Posts

Posted on

An illogical way to manage your health

The other day my friend was sick with the flu. She asked me which medicine I’d recommend. I didn’t have a recommendation, because I have not had the flu in quite a few years, so I queried my friends and family and came up with a consensus best medication.

I passed this along to my friend. She looked the medication up on the internet, and said, “I don’t want to use that one, because I’ve heard it can cause strokes.”

Now, I have no problem with that. I try to be pretty careful with what I put into my body, and, in fact, the kinds of risks she was citing are the very ones that keep me from taking any kind of unnecessary pharmaceutical products.

However, the irony of this situation is that my friend, the one who made this statement of concern about ingesting a drug that “can cause strokes”, is quite a bit overweight and has a hard time finishing any meal without a sugary dessert.

Excess body fat is definitely a factor in heart disease, cancer, liver problems — you name it. Refined sugar is well-documented to be a major culprit in the accumulation of that excess body fat.

My friend knows all these things — we’ve had discussions about them — yet she chooses to continue to risk her life with her poor dietary habits.

Her life. What she wants to do is fine by me.

And you, too. You are free to choose to destroy yourself with your poor dietary decisions.

But don’t, then, try to sell me that you do not want to take a medication, because it might cause a stroke, or liver damage (as many painkillers do), or whatever.

That kind of reasoning, that illogical approach to life, is just too annoying.

Posted on

Losing inches off the waist

It’s been more than two weeks since I went off primal eating — where I ate very few carbs and did not count calories — and back to 50/30/20 — where I eat 50% protein, 30% carbs, and 20% fat, and stick to 1800 to 2200 calories daily.

My waist is down an inch. After about 9 months of stalemate, with my waist not budging, it is now down an inch in 16 days.

What does this mean?

It’s only been 16 days, and, as usual, I am not applying the scientific method to these experiences — my environment is not nearly as controlled as it should be for that — so I am cautious about assuming a definite cause-effect relationship between the lower caloric intake and the waistline shrinkage.

However, I am hypothesizing that I was simply consuming too many calories on primal. As I said, I didn’t count calories on primal, but looking back, I know I was eating a ton of salami for snacks (I can buy those 3-pound Columbus salami at Costco — delicious with an apple), plus a lot of protein smoothies blended with fruit, and whatever else — as long as it was not full of processed carbs or grains — whenever else I wanted.

Now that I am watching my calories again, I am losing the inches.

I believe I’ll stick with this way of calorie-restricted eating for a while, but I’m going to mix up the balance. I’ll keep the calories to 1800-2200, but my only other constraint is that I’ll want to get at least 150 grams of protein a day.

I say calorie-restricted, but, really 1800-2200 calories a day, with a focus on protein, is not bad, i.e. I’m not going to feel hungry, you know, like those 1200-calorie diets.

I’m doing this, because the only way I can know what works for me is to experiment on me. I know I don’t feel right when I eat a lot of carbs — I get run down and logy — so I want to turn the tables a bit and eat more fat than carbs, or at least the same amount as a percentage of calories consumed.

As long as I keep losing inches off my waist, I’ll be happy.

Posted on

Yoga is an important piece of the fitness puzzle

During my recovery weeks, which occur for one week after every three or four weeks of training, I don’t do any heavy weight training, or anything too intense, for that matter.

I generally do a lot of yoga. Why?

Yoga builds strength. Yoga builds balance. Yoga builds self-control. And, you know what else? Yoga is hard!

A year after starting P90X, I still can’t get through a full yoga workout without stopping. The moves don’t seem that hard, but, wow, all those downward dogs, upward dogs, and warrior moves Tony does really present a challenge. I usually have to take a break every 15 minutes or so, more often toward the end.

But I keep doing yoga, and one of the reasons is because it is hard. I cannot wait for the day when I’m doing triangle pose and thinking, “Wow, this isn’t too difficult.” I think that day is years off, but I’m looking forward to it.

There is a mental side to yoga that Tony doesn’t really get into too much, and I don’t either. I think the physical benefits are plenty of motivation for me to keep returning to those yoga DVDs.

If you have P90X and don’t like the Yoga X DVD, you are not alone. It’s 90 minutes long, which is more than many of us have time for. Tony Horton has provided, as part of his One-On-One series, two other excellent substitutes for Yoga X: “Fountain of Youth” and Patience: Hummingbird”. I primarily use those DVDs. There is a yoga disk in the latest volume of One-On-One — I don’t recommend it. There are not enough verbal cues, and, in yoga, I think those are very necessary, because you just cannot always see the television.

You may have not given yoga a chance, but maybe you should. I think you’ll appreciate the benefits.

Posted on

How to do pull ups, when you can’t do pull ups

If you are like me, you struggle with pullups. Pushups I can do, but those back exercises are difficult. In fact, when I did the fitness test before starting Tony Horton’s P90X, I was able to do 33 pushups, but only 1 pullup.

Hmmmmmm….

During P90X, Tony suggests doing chair-assisted pullups, where you do as many pullups as you can, then put your toe on a chair to help you do a few more.

This didn’t work well for me, because (1) all my usable chairs have wheels, and (2) the floor below my pullup bar is tile, so even trying to use a step stool was a problem, because it kept slipping.

I struggled with the step stool all the way through my first iteration of Tony Horton’s P90X. I tried repositioning it, putting something behind it, trying to keep it in place, but finally ended up with it right below my body, which pretty much removed a lot of the resistance and, therefore, rendered the exercise less useful.

As I continued the program and got tired of struggling with the stepstool, I tried using an exercise band, which is another option Tony suggests. Using the band did better for me, so I stuck with that for a while, but eventually I had to acknowledge that a rubber band just does not provide the resistance that a 180-pound body can. I had to start doing real pullups.

Problem was that I didn’t feel I could get enough work in during the time allotted on the DVDs. Tony is a pullup master, and he whips right through them, but I would end up quitting when I thought I still had a few in me.

The answer finally came to me. It takes a bit more time, and requires a pause if I’m using the DVDs, although often, these days, I do the workouts without them.

Here it is: I just do as many pullups as I can do in one minute. I can rest, kip, stand on the ground between each pullup, if I need to, but I do as many as I can do in one minute.

I use my battery operated kitchen timer, set it for a minute, and start the timer before each set. I don’t stop trying to do pullups before the beep.

This gives me the resistance I need to progress, and also gives me a number of real pullups to record, instead of chair assist or band method. Because real pullups are what I want to be doing, that works for me.

Posted on

Which shoes should you wear for P90X (or for any workout)?

I am writing this quick post for those who, like me, had that question before starting Tony Horton’s P90X. I didn’t know what kind of shoes to buy for the workouts, so I googled it, of course, but I never found a really good answer. Or, rather, I found too many answers.

Having done P90X for a year now, here is my answer: NO SHOES!

No shoes is a no-brainer for yoga and Ab Ripper X, of course, but how about for resistance training and plyo?

Based on the recommendations I found online, I started with some court shoes, to give my feet and ankles extra support. I found this to be uncomfortable, but I wore them anyway, thinking I should.

Then, a few weeks into the program, I read Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint and started visiting his Mark’s Daily Apple website. Mark is a proponent of bare feet. That’s how our ancient ancestors trekked the earth, so should we, he says. Of course, trekking the earth barefoot is not necessarily safe, so he prefers footwear that emulates bare feet, like Vibram Five Fingers, but, dude, dem’s some spensy shoes and I just can’t afford it.

So … barefoot it was!

And still is.

I love working out with bare feet. The only time it’s a problem — besides when I stub my toe on a dumbbell — is when doing Toe Roll Iso Lunges. That move puts a bit of stress on the toes of my back foot, but I endure it, and my toes are stronger because of it.

Don’t have shoes for P90X? Try working out without them — you may like it, I know I do!