Active Exercise (with new graphs!)

As often happens to me, I got inspired by a new book. I won't write about the book just yet, but my inspiration came from this blog post.  I'm not all the way through, but I'm taking the point about needing to exercise, not just move around a bit.The book focuses on heart rate as a gauge of exercise, which is a good way to do it. However, I've got much more complete data from my nifty BMF device I've been wearing for four years.

The BMF measures movement with accelerometers, and adds measurement of skin temperature and skin impedance/conductivity (ie, how much you are sweating!).  This is why its such an intrusive device compared to the Fitbit, Nike bands, etc. The company claims its well calibrated, and those few comparisons I can find on the web agree it measures overall activity better than any other device.  The BMF measures "mets" which I have never bothered to research - I first heard of them using the Wii Fit, which also uses them. It allows some customization of how many mets equals "moderate activity" and how many equals "vigorous activity".  I made an adjustment to lower the threshold for "vigorous" because after wearing the device initially for a few weeks I never got to vigorous!  So my definition of moderate is 3 mets to 5.5 mets, and vigorous is anything over 5.5 mets.

I made some brand-new graphs to look at my exercise history, using this data which has been collected all along.  Here is the total exercise history:

You can faintly make out along the bottom some darker red bars - those are "vigorous" exercise - hardly any!  I broke out just the vigorous, and got this:

I have no idea what happened on November 14, 2010, my all-time high for vigorous exercise.  I went back and looked at old blog posts, the closest thing I have to a diary, and there is nothing the explains it. More interestingly, the concentrated vigorous exercise is in early 2012, when I decided to start running and train for some 5Ks. It really did get me moving.

The book recommends 45 minutes of exercise a day, six days a week. It further recommends breaking that out to two days of vigorous aerobic exercise, two days of more moderate, and two days of weight training.It is easy for me to accumulate 45 minutes of moderate exercise, and I do give myself credit for active housework here. But I have had less than 10 days in four years where I did 40 or more minutes of vigorous exercise!

I am focusing on moving more, and its having its results. Here is just this year's exercise log:

Again, the discerning eye may see some darker coloring at the bottom - that is vigorous exercise, as I try running again.

Based on book recommendations, I need to focus on that 45 minutes daily piece, and keep up trying to up the ante with running.  Just as an aside, I've almost never found myself moving into "vigorous" territory with anything but running. Jumping jacks at the gym workout, sure, but that's in tiny bursts. Because the extra stress running puts on my body, I'll have to figure out other options eventually.

Excelsior!

Buckling down with Atkins

I've written before about my recurrent trend hovering around the same weight- for more than two years! I'm pretty sure that maintaining my weight within a five pound band, even with a pattern of rapid loss followed by slow gain, is more good for me than bad.

I drifted upward in weight over the summer, and its time to wrestle it back down. I started by simply cutting back and upping the exercise. (This sounds very simple but its not. Especially the activity levels. I just couldn't have done it sooner for other reasons.)

But I got re-energized with Atkins as the way to eat. I surfed into a video of Gary Taubes again explaining what really is going on in our bodies with nutrition. Here is my understanding of the explanation which makes total sense to me.

We don't get fat because we eat too much while exercising too little. When we eat too many calories and burn too few calories, the result is we get fat, but there is no "because" there. Why do we eat more? Why do we burn less? Its not because of sloth and gluttony, moral failings on our part. There are many physiological reasons, but the big one for Americans today is insulin regulation. Sugar and simple carbs are the reason we eat more. Carbs make us hungry and screws up out insulin and other hormones. And on the calorie burn side, exercise has less impact than your internal hormonally driven metabolism regulation, which is also affected by the carbs. For many people, simply cutting the carbs sharply with no other changes will result in a weight loss. But for many people that have eaten otherwise for years, it is more complicated than that. And even for those for whom the magic formula works, it is very hard to persist in our society that doesn't build menus that way.

Nuances I have picked up: many people who try Atkins get the "fat is not bad for you" message and so end up after a time eating the worst of all possible worlds- high fat AND high carb. This is a recipe for all the bad things that come from bad nutrition, not just fat but unhealthy hearts and diabetes. So after being on Atkins for a while, moving away from strict adherence is a time for caution.

Here's a tidbit I got from a new book I just started: Mild depression is a positive evolutionary adaptation! I love this, understanding why our bodies have evolved to do certain things. We evolved as hunter gatherers, moving all the time. The only reason NOT to move was because food was scarce. So hunkering down, slowing your metabolism to make it through the dry season, or the winter, was an adaptive semi-hibernation type strategy. The obvious problem we have is we have no food shortage during the time our metabolism is dialed down. The trick is learning how to break the depression-which is the catalyst and which the result? Does moving break it, or does it break for other reasons, and then we start moving? I'm only a little way in the book, maybe the answer will appear.

In the mean time, I'm experiencing the basic Atkins induction rapid loss of 4-5 pounds of water. Very rewarding to step on the scale each day and see huge progress. I know my normal pattern would be two more weeks of faithful adherence which cements the gains into true loss, followed by several months of allowing it to creep back up. Stay tuned to see how I handle this.




What's different this time so far: I started up running before going into Atkins. I've kept it up, and I have a 5K coming up. The Atkins book does not recommend starting exercise the same time as the diet, but I'm currently more focused on strong versus slim.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Making Changes

It's been two weeks since my last post, and I've made some changes. I love my graphs, and they provide both information for me to use, and motivation to make the line on the graph head in another direction. As it turns out, I've managed to up my average calories burned each day by just under 200 calories!  I don't think I'm being a total fanatic, either. It's a walk at lunch, and more active in the evenings. Oh, and the running. Did I mention I signed up for the Dead Man's Run 5K six weeks from now?

The faint green line is the daily total calories burned, the dark green line is a running weekly average, and the flat lines are the monthly averages. Last date is 9/7/2013.

Here's the graph of calories expended this year - can you pick out the moment I decided to get more active? (Note to nerds: the 200 calorie improvement is the last two weeks' average compared to the previous two weeks' average. Can't really pick that out on the graph.)

Right now it feels like I'm entering a new, good routine, but it also involves a large number of ongoing obligations. I'm not so good at the sustaining things for the longer term, I'm better at blitz approaches. But my girl and I are volunteering at an animal shelter, with a minimum number of hours for each month required. My girl has some other ongoing activities that require support and transportation - and oh yes, school has started, so time spent on the pesky homework has to happen.

In addition, I've signed up for a class that will start in October - actually, two classes, one on-line and one in person. I've finally got my boat working, and the last three weekends have included magnificent, if brief, voyages. My mother is driving less, and so I'm making the trek out to her place more often.  I have to really do some training if I'm going to run the 5K (I confess now what I don't think I admitted here before: Last year, I just picked up the Tshirt and bagged the race).

So why does this all seem so manageable now?

It must be because work has been manageable. No one has threatened to fire me for at least four months. Many wonks have been on vacation. I've got some excellent folks on my immediate team. Your federal government will swing into its dysfunctional gears starting tomorrow, and some of that nonsense will trickle down to yours truly. Hopefully, I can continue doing a decent job without having all my emotional and physical energy sucked out of me while doing it.

And more than coincidentally, I've made three magnificent voyages in the past three weeks!

Back to School

It's been a tough few months. When things aren't going well, it's so easy to just crawl into my burrow and snuggle up. I've had two vacations in the past month, and they've done quite a bit to smooth me out. Plus, most of my crises are not resolved, but simmered down to sub-crisis level. So before going back to work tomorrow - and school starts for my youngest on Tuesday - I thought I'd take a hard look at what's up with me on the diet and exercise front.

I weigh myself every day, on a scale that transmits the number over wifi to a database. So every day I see that number, and when I want I can call up a graph on an app on the iphone. So I have been aware of my weight, and generally satisfied that it's staying within bounds. But now, with two vacations just behind me, its time to buckle down.

The orange line is the weekly average weight, the green dots are the actual daily weight.

Here we are with the standard pattern - buckle down, hit the hard floor, and creep back up again.

But I took the time for the first time in a much longer while to look at my activity levels. I wear my calorie and step counting arm band every day, and look at the numbers, but there is no app that easily shows me the trends. That is up to me to organize - export the data, and then manipulate it into a form that gives meaning. This is an exercise I love doing, but its fairly inefficient.  I finally did this for the first time since February.

Here is the sad story of my progressively more slug-like experience:

The faint green line is the daily calorie burn, then there is a running 7-day average in dark green, and the flatter medium green lines are monthly average calories burned.

I am burning fewer calories than ever!  My good friend has a slow metabolism, and struggles mightily to keep the activity up and the weight down. As she pointed out with anguish, the reward for losing weight is that you naturally burn fewer calories just living, and so have to cut food or up the activity even more because you have been successful.  So the first year I collected activity data - when I started this blog and focused on losing weight - I was burning on average 150-200 calories more each day than I am now. But I've been at this weight, roughly, for two and a half years. And so far this year, I've really almost hibernated.  I haven't averaged burning 2000 calories in a day since last December, and you can see the "high activity" days in 2013 are much lower than the high activity days in previous years.

I kind of knew this, I kind of felt it, but it is useful to confront the stats.

I think I'm done sitting at the computer for now, I'm off to take a walk. With a Mary Richards bounce and smile.

Choose Mary, not Rhoda

That would be Mary Tyler Moore, or really "Mary Richards" from the eponymous show, of course. A book was published about the show this spring, and the author made the rounds of the NPR shows I listen to. So I haven't read the book, but the interviews made me think about it.  During my post college years, my room-mate and I often watched the show together, enjoying seeing women pictured on a sitcom who were more like we were than any other show on TV. But we were both Rhoda, not Mary, wanting to be darkly funny and knowing, laughing at Mary's sunny and bright naivete.

I've gone through life identifying as Rhoda, the sarcastic, wise cracking, sidekick. I have always mentally used adjectives like sardonic and cynical to describe myself, and thought of myself as the outsider. I was the family photographer, standing at the sidelines with the camera, not an actual participant. I liked that.

But as I struggled through some very stressful and unhappy times this spring and summer, I wondered if its possible to consciously change. I am forced by circumstance to participate more actively in life. Can I move myself so that I can turn the world on with a smile, suddenly take a nothing day and make it seem worthwhile? Make people happy to see me, by bringing happiness into the room?

Is the way we relate to the world inherent or under our conscious control?

All the reading I've done on resilience and happiness and depression and cognitive behavior therapy - and physical survival and adventure - says yes, we control this. The big lesson from the adventure / survival literature (of which I've read a bunch - lost at sea features heavily) notes that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to it.  I've taken some profound thoughts and turned them into pop culture images in my mind of how to meet the world, with some small amount of success.

My first clue came from the clear realization that while humor may work with teenagers better than confrontation, sarcasm directed at them will simply outrage them. So I cut out the wise cracks, and tried to substitute more sympathy and empathy, directing my humor at the situation and the world in general, not them. Well, duh. Who wouldn't rather have that response?

Now I'm trying to act on these pop culture images in a physical way. When I walk, I think of Mary Richards, striding along with a bounce in her step and a smile on her face, joyfully anticipating whatever the world will bring her next. ("... with each glance and every little movement you show it...")  It helps me, it really does. Even thought it's embarrassing to admit it.  (This is far from all I am doing to cope with multiple issues, but it's one I can write about now.)

So I'm back, sort of. Today, with the humidity low, the sun out, and all the windows open, seems like a day anything is possible. What happened to my weight during the last couple of months since I've been gone from this space?  Amazingly enough, nothing. I weigh now more or less what I have weighed for the past couple of years, which I have to keep reminding myself is quite a bit lower than I weighed for many years, while not as low as I would like to be.  I seem to have changed some habits enough to sustain me through periods of less paying attention.

Excelsior.

Stress

Bad news arriving on Friday at lunchtime literally made the food taste like ashes in my mouth. But I remember thinking, "nothing will be better for my failing to eat at all". Today, when the final bad news was delivered and I knew I had done all I could, I made a nice healthy dinner for everyone, but I had three bowls of homemade ice cream with fresh strawberries, bittersweet chocolate sauce and a beer while watching ten episodes of The Mindy Project on my iPad.

Tomorrow is back to actual paying attention while eating. Plus moving from the couch occasionally.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Coasting

I've had a week or more of simply not tracking my food. Life catches up with me, and food logging feels both like work, and too self-indulgent, to spend the time to pay attention. It really isn't a lot of work or time, of course, to note down every bite, what with the phone and the ipad and the computer all as options.  I can log it while waiting the 90 seconds for the microwave. It just requires being mindful enough to do it, and that is what has felt like the effort I don't want to make. I can spend those same 90 seconds thinking of what I have to do next at home or on the job, poke at my iphone to check email, or simply zone out and let my mind go blank while I watch the numbers go down.

But my automatic tools track my weight and activity. All I have to do is remember to stand on the scale and it sends the number wirelessly to the internet. I actually forgot to stand on the scale one morning - I am clearly very distracted! I also have to remember to take off my armband, plug it into the computer, and then put it back on - that was too complicated one day this week.  I want a wireless activity tracking device!

As a result of the almost passive data collection, I know how the last couple of weeks have gone in the weight and activity realms - as far as actual results. Before I reveal the numbers, my data-less recollection is that I mostly made decent food choices except for an over indulgence of sweets in the evening (a couple times sparked by sweets in the afternoon at work).  My focus this week was to get the vegetables up. Easy food that meets my criteria for low-carb tends to be prepared meat: sausages, meatballs, things in the freezer. Vegetables take planning and work - or else buying a pre-made salad.  On the other front, my overall activity level was up most days, because spectacular weather means I am leaving the building at lunch time and working in the yard as I can.

Here's my weight graph:

It sure looks to me like there is the opposite of glass ceiling - a rubber floor? something like the sound barrier? - that I keep bouncing off at the point I'm at now.  There is a lot of discussion of "set points" and what it takes to change it. What is clear to me, is that if I would like to stabilize my weight at about ten pounds less than I am right now, I need to focus and blitz it again.  And then maintain it, with focused determination, for several months. Even then, it might not be possible.  But do I have the desire to crank it up and do that now? I'm not sure.  I want it, I want it bad, but enough to actually do it?  I want it because those ten pounds would put me in a place where I could wear trousers and dresses that are the same size bottom and top, reduce my pear-shape to more of a background impression instead of the first impression of how I am shaped. Frankly, I don't think those ten (or fifteen) pounds would make an iota of difference in my health.

Activity levels?  I like the activity for its own sake. I'm keeping up with the gym, I'm getting outside more, but I am not doing seriously aerobic stuff and I ought to do that. But I'm inching up my average calories burned by day, at least having fewer days falling below my target in the last couple of weeks.

Raw output from the BodyMedia report function

So no resolutions, no vows. I am about to make my Spinach Breakfast Pie, because the thing that sets me on a happy course for the day is this most satisfying start to the day.  It is slightly adapted from Fran McCullough's Low-Carb Cookbook, which is the source for a lot of my inspiration, but sadly not available anymore. She was first a food writer and cookbook author, and then realized that low carb was the way she wanted to eat. So the recipes here are adapted for my way of eating. They are full of fat, and low in grains and sugars, but do not use fake foods to achieve the low carb end. This recipe is basically the inside of spanikopita, baked in a pan with no phyllo.

Spinach Breakfast Pie

Serves 8 (or in my case, cut up into eight pieces and nuked by me and the family for breakfast all week)

1 pound fresh spinach, washed and somewhat chopped
2 Tablespoons butter
1 medium onion chopped small
6 eggs
15 oz container whole milk ricotta
1/2 pound feta cheese, crumbled
2 Tablespoons dilled, chopped
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
olive oil for pan

Sautee the onion in the butter till translucent, stir in the spinach, turn off the heat (I have an electric stove so it stays warm - its not necessary to cook the spinach, just wilt it).
Beat the eggs, whisk in the ricotta, then the feta and dill and parsley. Add the spinach and onions, stir well, and pour into the greased 13 x 9 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-45 minutes, until the top has dappled golden spots. Let sit for a few minutes before serving. Reheats very well in microwave.