Image via Wikipedia

In my previous post I shared a press release reporting the results of the 2011 F as in Fat report on rates of obesity in America. In a nutshell, the trends are depressing, and a lot of great thoughts were posted in the comments section, many of which I agreed with strongly. Based upon the response to that post, I wanted to share my thoughts on the topic – let me be clear at the outset that I am neither an expert on nutrition nor a particularly shining example of someone who has an ideal diet.

Weight control is a constant battle for me. I have a moderately large framed body type that seems to build tissue very easily – this applies to both muscle, and unfortunately, fat. I have found throughout life that I build muscle very quickly when I do strength training, but I also seem to lose it quickly when I slack off. Same goes for fat. If I let my diet slip, I can pack on the pounds seemingly overnight, but if I maintain control, I can take the weight off pretty quickly as well. My suspicion is that much of this is genetic – for example, my brother is a weight lifter, and his biceps are the size of my quads!

Given my apparent physiology, I have to be very careful about balancing my food intake and exercise output in order to maintain or lose weight. I fluctuate a lot, and typically go through an annual cycle where I gain a few pounds in the winter, and take them off as I get more generally active in the summer. Last summer into early fall I reached a post high-school low of around 162 pounds (I’m 5’10”), and I attribute my Boston Qualifying performance at the Smuttynose Marathon last October in large part to the fact that I was running pretty light compared to any of my previous marathons. Much of the energy expended while running is involved in supporting and propelling body weight (74% by some estimates), and shedding pounds can make a big difference in your efficiency. Right now I weigh in around 170, which is still almost 20 pounds under what I was when I became a serious runner back in 2007 (I’ve run on and off throughout life, but never with the regularity or intensity that I do now).

For me, running has surely played a part in my ability to lose weight, particularly when I first started running big miles. However, nowadays it seems to play a bigger role in weight control, and tweaking my diet is the bigger factor when it comes to gaining or losing pounds. Running serves as a counterbalance to my dietary lapses more than anything, and has helped prevent me from reverting back my condition of 4-5 years ago.

Putting all of this into the context of the obesity epidemic that is gripping this country, the big question seems to be why we are gaining so much weight. Many are now pointing the finger at refined carbs as the big evil via their role in spiking insulin and stimulating fat deposition – if you haven’t read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, it’s an eye-opening book. My wife is a staunch advocate of the Michael Pollan, whole-food approach to eating – I’m working through Pollan’s In Defense of Food right now, and it’s another fantastic read. She has a dietary willpower that I could only dream of – in our 15 years together I don’t think I’ve ever seen her eat a french fry or potato chip (the two biggest dietary offenders according to a recent study out of Harvard).

Personally, I think the amount of refined carbohydrate in our diet is a huge culprit, and a lot of the blame can be place in the hands of the government’s dietary recommendations from the 1970’s and subsidies provided for corn production. However, from a personal standpoint, I think it unwise to simply point the finger at carbs and not continue to emphasize that many of us simply tend to eat too much. From personal experience, my greatest successes when it comes to weight loss have been when I have actively counted my calorie intake. There’s a great app called Lose It! for the iPhone that allows you to track your intake by inputting the caloric value of everything you put in your mouth. I don’t use this regularly because I lack the discipline to keep up with it, but I find that doing it for a few days every now and then really helps to get me back on track with my intake. When you are completely honest (and I mean completely and brutally honest!) with yourself about just how much you put in your mouth, it’s amazing to find out how quickly your intake can add up. It’s very easy for me to accumulate several hundred additional daily calories by finishing off my kids’ table scraps or having a second helping at dinner, and this can quickly negate or even outstrip the several hundred calories that I might burn on a run. More than anything, portion control seems to be my bugaboo, and I constantly need to remind myself that every scrap of food I eat counts.

The national obesity epidemic is a problem with a fairly easy solution – eat less, eat better, exercise more. The problem is these things are incredibly hard to implement, and all of them take immense effort for most people. I’m pretty well convinced that lifestyle change is the answer to the question of how we combat the obesity epidemic, but how we get there on a broader scale is the challenge. Each of us can start by trying to be the best example that we can, and I finish this post with a renewed commitment to eating better – I simply can’t continue to keep relying on my running to save me from my lapses.

I’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about a website that I belong to called dailymile. In a nutshell, dailymile is a social training site for posting workout data, and has an interface that is similar to Facebook, with the major exception being that it is geared directly toward active people who value exercise as a part of their lives. I can’t begin to explain how much this site has meant to me and my training, and through my membership I’ve met some truly inspirational people, many of whom have become good friends. To get a feel for what dailymile is all about and the type of people you’ll find there, I urge you to check out this blog post that I recently wrote documenting members’ weight loss resulting from adopting an active lifestyle.

It was with great pride, therefore, that I recently accepted an offer to be part of dailymile’s Team of ambassadors. The dailymile Team is a group of 36 site members (at the time of writing this post) who have contributed significantly to the life of the site and who enthusiastically share their passion for exercise and living an active life. Our Team mission is to “Grow the community of active dailymilers and promote the activities we love by inspiring and motivating others.” Inspiration and motivation are what dailymile is all about, and I’m excited to be part of the Team that will help to guide this rapidly growing site as it continues to develop into the future.

What I’d like to do here in this post is introduce you to some of my friends on the dailymile Team by re-posting a series of introduction videos that were recently posted on the dailymile blog (thanks to Kathy S. for putting these together!). Before I get to these, I’d like to again ask that if you haven’t tried dailymile yet, you should give it a shot – it’s free, easy, and there is no obligation to stay if you don’t find that it suits your needs. Simply click on the banner below to give it a try:

Now for the videos – I’ll start with the one that I’m in (you get to meet Jack!), and then follow with the videos for the rest of the Team:

And then there were more from dailymileteam on Vimeo.

Dailymile Team introductions Round 1 from dailymileteam on Vimeo.

dailymileteam | east coast too from dailymileteam on Vimeo.

Last but not least from dailymileteam on Vimeo.

So there you have it – not all of us are featured in these videos, but I think you can get a good feel from these for the type of people that we are.  We represent a cross-section of the dailymile community, and it is our hope that we can help motivate and inspire you as you strive to achieve your health and fitness goals. For more information about the dailymile Team, and to friend anyone that you met in the videos seen here, please visit the dailymile Team webpage.

And once again, if you’d like to give dailymile a try, click here and it will take you to the sign-up page – my suspicion is that you’ll love what you find on dailymile.

Quick post here to alert you to a great article recently posted on the New York Times website.  The article, written by Olivia Judson, and titled “Stand Up While You Read This!,”discusses the negative health impacts of sitting for long periods of time during the day, even if you are a regular exerciser (I’m guilty!). Here’s the opening paragraph from Ms. Judson’s article, which gives a good feel for where she goes with it:

“It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.”

What I appreciated most about this article is that it was clearly well-researched, and the author provides a wealth of references to the scientific literature to support her claims – a refreshing change of pace from most mass-media articles on health and weight-loss. While I’m not likely to purchase a desk treadmill like that shown in the opening photo to the article (didn’t even know such things existed!), I am intrigued by the exercise-ball-as-chair idea – if anyone has used these and finds them beneficial, I’d love to hear some feedback.

You can view the article here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/

Last October I wrote a post on this blog about my personal story of weight loss achieved through running. In that post I mentioned a controversial article that was published in Time Magazine in early August of 2009 that questioned the efficacy of exercising to lose weight (“Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” by John Cloud). The basic premise of the article can be summed up by the final paragraph, quoted below:

“In short, it’s what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward.”

Reading this article made me angry, and not just because it was contrary to my own experience. I have seen many people who have made dramatic changes to their bodies and health by starting an exercise program, and any article that makes even the slightest suggestion that people skip exercise is ridiculous, and even borderline dangerous. My goal in this post is to provide examples of those who have used exercise as a tool to get healthy, and if you are just beginning this journey yourself, inspiration that if they can do it, you can too.

Over the past year I’ve become a huge fan of the website dailymile – it has served as a phenomenal source of support, motivation, and most of all friendship. About a week ago the theme for the day was Before/After photos – people were posting “Before” pictures of themselves before they started exercising, and “After” pictures to show how exercise has changed their health for the better. I have to say, the pictures and stories that were posted were amazing, and they reaffirmed to me more than ever the power of exercise to not only allow people to lose weight, but to in many cases contribute to a bodily transformation that is nothing short of astonishing. The pictures below are a sample of those posted on dailymile that day, and I hope that looking at them will confirm to you the positive benefits of exercise and a healthier lifestyle. You can view the dailymile profile of any of these people by clicking on the link below their photo – I’m quite sure any of them would happily accept a friend request, and all are great role models for the power of exercise to change one’s life.

 

  

 

 

 

Adam B. – dailymile Profile

 Bharani S. – dailymile Profile

 

So there you have it – everyday people like you and I who have done some absolutely amazing things for themselves by getting off the couch adopting an active lifestyle. So when articles like the one in Time Magazine say that exercise won’t make you thin, I have but one response – look at these pictures, they speak for themselves.

I’ll finish with this – all of these people are members of dailymile, which is an amazingly supportive community of like-minded people (kind of like Facebook for active people). If you’d like to give dailymile a try, click on the banner below and sign up – it’s free!

A lot of so-called Twitter “experts” have published “do’s and don’ts” guides for the on-line social networking service.  Among the things I frequently see listed as a “don’t” is posting of your workout data (here’s an example from The Oatmeal). Quite to the contrary, I use Twitter almost exclusively to connect with running friends, and posting of workout data and race results is more than expected, it’s one of the main reasons why we are all there.

I have found the Twitter running community to be home to a huge number of very supportive, motivational, and inspirational people, many of whom I would consider to be good friends.  Recently, several of us discussed the idea of starting a weight tracking group so that we could use to offer each other support as we each try to reach or maintain our respective weight goals.  Rather than sign up at yet another website (I’ve already reached social media overload with the few sites I participate in), we decided to do this within Twitter itself, and this post is just a quick summary of what we plan to do in case you’d like to join.

So here’s the scoop:

1. If you’d like to join in, simply tweet your starting weight at any time along with the hashtag #WLMon.

2. Every Monday, tweet your current weight along with any change (+ or -) from the previous week.  Always add the hashtag #WLMon to any tweet you want to go to the group.

3. If during the week you have any weight loss/maintenance related tweets, simply add the hashtag (#WLMon) and send it off.

4. If you reply to anyone’s #WLMon tweet, you can either include or not include the hashtag – you choose.

If you’re not familiar with hashtags, in most Twitter clients you can click on them and it will pull up all of the tweets that have used that particular tag. I use Tweetdeck, and when I click a hashtag it actually creates a unique column for that particular tag – in this way I have a way of grouping and seeing only those tweets containing the tag when they come through.

That’s really all there is to it – hopefully we can support and motivate each other to reach our weight goals for 2010. Feel free to send this post link along to anyone you think might be interested in joining – we’re all in this together!

In addition to being obsessed with all things related to running, I also have a strong general interest in the topics of health, fitness, and weight loss. Part of this stems from teaching classes in Human Anatomy and Physiology and Exercise Physiology, but a more significant part of this interest stems from my own personal journey to a healthier life and body by becoming a more active person. Below are a collection of posts I have written on these topics – some are about my own journey, some about the journeys of others, and some provide links and/or commentary on fitness related topics, news stories, and products/programs.