Category: Nutrition

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How to survive the holiday food fest

The holidays are upon us, with Halloween just past, and Thanksgiving and Christmas right around the corner.

I don’t know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in the United States, mid-November through New Year’s Day is prime eating season, with large family gatherings that include lots of food, including pies, cakes, cookies — everything you may be trying to avoid.

One way to deal with this time of year is to just say, “Screw it! I’m going to eat whatever is put in front of me, and then I’ll get back on the wagon in January!”

Okay, you can do that, but wow, putting on 10 to 15 (or more) pounds doing that is not out of the question, if you are also lowering your number of workouts, and that can be disastrous. Well, it would be for me, anyway.

Another way to handle the holidays is to eat your way through it, but increase your number of workouts. That is not a bad idea, but remember, an average-sized slice of chocolate cake will run you 500 calories. Ten Oreos have about that same number of calories. A couple cups of mashed potatoes have that many, too.

It doesn’t take long for those calories to add up, so I hope your extra workout is one helluva good one!

The way I choose to survive the holidays is to do nothing out of the ordinary. Just because it’s the holidays, doesn’t mean I have to go off the deep end. Really!

So, as usual, I won’t eat any sweets. I don’t want them, I don’t need them. My blood sugar rides the fine line between okay and trouble, so I don’t want to shoot it over the top. That’s a personal choice for my own health — yours may not be so strict.

I will overeat at a meal or two or three (or four or five). That’s normal for me, and it’s one of the reasons I can’t see my abs as well as I’d like to. But remember, I am a regular guy, not a fanatic.

Will aunt Gladys be upset by the fact that I won’t eat her pecan pie? She should know better than to try to feed me that stuff.

Will mom be pissed because I won’t eat a second helping of her sausage dressing? Sorry, mom, it’s great, but one serving is enough.

One of the reasons I was overweight for so long was because I sacrificed my own health to keep order in the family. I didn’t want to upset aunt Gladys or mom. It was not until I broke that control others had over my diet, sacrificed their feelings rather than my body, that I was able to get into shape. Once my family saw the results of my new way of eating, their hurt feelings were salved.

Am I oversimplifying? Sure. My life is pretty simple.

You may have more pressure, because you are around more family than I am. Eat everything but in smaller portions. Make the right choices for you.

Most importantly, develop a strategy that will work for you, before the holidays start, and then stick to it. Believe me, you will be happy you did, when you start next year without the extra fat.

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What you need to know before you start P90X — Part 1

I am just a regular guy. I am not a gym rat. I have no desire to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, rather, what he used to look like).

If you are just a regular guy who is wondering if P90X is right for you, read on, because it just might be exactly what you need, so I’ve put together a set of “rules” that I came up with based on my experience with P90X.

RULE #1: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE — OR WANT TO BE — A MUSCLEHEAD TO BENEFIT FROM P90X.

What I usually tell people is that my primary fitness goal — as far as looks go — is to make sure my chest sticks out farther than my gut. To measure this, I simply put on a properly sized t-shirt and stand up straight. Is my gut pushing out against the shirt? If the answer is “yes”, I have more work to do.

If you are, like myself, a man of a certain age, i.e. 40-plus, your fitness goal probably also includes the shrinking of a lifetime’s worth of accumulated gut fat. You may have tried other fitness programs. You may have looked around at your peers, noted that most of them are even fatter than you — except that one skinny guy, who you’re pretty sure is an alcoholic, and the well-built dude, who must just have good genes — so you have resigned yourself to the fact that as we get older, we just get fatter, nothing can be done about that.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I figured I was out of time and out of luck. I was walking a lot (15,000 to 25,000 steps per day), I could do 200 pushups in an hour, I was doing crunches, I, er, owned a pullup bar. My age, I figured, must just be doing me in.

I had not heard of Tony Horton”s P90X — I guess I don’t watch enough late-night tv, or, maybe, on second thought, I watch just the right amount — until my brother told me about it. He had always been a stocky guy who had to watch his weight, and he’d been in-and-out of bodybuilding all his life, so when he described the program to me, I figured it was only for guys who loved to wear speedos, shave their body hair, and stare at themselves in the mirror all day, so I didn’t bite.

I guess I reached the tipping point in February 2010. I was tired of spending hours a day walking for exercise with no apparent health benefit. I was treading water — at best — with my weight. Well, okay, it was steadily creeping up from a recent low of 180 to a precarious 195. Still quite a way from my peak of fatness at 235, but I knew the signs. It was only a matter of time before I would be there again … and beyond.

I told my brother to order me P90X. That was easily the best fitness decision of my life.

All that leads me to the gist of the matter, which is that if you are a regular guy who just wants to get into shape, you may have seen the P90X infomercials and thought, “That’s not for me.” But it worked for me, and it can work for you, too.

RULE #2: STICK TO THE DIET PLAN.

Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.

I knew this going into P90X, so I was very willing to adjust my diet to 50% protein – 30% carbohydrate – 20% fat, as prescribed by the program’s diet guide.

“Diet!” you exclaim. “I thought this was an exercise program.”

Sure, it is, but please refer back to the first sentence of this section. “Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.” You can work out all you want, but if you are going to eat like a pig, you’ll continue to look like one, although, admittedly, you will probably have a pretty decent body underneath all the fat.

But this is no regular diet, so don’t worry that you will be starving yourself. According to the P90X calorie requirement calculator, I could have eaten about 2400 calories per day on their plan. I cut that back to a goal of 2000, so that way if I went over a bit, I was okay. You may not think that is a lot of calories, but when half of them are protein, it’s pretty challenging to hit that goal.

One thing I will tell you right now is that when I started P90X, I gave up all sugary sweets. Everything. No cake, no pie, no candy, no you-name-it. You obviously don’t need to do that, but I had to do it that way — go off it completely — because I am not good at moderation. I can honestly say that I haven’t missed that stuff at all. Perhaps in the future there will be a time when I can add some of it back into my diet — in severe moderation. I do still eat fruit and other naturally sweet things, but sugar for me is a no-no.

RULE #3: PUSH THE ENVELOPE, BUT TAKE IT SLOW AND STAY WITHIN YOUR ABILITY.

P90X is tough. You may find that you cannot, even at the end of the 90 days, finish the routines without modifications. For sure, for me, the pullups will take a lot more time to get where I want them to be. I can’t even come close to putting up the numbers they do in the videos.

That is really one of the beauties of the program. I mean, what good is an exercise program, if you can complete all the moves right from the start? I was on that program, and it involved walking for hours on end every day. Where did that get me, besides from here to there and back again?

My greatest fear when I started P90X was getting hurt, because that’s what I do – I tend get all excited about a program, and I throw myself in there, push it too far, hurt myself, and I am out of commission. That’s why I say “push the envelope, but take it slow”. You surely need to push yourself to improve, but don’t go overboard and get hurt.

Tony provides modified moves for many of the exercises. Use them, if you need to, with the goal being to keep working, and testing the water every so often, until you don’t need the modification — you may find this happens rather quickly.

RULE #4: TAKE EXTRA BREAKS WHEN YOU NEED THEM.

This is really a continuation of the last thought, but it’s important, so I want to beat it to death.

It’s a DVD. Hit pause. Take a few extra breaths, then start back up again. You will be amazed at how fast you improve.

RULE #5: WRITE IT DOWN!

Speaking of how quickly you improve, the best way to see it, besides looking in the mirror, is to use workout sheets to write down your reps and the weights you used.

This will also assist you next time you go to do the exercise, because you will easily be able to see how much weight you did last time, so you can quickly adjust the dumbbells. Trust me, it’s tough to remember, so writing everything down is a must.

And that’s it for this post, but I’ll post more P90X “rules” in the next few days. In fact, here’s Part 2.

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Insanity: The Asylum – DAY 15 – “Speed & Agility”

Yesterday, Day 14, was “Relief”, so no post necessary, but today marks the halfway point of The Asylum and I’m stoked about that. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been tough going, and I know it won’t get any easier. Only 15 days to go!

This was my third time through “Speed & Agility”, but it was my first time through it while on a low-carb diet. Yes, I am testing out how effective low carbs can be on my gut fat, while I am going through a high-intensity fitness program. If not now, when?

For the record, this was just my second day on low carbs, but I have to say, I didn’t feel that I was hampered by the lack of carbs. My energy level was high, high enough to where I was able to really push it, although, yeah, I did need many breaks along the way, as usual with this routine. I wrote more about it on the first time through, if you want to check that out.

I will be interested to see how low carbs affect me over the next few days, as the glycogen leaves my body and I turn to burning fat for fuel. This transformation may take a few weeks, but I’ve got time.

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Are carbs evil?

Hmmmm…. Are carbs really as evil as many people think they are?

When I first started my quest for fitness, I went on a calorie-restricted diet. I didn’t pay much attention to what the calories were — fat, carb, protein, I didn’t care. I only wanted to stay under a certain number of calories daily. I lost 50 pounds that way.

Of course, once I went off that diet — I don’t know about you, but I can’t keep that up forever — I regained a few pounds. 15, to be exact.

I was doing a whole lot of walking during that time, and I added in some pushups and crunches to try to get more into shape. My weight was staying pretty even, but I wanted to lose excess fat. Problem is, I didn’t really want to diet, because I know that I just can’t stay on diets of any kind. No diet? Lose weight? I figured more exercise is what I needed.

Enter P90X.

When I got my P90X package, I read through all the literature that came with it, including the diet plan, along with a proclamation that reshaping my body was really mostly a matter of diet, not exercise. Exercise helps get a body more fit, adds muscle, and, yes, does burn calories, I read, but it just doesn’t burn as many calories as we think. We need to control our diets to lose fat.

This makes sense, I just had never thought about it that way. I can illustrate with a conversation I had with my neighbor just this morning.

I asked him this morning, when we were discussing his eating and exercise habits (after he complained about not being able to lose his gut), “How many miles do you need to go to run off a bowl of ice cream?” A cup and a half of regular vanilla ice cream is around 400 calories. Premium stuff like Ben & Jerry’s and Godiva raise that to about 700 calories.

You burn about 100 calories per mile, so you’ll need to run 4 miles to burn off that cheap ice cream or 7 miles to burn off the good stuff. And that’s just the ice cream. Wasn’t that a quarter-pounder with cheese, a large fries, and a large soft drink for dinner? That’s 1300 more calories.

1700 to 2000 calories. That is all the energy you need for a full day, and that was just one meal. Can you run 17 to 20 miles every day?

Why do we consume that many calories! That stuff tastes good! But why does it taste so good?

Sugar.

If you were to try to eat that ice cream without the sugar in it, how much do you think you’d eat? Have you tried drinking heavy cream straight? Not that tasty.

As for the meal before the ice cream, the large soda is the big offender, so good only because of the sugar. I drink sparkling water, and it’s not that easy to guzzle that stuff. But if you give me Coke? I can go through a few in no time.

There are carbs in the burger’s bun and potatoes the fries are made from, too, of course, but not so much sugar, so let’s focus on not the sugar itself.

Why can I drink so much soda? Sugar.

Why can I eat so much ice cream — and believe me, I never stopped at the 1.5 cups in the example above, unless that’s all I had on hand? Sugar.

Therein, I think, lies the key to controlling our diets. Lose the sugar. Sugar — in whatever form, whether it’s pure cane sugar, or high fructose corn syrup, or whatever — just tastes so good and therefore makes it too easy to consume too many calories.

Fats and proteins, on the other hand, make it much more difficult to overconsume.

When I started P90X, I dedicated myself to the provided diet plan, which required me to get 50% of my calories from protein, 30% from carbs, and 20% from fat. I had never eaten like that before! I’d been on low-carb diets, but not high-protein diets. And you know what? It was hard to get enough protein calories.

Do you know how much white fish I needed to consume to get half of my calories from protein each day? Almost 3 pounds (for 1000 protein calories of a 2000-calorie diet). That’s a lot of fish. Or about the same amount of boneless, skinless chicken breast. Or I could eat 7 turkey burgers (without the bun), although that would put me over my fat limit.

That’s when I started using protein shakes to supplement my meals, just to ensure I’d get enough protein.

Now, you could probably make the same argument about fat that I’m making about sugar. Yes, you can consume a lot of fat in one sitting. A fatty piece of meat usually tastes better than a lean one. Butter sure does make things taste better.

I don’t think it’s quite the same for me. I don’t tend to eat that much fat, anyway, so quitting sweets, removing everything from my diet that is created solely to provide sweetness — things like cakes, cookies, cinnamon rolls — seemed more sensible. You may be different.

Back to the original question: Are carbs evil? No. But for me, sugar may very well be. It just makes foods taste so good. So I avoid it.

How about you? Is sugar pushing your calorie count over the top?

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Setting your own rules (and then following them)

I’ve never had a problem with rules.

That’s not to say that I like rules when other people impose arbitrary ones on me — I don’t — but I understand why that happens. After growing up in a semi-strict household, attending a Baptist university for 2 years, and spending 20 years in the military, I suppose I’m just accustomed to living by rules.

When it comes down to it, I believe the main reason I don’t mind rules is because I like a streamlined life without a lot of surprises, i.e. I don’t want to deal with the consequences of breaking the rules.

For example:

  • I don’t smoke pot, because it’s illegal and I don’t like the variables involved
  • I overpay on my taxes, because I don’t want to end up on the short end of an audit
  • I drive an acceptable speed on the highway, because I don’t want to deal with being pulled over

And so on…. Some would call me overly cautious. Whatever.

Anyway, when I find myself in need of some added discipline in my nutrition consumption, I set new rules for myself.

Recently I have found myself staying up later, and so doing a lot of late-night snacking — sometimes 1000 calories worth. That’s not good! I don’t need those extra calories, and there is no real reason to be doing the snacking.

That called for a new rule: No eating after 8:00pm.

At various times in my life, I

  • quit caffeine for 18 months, because I wanted to see if life was better without it — it wasn’t
  • quit drinking for 18 months, because I was having liver issues — my liver is fine, but now I drink a whole lot less, because I found I enjoyed not drinking
  • quit grains for 6 months, because I wanted to see what that was like — it was okay, but I’ve added grains back into my diet in quite a bit more moderation than before
  • quit eating meat for 36 months, because I wanted to break my fast-food habit — it worked!

For whatever reasons, I set those rules for those times in my life when I felt I needed them, and I somehow stuck with them until they were no longer necessary.

How about you? Can you create some rules to help yourself reach a goal? If you think that might work for you, create those rules and stick to them!