Constant Random Change » Fitness

Things To Do This New Year: Fitness

Bry — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:38:00 +0000

This will probably be the last in the series unless I figure out what to write for Training.

Figure out the reasons behind your eating habits.

I’m sure many of you have resolved to “correct” their diets this year, either by cutting down on some types of food or by eating more of “healthy” food. Unfortunately, unless you have an unusually high degree of discipline, you’ll find out that these diet resolutions are impossible to follow.

The key point here is that one’s eating habits, like talents, are rooted to our past. Our experiences in our childhood subconsciously affects what and how we eat. Unless we learn the reasons behind our eating habits, we’ll eventually revert back to them a few weeks or months into a new diet plan.

For example, I was born into a poor family so I had been trained from a young age not to waste any food on the dinner table. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), our family became less and less poor as the years went by and the food on the dinner table also increased. My problem of eating more than I need became worse when I started working because of the free dinners and Frappuccinos the company gave us whenever we went on OTs.

After some thinking, I figured out a simple way of dealing with this problem: avoid free food. Having little free food means I don’t gorge a lot. When I did my fitness regimen four years ago, I didn’t eat at home except on Sundays. I also limited myself to salt crackers when passing by the company pantry (which is stocked with free snacks). Limiting myself to paid food also allowed me to limit the portions of food that I eat every meal, as opposed to the virtual all-you-can-eat meals at the dinner table.

Another aspect of my poor past allowed me to pull this off with relative ease: I can get sated regardless of how little I eat as long as I clean up my plate. It’s psychological, yes, but if I didn’t have this, I probably would have had to use other tricks to make me feel full easier on every meal.

So before you decide to change your eating habits, take time to look back and see what are the things that influenced how you eat today. You might be surprised that some of your worst eating habits could easily be turned off (e.g. you eat ice cream often because as a kid you thought it was the greatest thing ever, but nowadays it’s just meh) and that you could steer yourself to a healthier lifestyle with just a few changes (like my example above).

Something Not So Obvious About Exercise

Bry — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:34:56 +0000

A recent Time Magazine article explains why most people who go on exercise regimens don’t lose weight at all.

You’ve heard it for years: to lose weight, hit the gym. But while physical activity is crucial for good health, it doesn’t always melt pounds — in fact, it can add them. Here’s why.

It’s nothing new to someone who has taken fitness seriously. But given that a lot of people are not aware of the simple facts brought forward by the article, I think it’s still worth sharing.

Bottom line: if you want to lose weight, don’t feed yourself with more calories than you can handle, exercise or no exercise. When I was on the way to lose 20 pounds, not only did I perform regular cardio and strength training exercise, I also skipped the high-calorie snacks served at our company’s pantry and ate salt crackers (Skyflakes) instead.

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin [via Time]

Forget BMI

Bry — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:30:38 +0000

I hate BMI. It’s the reason why I was called “obese” in my 2008 annual HMO check-up even after going through six months of regular exercise and controlled dieting (which resulted in losing over 20 pounds of fat on my body).

I found a link yesterday about the flaws of using BMI as a gauge for a person’s fitness. While I have already mentioned why BMI is inferior to Body Fat Percentage in a past post, this article sheds light on why the former’s use is more prevalent than the latter.

Americans keep putting on the pounds — at least according to a report released this week from the Trust for America’s Health. The study found that nearly two-thirds of states now have adult obesity rates above 25 percent.

But you may want to take those findings — and your next meal — with a grain of salt, because they’re based on a calculation called the body mass index, or BMI.

As the Weekend Edition math guy, I spoke to Scott Simon and told him the body mass index fails on 10 grounds:

Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus [from NPR]

Kicking HFCS

Bry — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:57:48 +0000

Kicking bad habits are an essential part of every fitness regimen. Most of the time, these habits are the ones which caused you to be out of shape in the first place.

But what if you don’t have a bad habit like habitual drinking or smoking?

Try cutting refined sugar from your diet.

From your D-colon reactions, I can see that this is an impossible task for most of you. But have you checked how many (empty) calories you’re getting from sweetened drinks and processed food with refined sugar or HFCS?

You might be surprised how easy it is to shave hundreds of calories off your daily intake with just this mindset.

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Apologies for the short post. Spent the entire day enduring a bad migraine attack.

Simple Six-Week Training Programs

Bry — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:57:20 +0000

Here are three simple six-week training programs designed for people who don’t have time to go to the gym and/or don’t want to buy exercise equipment:

I found the first one in a Lifehacker article last year. Since then, the site owner decided to expand (copy-paste ) the program to work on the abs and the thighs.

I’d like to give couple of comments about the programs. First off, always keep in mind that working out a body part will remove fat from it i.e. targeted fat loss doesn’t work. You’ll need to control your calorie intake for that. At most, these exercises will tighten/tone their respective body parts preventing the loose skin and fat from sagging.

The other thing about these programs is that the sit up and squat challenges are too easy compared to the push up challenge. This is because the muscle groups used in those exercises are large and as such, respond quickly to exercise. Heck, in my summer weight training class back in college, we were doing 4 sets of 500 crunches at the end of the 5th week.

On the other hand, push ups use both large muscle groups (chest, abs, and to a smaller degree, back) and small muscle groups (shoulders and triceps). Unless your push up stance is wide (which puts more effort on the chest) your progress will be hampered by the relatively slower responding shoulder muscles and triceps. Expect to repeat some weeks for 3 times or more.

Fitness and Personal Finance

Bry — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:38:37 +0000

I find it odd that I failed to mention the relationship between Finance and Fitness in last night’s update of About This Site. It’s odd in the sense that these two seemingly unrelated categories share the same basic principles.

The most basic principle for personal finance is Spend Less, Earn More. For physical fitness, it’s Eat Less, Exercise More.

The similarities don’t stop there. Both basic principles are simple yet difficult to apply in real life. This often results in people getting into get-rich-quick scams (for finance) or trying out fad diets (for fitness) in the hopes of skipping the hard parts. However, time and time again, these two principles are often the only reliable means for people to reach their goals in personal finance and physical fitness.

Speaking about goals, both categories also require you to define realistic goals. Not only does this prevent you from the inevitable disappointment you fail to reach your goal, this also forces you to assess your situation and your target. Maybe your situation is more dire than you expected, or maybe you really don’t need to worry about your situation; either way, finding your starting point and your goal in both personal finance and physical fitness will allow you to determine the correct steps needed to get you where you need to go.

Even on the micro-level, there are still similarities between the two categories. Logging of all expenses and calorie counting are both very tedious tasks and yet they are among the most reliable ways for you to determine where you can trim off excess expenses/calories. Heck, these two tasks are so similar that you could probably log your calorie intake in a personal expenses logging software and vice-versa!

Another similarity is the importance of changing the way you think. You should change your perception about yourself by taking reality into account e.g. ignore how the media portrays “fitness”, you really don’t need to buy that gadget no matter how shiny it looks, etc. You should also understand that being both fit and financially stable requires a long term change in your lifestyle and not just a temporary one.

Of course, there are differences between fitness and finance, but my goal for this post is just to relate the two. You can’t blame me for not pointing the differences out.

(picture source: The Simple Dollar)

DOMS – Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

Bry — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:50:23 +0000

Did a lot of stuff in the past 4 days. I’m tired, my body hurts like heck, and I still have to write a second Daily Entry.

After a couple of hours of fruitless thinking about what to write about next all the while trying to ignore the fact that my back and abs hurt every time I move, I finally decided to write about the type of pain I’m having now.

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If you’re planning to undergo a full fitness regimen, you must be prepared for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), the muscle pain that occurs a day after performing an exercise.

The Wikipedia entry covers most of the stuff you need to know about DOMS. Heck, just the name alone should give you a good idea what to expect.

Some things you might want to take note about DOMS:

Know the difference between injury and DOMS. Pain from injuries are usually more localized to an area and the swelling can be visible. It’s also much more painful than the latter. If you’re not confident about the risk of having injuries, I’d suggest you perform your exercises with supervision.
I’m assuming that you have a job and not a bum like me. If that’s the case DOMS will kill your productivity at work so you must know how to deal with it. Know which painkillers work for your DOMS and keep a bunch of them within reach. You could also take note if stretching helps reduce DOMS in your current training regimen.
Ab DOMS is IMHO the most annoying type of DOMS because a lot of body movement requires the abs. Sit up straight? ow. Laugh? ow. ow. ow. Lie down? Ouch! Cough or sneeze? aw, fuck. Just something to keep in mind before doing those crunches.
Leg DOMS is also annoying but obviously it’s only a problem if you’re planning to walk a lot the day after you do your leg exercises.

Simple Six-Week Training Programs

Fitness and Faulty Advertising

Bry — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:14:58 +0000

In line with centralizing all serious stuff between my blogs, I’ll be continuing my series of posts on fitness on this blog. The other posts are still archived in LiveJournal because copy-pasting them here would be cheating.

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The most annoying TV commercial for me nowadays is the one for Lucky Me Sotanghon Lite. See if you can figure out why I don’t like this commercial:

At 125 calories per serving, it’s actually a better alternative to instant noodles. My problem here is that it puts too much emphasis on the low-fat (0.5g) and the zero-cholesterol. Remember, fat alone does not make you fat — calories do. Commercials like these spread the misconception that fat is important, and it usually leads to a scenario featured recently in GraphJam:

why people buy food with "50% less fat"

Cholesterol content is a non-issue. Instant noodle’s (our control group) cholesterol level of 5mg is hardly comparable to an egg yolk’s 200+ mg of cholesterol, so why should we even bother with 0mg cholesterol versions of instant noodles?

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Misleading ads are not new; I’d be tempted to take on the notorious Promil ads if only they were related to fitness. Milo is also a good target, but I’ll let it slide because of the amount of support (and sponsorships) that “sports” drink provides to our athletes. Jack and Jill Nova, on the other hand, is just ripe enough for some bashing.

I personally like eating Nova, but just glancing at the Nutritional Information at the back of the pack makes you think twice about whether this snack really lives up to its slogan “Guilt-free Snacking” and “Have as much as you want!“.

At 140 calories per serving, it’s calorie content is just average among similar snacks. Piattos even has less calories per serving than Nova.

You might say “but I’m eating Nova for the fiber from the multigrains”. Sorry, but Nova only has 2g of dietary fiber per serving. Compare that to the 1g of dietary fiber from Piattos and you’ll see it’s not that special. If you really want to get dietary fiber from a snack food, get it from my personal favorite: Oishi Pea Pod. Sure, it may taste like crap to some people, but 5-freaking-grams of fiber per serving (20% RDA) might make you consider having this for meriendaonce in a while.

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So remember kids, always take ad related to “diet” food with a grain of salt, and don’t forget to double check with the Nutritional Information label before buying something.