the healthy way and exercising, even if you can’t control your genetics!), you need to exert it.

Self-confidence is a great thing, of course. It’s just that sometimes, we still have to acknowledge that things can go wrong, and that we have to exert constant vigilance to prevent this from happening.

As a sidenote, I’m still running on a 2.3.1 and not a 2.3.2 install. I had way too many problems with the latter. I’ll get to that another day (as well as to trying to repair some weird database error in the Archives pages), because now, dinner is calling all the same.

My mother being also overweight and wanting to ‘do like I did and lose some of this weight’, we regularly chat about it, share tips and magazine articles, etc. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that she also very regularly mentions that both of us are the same (i.e. we gain on weight very easily) and that she wish we didn’t have to cope with this curse.

The curse bit is where we disagree.

Quite some time ago (years ago, probably), I had already blogged here about how thin people who can ‘eat anything’ aren’t necessarily shielded from illnesses, high BP, high cholesterol, etc. just because they don’t gain weight, and that at least, the threat of developing diabetes or whatever else is a good incentive for me to do healthier choices in terms of foods. I think it’s time I amend this: not only is it a good incentive, it is also NOT a curse.

Yep. Not a curse. It’s a survival mechanism. And I get the feeling that in our society where ‘thin is in’ (gosh, I hate that expression!) and a size 0 seems to be the highest degree of achievement possible, too many people tend to forget this essential point.

The ability to store fat easily was never ‘given’ to us to make us miserable, but to allow us to survive long periods of famine, when food was scarce and we had to tap into all our reserves in an attempt to go through such harsh trials. I very much doubt that anyone actually had the time to pile on enough fat to really be considered obese as per today’s standards; a famine would come up and get rid of that fat sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, not to mention that we didn’t have as much control as we have nowadays on crops, how to avoid them being ruined by insects, etc. No matter what, those stocks of fat would be put to use, and by doing so, our bodies would be able to survive longer. The human beings who managed to perpetuate our race were more than often the ones who had the ability to ‘get fat’, rather than those who were always perfectly fit.

The only problem with this well-working machine is that we were not meant to live in an environment filled with processed foods and, more generally, immediate access to plenty of foods. In fact, even only 100 or 150 years ago, this was still the case. It is somewhat shocking to think about it for a couple of minutes and realize that it’s Man who has turned a perfect survival mechanism into such a curse–much like he has ruined many other things on this planet, but this is not a topic for this blog.

Could I live without this tendency to put on weight easily? Surely–who wouldn’t, given the current circumstances in our industrialized, modern civilization! Do I consider it a curse, though? No. It makes some things harder, okay, but as far as I know, I still have two legs, two arms, a head that is working, and the ability to choose what foods I put in my mouth. I could consider it a curse; however, to me, it would be akin to belittling myself and my body for what they are, and I do not function well when burdened with negative thinking.

And I also do not want to consider like crap an ability that, who knows, might actually save my life if one day I were to find myself trapped in a basement for ten days after an earthquake, or whatever catastrophe might be thrown in my face. (You never know, after all!)

Tags: genetics, pounds, weight

Originally, I took a day off to attend a series of speeches about Elizabethan theatre, but things turned out differently than I thought, and I found myself unexpectedly home for the afternoon without anything planned. Since “nothing to do” tends to mean “whee, let’s eat something!” in my case, I decided to keep myself busy with an impromptu trip to the weights room, and with doing something useful for this blog for a change. Because, as you could guess it from the mess you might have encountered while visiting today, I (already) grew tired of my template.

Therefore, do not be surprised if odd changes and weird pictures happen to pop in here in the next hours or even days. Toying with CSS and PHP is one of my regular ways of keeping myself busy by doing something I like. Besides, I’m still very much undecided about which template I’ll finally choose among those I’ve picked and tweaked so far…

I just hope I won’t forget to add anything that was on the old design to the new template.

Tags: template, blog

Last week, as a belated Christmas gift from several family members, I got a deep freezer. It was something I had wanted for a long time, but wasn’t able to afford; besides, having lived for part of these past two years in a very cramped student room, I just didn’t know where I’d put a freezer anyway. So I could only do with my fridge, and its very imperfect cold compartment.

Well, things are changing now, and they’re changing fast. Of course, I didn’t need much time to fill this new freezer of mine! I immediately ordered plenty of vegetables and fruits from Picard (one of the leading frozen foods stores in France), and made sure that no ice-cream or cake would make it to my shopping list. I also took this as an opportunity to buy fish. So far, so good: these foods are really tasty, and it makes it so much easier to eat cauliflower or other vegetables that aren’t necessarily convenient to prepare when you’re living alone (I like cauliflower, but don’t necessarily want to eat it three days in a row just because I had to cook that big thing and it won’t keep good for long in the fridge).

The odd part in all of this is that it has sort of allowed me to reach a certain peace of mind in terms of food management. For instance, I bought a loaf of bread and froze it. Before, with fresh bread, I would always feel ‘compelled’ to eat it quickly, in a couple of days, so that it wouldn’t go to waste; evidently, 300g of bread for a woman my size in two or even three days is a little too much. The same thing happened with other foods, too. Now that it’s frozen, it’s all okay in my head. I know I can keep that bread for two months if I wish, and only take a slice or two once a week. It’s not a problem anymore, and I’m not wasting money on rotting food anymore either.

More astonishing, the same thing is currently happening with a… pizza. Yes, I went wild and bought a 300g pizza (a brand I really like, so that if I really want pizza, at least it’ll be the real thing and not some ersatz). However, now that I have it under the hand, knowing that I’m in no hurry to eat it, I don’t feel like eating it at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to remain untouched in my freezer for the next fortnight or more.

I knew having a freezer would change a lot of things and allow me to manage my stocks of food in a different way. But to be honest, I hadn’t expected this side-effect of having the food and not wanting to eat it. I suppose it is a good thing!

Tags: freezer, food, eating, picard