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Are you addicted to food?

I hear excuses from people all the time about how they would like to eat cleaner, but they just don’t feel they can do it. I have one word for those people: ADDICTION.

They are addicted to foods. Either to sugar, or grains, or dairy, or whatever.

Someone recently posted on Facebook that she felt so much better after giving up dairy, but she was unsure whether she could stay off it. There is but one word for that: ADDICTION.

That person is addicted to dairy.

Well, we rationalize, if we even admit that we have an addiction. “At least it’s food I’m addicted to, not some kind of drug.”

And you know what? According to Miriam-Webster online, you’d be right, because a drug is defined as “a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body.”

The key there, though, is the phrase “other than food”. I would argue that if you are addicted to it, sugar is not really a food. If you are addicted to it, dairy is not really a food. For those of us who are addicted to those substances, they are not foods. They are drugs.

Even if you don’t buy that concept, let’s explore the word “addiction”, which is defined by that same dictionary as “persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be physically, psychologically, or socially harmful”. Hmmmmm….

So you know sugar is harming you physically, by making you fat and generally wreaking havoc on your body, but you continue to consume it? ADDICTION.

You are aware that you feel a lot better without dairy in your system, but you continue to consume it? ADDICTION.

I am not picking on sugar and dairy here. They are just two common examples. Maybe your poison is gluten or alcohol or … you name it.

Many times people feel they cannot give up certain “foods”, so they continue to struggle with their fitness goals. Then they have a heart attack or some other brush with death, and, suddenly, they wake up to the wisdom of a cleaner diet, those “foods” are no longer so important.

Of course, that is assuming they survived their brushes with death. According to AllHeartAttack.com, about 33% of people who have heart attacks in the United States do not survive. That’s 500,000 deaths each year.

Eating cleaner after a brush with death is almost like installing the burglar alarm after the burglary — still effective, but it sure would be nice to never have been burglarized in the first place, right?

One other thing: I am so tired of the “life’s too short” argument. “Life’s too short to stop eating cake.” “Life’s too short to quit eating burgers.”

Life is too short. So I’m going to do whatever I can to make it longer. I may die before you, but it won’t be because I didn’t try.

Don’t let your food addictions stand in the way of your fitness. When you find yourself saying, “I’d eat cleaner, but I just can’t give up [insert ‘food’ item here],” think about what you are saying. Are you struggling with a food addiction?

 

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How thin is too thin?

I recently visited Kohl’s to, finally, get some new new shirts.

I am a t-shirt guy. I enjoy a good t-shirt. My favorite bands have cool t-shirts. I am comfortable in a t-shirt. However, there are times when a t-shirt is not appropriate attire, or so my wife tells me, anyway.

Therefore, I own several polo shirts. You know, the kind that are cotton, have 2 or 3 buttons and a bottom that you can leave untucked, which is how I prefer to wear my shirts. The untucking is not a holdover from when I was fat and just didn’t want the outline of my gut to be so well-defined. I remember being a skinny kid in high school and not tucking in my shirt. Not sure why, but I dislike it.

Anyway, at Kohl’s I found a couple shirts I liked, and on my way to the register, I saw the Levi’s. I thought, “I could use some new jeans.” I only buy Levi’s, because I like the way they fit.

The fact is, though, that I’d just recently spent a couple hundred bucks on Levi’s, and I’m not made of money, so even though the jeans I had were a bit too big now, they fit well enough, so…. But, still, out of curiosity, I thought I’d try some on.

I grabbed a pair of skinny 31s and a pair of regular fit 30s off the shelf. I didn’t really think I could fit into the 30s, but, what the heck, let’s just see.

The skinny 31 waist jeans fit well. I almost bought them.

Then I tried on the regular fit 30s. They fit, too. Okay, to be honest, they are a little snug, but I could easily close and zip them, and I could wear them in a pinch.

Size 30 waist? Really?

When I started my quest for fitness, I was wearing 42s and looking to buy 44s.

The smallest size Levi’s I’ve ever worn was 28 waist. That was back in the 70s, when the waist rode higher on Levi’s, but, still, to actually be able to close and zip a pair of size 30s today … wow, that was huge for me.

I didn’t buy the jeans, and will keep wearing my fairly new 32s, but, it got me to thinking: How thin is too thin? I mean, people develop eating disorders because they keep looking in the mirror and perceiving themselves to be fat, when they are not fat, right?

I did a bit of introspection, and, suffice to say, I am not too thin. I can still grab fat around my waist. I cannot see all my abs, so I can remain healthy and still be thinner. Will I be comfortable much thinner? Will I be able to maintain thinner if I get there? Possibly not. But I want to get there and find out — I at least want to give it a shot.

It has taken 5 years and 75 pounds for me to get where I am, so it’s not like I’m rushing it. I don’t obsess about it. But each of us must figure out  for ourselves along the way how thin is “too thin”.

I am not sure what “too thin” is for me. I only know that I have not yet reached that point.

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I don’t trust nutrition research

I read a lot about nutrition, and one thing is very clear to me: No matter what you want to believe about nutrition, there is research available to prove you are right.

What does that mean? Are the researchers mistaken? Are the experiments flawed? Are they lying to us?

Some of the research is surely flawed. It’s just too difficult to experiment on humans, because there is only so much control you can ethically exercise over them. There are always plenty of external variables entering into the equation, so we can never get fully controlled results.

Mistakes can be made, too, even by the most conscientious researchers, but as for whether they purposefully lie to us, well, I’ll just say that some of them may be overly biased.

In reality, though, even if all the research is perfectly controlled and unbiased, it is still only reporting generalities. When you try to apply generalities to individuals, that simply doesn’t work.

Look around? Aren’t there extremely thin people, extremely fat people, and many in between? Do you really think that if you put them all on the same diet, they’d all end up with the same body type? NO! Some people are naturally thin. Some are naturally fat. Some are naturally in between.

We all know the person who went on a low-carb diet and lost a ton of weight. We also have friends who lost weight on low-fat. Calorie restriction. Carb cycling. Food grouping. All those diets work to a certain degree, but some may work better for you than others do.

And that is really the point. You need to try things out, see how they affect you. Did you read that whole milk is the thing that will put your energy over the top? Try it out and see how you feel. Are you enamored with the idea of a vegetarian diet as a weight loss regimen? Try it out and see if it works.

Remember, in any nutrition research, you will read that “75% of the subjects” had this result, or “54% of the subjects” had that result. It’s never 100%, because there is no way that the same diet will affect 100% of people the exact same way.

So, don’t put your faith in nutrition research. Continue to read and learn, but do your own research, on your own body, and figure out what is best for you.

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Are your clothes hiding a mess?

When my wife and I decided to get a new kitchen range recently, we went with stainless steel. We like the look of it, and it shows everything, so, at least in my mind, that means it’s easier to keep clean, because you can see all the junk that has been splattered onto it. It’s in plain view.

A few months after our purchase, I updated my facebook status, saying how happy I was with our decision to go with a glass cooktop, double oven, and stainless steel finish.

One of my friends commented that he hates stainless steel, “because it’s so hard to keep clean.”

I countered with my thought on the subject — pretty much what I wrote above — and that was the end of the discussion.

It occurred to me only a few months later that what my friend really meant, although he’d never say it this way, was that stainless steel is “harder to leave dirty.”

In other words, his non-stainless steel range was probably a mess, but it was okay, because you couldn’t see the mess.

How about your body? Is it a mess that you are able to hide with loose clothing?

That only works for so long. At some point, you will no longer be able to disguise the fat. In fact, I am guessing that is why women in our society seem to be more prone to dieting than men, because women generally wear tighter-fitting clothes, so their excess baggage is more often on display.

Do you really think you look okay? Stop kidding yourself and others. If you are overweight, stop covering it up and do something about it.

And, really, I hope you understand that my point has nothing to do with the way you look. It has to do with your health. Overweight is just not as healthy as thinner. We all know that.

Contact me. I’m here to help.

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You can’t out-exercise a bad diet

I saw this statement again recently, and, while I have touched on it before in other posts, I thought I should finally write a full article about it, because this is a very important principle to understand.

YOU CANNOT OUT-EXERCISE A BAD DIET!

It’s just that simple.

While 20% to 25% of your body composition is controlled by your exercise regimen, 75% to 80% of your body composition is determined by what you eat.

So, then, why do some of the most health-conscious people I know think they can eat just about whatever they want, whenever they want, and then hit the gym to work it off?

A Big Mac Meal, with a medium fries and a 21-ounce Coke, comes in at 1130 calories. Oh, but you drink Diet Coke? 920 calories. That does not include ketchup, which will add a few more carbs (and calories). But let’s not quibble.

A Big Mac Meal is not an absurdly sized meal. It’s easily edible by people for lunch or supper. Many people enjoy the flavors of the Big Mac Meal. If you are one of those people, cool. No judgment here. I’ve had my share of Big Mac Meals.

Don’t like Big Macs? Here are some other typical meals. The calorie totals include a zero-calorie beverage (like diet soda or water).

  • Arby’s – Medium roast beef sandwich with medium curly fries – 990 calories
  • Taco Bell – 2 Beef Burrito Supremes – 840 calories
  • McDonald’s Breakfast – 2 Sausage McMuffins with egg and 1 hash brown – 1050 calories
  • KFC – Spicy Crisp chicken breast with cole slaw and beans – 810 calories
  • 2 home-made cupcakes with frosting – 1000 calories

Okay, so each of those has 800+ calories. Let’s see what the Mayo Clinic says about calories burned by exercise.

The bigger you are, the more calories you burn, so we include a range of weights. You can adjust the numbers to approximate your calorie burn, based on your weight.

Activity (1-hour)Weight of person and calories burned
160 pounds200 pounds240 pounds
Aerobics, high impact533664796
Aerobics, low impact365455545
Basketball game584728872
Bicycling, < 10 mph, leisure292364436
Resistance (weight) training365455545
Running, 5 mph606755905
Running, 8 mph8611,0741,286
Skiing, cross-country496619741
Skiing, downhill314391469
Stair treadmill657819981
Swimming, laps423528632
Tai chi219273327
Walking, 2 mph204255305
Walking, 3.5 mph314391469

I weigh around 160, so that means to burn off that single Big Mac Meal, I’d need to

  • Walk rather quickly for 3 hours
  • Run pretty fast for a little more than an hour
  • Play basketball or hit the stair stepper — without dogging it or taking any breaks — for about 90 minutes
  • Do about 2.5 hours of weight training

Again, that is just to work off one meal.

“Well,” you might reason, “that’s not impossible.”

I will grant you that. Difficult, but not impossible to work off that one meal, but if I am making poor dining decisions all the time, forget about it.

If eating that stuff is worth the extra workout time to you, that’s your decision to make, but it’s not worth it to me. I’d rather have my body spending time building itself than expending energy battling the things I ingest.

I have had this conversation with numerous people over the years. There are two rationalizations I generally hear:

  1. Everything in moderation.
  2. Life’s too short to restrict myself.

“Everything in moderation” – You know what? If you are otherwise engaging in health-conscious dining, and can eat from the above-listed or equivalent meals only once per week, I’m with you. Go for it. I doubt many people can do that, though, because once you are eating mostly clean, you simply won’t want the Arby’s sandwich and fries, or the Big Mac, or the cupcakes. That’s what happened to me. But if you can do it, and you really enjoy a weekly pair of Burrito Supremes, then go for it.

“Life’s too short to restrict myself” – I have an easy answer to that, because as far as I’m concerned, life is too short, and I don’t want to make it even shorter by eating what I consider to be junk food that can cause health problems. I don’t measure my life’s success by what I eat, I measure it by what I do, and the longer I live, the more I can do. ‘Nuff said.

Life is a continuous series of choices, so staying informed and making the best choices based on the best information available is important. Once you have all the facts you can gather, then you can decide whether you can out-exercise your diet or not. I choose not to let my diet stand in the way of my fitness goals. How about you?

If you’d like some no-obligation help with your diet or exercise goals, please feel free to contact me. I’m here to help.