NewRachael

So, you guys aren’t going to believe this, but I forgot I had a blog for a while there.

Now that I’m back, you should know that I’m writing this in a very sleep-deprived state.  I’ve been sleeping somewhat regularly, but on an incredibly odd schedule.  I go to bed at about two in the afternoon and wake up at ten in the evening, lather, rinse, repeat.  Basically, if I were to move the European time zone tomorrow, I would be going to bed at 10 PM and waking up at 6 AM, which would be ideal.  And I wouldn’t even have to worry about jet lag.

Since the beginning of the month, I’ve lost six pounds, which is good, but not nearly enough.  I was really hoping for some kind of drastic “omg!” weight loss this month, but this just goes to show that eating well isn’t enough if you aren’t getting regular exercise.  If only I burned as many calories feeling guilty about NOT going to the gym as I would have burned by actually GOING to the gym, I’m sure I’d be seeing results.

As you can see from the FoodFeed, I’ve been eating well, although I’ve been eating at completely random times of the day.  I had to stop saying “breakfast, lunch and dinner” because breakfast was at midnight, lunch was at dawn, and dinner was at noon.  Utter madness!

Disclaimer: I got a lot of the following info from Wikipedia, which isn’t good enough for English teachers but is good enough for me.

So, what is the correlation between sleep and weight loss? Apparently, there’s a big one and there have been a ton of studies done on it.  Like seemingly everything else in our lives, it’s all about hormones.  There are two big hormones that affect us: one is Ghrelin and the other is Leptin.

Ghrelin sounds like some kind of goblin/gremlin combination, but it’s actually the stuff that determines how hungry we are.  Surprise, surprise: thinner people have less Ghrelin in their systems than obese people do.  The more Ghrelin, the more hungry you’ll feel and the less you’ll want to sleep.

The other hormonal anti-sleep culprit is something called Leptin, which is the stuff that tells us when we’re full. If you don’t sleep a full night, your Leptin levels will decrease and you’ll have a harder time discerning when you should stop eating.  (Also, for the potheads out there: marijuana blocks your Leptin receptors, which is why you get the munchies.)

So, really, when we’re not sleeping enough, we’re eating too much because of these two factors.  Another cool thing that the scientists found was typically, when people who are height-weight proportionate are asleep, their Ghrelin levels increase and Leptin levels decrease overnight.  That’s why we all wake up hungry and want breakfast.  If you don’t sleep enough, your hormones don’t have a chance to “reset” themselves correctly.

Next post: is drinking all this coffee terribly bad for my diet?

This is probably one of the funniest things I’ve seen on YouTube in a while. MrChiCity3 goes to McDonald’s to “do something that’s never done before,” and orders one of everything on the dollar menu.  Being that I am on a strictly fast food-free diet, I wondered how many calories his order would be.  Here’s what he orders:

1. double cheeseburger (no cheese) - 340 calories, 15 grams of fat
2. small fries - 230 calories, 11 grams of fat
3. two pies - 500 calories, 26 grams of fat
4. three cookies - 480 calories, 24 grams of fat
5. parfait - 160 calories, 2 grams of fat
6. Apple Dippers - 105 calories, 1/2 gram of fat
7. small orange Hi-C with no ice - 160 calories, no fat
8. McChicken - 360 calories, 16 grams of fat
9. side salad with ranch dressing - 190 calories, 15 grams of fat

I did make some assumptions here: I watched a few of his other videos and he said ranch dressing was his favorite, so I assumed he got the Newman’s ranch dressing with his side salad, and I factored in the caramel dip with the apples.

Now, lucky for him, his McDonald’s was out of parfaits and only had one cookie in stock.  The grand total of all his calories (minus the parfait and two of the cookies) is:

2,045 calories and 81 grams of fat!

No WONDER I gained so much weight eating fast food all the time.  Look at that!  He may be a Dollar Menu Millionaire, but it’s like Biggie said: more money, more problems… like hypertension and high cholesterol.

P.S. If you liked the McDonald’s video, I definitely recommend watching the reenactment of MrChiCity getting a parking ticket. HILARITY.

I don’t know how it happened, but yesterday, I only ate 846 calories.  I’ve been tracking every single thing I eat in the FoodFeed, but it’s not until the end of the day that I sit down and plug it all into SparkPeople.

I love SparkPeople.  If you’re looking for a way to track your diet, it’s the best free one out there.  I use it to track nutrition and workouts every single day.  However, when I scroll down to the bottom of my nutrition page, I see a box like this one:

HOW AM I LACKING THAT MUCH POTASSIUM?  I ate two bananas that day! What the hell is potassium, anyway?

If I’m understanding Wikipedia correctly, potassium is the stuff that keeps our cells from absorbing too much salt, and not eating enough foods with potassium can increase your risk for high blood pressure.  Apparently I’m not alone in low K consumption, as most people in the United States only get half the recommended necessary potassium.

In the pursuit of higher potassium, I went to the drug store last night to look for some potassium supplements, but it turns out that you can only get them in doses of 99mg, or 3% of the recommended amount.  The vitamin bottle says not to take more than one a day, so it’s not as easy as just eating 20 potassium tablets to balance out a deficiency.  I decided that buying a separate bottle wasn’t worth it, and switched from One-a-Day Women’s (which has no potassium) to One-a-Day Weight Smart Advanced (which has 99mg).

So how in the world do I make up the other 2,000mg of missing potassium in my diet? It turns out that there are a ton of foods that are high in potassium that don’t really seem to have any correlation to each other.  Apricots, peas, baked potatoes, veal, tomato paste and sunflower seeds are some of them.  There’s also a salt substitute which uses potassium as its main ingredient, and 1/4 a teaspoon is 10% of your daily recommended intake, more than the amount in my vitamins. I might have to give that a try!

All in all, 4,500mg a day may not have been as elusive as I originally thought.  You win this time, potassium.  This time.

My last diet failed because of chairs.

It sounds ridiculous, right?  That’s because it is ridiculous if you completely disregard the fact that it’s true.

Over the past week, I’ve been taking time to really examine how and why my eating habits have changed over time.  What have I been doing differently this week than I had done in weeks past?  How was I successful last time, and what disrupted my patterns of eating and exercise?

I would wake up in the morning, have breakfast, go to work, come home for lunch, then go back to work, come home for dinner, and then go off to school.  What changed in May of 2007 that would upset this routine?

Chairs.

My ex-roommate Jen moved out at the end of April and took her wooden kitchen chairs with her.  From then on, I didn’t sit in the kitchen to eat my meals because there was nowhere to sit.  May 2007 was when I started eating every meal in front of the computer.  Over the following year and a half, it’s developed to the point where I feel like I can’t complete a task on the computer without first thinking, “Well… let me get a snack before I do this assignment.”  No longer are my schoolwork and my meals separate entities.  I have to fix this, so here’s the new rule:

NO EATING IN MY BEDROOM.

AT ALL.

EVER.

I’m off to buy some chairs.

I’m a big snacker. BIG snacker. When I try to diet, I have to work really hard to keep the bad food out of my house, or else I’ll eat it all in one sitting. The only solution for somebody who can’t resist eating a whole package of Oreos is to not buy Oreos, so I’m keeping myself honest by showing my food to the world.

Here’s my cabinet, where the majority of my food resides.  I’m a total carb lover, so I’m trying to train myself to snack on nuts instead of things like crackers.  The least healthy thing you’ll find on this shelf is some hot chocolate mix left over from a Christmas party.  (By the way, hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps makes a delicious holiday party drink.  Totally unhealthy, but really tasty to sugar addicts like me.)

The fruit bowl sits out on the kitchen table where it’s easy to grab something if you’re in a rush.  We swiped the gigantic lemons from our neighbor’s tree… just one of the perks of living in Arizona!

Let me introduce you to my secret love of cheese.  On the upper shelf, you’ll see a box of low-fat feta, my cheese of choice, as well as a few slices of swiss.  It’s easy to throw some romaine in a bowl with some feta, cucumber and olives and call it a greek salad!  The feta sticks to the lettuce so well that sometimes I don’t even use dressing.

My frozen food is along the top shelf of the freezer… you know, the shelf that looks like somebody knew their food would be photographed for a blog.  If you’re wondering what the weird tupperware container is on top of the ice, that’s food for my roommate’s sugar glider, Rocky.  He eats a mixture of wheat germ and chicken baby food and some other stuff.

Last (but not least) a whole shelf devoted to tea and tea accessories. My roommate is English, and she got me hooked on tea.  My favorite is English Breakfast (the blue box) but Throat Coat is a lifesaver when I’ve been talking too much.

So… that’s it. Oh and if you have a blog about dieting, please link me in the comments because I’d love to see what everybody else is up to.

Bye until tomorrow!

This morning, as I embarked on my first day of genuine exercise, music was both a motivator and a timekeeper for me during the five-minute daily required stretch period I talked about yesterday.  I opened iTunes and sorted by track length, then stretched through the entirety of Spoon’s “My Mathematical Mind.” Other songs right around the 5:00 mark:

• Ryan Adams - La Cienaga Just Smiled
• MGMT - Kids
• Badly Drawn Boy - Take the Glory
• The Killers - All These Things That I’ve Done
• The Postal Service - We Will Become Silhouettes
• Cake - I Will Survive (this is a good motivator, too!)
• Beastie Boys - Paul Revere
• Geto Boys - Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta (from Office Space)

After that, I started with a two-mile walk.  Tomorrow I plan to walk 2.1 miles, then the next day 2.2, until I get up to four miles every morning.  Ideally I would have gotten my heart rate up to 155, but because walking isn’t too strenuous an activity, I topped out at about 128, which is 65% of my maximum heart rate instead of the recommended 80%, but I feel like I have to start slowly to avoid injuring myself.

So what’s the best music out there for a workout?  If you ask me, it’s Girl Talk’s recent mix album Feed the Animals. Best of all, you can get it for FREE at the Girl Talk website.  Just go here and enter your contribution (which can be anything, even $0.00) and download the mp3s. It’s an upbeat mix of TONS of songs that somehow flow together perfectly.  If you try it out and like it, or you have another good workout music suggestion, please let me know in the comments.

Happy workout!

If you haven’t heard, this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to track a weight loss program online.  For a year (August 2006 through August 2007) I did an almost-daily video blog with constant updates on my diet and how things were going.  I started then at 242 pounds, got down to 212, then back up to 235.  When I ended the vlog, I breathed a big sigh of relief and relaxed everything, including my eating habits. In the year and a half since, I’ve gained another 35 pounds.

The problem with yo-yo dieters such as myself is that when we gain the weight back, we also lose muscle.  When I have since tried to diet without exercise, it turns out my body was losing muscle tissue, leaving me feeling weak all the time while not losing any weight at all.  (I’m cribbing largely here from You: On a Diet, and you can rest assured that Dr. Oz knows a lot more about this than I do.)

So what is the solution?  It turns out there are a few key things that we should be doing:

Stretching/Flexibility exercise: 5 minutes a day

• Women’s Health Magazine has some good tutorials on stretching. Move 1 is my favorite because it helps release all the tension in my back.

Cardio: 20 minutes, three times a week at 80% of your maximum heart rate

• Figure out 80% of your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. For example, I’m 26, so 220 - 26 = 194. 194 * .8 = 155.2, so I should be doing twenty minutes of cardio three times a week at about 155 beats per minute.  If you don’t use the gym or prefer not to hold onto the censors while you’re on the treadmill or elliptical machine, I recommend the Sportline Solo Heart Monitor watch, which I’ve had for over a year but plan to use a lot as I start doing more walks outside.

Resistance training: 30 minutes a week

• This is definitely more than I would have thought to do, but broken down into 10-minute segments, it doesn’t seem like that much.

Walking: 10,000 steps throughout the day with at least 30 minutes of continuous walking

• If you don’t have a pedometer to count your steps, check out this one (it’s only three bucks).  Another option is a little more work, but it’s good if you can get 10,000 steps into your workout.  The average female step length is 2.2 feet, which means that we get about 2,400 steps per mile.  Four miles will get you to 9,600, and if you’ve made it that far, you’re probably good to go with factoring the other 400 steps into your daily routine.  For example, it takes me 100 steps just to take the trash out.  If you don’t know how far your walks are taking you, use Google Maps to recreate your route.

So, all told that doesn’t seem like a ton of exercise, and definitely doable.  I think I’m going to try to start doing two miles of walking a day and then up it by a quarter of a mile every couple days until I’m doing four miles religiously.

Here goes nothing!

Well, it’s been five days since the New Year… how are your resolutions coming along?

I’ve definitely been eating better; I’m not eating fast food for every meal, I’ve completely forsaken candy bars, and I’m slowly cutting out the caffeine even in the wake of a terrible caffeine headache this morning.  But what about exercise?  Where in the day are we supposed to exercise if our schedule is busy?

My old excuse was a good one: I went from bed to work to school to bed again with little time for a workout.  But now that my schedule is flexible and my classes are online… now that my time is my own and I can portion it out however I please, why am I unable to commit to exercising?

The problem is that I no longer can point to time constraints, but I can still look at all my obligations.  “How am I supposed to find time to exercise when I have to do all this Access programming and do a report on Saul Bass and write an essay on the junk food tax?” There are no more blocks of time, only deadlines.  For me, this is just not working.

In order to commit to a certain time period for exercise in my day, I need to assign blocks of time for the rest of my schoolwork and housework.  Most importantly: the exercise must come first.  I understand that a lot of people choose to work out at the end of the day, after they come home from the office or after their spouse gets home to watch the kids, but for me, if I don’t exercise before I get engrossed in my essay writing and required reading, the exercise will not happen at all.  Though it may be more financially and educationally important for me to complete my homework, for those in situations like mine who have a waistline like mine, it should be equally important to get and stay healthy.

Tomorrow, more on exercising and dieting instead of just dieting alone.

On Saturday night, I had four beers in four hours.  No big deal, I thought.  I’m not driving, so I’m fine. These are Michelob Ultra Amber beers, so they’re only 64 calories.

Oh, no they’re not. My four twelve-ounce beers were actually a total of 456 calories! It turns out that I had confused the marketing for MGD64 with the Michelob Ultra brand. Oy vey.

Ideally with a diet you’re not supposed to drink at all, but if you must drink beer, here are some options:

Michelob Ultra Amber - 112 calories for 12 ounces.  My favorite of the low-calorie beers, it’s the only one I’ve tasted that actually tastes like beer.  If you’ve ever tried Michelob’s delicious Amber Bock, imagine a light version with about 50% of the flavor.  (Also noted: you don’t want to drink this one when it’s really really cold. Let it sit out for a couple minutes out of the fridge and it’ll taste much better.)

Michelob Ultra Lime Cactus - 107 calories for 12 ounces (also comes in Pomegranate Raspberry and Grapefruit Orange or something) The lime one tastes pretty much like a Corona Light with a lot of lime juice added.  At this point, you’re nearly drinking a wine cooler.

Michelob Ultra - 95 calories for 12 ounces is like a watered down Michelob Light.

MGD 64 is 64 calories for 12 ounces. I haven’t tried this one yet so I can’t speak to its taste.

A shot of vodka is roughly 70 calories, but varies slightly by its proof.  Good zero-calorie mixers include diet soda or diet tonic, or some light lemonade will be around 5 calories.

I’m starting to feel like an alcoholic writing all this information out, so I’ll refer you to the good people over at WebMD.  They’ve got an excellent article all about Low-Calorie Cocktails.

I’m attempting a ban on alcohol all together through the end of January, so I definitely won’t be making any more caloric mistakes. Cheers!

Tonight at dinner with my good friend Eddie, I sized up my salmon and said, “This is probably two servings’ worth.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Well one serving is about the size of a deck of cards, so this is about two decks of cards and it’s two servings.”

Because Eddie is naturally skinny, overactive, and physically unable to gain weight, he has no idea how to eyeball how much food he’s eating and measure it visibly. Unlike me, he can just decide he’s full and stop eating.  As a frequent passenger aboard the diet wagon, I know all the little tricks by heart to “eye measure” what I’m eating, so I’ll share them here.

one cup = about the size of your fist or a tennis ball

1/4 cup = about the size of an egg

one ounce = about the size of your thumb or a golf ball or enough to fill a shot glass

one tablespoon = about the size of a postage stamp

the size of the human stomach = one quart of milk

You can use the above sizes, found from this site, to guesstimate how much you’re eating (like my 6oz piece of salmon tonight) and then bring the information home and plug it into a calorie counter like the free ones available at SparkPeople.com.  If for some reason I’m not thinking about the estimated sizes above, it helps me to picture the measuring spoons and cups I have at home and compare what I’m eating to the various sizes.

My thin friend Eddie may never need to know that he’s eating two cups of hummus, but I still do.