Trail Mix is one ingredient away from being a snicker's bar, dammit people! If one more of you tells me you're sweating your ass off in the gym (on the treadmill, walking, zero incline, at a pace of a 20 minute mile...that's sweating your ass off? You better be HUGE), and eating salads (with ranch dressing and bacon bits and cheese and croutons and...) and TRAIL MIX, I'm going to reach out there and SMACK YOU!
Trail Mix:
raisins (a healthy food turned into candy by shrivelling it into little sacs of sugar)
nuts (healthy in VERY SMALL DOSES, not HANDFULLS)
m&m's (seriously? This is CANDY!)
mini chocolate chips (CANDY!)
mini peanut butter chips (THIRD CANDY INGREDIENT!)
Just because people (supposedly) eat this food on the trail doesn't make it healthy for you! "Trail Mix" was designed as a quick, easy-to-carry, calorically DENSE food (that means a little bit has TONS OF CALORIES) so that as you HIKED ALL DAY LONG you could eat it and replenish your glycogen stores in your muscles.
You aren't hiking, let alone all day long. PUT IT DOWN AND GO EAT AN APPLE!
No more Trail Mix, people. I MEAN IT!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Journeys
In Jillian Michaels' book, Master Your Metabolism, she talks about her Journey. Like all of us, she has a story, and a Journey, and like all of us, her Journey stops and starts, meanders and twists, and sometimes, she gets lost. As she puts it, "Have you ever made a choice in your life that seemed like a mild course correction but turned into a major detour? That's what happened to me, and it took me years to get back on track."
We all say the same thing, just in different ways, and this is one of those "The In Club" secrets I'm trying to help you all uncover. I call it Just One Step, Just Not Just Any Step. The First Step in your Journey. Jillian is a very down-to-earth person, and she said the exact same thing. Only she put it this way:
"A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul."
It's taken out of context (she's speaking of being fired and blackballed all over town and having to take a job making 1/10th what she was making before, and being seriously humbled and mortified, and how it was the best thing to ever happen to her), but it should ring true for all of us. It's not the best days of our lives that cause us to look over where we are and make our lives better. It's those WORST days of our lives.
Go ahead, folks. Count your blessings. Just don't dismiss your curses. Those are just the blessings you haven't turned around yet! Get out there and have a really f*cking bad ego day. You'll be glad you did.
Don't Think. Just Go.
We all say the same thing, just in different ways, and this is one of those "The In Club" secrets I'm trying to help you all uncover. I call it Just One Step, Just Not Just Any Step. The First Step in your Journey. Jillian is a very down-to-earth person, and she said the exact same thing. Only she put it this way:
"A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul."
It's taken out of context (she's speaking of being fired and blackballed all over town and having to take a job making 1/10th what she was making before, and being seriously humbled and mortified, and how it was the best thing to ever happen to her), but it should ring true for all of us. It's not the best days of our lives that cause us to look over where we are and make our lives better. It's those WORST days of our lives.
Go ahead, folks. Count your blessings. Just don't dismiss your curses. Those are just the blessings you haven't turned around yet! Get out there and have a really f*cking bad ego day. You'll be glad you did.
Don't Think. Just Go.
Plateaus-Yours and Mine
If you haven't hit a plateau yet, you will. And when you do, you're going to want to give up (lizard brain!). Let's talk about plateaus, why they happen, how to punch through them, and create some ammunition to use against the lizard brain BEFORE you hit this crisis, shall we?
A plateau is a sticking point in your weight loss. It may happen after the first 10% weight loss, it may happen after the first 10 pounds, or it may not happen until the LAST 10 pounds. But at some point, you're going to get stuck. Day after day, week after week, you will step on that scale and it will stay within the same 1-3 pound fluctuation. And if, as this happens to you, you do not break down and cry at least once...
You're a stronger person than I am!
A plateau is a sticking point in your weight loss. It may happen after the first 10% weight loss, it may happen after the first 10 pounds, or it may not happen until the LAST 10 pounds. But at some point, you're going to get stuck. Day after day, week after week, you will step on that scale and it will stay within the same 1-3 pound fluctuation. And if, as this happens to you, you do not break down and cry at least once...
You're a stronger person than I am!
"The lizard brain"
A couple of weeks back Seth Godin posted a blog entry about Quieting the lizard brain that I just loved.
The lizard brain (the amygdala) is, as Seth defines it, "...the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The [lizard brain] is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.... The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive."
The lizard brain is what stops us from succeeding, what kills our motivation in the 11th hour, it's the thing that, after we've fought so long and so hard to have our goals in sight, scares us into quitting.
I wanted to share his post with all of you so you could contemplate it in conjunction with your weight loss goals. Sooner or later, your lizard brain is going to rise up and try to sabotage you, and you are going to need to be ready for that moment. You are going to need to be able to anticipate the irrational fear that grips you, the sudden desire to give up on your goals that you've worked so long and hard for, and to go back to your old ways. You are going to be fighting against a very basic instinctive response, an instinct that has helped keep us alive over the millenia. It is an instinct of self-preservation, but sometimes that instinct backfires and causes us to try to preserve things in our lives that are NOT WORTH preserving. Things like sitting on our asses and eating bag after bag of potato chips.
So, friends, as you set forth on your Journeys, keep the Lizard Brain in mind, and start setting up your defenses now. That way, when it tries to beat you down, you'll be ready for it, and you'll win! Don't Think, Just Go!
The lizard brain (the amygdala) is, as Seth defines it, "...the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The [lizard brain] is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.... The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive."
The lizard brain is what stops us from succeeding, what kills our motivation in the 11th hour, it's the thing that, after we've fought so long and so hard to have our goals in sight, scares us into quitting.
I wanted to share his post with all of you so you could contemplate it in conjunction with your weight loss goals. Sooner or later, your lizard brain is going to rise up and try to sabotage you, and you are going to need to be ready for that moment. You are going to need to be able to anticipate the irrational fear that grips you, the sudden desire to give up on your goals that you've worked so long and hard for, and to go back to your old ways. You are going to be fighting against a very basic instinctive response, an instinct that has helped keep us alive over the millenia. It is an instinct of self-preservation, but sometimes that instinct backfires and causes us to try to preserve things in our lives that are NOT WORTH preserving. Things like sitting on our asses and eating bag after bag of potato chips.
So, friends, as you set forth on your Journeys, keep the Lizard Brain in mind, and start setting up your defenses now. That way, when it tries to beat you down, you'll be ready for it, and you'll win! Don't Think, Just Go!
RPE vs. Target Heart Rate
An old friend of mine from high school (the second of the three I attended) who read my last blog entry, Crunch the Numbers, had a great question, and it's one I want to hit on today. She wrote to me:
"Since we're the same age, my target HR should be 161 too, but I'm almost always up in the 180's when I'm on the elliptical, and God help me when I'm running! The thing is though, I can sustain that for an hour no problem (well, not so much the running, but the 180's), and if I drop down to 160, I feel like I'm not pushing myself hard enough. So what's the deal with that?"
This was such an excellent question, and one I'm sure quite a few of you are asking yourselves, if you started using my Heart Rate formulas. Many of you will find that, if you really push yourselves, you are blasting way past your THR. So should you slow down? What if you are in good health (as my friend Carly is) and are still not really pushing yourself at your THR? What does that mean?
"Since we're the same age, my target HR should be 161 too, but I'm almost always up in the 180's when I'm on the elliptical, and God help me when I'm running! The thing is though, I can sustain that for an hour no problem (well, not so much the running, but the 180's), and if I drop down to 160, I feel like I'm not pushing myself hard enough. So what's the deal with that?"
This was such an excellent question, and one I'm sure quite a few of you are asking yourselves, if you started using my Heart Rate formulas. Many of you will find that, if you really push yourselves, you are blasting way past your THR. So should you slow down? What if you are in good health (as my friend Carly is) and are still not really pushing yourself at your THR? What does that mean?
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Crunch the Numbers
A major part of the weight loss equation, Calories, requires some math.
Oh, stop whining. This is where all that Algebra you thought you'd never use will come in handy!
Oh, stop whining. This is where all that Algebra you thought you'd never use will come in handy!
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