Create Away.

Wherein I spend 6 hours acting like a fitness model

So my 30th birthday present from my amazing and supportive husband was a photo session with the lovely and talented Amanda Waltman of Art of Subtlety Photography. Nick's idea was that I've worked so hard on my fitness that documenting it for the big 3-0 seemed appropriate. I have to admit that, though I am not a girly girl and have never in adult life had photos professionally taken, I approached this opportunity with my trademark obsessiveness and just went for it.

I have known Amanda for a while, so I was already excited about the shoot, but she far surpassed my wildest expectations in terms of creating a fun, supportive, creative and dynamic environment. This whole "posing for the camera" thing is pretty new to me, but Amanda gave awesome direction to help me look my best, and had great ideas for setting up a huge range of shots. We took catalog shots, we took high-art shots, we took muscle definition shots, we took "this one's for Nick" come hither shots...it was great.

So the whole experience started off at my house. My friend Shemai came over, did my hair and helped me with styling. She was invaluable...I am pretty hopeless with hair but Shemai managed to give me a soft, fun, tousled look that was really well-styled without looking overdone or making me feel like I was wearing someone else's hair.

Amanda arrived with a mobile studio. She had all kinds of lighting, backdrops and meters to get the full studio experience in my living room. It took her about 15 minutes to get everything set up and adjusted and then we started shooting.

After several hours and wardrobe changes, we took a break and packed everything up for a venue change. We headed down to a section of the Edmonds beach where there was sand, water, rocks and seawall to work with, and did another session that lasted 90 minutes or so. I was in the water, out of the water, doing yoga, swinging kettlebells, overhead squating driftwood, climbing up on rocks, hunching back against concrete...all while having a blast.

I think the single downside was that I got a bit of a burn over my fake-o tan. Not sure why I'm surprised...I was at the beach in the middle of the day in 80 degree weather wearing no sunscreen and covered in sweet almond oil to give my muscles a nice sheer...the only worse thing I might have done was lay down for a three or four hour nap on a reflective blanket.

I am super excited to see the proofs. Amanda took tons of shots, and she said it would take her a few days to get through all of them and get them posted to the client section of her website. I'm hoping in the next few days I'll get a preview of how everything turned out and can start finalizing my order.

I figure if a few of these pictures are as good as I hope, I'm going to send them in to Oxygen Magazines "fitness/body transformation" section. I think I would make a pretty darn good "fitness transformation" subject, if I do say so myself. I also figure it can't hurt to send the kettlebell stuff over to Crossfit.com, since they post pics up on the mainsite and I would consider it a tremendous honor to be Crossfit eyecandy for a day. If nothing comes of either I won't be too bummed, though...this photo thing was really for me.

Moroccan Veggie Stew

So I've been reading Clean Eating Magazine, the sister publication to Oxygen magazine. Clean Eating has some yummy stuff. Usually I modify to reduce the land-based-animal protein component, but the recipes are a great source of inspiration.

Tonight I made this Moroccan Veggie stew from the most recent issue....the picture in the magazine showed all these gorgeous vegetables, snuggled up in an almost clear broth that was highlighted with brilliant green cilantro. Yeah, mine didn't turn out like that.

The sweet potato dissolved by the time the carrot and onion were nice and tender, so I had a thick stew with barely discernible chunks of veggies. There was no broth to speak of. There was also no cilantro, and hence no gorgeous green highlights. But you know what? It didn't matter. This was good! Like, one-week-out-from-pictures-be-damned-I'm-having-more good.



To be fair to the Clean Eating people, I didn't exactly follow the recipe in a strict scene, so perhaps if you do your stew will be more visually appealing. I added the veggies I had in amounts that seemed reasonable: fennel, sweet potato, onion, kohlrabi, garlic carrot and zucchini, and added both prunes and raisins into the mix. I skipped the puree step because I didn't have any liquid to speak of; I just had the sweet potato mash. I also skipped the fish, because today wasn't a training day and I just didn't feel the need to thaw fish.

Instead of the recommended couscous, I served mine on brown rice (which I had already made), and topped it with a dollop of sambal for heat and a wedge of lime. The acid from the lime elevated the whole thing, although it may have taken the flavor profile in a vaguely Thai-ish direction. If I were to leave out the dried fruit and chickpeas, and add in some coconut milk and fish sauce, this stew would be very similar to a Thai Root Veg Stew I have made many times.

Clean Eating May/June 2009:
Couscous with Seven Vegetables

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp Moroccan spice blend (or combine cinnamon, ginger, tumeric, black pepper, allspice, cuman and coriander)
1 large sweet potato, peeled and large-diced
2 small turnips, peeled and large-diced
1 medium zucchini, large diced
2 carrots, large diced
1/4 head cabbage, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 cup green beans, cut in thirds
1/2 to 1 tsp. Harissa or chili sauce
1/2 tsp. sea salt
1/4 cup raisins
3/4 cup chickpeas, pre-cooked or canned, rinsed and drained
16 oz. white fish (tilapia, haddock or sole), cut into chunks*
1 1/2 cup whole wheat couscous
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped

Heat oil in large stockpot over medium heat. Cook garlic and spice mix until brown, then add next five ingredients. Add enough water to just cover vegetables. Cover and cook 25-30 minutes, until vegetables are soft but not fully cooked. Add pepper, beans, Harissa and salt. Cook another 10 to 15 minutes, until tender.

Ladle out 3 cups of broth and vegetables (1 1/2 cups of each). Puree in blender until thick. Add back to stew.

Mix in raisins (prunes were awesome) and chickpeas. Bring to a simmer over medium heat and place fish on top of mixture (don't mix in, because fish will beak up.) Cook, covered, for 10 to 15 minutes or until fish flakes easilly with a fork. Fish will steam on top.

While fish is cooking, boil 1 1/2 cup water. Remove from heat, add couscous and cover. Set aside for 5 minutes. Fluff with fork. To serve, place 1/2 cup couscous in bowl. Pour 1 cup vegetable-fish mixture over top and sprinkle with 1 tbsp. cilantro.

Per 1/2 cup couscous and 1 cup stew, including 2 oz fish:
Calories: 260
Fat: 3.5 g
Carbs: 40 g
Fiber: 8 g
Sugars: 10 g
Protein: 19 g
Sodium: 310 mg
Cholesterol: 35 mg

* I love almost all seafood, even crazy stuff like pickled herring and eel (unagi...yummmm) but to me tilapia is the least pleasant fish around. Every instance I've eaten tilapia it's tasted like dirt, literally. I know it's the "loaves and fishes" fish, I know it's a relatively responsible seafood choice (apparently growing tilapia is much less harmful than farmed salmon aquaculture) but to me it's the boneless, skinless chicken breast of the sea (and sadly that's not a complement).

When a super healthy food is so devoid of flavor (or worse, has a slight bottom-feeder flavor) that only wrapping it in bacon and sauteing the whole package in butter could possibly make it palatable, what is the point? But perhaps I am being too harsh on tilapia. Maybe the several times I've eaten the fish were not representative. Is anyone out there a tilapia fan? Or have other people noticed the muddy flavor thing too?

What is Health? What Is Sickness?

Today was a day of recharging. I had an awesome meal with a great friend. Lunch stretched to 3.5 hours because we were having such a nice time, talking about everything. It was super pleasant.

My friend is a genius with data organization & categorization and gave me some interesting things to ponder regarding defining and qualifying health/fitness etc. One of the many things we discussed was how you take something as complex as the human body and quantify what it means to be healthy, fit, etc.

My friend's expertise is in taking complex variables - data - and turning them into something useful - information. Isn't that really what's needed when we discuss health in general? Taking the mass of data generated from nutrition and fitness lab studies, cohort studies, corelational studies, etc., and figuring out how any of that may or may not apply to a system as complex as the human body?

To get any value from the data, we need to know how it affects health. But first, we need to figure out what health is. So that's what it comes down to -- what is health? How do we define it? How do we measure it?

On the surface, there seem to be a whole lot of ways to measure health. There's quick-and-dirty methods like height-weight charts or BMI calculations, and slightly more involved measures like blood pressure and cholesterol readings or body composition analyzes. There's really expensive stuff like whole body CT scanning, which may be valid preventative medicine but is more likely just be a nifty, expensive toy.

All these things are valuable (except perhaps the height-weight charts) and are doubtless useful in demonstrating something but by themselves these measures cannot tells us whether or not a person is healthy.

Case in point: would you say this girl is healthy? Or would you say she's in need of a diet and should probably get to the gym a bit more? Let's say you saw her at the mall. What would you think? C'mon, be honest.


Ok, now would you think differently if you saw her up on an Olympic's platform, recieveing a bronze medal? This girl is Cheryl Haworth, bronze medalist and world class athlete in the 75+ kilo division of Olympic Weightlifting. At 5'9" and 315 pounds, Cheryl's height-weight and BMI measures would read: obese. In fact, with a BMI of 46, Cheryl is so far into the "morbidly obese" category that her doctor, if he didn't know better, would probably be freaking out about her compromised health.

But with her 75 bpm resting heart rate, 28-30% body fat composition (this is a healthy body fat percentage for woman, by the way), 30" vertical leap, 495 pound squat and ability to do the splits (both directions) I can tell you that Cheryl is way fitter than you or I: she is stronger, more coordinated and more flexible.

So with her BMI of 46, is Cheryl healthy? Well, she's sure as shit healthier than most of us. There are tremendous risks associated with generalizing from BMI statistics (or any other single-point measurement) because athletes like Cheryl will come along and make you look like an idiot.

Coach Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit (my training program of choice), looked at a closely related question, "What is fitness?" Glassman was unable to find any satisfactory and applicable answer to this question. Most of the glorified "fittest" athletes were long endurance specialists, ironman triathletes and marathoners and long distance cyclists.

These athletes are indeed fit--hey, if you can run Boston you're an athlete in my book--but societally, why do we define fitness based on one's ability to run or bike ungoddly distances in one go? Why is that a better benchmark than your ability to lift ungoddly amounts of weight in one go? If one measure isn't inherently better, then (culturally glorified phenotypes notwithstanding) there's really no reason to think Lance Armstrong is an inherently better athlete than Cheryl Haworth, is there?

Glassman, looking at this and many other related issues, came to this conclusion:

"There are ten recognized general physical skills. They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these ten skills."

So these are the terms of a new fitness standard that does not glorify Cardio Uber Alles. These terms led Glassman to define fitness in a new way. Concise, scalable and all-inclusive...the Crossfit 30 Second Elevator Speech, if you will:

"Increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains."

So there is it. Crossfit has defined fitness - "work capacity across broad time and modal domains." To the degree that you can get more work done in less time across the ten recognized skills in any combination they might occur, you are getting fitter.

What can this definition of fitness tell us about a definition of health? The current de facto definition of health is, "not sick" but I think it is clear that an absence of sickness is not the same thing as a preponderance of health. Does the absence of Type II diabetes, cancer or high blood pressure mean someone is healthy, even if they are a stressed, sedentary, chronically sleep-deprived smoker who lives on twice-a-day McDonalds, rarely eats a vegetable and has painful battles with constipation?

Luckilly for me, Glassman has recently turned his attention to this topic. If you accept that increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains is a good way to measure general fitness, then you can define health as "work capacity across broad time and modal domains, sustained over a lifetime." In otherwords, you are healthy to the degree that you are broadly fit over a lifetime.

This definition is clearly a starting point, but it is a good starting point. It allows for sickness in as much as sickness will impact one's work capacity, but is not defined by sickness.

It says, if at 40 you can perform the same work, in the same time frame, at the same intensity that you performed when you were 30, then maybe a few point bump in your cholesterol isn't that critical when assessing your overall health.

It says, if you gave up marathoning but gained the ability to sprint, lift heavy, jump, swing, pull-up and walk on your hands then maybe gaining 15 pound in the process was good for your health.

It says, define your health based on what you can do now, what you could do then and what you will do later. Look at the delta and see where you are. Look at your work capacity across broad time and modal domains to assess your fitness; look at your fitness over time to assess your health.

It is my belief that actions based on improving work capacity across broad time and modal domains, over a lifetime, will lead to increased health measured via almost any other metric. When I went in for my physical, my doctor said my resting heart rate (46) was, "like a marathoners," I joked back, "yeah but without the joint problems and soft tissue damage." I'm not trying to slag on marathoners here, but my doctor's comment goes to the heart of the Cardio-centric view of fitness, and therefore health.

I propose we start talking about health within the context of this new, broad, inclusive definition, and see where it takes us.

Countdown to 30: 10 Days to Go

4/1: 157.0
4/2: 155.0
4/3: 155.2
4/4: 154.6
4/5: 154.8
4/6: 154.2
4/7: 153.2
4/8: 154.8
4/9: 152.6
4/10: 151.2
4/11: 153.2
4/12: 152.2
4/13: 152.2
4/14: 152.4
4/15: 153.2
4/16: 152.2
4/17: 152.0
4/18: 151.8
4/19: 152.0
4/20: 152.0
4/21: 152.0
4/22: 152.6
4/23: 151.4
4/24: 151.4
4/25: 151.6

10 days to go. Taking stock, I can look back on the past 25 days and honestly say I've given it all I could so far. My diet has been really clean and healthy, I've been accountable with my portion sizes (I've been ranging between 1700-2300 calories most days, with an average of probably 1900 or 1950, depending on how much I worked out.) My exercise has been intense and effective, and more days than not I've doubled up with an AM & PM workout.

I feel and see results, too. I am definitely in the best shape of my life. I have way more energy, a more stable mood, and my sleep is much improved. My strength has remained steady or continued to go up, and though it's hard to judge my metabolic conditioning without a stable benchmark workout, I definitely perceive an improvement in my interval and intense crossfit workout times. My skill base in pose running, kip pull-ups and (hopefully, as of Kevin's lesson yesterday) c2 rowing has improved too.

Physically, I notice the greatest change in my arm and abdominal definition. I have more distinct cuts in my upper arms. My shoulder, bicep and triceps are standing out more than they ever have, and my abdominals look pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. I see less noticeable change in my lower body (where I tend to carry my extra weight), but my pants fit a bit more comfortably. These things are great.

Losing a percent or two of body fat has led to some unexpected physical changes too. I'm getting a bit vein-y, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I made peace with my forearm veinage when I started to increase my pull-up load a year ago, but now for the first time I am starting to see the veins in my biceps and lower abs. This is, I will admit, a bit creepy.

Of course, this brings up the question as to why I find the vein thing creepy....the circulatory system responds to the stress of increased physical activity like every other system: by getting stronger. Trained athletes develop a blood supply system that allows their muscles to work longer and harder under increased loads. The natural result of training, therefore, is increased veinage. At a lower body fat percentage one can't expect just the "pretty" parts of training--the muscles--to pop. The support system is going pop too.

So then, again, why are visible veins a bit creepy? I think the answer for me is two-part. First, I have always been terrified of shots & needles, and it's hard for me to see a big ol' vein without thinking of phlebotomy. Even typing this, I am squirming in my seat with discomfort at the idea of blood draws.

Secondly, a lot of visible veins represent strength, and are therefore masculine. And, as a girl, I want to look strong, lean and ripped, but I don't want to look masculine. So there's that: good old fashioned sexist social conditioning about what defines "feminine" and therefore attractiveness.

So what to do? Other than the veins, I'm thrilled with how I feel and look as a consequence of my increased training and super clean diet. I'm not going to stop training. After the 5 pound 5 week challenge is over I will increase caloric consumption to something in the maintenance range instead of the weight loss range, and with this my body may bounce back to it's happy place of 155. If not, well, I guess I'll just have to embrace my veins and the strength they represent.

But I'm still not going to dwell on the idea of blood draws.

Weight Loss 101, Goal Setting, Excuse Busting

Up until about three years ago, I had spent most of my non-childhood somewhere between mildly and significantly overweight. In the years after I left college until I began my year-long process of losing weight, I weighed in between 180-210 pounds. I remember the day when I could no longer zip up my size 14 jeans - I was 19. I wore a size 16 wedding dress, and went into the hospital to give birth to my daughter at 260 pounds.

At age 22, approximately 200 pounds:

Almost 30, and about 50 pounds lighter:

Losing that weight and gradually increasing my fitness opened up a whole new world to me, and as my weight stabilized at 160 pounds around two years ago, I turned my focus more and more to training. I shifted my focus to fitness gains instead of pounds lost. In the process I lost another 5 pounds, and I have been within about 2-3 pounds of 155 for the past 2 years.

But the past few weeks I've revisited weight loss, this time for pure vanity. At 155 pounds I am well within a healthy weight range for my height and look good; losing 5 is purely a fine-tuning exercise to start my 30s feeling like I'm in the best shape of my life. And so far, I have to say it's working great - I really have never felt better. Perhaps it's the extra sleep; perhaps it's the not drinking - whatever it is, I really do feel great.

So I thought, since I'm back in weight-loss mode for the first time in 3 years or so, I might take a moment to lay out my weight loss philosophy/theory/game plan for anyone who might be interested, or who might themselves wonder how to effectively loose weight.

First, I will assume that the weight-loss-desirous reader is not a total idiot. This is not the normal starting point for weight loss advice. Witness: almost 500,000 Google hits for the phrase "weight loss for idiots."



The reason most weight loss programs try to tell you you are stupid is because they want weight loss to seem really complicated so you'll give them money for their "trick" or "miracle."

Well, guess what, weight loss is not complicated and has never been complicated. What it is, is hard. But I suspect "LOSE WEIGHT THROUGH HARD AND OFTEN BORING PERSISTENCE" just doesn't have the same marketing appeal as: "THE TRICK TO LOSE 10 POUNDS in 5 DAYS."

Which is probably why weight loss marketers continue to be handsomely rewarded for lying without delivering any results. Conversely, the most honest and straightforward diet book available, The Hacker's Diet, was written by a formerly fat and independently wealthy geek and is totally free.

So how not complicated is weight loss? Forgot everything you know about carbs, fat, protein, Mediterranean, Zone, Atkins, South Beach, pH balance, blah blah blah.

This is what you need to know: maintaining a moderate caloric deficit over time is the basis of every successful weight loss program. Nothing is more important, though many things will influence how comfortable or uncomfortable that moderate caloric deficit is (but that's another blog entry).

So, here's the terms: a calorie is a way of measuring energy. It's not evil, it's just a way of measuring something, like tablespoons or cups or miles. The food and beverages you consume contain energy, which is measured in calories. Your body uses energy - again, measured in calories - in order to do everything from breathe to digest to run 10 miles to sleep (some activities, obviously, take a lot more energy than others).

If you want to lose weight, you must USE more energy than you TAKE IN. That is how you create a caloric deficit. Specifically, for every pound of fat you want to lose, your body must expend 3500 more calories (the amount of energy in 1 pound of fat) than you consume.

That's it. That's as complicated as it gets. Maintain a moderate caloric deficit over time. That's not hard to understand. The math is so easy a third grader can handle it. The hard part is keeping your focus consistent in the face of the million small decisions each and every one of us makes about food and fitness every single day. So how do you do this?

The first and most important is to define and prioritize your healthy-eating/weight-loss goal. As with anything in life, it is not enough to say, "I want to get lean, feel great, and look hot." We all want a lot of things, and we don't get most of them. As my dad used to say to us kids when we said we wanted something: "So? How does it feel to want?"

Wanting is not enough. Wishing, hoping and dreaming are also not going to cut it. You have to define your goal and your terms in concrete ways. When defining your goal the word "want" is totally off limits. Good goals have concrete, measurable targets and end-dates. Without these things you will not be able to hold yourself accountable, measure your successes or minimize your slip-ups.

"I want to look hot for my wedding," is not a goal. This is: "I will lose 10 pounds by my final dress fitting on June 10th and keep my weight constant from then until my wedding on July 11."

"I need to eat healthier," is not a goal. This is: "By my 40th birthday I will have lowered my cholesterol by 10 points by eating a low-fat diet and walking 30 minutes a day on my lunch hour."

As Henry V said, "All things be ready, if our minds be so." So, write down your goal, really commit to it and you are half way there.

Now that you've defined where you are going you have to figure out how to get there. With weight loss this is pretty much about determining what your caloric deficit over time should be. The math is easy.

Using our wedding example from earlier, Blushing Bride determines that she has 8 weeks to lose 10 pounds. 10/8 = 1.25, so she's looking at weight loss goal of 1.25 pounds a week.

This is a reasonable goal, assuming our bride has 10 pounds of fat to lose in the first place (if she doesn't, all bets are off, as the body will protect it's last fat reserves pretty stubbornly. It's that pesky survival mechanism kicking in). Generally speaking, 1-2 pounds of fat is the most you can lose in a week. Don't try to starve yourself into a faster pace than that. You'll just lose muscle and if you think losing muscle is cool, get the hell off my blog and don't come back until you can snatch your bodyweight, biatch.

Anyway, Blushing Bride has 1.25 pounds a week to lose for the next 8 weeks. What daily caloric deficit does she need to maintain to achieve this?

3500 (calories per pound of fat) x 1.25 (pounds of fat to lose per week) = 4375 (total caloric deficit per week)
4375 (caloric deficit per week) / 7 (days in the week) = 625 (caloric deficit per day)

So, to achieve her goal she will need to create a moderate caloric deficit of 625 calories per day for 8 weeks. That is the specific roadmap that will get Blushing Bride to her specific goal. See, easy.

So Blushing Bride knows she needs to eat 625 calories less per day than she burns. She is armed with almost all the information she needs to begin the slow, boring process of successful, no-bullshit weight loss. There's just one more thing: Blushing Bride still needs to know how many calories she burns every day, so she can figure out how many she gets to eat.

How many calories you burn in a day is called your metabolic rate. The extremely stripped down version is called your basal metabolic rate, and is how many calories you would burn if you laid in bed all day doing nothing harder than keeping your vital organs alive. Figuring out your basal metabolic rate is easy: there are all kinds of calculators on the web developed to give you a pretty decent approximation. Here's a good one: Basal Metabolic Rate.

But since Blushing Bride has all kinds of things to do: job, errands, wedding planning, we will assume she does get out of bed and move around, so for our purposes, here's a good calculator for Metabolic Rate with Activity Level factored in.

Let's assume Blushing Bride is 5'7", 160 pounds, 28 years old and lightly active. The calculator linked to above indicates she needs 1965 calories to maintain her current weight.

1965 (calories to maintain) - 625 (caloric deficit) = 1340 calories she should consume per day to meet her goal, assuming her activity level remains unchanged.

Now, 1340 calories really isn't a lot of food for a 5'7" person, so Blushing Bride is going to be a lot more comfortable for the next 8 weeks if she increases her activity level. If she burns 250 calories every day at the gym, she gets to eat 1590 calories, which is a lot more do-able. If she burns 500 calories at the gym, she gets to eat 1840 calories and still lose weight.

So in the end the roadmap to your goal is simply a numbers game. When you understand the numbers you understand how your decisions take you closer to or further from your goal. There are other parts to it, of course, mostly involving being honest with yourself about your behavior, keeping yourself accountable, and cutting out the bull-shit you've been telling yourself that has been keeping you from reaching your weight goal. You know what I mean, things like:

"I eat pretty healthy so I don't understand why I can't lose weight." Sometimes this is true. But usually most people who "eat pretty healthy most of the time" have no idea what they are actually eating because they are not maintaining a log or a journal, they are not properly weighing or estimating portions of food, or they are just forgetting all the mindless munching that is so easy to do. A few pieces of candy from the dish at work, a beer with dinner, 8 oz. of steak instead of 6 oz., 4 tablespoons of mayo on a turkey sandwich....when you are trying to lose weight these details count, and usually people who do eat pretty healthy but can't lose weight are in that position because they aren't paying attention to the details.

"My whole family is overweight. It's just genetics and there isn't anything I can do about it." Yeah, I get this. My family is heavy. I used to be overweight. Apparently Jessica Alba's whole family is overweight too. Generally speaking, nature has selected for fat storage as a positive trait. Yes, some people are naturally thin and will be no matter what they do, but most people have to work pretty hard for their lean bodies. So what? If you need glasses, you don't whine about how unfair it is that some people have 20/20 vision and you don't and that's just genetics and you're stuck with it, right? No, you get a proper prescription, get glasses or contacts and get on with your life. Well, your caloric deficit roadmap is like your weight prescription. Get it, follow it, get lean and get on with your life.

"I don't have time to get to the gym / I don't have time to cook." Do you have time to watch American Idol? America's Next Top Model? House? Heroes? Lost? Then guess what, you have time to cook some real food and stick it in the fridge, and you have time to do a 15 minute at-home workout. Almost everyone does have time if they make their weight loss and health a real priority.

"I don't want to exercise because I want to have some way to break a [future] weight-loss plateau." I actually heard this once, from a friend who had a 100 different excuses for the 100 extra pounds she was carrying on her body. She had it backwards: calorie restriction without weight-bearing exercise is an excellent way to lose lean muscle mass, decrease metabolic rate, and create a weight loss plateau. More about weight loss plateaus and breaking though them in a future blog.

"But I have to buy (insert crap food here: cookies, chips, soda, etc.) for the kids." I get really upset about this kind of attitude. Parents, offering up your kid's health for the dubious honor of being a tool to the marketing agenda's of multi-billion dollar food processors is stupid. Don't kid yourself. Every time you put those high-fructose corn syrup fruit shaped snacks in your kid's lunch, the only one really getting a treat is the General Mills corporation. Do your kids a favor: don't straddle them with the burden of childhood obesity. Teach yourself the value of proper nutrition, then teach them. Giving your kids an unending supply of crap to pacify them instead of standing up for your families health doesn't make you a good parent. At the end of the day, if it's not real food, you shouldn't eat it and neither should they.

"My husband eats a lot. I was never fat until I married him. He's a bad influence." Yeah, generally speaking guys have a higher metabolic rate than women. This is a function of height and muscle mass in addition to gender. If you want to level the playing field a little bit, build up your own lean muscle mass with consistent weight training. Trust me, the most lean, ripped girls you know eat a lot of food. They have to to maintain that muscle. In the meantime, he's not spoon feeding you in a high-chair, so take control of your own fork.

"I haven't been able to lose the baby weight." Having a kid changes your body. Some things will never go back exactly the way they were. That's reality. But I know moms to three kids who look amazing, because they work for it. If your youngest child is older than 3, this excuse no longer cuts it, ok?

"It's just so hard for me to lose weight." It's hard for everyone. Weight loss is hard. It involves delayed gratification, behavior changes and sometimes some pretty uncomfortable self-reflection. So it's hard - what's your point? Have you really never done anything hard before? If you truly believe you can't do something because it's hard, you are probably right. On the other hand, if you truly believe you can do something despite the fact that it's hard, you are also probably right.

Next time I'm feeling rant-y: ways to make the journey easier, stay accountable, change your habits and maintain once you've reached your goal.

Feeling Good vs. Looking Good

So the last two weeks have been - let's be frank - a vanity exercise with a nice training bonus attached. Basically, I have embarked to lose five pounds before my 30th birthday just because I want to know if I can start my 30s in the best shape of my life. With most things fitness related my overdeveloped stubbornness (horoscope: taurus) gets me to my goal. I'm pretty good at delayed gratification and all that.

So I was expecting a cleaner, stricter diet and more training to be doable to get me to a goal, but not actually...well...fun (no wine? less coffee? really, am I sure about this?). And yet I have been struck by an undeniable feeling of, well, feeling good for the past week or so. I wasn't expecting this, but I really think the clean consistent diet, the short, intense workouts and the adequate sleep have just put me in a good mood. I'm less stressed, more calm, more patient, generally just happier.

Now I'm not normally a Polyanna type. More like Polyanna's asurbic older sister who wears a lot of black and makes sarcastic comments and drinks 6 cups of coffee a day. But focusing on the diet-exercise-sleep trifecta has me waking up without the alarm, at hours that are normally unthinkably early for me, getting out of bed cheerfully (or staying in bed to blog until Bella wakes up) and answering the question, "how's it going?" with a genuine: "really great, thanks!"

So while I took this 5 pounds, 5 week Challenge on as a short term goal and anticipated a payoff of looking good (or maybe more accurately, feeling good about how I look) I am finding the day to day feeling good bonus is too compelling to ignore. Even after by birthday I think the clean living program may have to continue. I will modify a bit, of course: I will probably stop monitoring caloric intake, do slightly less training, indulge in the occational glass of wine. But for now, this feels like a pretty great way to feel. All the time.

Moving Average and Weight Loss (Where Geekness and Fitness Come Together!)

I glanced back at my past several post and realized I mention the phrase "moving average" in almost all of them. So what the heck am I talking about? When you are monitoring your weight, there will be day to day fluctuations. Depending on your hydration levels, changes over the course of the month (ladies, I think we all know what I'm talking about here) sodium intake and the -ahem- progress of food through your system, it's easy to fluctuate 3, 5 or more pounds over the course of a day, or from day to day.

K-Lo, who is on the 5 Pound 5 Week Challenge with me, lost 5 pounds in 3 hours one morning. She had a particularly salty meal the previous night, woke up bloated and retaining water, and as her body rebalanced her hydration levels, normalized to a more accurate weight.

Obviously, eating clean and working out consistently and seeing a 3 pound weight gain on the scale can be really discouraging, which is why a lot of weight loss programs advocate only weighing yourself weekly.

But I think the ritual of the morning (or evening or whenever, as long as you are consistent) weigh-in helps to focus one's attention and set a tone of healthy weight management for that day. And, as someone who has been quite overweight, I prefer to catch upward trends sooner and nip them in the bud with small behavior changes, rather than waiting three or four weeks to see a trend emerge and then having to deal with 5 or 7 pounds to lose. (Think you can't gain 5 or 7 pounds in a month? Au contraire, mon fraire. Two words: Christmas Cookies.) In any event, my morning weigh-in is like brushing my teeth: just one of those things I do everyday.

So if you are going to weigh yourself daily, how do you avoid making yourself crazy when confronted with sudden gains and losses? You factor in the moving average of your weight, which shows the trend of weight loss and damps down the day-to-day fluctuations. Investors use moving averages (simple and more complex versions) to get a better idea of the trend of stock prices without getting caught up in day-to-day market fluctuations. It's a pretty neat and very simple tool for analysis of something over time.

A simple moving average is calculated by tracking your weight over a given number of days, adding up the total pounds from that time period, then dividing the sum by the number of days. To get a four-day simple moving average of your weight, you would add together your weight over the last four days, and then divide that number by four. Perhaps some charts would make this clearer:

This is the chart of my weight since 4/1/09, when I began the 5 Pounds, 5 Weeks Challenge. Note the big uptick on 4/8 and the big downtick on 4/10. Both of these were times that could have been cause for a lot more emotionality than they really deserved. It would have been easy to feel a bit despondent on 4/8, like all my hard work was ruined and I was back up to my 4/2 weight from a week earlier. But that would have been a false interpretation of the trend, as the moving average will soon demonstrate. Likewise, while it felt good emotionally to hit 151 pounds on 4/10, I knew immediately I was looking at a false low and I would see some rebounding the next day or two. If I hadn't realized that, the 2 pound weight gain the next day could have really taken the wind out of my weight loss sails.

So here's that same data, analyzed with a four-day simple moving average. The upticks and downticks are damped out, and a much more realistic picture of my weight loss progress becomes clear. Instead of a seemingly random collection of ups and downs, a slow, gradual decrease comes into view. This is a believable picture, showing about a 3 pound weight loss over 9 days, and is far more likely to represent actual fat loss, which is of course the goal, instead of changes in my hydration.


Now here's those two charts viewed together. Which line do you think gives you a clearer feedback picture? The Moving Average, natch. You don't have to actually create an Excel spreadsheet to figure all this out and calculate your own moving average (but it's really easy and if you do you get bonus geek points!) but if you are tracking your weight, it's a good idea to at least keep the moving average idea in the back of your head before you jump to conclusions about a "ruined diet" or "breaking through a plateau." Sometimes it's enough to glance back over the past several days of your weight log: are the past few days when taken together generally lower than those same days last week? Then you are probably on track.

There's quite a few tools to help with this concept online. There's the Google 15, an awesome little moving average calculator widget that you add to your Google Homepage. Old School .xls speadsheets are available with the (free! free! free!) Hacker's Diet, the most effective and honest (and did I mention free?) weight loss book around, assuming you can handle the geek-truth contained in it's pages. And if reading this has just made you tingly to know more about statistics, Wikipedia's Moving Average page goes into far more detail than I ever will.

Countdown to 30: 32 Days to Go

4/1 Starting Point: 157.0/27% Unadjusted Body Fat (my actual body fat is probably 17%)
4/2: 155.0/27% UABF
4/3: 155.2/27.5% UABF
4/4: 154.6/27.5% UABF

Played a little golf today at the pitch and putt and did some gardening, but no gym time. Taking this as a down day. A series of double-workout days have left me needing some recovery time and one of my BIG goals for this season is to train smarter so I end up with less sick & down time due to overtraining.

To that end, I am moving away from my previous season's training methodology wherein I did the WODs as best I could while grinding out sprint-distance amounts of long slow swim, boke or run cardio on an almost daily basis.

I am instead embracing the crossfit endurance programming, which uses a lot more fast interval work along with some tempo work to get an endurance base built with a LOT less stress on the body. There's a part of me that is skeptical -- can a workout regime that never trains you up to or past your distance really prepare you for your distance? really? -- but so far crossfit programming has rarely failed to deliver what it promises. So I'm going to be working in a lot more wind sprints and a lot less long slow distance. We'll see how it goes.

Fit at Thirty

If you've noticed a few more posts than usual today, it's because my ambition to keep up with super-biker Ian yesterday has led to super-recovery day for me.

So a bit of background: Ian and I have known each other for roughly ever. I'm pretty sure he came to my first grade birthday, and we went through those awkward years called middle school as pretty good friends. But life, as it does, rolls on, and for the past several years I've been busy, being a mom and growing a business. Meanwhile, Ian's been growing his own very successful career and has kept himself incredibly busy. The upshot is that it had been quite a few years since we'd really connected or had anything beyond our childhood memories to talk about. But I do remember one phone call about 3 years ago, when I told Ian I was just starting to take a Pilates class at the rec center and he said he'd purchased a bike and was getting into bike commuting.

So fast forward 3 years and Ian's become quite an accomplished long-distance cyclist with the absolute ideal strength:weight ratio for hill climbing. He tackled STP in one day and said it was, you know, not too bad, and now he's thinking about taking on the Paris-Brest-Paris. Meanwhile, I'm surprising myself at how much I'm enjoying the constant challenge of crossfit and triathlon. So after our ride yesterday at lunch we talked a little about our rapidly approaching 30th birthday's, and how that landmark year is a bit easier to swallow since we're both in absolutely the best shape of our lives.

It got me thinking: neither of us were exactly athletic in our youth. I leaned towards chunky and hedonistic and Ian, though always extremely lean, didn't have the same long-distance wireyness that he now displays. What compels a couple of book worms to make a physical challenge such an important and (dare I say) cherished part of their lives?

I think for me (and I make it a rule never to speak for Ian) the answer comes in part from having never been an athlete. I never defined myself through athleticism or physical achievements in my youth, focusing instead on academic successes. So my foray into fitness was quite tentative at first. I wasn't "diving back into" something I did in High School. I was dipping my big toe into waters that were a bit foreign, a bit scary (the water analogy in my case is quite apt: swimming terrified me).

But overcoming that fear and working for success in something totally new filled me with a kind of pride that the academic success of my youth just didn't. I was expected to do well in school. It was assumed, and when I did, the success wasn't a particularly big deal. Which is not to say that I didn't occasionally work very hard in school; just that the outcome of that work was never particularly surprising or, to be frank, gratifying.

I remember a particularly challenging spin class. I had pushed myself pretty hard through hill intervals and glanced over at the mirrored wall. I was dripping sweat, half stripped-down to my sports bra, and grinning like a maniac. I just kept thinking - I can't believe I can do this! I can't believe my body can do this. I was ludicrously happy to be able to push my body in a spin class because I knew there was a time my mind would have abandoned the challenge.

I have found, as I grow in my fitness that I continue to run up against things that scare me-- swimming, particularly in a lake or open water situation, terrified me. Overcoming those fears has has a physical but also mental consequence. I now look at almost all any physical skills and think, "you know, with enough time....the right training....I could DO that," instead of, "Who DOES that?" And at the end of the day, it's just really, really fun to keep learning.

Goals & Weight

In an old post, I think I talked about some of my fun fitness goals now that my weight and body composition is more or less where I want it. Josh Hillis talks about how women can strive for a certain weight or fat percentage for so long that when they actually achieve it it's hard to be done. The temptation is to keep going: to get leaner and leaner.

But unless you are literally a world class athlete or a woman in active preparation for a body building competition, there is very little reason to maintain a sub-16ish% body fat percentage (and for most of us, very little hope of that anyway). Josh says, and I'm paraphrasing here, that below about 17% body fat, most women will start to lose their "womanliness." This is where your personal ethicist come into play. I like a sporty, well muscled look on me and on women in general, but hold short of liking that ultra lean body builder look. I should note that I also don't really care for the willowy distance runner look, but that doesn't mean I don't covet the skills of both the body builder and the marathoner.

Whatever your personal ideal "look" is, once you've gotten down to a healthy, strong body composition and have maintained that for awhile, what's next? Unless you are going into competition, most women are not well served by trying to strip off every bit of body fat, but if you've caught the fitness bug you still want to keep pushing yourself.

And this is when it gets fun. When you're not thinking about how your diet and exercise will effect how you look and you start thinking in terms of what you can do with your body. Small successes build confidence and allow you to try things that you never imagined possible. My first small step into athleticism was a very intro-level pilates class at the rec center. Now I'm eagerly scanning MultiSport Washington for Sprint and International Distance Tris and even contemplating things I've sworn million times I'd never do: marathons, IM distance tris, long distance open water swimming....

In the gym my goals have changed too. I don't care if I ever weigh 150 pounds. Honestly, at this point I wouldn't want to lose the muscle mass to make it happen. I do know I want to be able to perform 10 strict pull-ups and 10 kip pull-ups. I'm working on single-arm push-ups and handstand push-up. I want to squat my body weight (155 lb.--I'm at a 135# squat, so this is definitely in sight) and deadlift 1.5x times my bodyweight. Way out there--way, way out on the horizon--I'm wondering if one day I might be able to do a single muscle up.

I don't always know what fitness or life obsession I'm going to fall into next, but I do know that when you start setting goals to push yourself instead of a goal to shrink yourself, fitness gets a hell of a lot more fun.

To Run Faster, Stop Crosstraining?

New York Times article sent to me by training buddy D:

For Peak Performance, 3 Is Not Better Than 1

The article basically suggests that it is not possible to peak in three separate sports at the same time because human physiology won't allow you to optimize performance in biking at the same time as running. Opposing muscle groups and all that, plus basic time management...even a top level triathlete is unlikely to put in more than 10 hours a week into running because they need to have at least that into the bike, and a few swims too. Compare that to a pro-level marathoner-who's going to have more time to run?

Triathlon is about training to create a balance in your endurance capacity across disciplines. Here's my thought: is it really appropriate to think of tri as THREE sports anyway? Sure, the components look like open water swimming, road racing and running, but isn't tri really more (or at least different) than the sum of it's parts? Countless pro-level training strategems for tri will tell you that it's not how fast you run, it's how fast you run off the bike.

Tearing up the bike and taking top honors in that leg only to hobble through the run and get passed by 100 people doesn't get you anywhere. It's the race as a whole that matters. Everyone would love to shave 3 minutes off their bike time, but not at the cost of adding 5 minutes to the run.

Triathlon is about training to create a balance in your endurance capacity across disciplines. And that's why tri training is different, and why a tri should be viewed as a single sport, not three distinct sports done in quick succession.