Sunday Story…Exercise Control part 3

It’s the end of February and your New Year’s goals have gone by the way side. The gym was too hard or maybe you didn’t get the results you wanted. Your work out buddy bailed on you. You missed a day then 2 then a week. You just can’t seem to get a jump start to get going again.

Similar to your nutritional situation you need to set yourself up for success. Working out 7 days a week is not a sustainable plan. On the other hand, having a plan is absolutely necessary.

Control your Movement

Commit to moving. Buy one of those step counter things (fit bit or a pedometer) and commit to a certain number of steps every day. Start low. Add some every day until you are getting 10,000+ a day.

Park your car at the far end of the parking garage. Every. Time.

Take the stairs. It may only be one flight on day one but it’s the stairs.

Hire a trainer. A professional (like me or one of us here at Odyssey!) who will assess you and get a program to build your strength, endurance, and fitness.

Set a timer every 15 minutes for you to get up from your chair and move for 5 minutes or more.

Get a buddy who will walk or go to class or at least keep you accountable.

Commit to doing something outside every weekend for a few minutes then more every weekend.

Set realistic goals. I don’t work out 7 days a week and neither should you. But I do move every day and so should you.

Understand that your results are dependent upon how hard you work not how long. 60 minutes of unintentional movement will never beat 15 minutes of intentional hardcore sweat dripping heart pounding training to burn excess calories and fat.
Muscle takes up less space than fat. Get strong by doing squats. Just in the air then with weight. You will get stronger, guaranteed. And stronger people are harder to kill!

All the BMI and average weight tables mean nothing if you aren’t fit and healthy. This is a lifestyle, a way of living not a short term fix. You are doing this for yourself, not me, not your spouse but for you.

Eating healthy is fun. Living in a body that moves well is fun. Being fit is a way of being not a chore or a duty. Long term change can easily take place 1 degree at a time…after all when water goes from 211 to 212 degrees it becomes steam and steam can power a 5 ton locomotive engine…see it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRDNLTMaZqo

Get Fit…Body, Mind, Soul. If you want personal attention…call me at 775-338-2412

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Exercise Control part 2

Last we started discussing how to achieve success when we are moving to a more healthful relationship with food and eating. Let’s be honest…food isn’t just fuel. Food is all tied up for many of with our emotions and how we relate to our food choices. Food is often like a comfortable pair of slippers we put on in certain situations. Sometimes we are stressed and we eat. We are bored and we eat. We are sick and we eat. Food comforts us, give us nutrition and is all tied up with our various emotional and mental states.

Last week we had tips and ideas to help control the various environments we find in our everyday life. This week is about some of the environments many of us find ourselves in that are out of our direct control. These are the places that make it very difficult to hold to our commitment to healthy eating. Here is what to do:
When Eating Out or Social Dining:
Eat something light before you get there. Don’t arrive hungry.
Eat Low calorie but filling food like crudités vegetables (skip the ranch, thank you).
Eat a very small portion of the food you like
Wait 20 minutes between filling your plate, that way you can make sure you eyes aren’t bigger than your stomach
Drink alcohol in very limited quantity. Have a soda with a squeeze of lime or lemon.
When Eating in a Restaurant:
Order a la carte and order exactly what you want.
Skip the bread on the table…ask for it to be removed if possible. If not possible order a vegetable tray or salad for an appetizer
Share your high calorie dish
If you must eat dessert share it with the other 2 or 3 people at the table
Pack up the food you want to take home before you start. Ask for a doggie bag first and portion the food out you are going to eat now.
Get the sauces and dressings on the side and use your fork to dip before each bite.
At a friend’s house:
Offer to bring food that will serve your needs. Healthy is always welcome at any table.
Keep your portions small and load up your plate with green things
Avoid the snack table. Grazing will not help you…make a plate and sit down and eat it.
At Home:
Find Cookbooks that make healthy eating fun. There are lots of them.
Experiment with different international cuisines…there are many fun choices out there and most of them are not difficult to prepare.
Keep lots of choices on hand to avoid mindless snacking…hard boiled eggs, carrots, and broccoli are all easy to grab and go.
Holidays:
Be mindful about eating…see all of the above ideas.
Allow yourself to indulge once a day…guilt free and with full enjoyment
Eat regularly…don’t save up for the feast

These last two posts about sum up the changes that will help you make long lasting meaningful shifts in your behavior. These changes will make the trek to healthful eating and living much easier and less tedious. Eating healthy does not have to be hard or unpleasant. It can and should be fun and delicious.

Next…exercise and attitude!

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey@gmail.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Exercise Control

So we are still on the change train. How do we change, how do we insure success when we want to change? If we are talking about our nutritional challenges (and that is where we started) there are several places we need to be watchful of.

Once we have moved toward a more healthful outlook that includes knowledge of nutrition and exercise there are several key factors in success. Internal motivation is always going to be more effective in the long run. This is why challenges are not long term success strategies…too often the motivation is externally driven. Internal motivation such as better health, increased energy, self esteem improvement, and more personal control will all improve your ability to be successful in your life long quest to be more fit. You must believe in yourself, and believe you can do this.

Here are some concrete ideas to help you on your way:

Control Your Home Environment

Sit down and eat. Don’t eat standing over the counter, while watching TV or on the computer. Be mindful in your eating practice.
Don’t buy food that tempts you to eat the wrong thing…out of sight, out of mind!
Keep healthy choices prepared and available all the time.

Control Your Work Environment

Get rid of the “treats” hiding in your desk!
Bring healthy snacks from home if you must eat at your desk.
Take a walk instead of hitting the break room where the cookie stash is.
Make sure you eat when you are supposed to…not eating will only create desire and then the poor choices will be easier to make.
On special occasions bring your own food or pick one thing to eat and enjoy that ONE thing. Be that guy or girl!

Control Your Mealtime

Plate your food. In other words put what you are going to eat on a plate and put the plate on the table not the entre serving dish.
Put a palm sized portion of meat (protein) and a palm sized portion of starch on your plate and then cover the rest of it with vegetables. And that is your palm not a King Kong palm. You do not need to eat a 16oz. porterhouse steak!
Use smaller dishes to fool yourself into thinking your plate is full.
Limit yourself to eating what you put on your plate. It’s a habit.

Every Day

Trade mindless eating with another activity. If you snack while watching a certain thing on TV or at a certain time, go for a walk instead, or pick a new activity. We all watch too much TV anyway!
If a craving strikes, wait 20 minutes to see if it passes.
Drink a large glass of water before eating.
Always have a bottle of water to drink all day. Thirst is often interpreted as hunger.
Quit adding calorie rich add ons to your food like salad dressings!

Shopping

Do not shop hungry or tired
Make a list, check it twice and then stick to it
Read the labels. Make a different choice if the item appears to be a chemical sh*# storm. Remember real food doesn’t need a nutritional label!

Food Preparation

If you must taste test use a very very small spoon.
Fix only what you will eat or if you are making enough to eat later, portion that out and put it in containers as you go.

Eating

Be mindful
Put your fork or spoon down between bites and chew your food thoroughly before you cut the next bite.
Cut smaller pieces and cut it as you go, not all at once (you aren’t 4 anymore!)
Stop eating and rest to allow the food to settle

There is more to this…next week!

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday story…Change

Is hard. Change is uncomfortable. Change is a process. It is often said that when the pleasure of something new is greater than the pain of staying the same you will change. Change is a process not an event. Let me repeat that…Change is a process. It is something that takes time to happen. It doesn’t happen just one time, like running a marathon or doing a 30 day challenge.

According to many experts there are 5 stages of change. Each stage prepares you for the next one so skipping one will often lead to setbacks on your way to permanent shifts in behavior.

1. Precontemplation…in other words you aren’t even thinking about change yet. You are avoiding even reading or talking or thinking about the unhealthy behavior. At some point you will sense that the unhealthy behavior is not serving you on your way to important goals you may have, like living to see your grandchildren grow up. This will lead you to:
2. Contemplation…your thoughts have turned to weighing the pros and cons of change. If I quit eating CRAP I will have to give up Friday night pizza night and my kids love that. At some point you will shift your rationalizations from why you can’t to HOW you can, i.e. we can still go to pizza and I will order a healthy choice. This brings you to:
3. Preparation…where you are making steps to change. Buying healthy cook books, looking up web sites with the kinds of food that will support your healthy choices are a couple of examples of this. It is here that you will create an action plan with goals that are achievable and realistic. At this point you are ready for:
4. Action…change is made here. You have stopped the previous behavior and have moved into the new behavior. If you are cutting out sugar (a good place to start by the way) you are learning to drink your coffee black and living without cookies. You are using strategies to help you get through the difficult times. You are asking for and receiving support from friends and family. Your self talk is there to support your change. You can see the pleasure of change is outweighing the pain of the status quo. At the point of about 6 months you will be on the last step:
5. Maintenance…where you are integrating the change into your everyday life. You are avoiding triggers that may create a relapse into old habits and behaviors. You assimilation of your new habits and activities still requires vigilance and conscious effort.

This is why the 30 day challenge should die. This road to permanent and long lasting change requires real long term effort and planning. If you want to change you can. The process is simple. It isn’t easy but it will be worth it. Begin with the end in mind…Who will you be? What will your life look like when you are eating real food in amounts that serve your body with proper nutrients? Real food is not deprivation. Real food is fun and healthy and nutritious and very tasty. You should never feel bad or guilty about eating well.

Next week: more on change!

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Challenge not

If you are paying attention to what is happening in the land of fitness as it pertains to nutrition you have seen the prevalence of the “30 day challenge”. These challenges have become so common as to be monotonous. Here’s the real shocker…evidence has begun to prove they really don’t work. It’s a shocker, I know, but the reset or kick start to get you on track for the beach, or the wedding, or after the gluttony of the holidays just doesn’t work.

I know it’s popular. I know all your friends do it. I know your second cousin’s brother-in-laws sister lost 12 pounds on her eat only green food 30 day challenge. None of that provides empirical evidence (as in factual) that these challenges actually work for the great part of the population. Most of us drop out about half way through the challenge. Or we gain the weight/inches back and go back to eating crap (Calorie Rich And Pathetic) food the same way we did before the challenge started.

Here are some of the issues with 30-day challenges:

1. Most of these challenges are based on restricting some portion of your diet/food consumption. This puts you into a mindset of deprivation and scarcity. You decide you can “tough” or “gut” it out for the 30 days. And sometimes you can. Often you can’t or some life event gets in the way. Eating a certain way that is foreign to you simply serves to have you craving the last day and dreaming of all the junk food you are going to gorge on when it is over. This gives you NO sustainable shift in your eating habits, behavior patterns or belief systems. That shift is required to modify your nutrition into a healthy pattern.

2. Too many of these programs want to have you feel bad if you can’t or won’t complete the challenge. If you can’t do this for 30 days you are weak or bad or worthless. It isn’t that hard, after all. The fact is simple: this type of motivation is rarely successful and usually backfires. How do you like being guilted or shamed into doing something? For me…not so much. These feeling usually result in a high dropout rate and zero change into healthier eating habits.

3. I should clarify that I am NOT disagreeing with the nutritional advice and guidelines most of these challenges provide. Eating real food, avoiding sugar and alcohol, eliminating allergens, proper hydration and shopping on the perimeter of the grocery market are all good things. The problem is the method used to get you to do those things. If you don’t address how you are going to incorporate all the restrictions on your diet after the challenge you will revert to your old patterns and behaviors (Friday night IS Pizza night!)

Restriction is not a recipe for long term change and success. If you were addicted to heroin you could avoid heroin for the rest of your life. You cannot avoid food. You are going to eat for the rest of your life. What is needed is a reprogramming of behaviors and attitude around food. What is needed is a way to create a desire for healthy foods. What is needed is a way to have you WANT to make good choices around food.

This process is going to require you to change how you think about food. It is a circular process…thoughts create feelings which create behaviors and the behaviors reinforce thoughts. The real question that needs to be answered is how? How to create an attitude shift? How to make it over to the other side of restriction and scarcity to abundance and fullness?

Stay tuned! The answer is simple. Not easy just simple.

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…BMR

The question has come after last week’s story about eating more food. How does that work? Why is it true? It is the exact opposite of what most of us believe. We all have a basal metabolic rate. In simple terms you have an amount of calories you need to eat every day to maintain the lean muscle mass your body has. If you don’t have much lean muscle mass you don’t need many calories. If you are a 300 pound body builder you need a lot more food every day just to fuel the muscles on your body.

If you want a scientific discussion you can go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate

There are formulas and everything to satisfy your yearning for science. The bottom line is this: before you do anything in your day you need a certain number of calories to support your current lean muscle mass. It is just like a business…before I turn the lock in the door I need a certain dollar amount every day to cover the rent and lights and fixed expenses. This is my base metabolic rate.
If you want to calculate your BMR you can go here:

https://www.healthstatus.com/perl/calculator.cgi

I did it two ways…one with my gross weight and it gave me about 3100 calories a day. The other way I put in my lean muscle mass and it gave me 2800 calories a day. SO before I do any work I need that many calories just to keep my muscle on. When I work out and start moving I will burn more calories. If I want to get stronger and build muscle my body needs more fuel to build that strength. I need the fuel REAL FOOD gives me…the macro nutrients as well as the micro nutrients...the fiber, the act of digestion…I need it all.

For too long we have been seduced by the calorie in – calorie out argument. You can live on 1000 calories a day. You won’t be healthy. You will compromise our immune system. You will lose weight. Unfortunately your body will conserve fat (a very rich source of fuel that doesn’t have any caloric needs) and will burn muscle to fuel the deficit in calories. So you will keep the fat and lose the muscle. It takes more calories to feed muscle than fat. You will become the dreaded Skinny-Fat person. You see them all the time…especially in fashion magazines. They are both men and women.

You need fuel to feed a strong sexy body. EAT MORE REAL FOOD. Run your basal metabolic rate. Let’s get a scan and figure out how much you need to eat and then we will strip the fat off and leave a body ready to kick some a** and take names!

Call me!

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…More Food

We live by 3 words when we talk about nutrition and diets and food…Eat Real Food. That’s it…Eat Real Food.

I often get questions about supplements and pills and powders and shakes. I will ask you to first refer to the 3 words above. If you are eating real food and eating enough of it to support your activity level but not store fat then we can discuss the other stuff. The facts, in general, are simple…Eat Real food…meat, vegetables, seeds and nuts, a little fruit, some starchy vegetables, healthy fats, avoid sugars and consume in quantities to support activity.

There is no magic pill or potion that is going to fix a poor diet. You can’t out exercise a poor diet. No amount of burpees or road work or miles or spin classes, or yoga, or boot camp or CrossFit is going to fix eating crap (Calorie Rich And Pathetic). Maybe you can get away with it for a bit, especially if you are young but the bottom line is eating crap and drinking a boatload of booze is going to mess up your fitness journey.

Not only do you need to Eat Real Food but you need to eat Enough Real Food. That’s right; you may not be eating enough food! If you don’t put fuel in the tank the car won’t run. If you only put a little fuel in it will sputter and stop. Or if you put just enough in it will only run a little while and then stop. You need to fuel your body like the high performance vehicle it is unless you are not taking it out of the garage (lying on the couch much!) in which case it probably isn’t going to matter too much anyway.

How much is enough? It is more than you think especially if you are using the prescription above. I recently brought my calories up to almost 4000 a day based on a nutritionists recommendations. It is a lot of food. But I can tell you my energy levels are up. I don’t crash as hard in the afternoons and I don’t feel as beat up by my workouts. And it is all real food except for 1 scoop of a high quality protein powder.

You can do this…eat well, be satisfied, get lean, get strong. But it isn’t going to be easy…it takes discipline and preparation. Yes, you can cheat once in a while. Yes, you can relax and have a glass of spirits occasionally. But those things are not the habit. The habit is to Eat Real Food.

Let’s talk food again…soon!

John Mariotti
www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com