Women Require an Hour of Excercise a Day

In a recent study it was found that as women get older only those who are already their goal weight and getting at least 1 hour of moderate exercise a day could maintain their weight.

If women are already overweight, they'll need to restrict their calories in addition to getting 1 hour of exercise.

I don't know about you Dear Readers but I think this makes perfect sense!  The idea that 20 minutes a day is sufficient was probably leaving a lot of people feeling like exercise wasn't working for them and that their weight loss goals were hopeless.

Take heart, your goals are not hopeless, just harder to attain than previously thought.  So how about we book a 1.5 hours of moderate exercise a day, cut back on our consumption and watch the lbs fall off?

Pokemon SoulSilver with Pokewalker

Dear Readers, you know by now that I'm on a quest for the holy grail of fitness equipment.  Something that combines strong motivation with great technique to get to fantastic results. 

In my previous searches I found things like Wii Active and Yourself Fitness which are all great games that incorporate the techniques of a personal trainer but require a level of motivation and commitment that is somewhat lacking in my busy days.

Enter the popular game from my childhood: Pokemon.  This new edition of SoulSilver and HeartGold incorporates a pedometer in the guise of a Pokerwalker. You see, you clip this Pokeball to your belt and it tracks your steps all day.  The higher the number of steps at the end of the day the better the prizes you'll find in the game. 

My husband, a big Pokemon fan, bought HeartGold for himself and later bought SoulSilver for me so we could trade.  I found that I'm striving to beat his steps, much like the Personal Trainer: Walking game for the DS did but with more of a collaborative feel.  And it's been great in convincing him to go on walks with me after work. 

"Honey, do you want to go on a pokewalk?" I say.

Checking his pokewalker, "Sure, I'm only at XXXX steps."

The best part about this game is the pedometer is easy to carry integrating into your everyday life while the actual pokemon game is somewhat addicting in it's cute characters, puzzling game play and the compulsion to catch them all.  It's motivation in a video game!

Now, this isn't going to get you ripped, but if you're a gamer having a hard time getting the right level of physical activity, this game could be the answer to your prayers.  And if you're a parent worried about the lack of exercise your video game addicted child has been prone to this game is the perfect solution.

Personally?  I've been carrying it around for about a week now and I've already started increasing my steps in a subconscious way, now only falling short about 2000 of my daily step goal. 

I'll get them all in today because I've Gotta Catch 'Em All!

Japanese Women Don't Get Fat or Old?

As I was lazing around my house Sunday after a gluttonous wedding weekend as a Matron of Honor I was perusing the health and fitness videos on MSN.com and came across a clip from the Today show where Katie Couric interviews the author of Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen.

I'm Chinese, I buy into the idea that the average Asian diet is healthier than the average American diet so of course, I kept watching. Apparently there are 7 basic guidelines.

Here's the gist with my own little spin:

1. Healthy ingredients make for healthy food. Eat homemmade meals preferably using fish, soy, vegetables and fruit. She made a point in the interview of noting that chicken is fine, the key is less red meat.

2. Get Closer to the Grain. Use rice instead of bread. Brown rice is preferred.

3. Small Plates, Smaller Body. Eat smaller portions by serving your food separately on small plates. The sample meal in the video included a small bowl of miso soup, a small bowl of mixed green salad, a small plate of chicken, a small bowl of rice, a small plate of multicolored vegetables and a pot of green tea with cup. Visually it looked like a lot and full of healthy and appetizing foods.

4. Miso Happy Day. Have a bowl of miso soup for breakfast, which is traditional in Japan because of ease and quickness of preparation, it's high nutrient, protein and fiber values and because it's just plain delicious.

5. Small Desserts. No really, that pazookie is not small enough.

6. Light and Gentle Cooking. I'm a big proponent of raw fish and other sea life but this concept lends itself to general Japanese cooking. Steaming, brief boiling, anything that doesn't impact the original ingredient too far from it's original flavors is preferred. Yes, I am talking to you Broccoli Casserole.

7. Hari Hachi Bunme. This is the Japanese art of not stuffing your face until you're full ala some pizza buffet. The author more tactifully put it as eating small amounts of food whenever you like until you are 80 percent full.

Pretty solid ideas except I like foods from other cultures. There's got to be easier, wider guidelines. I'll think on it and get back to you soon.

Image courtesy of Finnair.com.

The Diet Derailer: Weekends

What is it about weekends that make them such a huge diet derailer? Is it the lack of routine? The copious amounts of partying and meals with friends? The idea that it's a minivacation amid the week of responsible behavior?

All I know is that come Monday I'm struggling to get back to my healthy lifestyle changes, find that I'm at least a lb heavier than I was Friday morning, and sometimes nursing a hazy post weekend buzzy headache. Am I alone here?

On Mondays, I try to go back and enter everything I can remember consuming into my diet journal because despite the fact that I have a program that will wirelessly sync the data from my cellphone to the website, on weekends I just can't seem to find the concentration to even think about calories. Even with the memory blocks that might have occured in a retrospective calorie count, I still blow my caloric intake off the rails! (Read: 1000 calories over par.) Partner that with the fact that I RARELY make it to the gym on the weekends and I'm basically reversing my entire weeks progress in the matter of 2 days!

Here's what I'm going to do to get my train on track this weekend:

1. Drink More. Water that is. Between every glass of beer while bowling, every drink while bar hopping, every wine glass at dinner there will be a glass of water instead. I don't care if it doesn't look cool, I'm starting to think that I'm imbibing more alcohol than I have use for just because it's something to do between gutter balls, funny stories and courses respectively.

2. Eat More. Leafy green vegetables I mean. I will sneak some spinach into a breakfast omelette, a salad before every gluttonous meal just to take up space in this cavernous pit I call a stomach. More goodness in my stomach means less room for that cheesecake that keeps giving me the eye.

3. Play More. If I'm not going to get to the gym because I'm too busy socializing, then I can play while I entertain my friends. A game of tennis here, frisbee golf there, maybe even a bike ride to the beach. The possibilities: endless.

4. Pamper myself. Ok, this is more of a perspective shift. For most of the week, because I workout early in the morning before work, I never get a chance to sit in the steam room or sauna or hang out in the spa. I think if I make it the first thing I do on Sunday with the purpose of relaxation versus working out I could actually convince myself to get into the gym on... wait for it... a weekend. *gasp*

The Basics of Weight Loss One More 'Gain

Ok, so everyone has said this over and over again but I read an article on MSN on Secrets of The Belly Off! Club. Yes, it's from Men's Health Magazine but I don't think that matters Dear Readers, do you?

Here's the gist, no need to thank me for cutting down your reading time.

1. Cut Out Refined sugars and carbs. No candy, chips, soda and if the grain based product doesn't say Whole in it, don't put it in your mouth.

2. Eat more protein, healthy fats, and fiber-rich produce and whole grains.

3. Eat breakfast.

4. Do weight training 3 times a week.

5. Do interval cardio training.

6. Be motivated.

Seems easy enough.

Low Carb: Why Does It Work? Part 2

I'm on Day 3 of my low carb adventure. I assume that eventually, after the first 30 days it'll be a lifestyle choice instead of an adventure per se. I'm starting to feel the dizzy carb withdrawls which I can only assume are occurring because my body has no more glucose to burn, no more glycogen to tap into for energy and as a result, thinks I am starving. After I go to the gym for a couple of hours tonight I'm going to assume my body will start burning fat.

Back to the low carb logic. Insulin is the hormone that basically stops the use of fat for energy. It is responsible for pulling glucose from the blood stream and converting into the glycogen for energy use. The body will only store about a day's worth of glycogen for energy use. Anything beyond what the body can convert and store as glycogen is converted to fat.

Insulin is released whenever glucose is released into the blood stream. Glucose is apparently something our bodies want regulated in the blood so insulin is something of a blood stream hero. There's some nitty gritty science going on about glucose release but we'll skip it. For low carb purposes, know that the consumption of carbohydrates results in the introduction of glucose into the blood stream which results in the release of insulin.

So how do you avoid the release of insulin in the blood stream if you need to get at least 7 servings of vegetables in per day and vegetables naturally have carbohydrates in them?

The key is minimize the amount of glucose released in the blood stream resulting in the smallest amount of insulin released into the blood stream. The less glucose, the less insulin required to regulate the glucose levels.

So what vegetables should you eat to reduce the amount of insulin released and continue to burn fat? For that answer we turn to the Glycemic Index (GI).

This is another topic that most mainstream diets fail on. Being low on the GI is not purely enough to say that you can eat as much of it as you want. The GI measures the glucose effect on blood when a particular food is eaten. That measurement is based on a specific serving size. Consumption beyond that serving size can increase the glucose load.

Most foods that have a high fiber to calorie ratio, low in glucose and fructose as well as high in fat tend to have a much lower GI rating than foods than the average food.

Particularly easy to eat, find and enjoy low GI foods include:


(Chart courtesy of southbeach-diet-plan.com)

Low Carb: Why does it work? Part 1

I got a bit of a tongue lashing from my personal trainer for juicing. At first, he didn't say much about it then later reminded me of my weight loss goal for the wedding. It's fine to mess around with different nutrition ideas, apparently, but when you're 13 lbs overweight and looking to lose 30 lbs in time for a wedding ceremony so you can look like a supermodel in pictures, this just isn't going to cut it.

He reminded me that I should be consuming no more than 1300 calories per day, most of which should be veggies and protein and I should be laying low on the carbs. And by low he means not intaking 100% of my calories from fruit and veggie juice. Hmm...

Alright Mr. Munoz, I'll play your game after some research. Not that I don't trust you, my dear good friend, I just need to know where the logic comes from so that I might improvise in low carbing when certain scenarios are undefined.

Apparently, the body uses glycogen as the source for energy primarily which is found in carbohydrates. Only when the glycogen is depleted does the body move onto lipolysis, basically burning fat for energy. Low carb diets remove carbohydrates from the equation resulting in the body being forced into using fat for energy.

Now, I had a friend who told me that the low carb thing didn't work for her. That eventually, she just ended up gaining weight while on the diet. There's a caveat that most main stream low carb diets only touch upon. It's that the body will use the fat consumed in the day for energy before going after the fat in the body. Low carb is not Carte Blanche to eat high fatty foods.

But we all know that you can't avoid carbs entirely, in fact a diet that is high is vegetables will inevitably be relatively high carbs and some vegetables have such a high sugar content, they might was well be a candy (yes, I'm talking about you corn.)

Well... enter insulin's important role in the low carb diet.

(Image courtesy of 1001herbs.com)

Community

There are times when I'm happy with how I look and in turn become complacent with what I eat. Sure, these times are usually after a really great workout session with Anthony, my personal trainer, but they're detrimental to my weight loss goals.

I believe the reason I haven't been as committed as I could be to reaching my goal weight is because I'm having a hard time facing the fact that I am in actuality overweight and as a result am putting a strain on my heart and general health. I realize that it's hard going it alone so I decided to join a community. Today I joined http://weight-loss.fitness.com.

I'm committed to the following:

1. Keeping a food diary. *edit: I'll just be keeping the information on my fitday.com account.

2. Sticking to my diet that includes the following items:
a. 100g of protein per day (Approximately 33g per meal or a 4 oz skinless chicken breast).
b. 25g of fiber per day ( Approximately 8g per meal or a Thomas's light english muffin).
c. 7 servings of fruits and vegetables (Approximately 2 servings of veggies per meal and a fruit snack or a salad before a meal and a fruit dessert after).
d. 2.2 liters of water per day.

3. At least 1 hour of exercise per day. Ideally a training run.

4. Posting daily on the weight loss forum.

California is the Key

Being from southern California means more than living in sunshine, traipsing around with the stars, and having plastic surgery to augment those parts that seem less than perfect. No no, with great weather comes great responsibility. Like gym memberships and water bottles.

It occurs to me that I've been blogging for over 6 years, longer if you count the Asian Avenue days. When I started, it was refreshing. I mean, I had been journaling since I realized that there were thoughts and memories that could/should only be kept for myself. A public journal was like a Post Secret release on a daily basis. Inevitably though, nothing stays private and someone finds you and your innermost thoughts, that you meant to only share with perfect strangers over the internet, are stumbled upon by someone you know. Sometimes blogging becomes a show. It's written with the intent of entertainment instead of personal growth and reflection.

I bring this thought up because though I think the description of California written above is humorous, it's not what I really think. However, I am fully aware that other people, outside of the state, may see it that way. And why not? Despite the fact that I know better because I live here, I see it that way at moments too.

I mean, as a California resident I feel the need to adhere and surpass the physical expectations that the media puts forth. Being an empowered woman makes me feel the same way. Everyday when faced with someone with a better body than mine, whether in person or in the media, I think "I can do anything anyone else can do, so why don't I have that body?"

Thinking that way is both good and bad. I don't think anyone would disagree that believing you can do anything is a great characteristic, but the reality is that when you're striving for it and sometimes failing, it can be pretty defeating. Jessica Alba's body is a great goal, but really, I think she might be genetically engineered to look that good.

So how do people stop themselves from being defeated by falling short of their goals? Obviously there should be a healthy level of self disappointment when you fail to reach a personal goal (regardless of what those hippies teaching unjustifiable self esteem in elementary schools will tell you.) But how do you get disciplined and stay disciplined your whole life despite the occasional crushing setback?

I suppose my first step is to stop calling them crushing.

Alcohol, My Weakness No More

At my most fit I had given up alcohol. I also crawled under a rock and refused to leave my apartment for anything but work, the gym or a run in the park. It's a lot harder to live that lifestyle now. As my life and my friend's lives evolve from post college grads to dream achievers I have engagement parties and weddings, nights at the club to support blossoming DJ careers, Lakers games at the bar and liquor filled dinner parties on to attend.

My problem is that alcohol not only lowers my social inhibitions, it lowers my food inhibitions. Sure, on a normal day my self control can hold me back from that pastrami sandwich that beckons from the Hat but put a few vodka club sodas or gin & tonics in me and I'll eat anything that sounds remotely bad for me.

I feel that maintaining a healthy lifestyle has a lot to do with planning and control. In a sense, alcohol is the anti thesis of a healthy lifestyle, not counting the single glass of red wine that is supposed to be good for your heart.

Last night the fiance and I headed over to Joe's Sushi, one of my favorite sushi places. Not because of any exotic rolls or anything, in fact I dislike all that new fangled ginormous rolls they try to pawn off as sushi these days. Give me some salmon and uni sushi and a spicy tuna hand roll and I'm a happy girl. Anyway, Joe's is spectacular at the basics and for $24 the sushi chef in front of you will basically make you whatever you want, however much you want. Sure, some people would call that "all you can eat sushi," but that phrase brings to mind places like Todai and Hokkaido who have no business calling their rotten fish sushi in the first place.

That will be my last big meal for the next month. I'm attempting to shrink my stomach will 5-6 small meals consisting of no more than 200 calories at a time so that I can rev my metabolism all day. I actually only had an apple and one hard boiled egg all day in anticipation of the sushi gluttony at Joe's.

Here's my meal's damage:

2 pieces of salmon sushi - 120 calories
6 kumamoto oysters topped with roe - 57 calories
4 pieces of uni - 220 calories
1 alaska dynamite - 200 calories
4 pieces of a Philadelphia roll - 160 calories
4 pieces of a rainbow roll filled with spicy tuna - 210 calories
1 piece of unagi - 80 calories
2 side salads - 100 calories
1/3 a bottle of Kirin - 160 calories
Total last night of gluttony: 1307 calories

Looking back, the next time I go to have sushi I'm going to have a salad, 6 oysters and split a roll of spicy tuna with my honey. That'll put me at around 250 instead of that massive number. Portion control!

After the sushi we headed over to the bar to catch up with our newest couple friends K & K who were having dinner at a local pub. I have to pat myself on the back, despite the fact that the drinks were only $2.75 each, I only had a club soda on the rocks ;)

And the Lakers beat the Supersonics. Today was a good day.

The Yo Yo Diet

Losing weight seems like an easy enough task. Burn off 3500 calories and you lose a pound. The best way to intake calories is with high fiber, high nutrient or high protein sources that are low sugar and low fat. So why have I been up and down in my weight since I was 10?

After 27 years of life, which is obviously un peu overstatement since I can only remember the last 22 years of my life honestly, I've finally figured out my weight loss and weight gain cycles.

I'm a happy eater. Typically when I'm settled into a happy long term relationship I enjoy lavish meals out, cook delicious extravagant meals and post coital snacks. I think something about being in a relationship makes me stop depending on myself for healthy food choices and I start eating like a man, specifically the man that I'm dating, who is typically at least 6" taller than my 5'2" asian frame.

When I'm single I try to look my best. I don't know if it's all the free time on my hands, the ability to be selfish with my time or just the knowledge that in order for me to date the men I'm interested in I have to get to the peak of hotness, but when I'm single I can commit to waking up at 6am to go running, working out for 3 hours straight, eating a healthy vegetarian diet, etc.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't blame my current beau or my relationships for my change in attitude. I blame my complete lack of discipline and my gluttonous ways. I just don't know why they surface.

So what's with today's introspection? I'm engaged and I don't want to be little ms. muffintop for the rest of my life. I want to be the best woman I can be which includes the hottie within coming out permanently.

Today I commit to the first day of the rest of my life. The first step in the journey of a million miles to be who I want to be by the end of my life.