Journal of Healthy Living

More Beets & Cabbage

Beets and cabbage have headlined the latest “best foods you’re not eating” article, this time on the Well column of the New York Times. Author Tara Parker-Pope listed these items as foods you should be eating but probably aren’t (along with simple preparation methods):
1. Beets
2. Cabbage
3. Swiss chard
4. Cinnamon
5. Pomegranate juice
6. Prunes
7. Pumpkin seeds
8. Sardines
9. Turmeric
10. Frozen blueberries
11. Canned pumpkin

Of the foods listed, my wife and I do get cabbage from time to time as well as frozen blueberries in our fruit smoothies. Outside of those two, we hardly eat any of them (pumpkin seeds from time to time too, now that I think about it) and probably should integrate them more. Pumpkin appears twice, that’s interesting… since most Americans only think of them during Halloween!

Post-Dinner Walks FTW

My wife and I have the great pleasure of living within walking distance of a nice man-made lake. The total distance from our front door, around the lake, and back is approximately three miles. Our neighbor, who has lived here for quite some time, gave us the estimate of the length and we’ve never had any reason to doubt it.

What we’ve started doing is walk around the lake after dinner as often as we possibly can. It’s not terribly strenuous but it’s a bit of added activity every day that has the potential of yielding good benefits down the road.

First, it gets us out and about. I spend most of my day on the computer, sedentary; so getting up and walking around more often is certainly a bonus. While I do go to Body Pump twice a week, every little bit extra certainly helps.

Second, it burns calories at a rate of 100 per mile so that’s 300 burned calories each time we go out. If there are 3500 calories per pound of fat, that’s a pound every 12 days if we’re running at equilibrium. In a year, that’s potential 31 pounds.

Lastly, it’s some good quality time where there are few distractions. We get a chance to chat and that’s priceless.

One Pound of Fat = 3500 Calories

One pound of fat equals three thousand, five hundred calories.

If you want to lose weight, your body needs to run at a deficit. If you eat 3500 fewer calories a week, you can expect to drop a pound of fat. If eating 3500 fewer calories seems unreasonable, especially if the typical diet is 2000 calories a day, you need to figure out ways to burn an additional 3500 more calories a week. How can you do that?

First, let’s break it down per day. If you can burn up 500 calories a day extra, or eat 500 less, or any combination of the two; you can cut out one pound a week. That seems much more manageable than the 3500 number right? So, think of ways you can cut out 500 calories a day. If you drink a can of soda, that’s 100 calories. Can you skip it? If so, you only need to burn an extra 400 calories. Take one less bite of lunch and save it for tomorrow. Go low calorie and eat lots of fiber. Eating one fewer calorie is far easier than burning it.

But, let’s talk about burning it. The typical benchmark is that a 150 lb. person will burn 100 calories for every mile they walk on level ground. If you weight 150 lb., simply walk five miles a day and you’ll have burned out 500 calories and well on your way to losing a pound a week. Doesn’t that sound really easy? If you weigh more, you’ll burn more. You don’t burn more by running that mile, though you do improve cardiovascular health.

If you are more ambitious, hit the gym and ride the bike, walk the treadmill on incline, or do the elliptical machine. All those will burn calories far faster than walking on level ground, but require more effort. You could always start walking and then move to the gym. Or simply walk on an incline at the gym while watching TV or something.

Remember, 3500 calories is a pound of fat.

Muscle Doesn’t Turn Into Fat

Many many years ago, someone told me that if you kept bulking up and then stopped, all of your muscles would be converted into fat. That’s right, muscles that were not used would magically turn into fat.

Wrong.

Wrong and a bit insulting to one’s intelligence I might add. Muscle and fat are two entirely different tissues and there’s no way one could convert itself into the other, in either direction, so the mere idea of this is ludicrous.

How did this crazy myth come about? Likely as the result of poor conclusions made from observation. People who lift a lot tend to consume calories. When you stop lifting your muscles will begin to atrophy and the higher caloric levels, if they stay that way, will contribute to more fat in the body. Muscles shrink, fat stores increase, it looks, superficially, as though muscles as turned into fat.

100 Pushups Update: Week One Done, Elbow Issues

Week one has been a success though my elbow continues to make a clicking noise. I’ve been more cognizant of the way I’ve been holding the bar at Body Pump during the leg track, when I believe I hurt my elbow three weeks ago, and haven’t experienced as much soreness as last week. The clicking is a bit disconcerting but we’ll see if it translates into pain, so far it hasn’t.

So, how have my friends in the Fitness Health Network been faring this week?

Weight Ladder has a review of Bob Harper’s Are You Ready. Bob was one of the trainers on The Biggest Loser and Kevin loved it. Check out his review.

NCN has joined the 100 pushups craze and noted that he’s been doing his pushups wrong… so he retested himself and restarted the process.

Lazy Man reviewed his health this week and took down some measurements.

And last but not least, Fat Man Unleashed’s Dr. Kal took a look at some of the 125 Best Foods for Men from the June 2008 issue of Men’s Health.

How to Prevent Common Golfing Injuries

I’ve recently picked up golfing, a sport that my dad is an avid fan of. I remember, many years ago, watching him practice for hours each night. He’d stand on the back deck and hit balls into a practice net over and over and over again. Never, in the years I’ve watched him do this, has my dad, who is over 50, complained about any injuries and it amazed me. How could he take swings are a hundred balls a night, minimum, and not suffer the same injuries I heard others suffer from? While I don’t know, I think a lot of it had to deal with his focus on form.

Now, years later, I’ve decided to pick up on golf and the elbow soreness I experienced from leaning into the bar at Body Pump has made me more aware of potential injuries. My dad actually sent me a mat, one that my uncle no longer used, and a practice net to put up on my deck. Now it’s my turn to swing a club a hundred times a night. So, in an attempt to preempt injury, I learned all I could.

Most golf injuries fall into three areas: lower body, arms, and wrists. With the lower body it’s your lower back and knees, with your arms it’s your shoulders and elbow, and finally wrists really mean wrists and hands (and fingers). The number one cause of injuries is flexibility, underscoring the importance of stretching before playing or practicing. When I was younger, I didn’t need to stretch before anything. Now, if I don’t stretch I risk injury at worst and soreness at best so always stretch.

Lower Body

With the back, it’s important that you do plenty of back stretches because of all the rotational movement involved. Also, your back does a significant amount of work so consider focusing on it for a while when you do your strength training.

Unfortunately with the knees, there’s not much stretching or weight training you can do to prevent an injury. If you do feel tenderness or pain, it’s important that you rest rather than try to fight through it. Your knees are composed of ligaments that will not improve with use, rest is the best medicine.

Arms

The two biggest arm injuries in golf are Tennis elbow and Golfer’s elbow. Surprisingly, Tennis elbow is more common. Tennis elbow is inflammation, soreness or pain on the outside of the upper arm near the elbow. Golfer’s elbow is the same thing but on the inside. Both are caused by repetitive stress.

Wrist & Hands

Stretching your wrists consists of rotation your hands and then stretching your fingers, though most of the wrist and hand related injuries are the result of repetitive stress. How do you avoid repetitive stress? The biggest culprit is once again hitting the mat, so focus on getting a good clean shot, but ultimately you need to make sure you don’t push yourself too hard. If you feel pain, it’s best to take a few days off until the pain subsides. If you are feeling some prolonged discomfort, here are the names of several common ailments, do some research to see if they apply to you:

• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Pain in the wrist, specifically the tendons that connect the hands and the muscles of the forearm.
• Trigger Finger: A tendon in your finger locks up and puts it in a position that looks like it’s on a trigger.
• Wrist Impaction Syndrome: Sounds as much fun as it feels, it’s pain because the bones of the wrist bang together and you feel it at the top of the wrist during your backswing.
• ECU Tendon Subluxation: Subluxation refers to when bones slide out of place and put pressure on the nerves, the ECU Tendon (extensor carpi ulnaris tendon) is the tendon, held in by a ligament, that runs within a smooth sheath in a groove at the wrist joint. So, put that all together and you have a slipping of that ECU tendon from that groove. What happens now is that the ECU Tendon, slipping in and out of that groove, may roll over the wrist bones and cause pain as you rotate your wrist.
• DeQuervains Tendonitis: Tendonitis refers to when tendons swell and DeQuervains tendonitis refers to swelling of the tendons that connect your thumb to the wrist. You’ll feel this in your left hand if you’re a right handed golfers and your right hand if you’re a left handed golfer.
• Hamate Bone fracture: The Hamate Bone is the bone in your hand that is connected to your pinky. While this is rarer, repetitive stress may cause small fractures in that bone.

Now, armed with that knowledge, I can hopefully prevent some of these injuries before they happen!

100Pushups: Back On Track

Last week I took a break because of elbow and wrist soreness and pain, this week I’m back on track having gone to Body Pump on Tuesday and restarting the 100 Pushups regime on Monday. I just finished up Week One, Day Two with good results despite the layoff.

What I like the most about the idea of doing 100 pushups is that it’s very much high repetition, low weight training. High reps, low weight is the same idea behinds Body Pump so the two are very in tandem. I know a lot of guys prefer to do low rep, high weight in order to build muscle mass so it’s a bit incongruous to work on your stamina. As much as I respect larger muscle mass, I don’t see the point. The one benefit of more muscle is that you have a higher metabolism but outside of that I don’t see the purpose.

One thing to note when you’re doing these pushups, the period of rest as the days progress increases. You’re supposed to rest 60 seconds between “sets” on Day one, 90 between “sets” on Day two, and 120 seconds between sets on Day Three. Keep that in mind if you’re doing these.

Anyway, Day Two was a success with only minor soreness and clicking in my elbow so we’ll keep going. On the last max-out set I was able to do nineteen pushups.

Cut One Soda A Week

Cut one 120 calorie soda or one 120 calorie beer a week and you’ll lose some serious weight.

A pound of fat is about 3500 calories, so cutting a 120 a week for a year would save you 1.8 lb. of fat a year. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, that’s one soda a week. How many 12 oz. sodas do you consume in a week? What if you cut out one a day? 12.5 lb. of fat removed.

Typically I write more about personal finance than I do about health but there are so many similarities between the two. With your health, it’s about calories. With your wallet, it’s about cents. Cutting out one small “bad” thing for you, whether it’s your health or your wallet, is the key to making significant life long changes that will benefit you for the better. Just try skipping one soda and taking that 2 lb. difference to the bank. Maybe next year it goes to skipping two a week.

Start looking for things you consume that are only calories and provide no other nutrients. Soda is a great example (no, sodium doesn’t count) but there are plenty of other high calorie, low nutrient foods that you may be eating on a frequent basis that you could cut out.

Of course, I don’t think that you should cut everything fun out of your eating. The occasional piece of chocolate or glass of wine can do your psyche a world of good. Sometimes, you may even need two glasses.

High Protein, Low Carbohydrate Diets

If you’ve ever heard of the Atkins diet then you’re familiar with one of the most popular high protein, low carbohydrate diets. The idea behind high protein and low carbohydrate diets is that you get approximately 30-50% of your calories from proteins, which is much higher than what the American Heart Association, the National Cholesterol Education Program, and the American Cancer Society recommends. The logic of a high protein, low carb diet is that by consuming less carbohydrates, you put your body into a different metabolic state in which you consume fat for fuel. This state is known as ketosis, named after ketones, the carbon fragments created after breaking down fat and what the body consumes.

Your body typically consume carbohydrates for fuel and only turns to fat stores whenever you’ve run out of carbohydrates. My limiting the consumption of carbs, you skip the carb burning stage and go immediately into consuming fat.

There are significant risks to diets like the Atkins diet that aren’t widely discussed. Weight loss is certainly one of the benefits for you run the risk of problems such as kidney failure, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, kidney stones, cancer, nausea and bad breath.

(Photo by size8jeans)

5 Vegetarian Proteins & Roundup

I mentioned earlier that my wife and I might go vegetarian for a week and so I began researching some vegetarian sources of protein. As it turns out, there are plenty of proteins out there from non-meat sources so I figured I’d find five that could be our staples. The five are:

• Beans
• Tofu
• Peanut Butter
• Lentils
• Broccoli

This whole vegetarian thing is still in its nascent stages so don’t have any high expectations yet.

As for this week in the fitness blogosphere:

• Lazy Man talks about how exercise is about more than losing weight. It can provide sleep and mood benefits as well.
• NCN has joined the the 100 pushups craze and cranked out the 42 pushups of day one, week one. Congrats!
• Israel shares some unconventional benefits of weight loss, including the donation of old clothes to charity!
• Weight Loss Journal has lost 53 lb., or 40% of his goal, so far. Here are his amazing before and after weight loss pictures.