Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

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

A friend of mine posted this piece of wisdom on her blog a few days ago, and I felt like I had to share:

An old Cherokee was teaching his grandson about life :

“There is a struggle inside me” he said to the child. “It is a struggle between two wolves.

One is full of envy, anger, greed, jealousy, arrogance, resent, possessiveness, lies, superiority and false pride.

The other is good, at peace, happy, serene, humble, generous, true and full of compassion.

This struggle is happening too inside you, my child, and inside every person.”

The grandson pondered for a while and asked his grandfather : “Which of these two wolves will win the fight ?

The old man simply replied : “The one you feed.”

It may seem silly, but when I read this short text for the first time, something snapped in me.

This goes for life in general, but I think it also goes for that specific aspect of life I’m dealing with on this blog.

I can choose to feed the wolf of anger, resent, woe-is-me thinking, self-loathing and eating to bury my problems and negative emotions. Or I can choose to feed that other wolf, the one that speaks of benevolent thoughts, acceptance, positive thinking, dedication and self-love.

I can choose to live in a cycle of bingeing/anger at myself for having let it happen, dieting, then bingeing, then dieting again. I can also choose to say “No” to the raw desire to eat whatever, embrace a healthy lifestyle for ever, and nurture myself in other ways–I may not have much money to treat myself, but I can at least enjoy a walk in the sun, or light a scented candle on my desk. A candle will not solve my problems, but neither will fast-food.

This is all the evidence, you might say, and I would agree. It is evident. It is something we should all know and apply. Alright. Now how many of us are actually able, from the start, to embrace the second path, the one of benevolence? It’s not as easy as it sounds.

I guess this hit home with even more strength because tthe past week has been pretty rough in terms of thoughts and feelings. The second semester has started again, I didn’t have time to get some ‘mental rest’ between taking my exams and attending classes again, and we of course got the mandatory speeches by every teacher about “if you want to succeed in my class, you need to put up with at least ten hours of work for every session”–which, as irrealistic as it is, can still grind you down when you’re already feeling down. And goodness knows I’ve been feeling down, about having to hold a job and being unable to focus on my studies at 150%, about aiming at a competitive exam and not being ‘allowed’ to pass my B.A. with ‘only’ the average grade… Down, I tell you.

However, this does not mean I have to let that angry wolf win.

It is hard. It takes much talking to myself, as well as much talking myself into, for me to stop resorting to that silly band-aid of snacks and ‘comfort foods’. Yet I have to do it, because I do not want to go on spiralling downwards.

That young, benevolent wolf is going to grow up and become strong, I tell you.

Tags: inspiration, wisdom

I had plans that fell through at the last minute this afternoon, and since I was feeling myself steering towards the prospect of spend said afternoon in front of the TV eating crap, I said: “No.” And I took my bike to head downtown, with the sudden aim of doing something I should have done a long time ago: having the third hole in my left ear pierced again. (Silly me had broken the ring that was in it a few years ago, and by the time I found something else to put in it, the hole was closed again. Feh.)

Well, I didn’t just go to town, to be honest. I also put on sexy clothes, and decided–again, at the last moment–to try on a tube of temporary blue dye a friend had offered me some time ago. And I put on make-up as well. And jewellery. Whatever I could lay my hands on to make me realize that getting out and showing off to the rest of the world was much better than plopping down on the couch with a bowl of cereals.

So I biked downtown, went to a store where I knew I could have my ear pierced in a safe and non-expensive way, and took this as an opportunity to buy some more jewelry and accessories that were on sale (they also had scarves for 1 euro, things like that). It took me quite some time–mostly because the first store I walked in was too full, and the employees at the second one had me apologetically wait because they had to deal with two kids who had attempted to steal earrings. But since it took me so long, I also was kept away from the TV+food temptation long enough for it to dwindle.

Anyway, I went back home more than two hours later with my new earrings and scarf and bracelets and stuff… and boy, was I glad I went on that shopping spree. I know it seems silly, but doing that kind of things from time to time really feels nice, and reminds me that, yes, I am worth the care and trendy clothes.

Or maybe I’m just so vain, but as long as it helps me not regaining that darned weight, I’m okay with that!

Tags: girl stuff, jewellery, piercing

I swear I more and more have the feeling that everything remotely ’social’ is revolving around food these days. Or maybe it’s just me?.

I’m guilty as well. I also invite friends over to share a cup of tea and a slice of cake. But I’ve come to realize that I do that just because it seems to be the only really accepted (and acceptable) social convention to follow. Personnally, when I want to see my friends or family, I couldn’t care less about having something to nibble on. I would be just as happy with a glass of water, no food on the table, and chatting happily will the people I like.

But somehow, I have the nagging feeling that if I were to do that, sooner or later rumors about me being very ‘rude’ would arise. Because it seems so ingrained in our society that social gathering = food, and that going against that isn’t appropriate.

And this bothers me.

It bothers me because it makes me feel forced to do something I don’t want to do.

It bothers me because I have to plan, make sure I have stuff to serve to my guests, and if someone shows up unexpected, either I don’t have anything to offer them, or it means I have to store foods I don’t want to have around me. How long do a few bags of cookies last in my pantry if there’s no one else than me to eat them? Answer: not very long.

It also bothers me because, every time I am invited to someone else’s house, I have to worry about exerting portion control and not eating [insert random crap here] for the only reason that it’s here in front of me. (I don’t mind having a cookie or two if they’re good and I feel like it; it’s just that when everybody around you is eating and eating and eating from the plate, it’s not a matter of ‘willpower’ anymore.)

People will say that I am ‘obsessed’ about food and shoudn’t worry my head about it. I suppose I should also stop worry about being 100 kgs by the time I am 40 (and trust me, if I don’t watch myself, I will be 100 kgs by then; either you gain on weight easily or not, after all). Right. Being worried about food or being worried about my cholesterol, health, how long I’ll be able to walk alone without being in pain, etc. Food is still the least evil.

I know things won’t change, and if they do, it’ll likely be after a long time only. Nevertheless, I am miffed about that. I like good food. I like enjoying a well-cooked meal. I don’t mind a social gathering centered around food now and then. On the other hand, all the time gets damn tirseome, and I don’t like being faced with temptations to which I know I will give in without actually especially liking them. (Junk food is so banal and second-rate. Seriously. I eat it out of boredom, because I like munching on something, but not out of sheer pleasure for such foods–not anymore, at least.)

Oh, well. I guess I just had to rant a little about that. Eating as a whole is tiresome when it happens too often. And it seems to happen so often no matter where I go.

Can’t we just enjoy each other’s presence without having to place a box of cookies between us?

Tags: food, temptations, social, gatherings

It seems to be a given on many blogs I tour, and on the forums I browse as well: almost every single woman there will sooner or later complain about PMS and the weird cravings it induces. I’ve been at overcoming my bad habits and replacing them by healthy ones since 2005, so I’ve seen my share of such threads and posts. It always makes me wonder.

A couple of times, I must have used PMS as a justification for a few wrong food choices. There, I confessed it. Well, it was all a lie. It’s not on my period that I’ve had my worst binges. Or the contrary. Or whatever. I’ve looked for a correlation, but I haven’t found any.

Sometimes, it feels like I’m not really a woman in that regards. Like I’m a man, or some kind of neutral organism who just happens to bleed every month. When it comes to losing weight, it must be quite the blessing, because I don’t experience anything special. My moods don’t change. The weight on the scales barely shifts by one pound, two at the very most. I don’t crave chocolate or pizza or any other kind of junk food. I don’t feel hungrier than usual, unless I’ve been stubbornly refusing to turn the heater on, in which case being cold will make me hungry, but this has nothing to do with having one’s period, I suppose.

Granted, getting on the pill fixed my problems of long periods, heavy pains and feeling anemic half of the time, but even before that, I never suffered sudden cravings nor had the urge to eat whatever on those days. I guess I was too busy lying down while some invisible sadist drove nails trough my uterus, one by one, sloooowly, and refused to stop before I had taken four or five painkillers pills and almost fainted at the office or at school because that’s just a stupid thing to do. At least pain is not a feeling that compels me to eat. Joy.

Well. Where was I going? Oh yes. For the reasons mentioned above, if you ever read about me overeating/making bad food choices “because I’m PMSing”? Please immediately call me out on this. Or hit me hard with a virtual shovel. Because it will be a lie and pathetic attempt at justifying what I should, plainly and simply, call a bad choice.

Being lucky in that regards doesn’t mean I have to use what may be a real problem for other women to cover up my silly behaviours.