Thanks Ali :-)
Five things you probably don't know about me:
1. My husband and I met in a gym! We got married on our 10th anniversary and have now been together 13.5 years.
2. I have worked as a fitness instructor (weights) and started a nutrition degree but didn't finish it. I'd like to complete it one day, but at the moment I'm just enjoying reading nutrition articles to find out how they can help me rather than understanding all the biochemical reactions involved.
3. I work from home - going to the gym each day gets me out of the house and gives me the opportunity to socialise with other people.
4. I first tried to prepare for a competition about 12 years ago, back when no-fat diets were all the rage. I got lean real fast (probably the leanest my legs have ever been) but had no energy, and ended up sleeping most of the time that I wasn't training (I was only working part time then). I also had upset stomachs from all the protein I was eating. It wasn't until I started working for myself about three years ago that I decided to give it another try.
5. I'm not genetically cut out to do bodybuilding, but I do it because I love it.
I tag Deb, Di, Magda, Tara & Ursula
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Keep It Simple, Stupid
I have a tendency to make things difficult for myself. I overanalyze things. I found the perfect way to decribe this the other day: paralysis by analysis. I give myself too many choices then can't decide what to do. This is a problem at the moment with my food. I keep thinking about what to eat, how much to eat etc. It's taking up way too much of my time - time that should be spent working or sleeping. I just need to remember that as long as I'm consistently eating clean I'll be fine:
'Before you go psycho trying to figure out your post workout meal or order the latest supplements, realize that if you can just consistently exercise and eat clean then the rest of this stuff just does not matter. While you are busy losing your mind and eating bad because you don't have everything right, your neighbor is steadily 'out-dieting' you by eating "some" good things "most" of the time!' (Jodi Jones, Cathy Savage Fitness)
Not that I'm eating bad, but I do feel like I'm 'sweating the small stuff' too much sometimes.
'Before you go psycho trying to figure out your post workout meal or order the latest supplements, realize that if you can just consistently exercise and eat clean then the rest of this stuff just does not matter. While you are busy losing your mind and eating bad because you don't have everything right, your neighbor is steadily 'out-dieting' you by eating "some" good things "most" of the time!' (Jodi Jones, Cathy Savage Fitness)
Not that I'm eating bad, but I do feel like I'm 'sweating the small stuff' too much sometimes.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Commitment
The lie: Motivation will get you there.
The truth: It won't, motivation comes and goes. It's about commitment - that's what keeps us going when the motivation is absent. It's about being totally emotionally invested into that endeavour so that even when you don't 'feel like it', you're still doing what you need to do to create your desired outcomes. When most people have thrown in the towel, you persevere.
link
The truth: It won't, motivation comes and goes. It's about commitment - that's what keeps us going when the motivation is absent. It's about being totally emotionally invested into that endeavour so that even when you don't 'feel like it', you're still doing what you need to do to create your desired outcomes. When most people have thrown in the towel, you persevere.
link
Monday, November 19, 2007
46 Weeks to Go
Got all my workouts in last week, just! And had at at least eight hours sleep every night except two, so that's one better than the week before. Once I've gone a week with at least eight hours sleep every night I'm going to reward myself with a trip to the hairdresser. My hair really needs it so I better start getting some more early nights! Weights sessions are going really well, making small improvements in weight or reps each time. I'm making a real effort to go to failure with each set - my husband would be proud of me, LOL. That's one thing he always used to hassle me about when we trained together - stopping when I got to the required number of reps instead of when I couldn't continue with good form.
Keeping a food log and recording my weight regularly has also shown me some interesting things. I train in the mornings and tend to be hungry the rest of the day, and am then lighter the next morning. On a nontraining day I'm not so hungry, and am heavier the next morning. Common sense really, but something I didn't really think about until I started recording my numbers. This week I'm increasing my cals a touch again, with a little extra on training days to see if I can fix the hunger.
Eating has been going really well. After being restricted with my diet for so long I've found having heaps of variety is keeping me pretty satisfied. I didn't end up having a treat last week. I had thought about a few things I wanted at the start of the week, but the week went by so fast and by last night I realised that that I hadn't had any of them - I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything though. Am sure there will be plenty of opportunities for treat foods over the next few weeks.
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio done
Wed Lower Body + cardio no, overstretched hip muscle doing yoga on Sun, and was still too sore to do legs today
Thu walk dog & do yoga walked dog but didn't do yoga
Fri Upper Body + cardio; plan meals for the following week done
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping done
Sun walk dog & do yoga walked dog but didn't do yoga
Mon prepare lunches for the week did on Sun!
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating yes
Go to technical failure in the gym yes
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, stayed up late one night
Keeping a food log and recording my weight regularly has also shown me some interesting things. I train in the mornings and tend to be hungry the rest of the day, and am then lighter the next morning. On a nontraining day I'm not so hungry, and am heavier the next morning. Common sense really, but something I didn't really think about until I started recording my numbers. This week I'm increasing my cals a touch again, with a little extra on training days to see if I can fix the hunger.
Eating has been going really well. After being restricted with my diet for so long I've found having heaps of variety is keeping me pretty satisfied. I didn't end up having a treat last week. I had thought about a few things I wanted at the start of the week, but the week went by so fast and by last night I realised that that I hadn't had any of them - I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything though. Am sure there will be plenty of opportunities for treat foods over the next few weeks.
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio done
Wed Lower Body + cardio no, overstretched hip muscle doing yoga on Sun, and was still too sore to do legs today
Thu walk dog & do yoga walked dog but didn't do yoga
Fri Upper Body + cardio; plan meals for the following week done
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping done
Sun walk dog & do yoga walked dog but didn't do yoga
Mon prepare lunches for the week did on Sun!
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating yes
Go to technical failure in the gym yes
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, stayed up late one night
Braised lamb shanks with polenta
For Di :-)
Ingredients
2 tbsp cumin seeds
3 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp sea salt
4 lamb shanks, about 250g each
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced
2 small sticks celery, trimmed and finely diced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 400g tin tomatoes, drained and roughly chopped
200mL dry red wine
200mL port
1 litre beef stock
Polenta:
1 litre chicken stock
200g instant polenta
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Green beans for serving
Preheat the oven to 140C.
Using a mortar and pestle, roughly crush the cumin and coriander seeds until fragrant. Add the salt and mix well. Sprinkle over the lamb shanks and press on to coat. In a large, deep, heavy-based ovenproof dish, heat the oil over medium heat and brown the lamb shanks well. Remove the meat and set aside.
Place the onion, carrot and celery in the same dish and saute over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and tomatoes and stir. Pour in the wine and port, stir, then add the beef stock. Bring to the boil then turn off the heat. Return the lamb shanks to the pan, cover with aluminium foil and place in the oven for 3 hours, until the meat almost falls off the bone.
Remove from the oven and lift out the shanks. Set aside and keep warm.
Skim as much fat as you can off the surface of the cooking liquid, and return to the stovetop over medium heat to simmer and reduce to a slightly syrupy consistency while you cook the polenta.
To make the polenta: In a medium saucepan, bring the stock to the boil. Pour in the polenta in a slow, steady stream, stirring constantly. Turn down the heat to low and stir for 5-10 minutes, or until thick. Season to taste.
To serve: Divide the polenta among four plates and place a lamb shank next to it. Strain the cooking liquid and spoon over the meat (you may not need all of it).
Serve with steamed beans
This is a Luke Mangan recipe.
Ingredients
2 tbsp cumin seeds
3 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp sea salt
4 lamb shanks, about 250g each
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced
2 small sticks celery, trimmed and finely diced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 400g tin tomatoes, drained and roughly chopped
200mL dry red wine
200mL port
1 litre beef stock
Polenta:
1 litre chicken stock
200g instant polenta
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Green beans for serving
Preheat the oven to 140C.
Using a mortar and pestle, roughly crush the cumin and coriander seeds until fragrant. Add the salt and mix well. Sprinkle over the lamb shanks and press on to coat. In a large, deep, heavy-based ovenproof dish, heat the oil over medium heat and brown the lamb shanks well. Remove the meat and set aside.
Place the onion, carrot and celery in the same dish and saute over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and tomatoes and stir. Pour in the wine and port, stir, then add the beef stock. Bring to the boil then turn off the heat. Return the lamb shanks to the pan, cover with aluminium foil and place in the oven for 3 hours, until the meat almost falls off the bone.
Remove from the oven and lift out the shanks. Set aside and keep warm.
Skim as much fat as you can off the surface of the cooking liquid, and return to the stovetop over medium heat to simmer and reduce to a slightly syrupy consistency while you cook the polenta.
To make the polenta: In a medium saucepan, bring the stock to the boil. Pour in the polenta in a slow, steady stream, stirring constantly. Turn down the heat to low and stir for 5-10 minutes, or until thick. Season to taste.
To serve: Divide the polenta among four plates and place a lamb shank next to it. Strain the cooking liquid and spoon over the meat (you may not need all of it).
Serve with steamed beans
This is a Luke Mangan recipe.
Graham Schnell's garlic chicken
For Em :-)
Ingredients
4 chicken breasts
6 cloves garlic
1 tbsp black peppercorns
2 tsps salt
4 whole plants of fresh coriander (I take this to mean 4 bundles joined by roots in a bunch, rather than 4 bunches)
4 Tbsps lemon juice
Method
Crush garlic and coarsely crush peppercorns (can use a mortar and pestle or blender for the pepper but I tend to take the lazy option and just use my pepper grinder, until I have about a Tbsp's worth.)
Wash coriander and finely chop the lot, roots, stems and leaves.
Mix all marinade ingredients together and rub well into the chicken (I usually just chuck everything together into a large snaplock bag and roll it all around).
Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour - overnight if possible.
Grill or BBQ chicken pieces. Serve with a simple salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, a small red onion and red or green capsicums. Dress with a little vinaigrette.
Ingredients
4 chicken breasts
6 cloves garlic
1 tbsp black peppercorns
2 tsps salt
4 whole plants of fresh coriander (I take this to mean 4 bundles joined by roots in a bunch, rather than 4 bunches)
4 Tbsps lemon juice
Method
Crush garlic and coarsely crush peppercorns (can use a mortar and pestle or blender for the pepper but I tend to take the lazy option and just use my pepper grinder, until I have about a Tbsp's worth.)
Wash coriander and finely chop the lot, roots, stems and leaves.
Mix all marinade ingredients together and rub well into the chicken (I usually just chuck everything together into a large snaplock bag and roll it all around).
Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour - overnight if possible.
Grill or BBQ chicken pieces. Serve with a simple salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, a small red onion and red or green capsicums. Dress with a little vinaigrette.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Tagged!
Four dishes I like to cook:
I love cooking so this one is hard for me. I especially enjoy cooking for other people - it gives me great pleasure to see someone enjoying something I've made.
1. whole fillet of beef marinated overnight with red wine, mustard & garlic - great for dinner parties/BBQs
2. garlic chicken (marinated with garlic, salt, pepper, lemon juice and lots of coriander) - another great BBQ food and great for dieting too.
3. basil beef (Thai stir-fry with beef strips, onion, red capsicum, green beans, red curry paste, lots of garlic, chilli and basil) I love having this when I feel like I'm coming down with a cold - the spicyness helps me sweat it all out, and it tastes great!
4. braised lamb shanks with polenta and green beans. Time consuming but worth it - the meat just falls off the bone.
That's just the savouries, don't get me started on the sweet stuff!
Four qualities I love in people:
1. Good listener
2. Good sense of humour
3. Supportive
4. Optimistic
Four places I have been:
1. Japan
2. Italy
3. Turkey
4. New Zealand
Four things in my bedroom:
1. Queen-size bed that dog and cat also like to sleep on - it can get a bit squashy!
2. Chair that cat sleeps on when he's not on the bed
3. Latest 'Readings' brochure to help me decide what I want to read next.
4. Clothes horse piled up with clothes in various states of cleanliness
Four dirty words I like to use:
1. Sh*t
2. P*ss off
3. Damn
4. Bugger
I love cooking so this one is hard for me. I especially enjoy cooking for other people - it gives me great pleasure to see someone enjoying something I've made.
1. whole fillet of beef marinated overnight with red wine, mustard & garlic - great for dinner parties/BBQs
2. garlic chicken (marinated with garlic, salt, pepper, lemon juice and lots of coriander) - another great BBQ food and great for dieting too.
3. basil beef (Thai stir-fry with beef strips, onion, red capsicum, green beans, red curry paste, lots of garlic, chilli and basil) I love having this when I feel like I'm coming down with a cold - the spicyness helps me sweat it all out, and it tastes great!
4. braised lamb shanks with polenta and green beans. Time consuming but worth it - the meat just falls off the bone.
That's just the savouries, don't get me started on the sweet stuff!
Four qualities I love in people:
1. Good listener
2. Good sense of humour
3. Supportive
4. Optimistic
Four places I have been:
1. Japan
2. Italy
3. Turkey
4. New Zealand
Four things in my bedroom:
1. Queen-size bed that dog and cat also like to sleep on - it can get a bit squashy!
2. Chair that cat sleeps on when he's not on the bed
3. Latest 'Readings' brochure to help me decide what I want to read next.
4. Clothes horse piled up with clothes in various states of cleanliness
Four dirty words I like to use:
1. Sh*t
2. P*ss off
3. Damn
4. Bugger
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
2007 INBA Victorian Figure Novice line-up
5th............1st............2nd.............3rd..........4th (me!)
Thanks to Ursula (the winner of our class) for sending me the photo
47 Weeks to Go
My metabolism appears to have increased after adding more calories. Prior to my show I was eating 0 or 1 complex carb meals per day. I'm now having 4 small carb meals a day, and I still haven't put on much weight. I'm pretty happy with my bodyfat level at the moment, but I'd like to grow some more muscle, so I'll be continuing to slowly increase my calories.
I've finally bought some xylitol, so will be using that instead of Equal in my coffee. That's one less chemical going into my system. I buy the La Ionica chicken, as that's processed without chemicals, and this week I'll be looking into having organic fruit and veges delivered. My other focus this week will be making sure I get enough sleep, as I know how important sleep is to help me grow.
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio no, was behind with my work
Wed Lower Body + cardio did upper body & cardio
Thu walk dog & do yoga; plan meals for the following week did lower body & cardio, walked dog and did yoga; done
Fri Upper Body + cardio rest day
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping did upper body & cardio, shopping and prepared patties for the week - a productive day!
Sun walk dog & do yoga did lower body & cardio
Mon prepare lunches for the week done on Sat! Walked dog and did yoga today
Have one planned treat Things I've thought of so far: shortbread, caramel Magnum (I'd like to try the mint one but am worried it won't be as nice as the caramel one, LOL), swiss cheese
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating
Go to technical failure in the gym
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, was up late Friday & Sunday
I've finally bought some xylitol, so will be using that instead of Equal in my coffee. That's one less chemical going into my system. I buy the La Ionica chicken, as that's processed without chemicals, and this week I'll be looking into having organic fruit and veges delivered. My other focus this week will be making sure I get enough sleep, as I know how important sleep is to help me grow.
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio no, was behind with my work
Wed Lower Body + cardio did upper body & cardio
Thu walk dog & do yoga; plan meals for the following week did lower body & cardio, walked dog and did yoga; done
Fri Upper Body + cardio rest day
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping did upper body & cardio, shopping and prepared patties for the week - a productive day!
Sun walk dog & do yoga did lower body & cardio
Mon prepare lunches for the week done on Sat! Walked dog and did yoga today
Have one planned treat Things I've thought of so far: shortbread, caramel Magnum (I'd like to try the mint one but am worried it won't be as nice as the caramel one, LOL), swiss cheese
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating
Go to technical failure in the gym
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, was up late Friday & Sunday
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
48 Weeks to Go, LOL
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. (Henry Ford)
It's been a month now since my show. I trained for about two weeks afterwards, but then decided my body needed a bit of a break. I've done that after every show - kept on going hard then trickled off. Next year I am going to plan a holiday after my show so I have to rest whether I like it or not. Today was my first workout after my break - upper body and a bit of cardio. It's full steam ahead from here!
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio done
Wed Lower Body + cardio done
Thu walk dog & do yoga; plan meals for the following week done
Fri Upper Body + cardio done
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping done; done
Sun walk dog & do yoga; walk yes, yoga no. Aim is to do 1 yoga session a week so it was a bonus if I got this one in.
Mon prepare lunches for the week done
Have one planned treat Maybe another cheese pizza at Amello? The one I had there when Lia, Rae, Combat Girl and I went out for lunch was the best! Plus they do gluten-free meals, so Rob can eat there too. Still haven't had my Snickers dessert at Circa either, but both places are in St Kilda, so will probably be one or the other, depending on if I feel like having savoury or sweet. Didn't feel like going out on Sunday so made a cheese pizza on a gluten-free base, plus had a Snickers bar and a couple of glasses of wine.
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating yes
Have only one coffee with Equal no, two on Tues
Go to technical failure in the gym yes
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, stayed up late working on Tues & Thurs, and Oscar got me up early on Sunday so I decided to stay up and do some work
Don't spend too much time focusing on what not to eat, rather, focus on including loads of great foods in your everyday diet. By eating enough antioxidant-rich fruits and vegies and grains, legumes and pulses full of fibre your body will soon crave better, more wholesome foods and hopefully ward off disease naturally (Amy Pongrass)
It's been a month now since my show. I trained for about two weeks afterwards, but then decided my body needed a bit of a break. I've done that after every show - kept on going hard then trickled off. Next year I am going to plan a holiday after my show so I have to rest whether I like it or not. Today was my first workout after my break - upper body and a bit of cardio. It's full steam ahead from here!
Goals for this week:
Tue Upper Body + cardio done
Wed Lower Body + cardio done
Thu walk dog & do yoga; plan meals for the following week done
Fri Upper Body + cardio done
Sat Lower Body + cardio; food shopping done; done
Sun walk dog & do yoga; walk yes, yoga no. Aim is to do 1 yoga session a week so it was a bonus if I got this one in.
Mon prepare lunches for the week done
Have one planned treat Maybe another cheese pizza at Amello? The one I had there when Lia, Rae, Combat Girl and I went out for lunch was the best! Plus they do gluten-free meals, so Rob can eat there too. Still haven't had my Snickers dessert at Circa either, but both places are in St Kilda, so will probably be one or the other, depending on if I feel like having savoury or sweet. Didn't feel like going out on Sunday so made a cheese pizza on a gluten-free base, plus had a Snickers bar and a couple of glasses of wine.
Every day I must also:
Journal my eating yes
Have only one coffee with Equal no, two on Tues
Go to technical failure in the gym yes
Get at least 8 hours sleep no, stayed up late working on Tues & Thurs, and Oscar got me up early on Sunday so I decided to stay up and do some work
Don't spend too much time focusing on what not to eat, rather, focus on including loads of great foods in your everyday diet. By eating enough antioxidant-rich fruits and vegies and grains, legumes and pulses full of fibre your body will soon crave better, more wholesome foods and hopefully ward off disease naturally (Amy Pongrass)
Monday, November 5, 2007
Good Luck Claudine!
While all the Australian shows have finished, Claudine, our French-Canadian friend from Montreal, is still counting down to hers - she's competing in her first show this weekend at the Coupe ProGym - Espoir Québec.
Here's a sneak peak at her suit
(Claudine's blog is in French, so if you want to read it in English, paste divapoussine2.blogspot.com into the Google search engine, then when Miss Fit comes up as the result, click on 'Translate this page'; when the blog loads, scroll down to read the text in English.)
Sunday, November 4, 2007
The Bodybuilding Poem
When you break it down
Bodybuilding is an individual sport
You may have advisors and trainers,
But the bottom line is this:
At the end of the day, you will reap what you sow.
As you prepare to head into the gym~
into the kitchen~
or lie down to sleep,
You are the ultimate controller of your efforts and goals.
No one can make you train harder
No one can make you block the pain
No one can make you eat clean
No one can make you sleep a little longer
You are the manager of your free will.
How you do stack up?
Bodybuilding is an individual sport
You may have advisors and trainers,
But the bottom line is this:
At the end of the day, you will reap what you sow.
As you prepare to head into the gym~
into the kitchen~
or lie down to sleep,
You are the ultimate controller of your efforts and goals.
No one can make you train harder
No one can make you block the pain
No one can make you eat clean
No one can make you sleep a little longer
You are the manager of your free will.
How you do stack up?
Friday, November 2, 2007
What are you going to do with your off season?
by Jodi Jones, Cathy Savage Fitness
Are you going to waste this time fighting with yourself day in and day out saying the same ole', "I blew it, so now I'm just going to eat blah, blah, blah." Or, are you going to maximize what little time you have and FOCUS for the next season?
My biggest problem is getting everyone to realize how little time there is in the offseason…it is over before you know it. The most effective thing that you can do in the offseason to better manage your competitive career…is goal setting and planning. Decide right now, "If I was to fast forward to next November and look back at the 2008 season, what would *truly* make me happy?" This question is so important and so profound that many of you are going to miss it because of its simplicity. Your answer is going to shape your offseason more than you know. Here is how:
LOWER BODY: My goal for the offseason is to fix my lower body. Ok, you have your work cut out for you. First of all, lower body takes about 18 to 24 mos to "fix". Less time if all you are doing is reducing the size. For most of you, though, you need to increase your upper body size as much as you have to reduce your lower body so you have dual work. DUE DILIGENCE is what I recommend for you. CONSISTENCY. Stick to your workouts like glue, lose the processed food, stop looking for the miracle exercise because there isn't one, stop running, get on a track and run some sprints. Lift so heavy that the big guy in the gym asks YOU for a spot!
LEANNESS: I really want to be super lean next season…Ok, if you are semi lean, looking to get leaner I need two things from you: a clean offseason and an increase in cals. If you think that you can eat your show cals now for weeks on end and get leaner and leaner you are going to ruin your chances of leaning out. (Please note: You cannot be lean, eating 700 to 900 cals, doing oodles of cardio and think you are going get leaner. How can you drop your cals more? Where can you go from there? 3 hours of cardio per day? 600 cals? Smelling your food? You must raise your cals in the offseason and then drop them again to get more out of your body. The trick here though is to raise your cals without gaining any weight. So you do it S-L-O-W- L-Y.) …
MUSCLE: I want to add some muscle. Ok, if you think that you are going to add major size in 8 weeks, it's not going to happen. At best we might get 2 quality pounds of muscle on you. We need way more time than that, we need to stay FOCUSED that whole time AND you need to eat like a pig and sleep like a sloth. Can you stick to it? LMK 'cuz I'm not going to feed you more and send you to bed if you are not going to lift like a psycho and eat as clean as a newbie two weeks out from show. It could get ugly. (Running and hiding as I type!)
…Please. If you do nothing else for the offseason, decide (and stick to it) what you want for your 2008 season.
Are you going to waste this time fighting with yourself day in and day out saying the same ole', "I blew it, so now I'm just going to eat blah, blah, blah." Or, are you going to maximize what little time you have and FOCUS for the next season?
My biggest problem is getting everyone to realize how little time there is in the offseason…it is over before you know it. The most effective thing that you can do in the offseason to better manage your competitive career…is goal setting and planning. Decide right now, "If I was to fast forward to next November and look back at the 2008 season, what would *truly* make me happy?" This question is so important and so profound that many of you are going to miss it because of its simplicity. Your answer is going to shape your offseason more than you know. Here is how:
LOWER BODY: My goal for the offseason is to fix my lower body. Ok, you have your work cut out for you. First of all, lower body takes about 18 to 24 mos to "fix". Less time if all you are doing is reducing the size. For most of you, though, you need to increase your upper body size as much as you have to reduce your lower body so you have dual work. DUE DILIGENCE is what I recommend for you. CONSISTENCY. Stick to your workouts like glue, lose the processed food, stop looking for the miracle exercise because there isn't one, stop running, get on a track and run some sprints. Lift so heavy that the big guy in the gym asks YOU for a spot!
LEANNESS: I really want to be super lean next season…Ok, if you are semi lean, looking to get leaner I need two things from you: a clean offseason and an increase in cals. If you think that you can eat your show cals now for weeks on end and get leaner and leaner you are going to ruin your chances of leaning out. (Please note: You cannot be lean, eating 700 to 900 cals, doing oodles of cardio and think you are going get leaner. How can you drop your cals more? Where can you go from there? 3 hours of cardio per day? 600 cals? Smelling your food? You must raise your cals in the offseason and then drop them again to get more out of your body. The trick here though is to raise your cals without gaining any weight. So you do it S-L-O-W- L-Y.) …
MUSCLE: I want to add some muscle. Ok, if you think that you are going to add major size in 8 weeks, it's not going to happen. At best we might get 2 quality pounds of muscle on you. We need way more time than that, we need to stay FOCUSED that whole time AND you need to eat like a pig and sleep like a sloth. Can you stick to it? LMK 'cuz I'm not going to feed you more and send you to bed if you are not going to lift like a psycho and eat as clean as a newbie two weeks out from show. It could get ugly. (Running and hiding as I type!)
…Please. If you do nothing else for the offseason, decide (and stick to it) what you want for your 2008 season.
More Advice on Avoiding the Rebound
From a competitor on the Oxygen website:
I would say the key is to not do anything drastic on either side of the coin. If you are able to keep in cheat meals going into the shows and still drop bodyfat at a comfortable rate, then try it. Since I've done that, I haven't had a three-page grocery list of items I want to eat as soon as I get off stage. I also continue to eat six meals a day even during the off season, and I don't stray from the cardio. Cheat meals/days are scheduled and carefully chosen, and the weight workouts are serious even during off season days.
I also don't mess with diuretics...not even over the counter. I feel those just worsen the rebound effect, which initially is mostly water retention. If your conditioning is on point, then you don't have to drop as much water for the stage.
Continue talking with other competitors. We all go through the same thing of seeing cankles and uni-abs just days after we would have walked naked onto the New York subway with our etched muscles and done it with pride. Take comfort in knowing you aren't alone and see what other competitors do to have a few of the foods they enjoy but keep it in moderation...even when there isn't a show at the end of the goal line.
I would say the key is to not do anything drastic on either side of the coin. If you are able to keep in cheat meals going into the shows and still drop bodyfat at a comfortable rate, then try it. Since I've done that, I haven't had a three-page grocery list of items I want to eat as soon as I get off stage. I also continue to eat six meals a day even during the off season, and I don't stray from the cardio. Cheat meals/days are scheduled and carefully chosen, and the weight workouts are serious even during off season days.
I also don't mess with diuretics...not even over the counter. I feel those just worsen the rebound effect, which initially is mostly water retention. If your conditioning is on point, then you don't have to drop as much water for the stage.
Continue talking with other competitors. We all go through the same thing of seeing cankles and uni-abs just days after we would have walked naked onto the New York subway with our etched muscles and done it with pride. Take comfort in knowing you aren't alone and see what other competitors do to have a few of the foods they enjoy but keep it in moderation...even when there isn't a show at the end of the goal line.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Stop Me Before I Eat More!
An article about appetite. It's a long one, but helps to explain a lot of what happens to your body chemically after a show. If you're short on time, I've highlighted some of the more relevant points in blue.
Stop me before I eat more! Who's in charge--you or your appetite? Eating right would be a piece of cake if it weren't for that overpowering urge called hunger. But where do those "feeeeed me!" signals really come from? Your genes? Our culture? The mysterious hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin? Michelle Stacey helps you get a handle on the Big Pang.
LIKE THE INSATIABLE HOUSEPLANT IN LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, our bodies send a message to our brains: "Feeeeed me!" The monster within us makes its relentless demand, we comply, and soon enough it rears its ugly head yet again and roars for more.
We're supposed to feel hungry when we need fuel, but hunger has become so fraught, so linked to our collectively ballooning girth, that it often seems less like a finely tuned bodily function and more like a beast in need of taming. Who's in charge--our appetites or our brains? And is there really such a thing as willpower?
The answer to the second question is yes, of course, but if we try to live by will-power alone--to eat less than nature intended us to eat, to be thinner than our genes meant for us to be--we're in for a struggle. The sad truth is that for some people, staying thin means going hungry. The much happier truth is that scientists are beginning to understand much more about how we know when, and how much, to eat. Millions of people, from the clinically obese to those struggling with an extra five pounds, stand to gain (and lose) from the researchers' insights.
A major advance in Big Pang theory came in 1995, with the discovery of leptin, the first recognized hormone that regulates body weight. "Since then, the pace of change in understanding appetite control has been exponential," says David E. Cummings, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Two years ago, Cummings himself reported that surges of another hormone, ghrelin, prompt hunger before meals. Both breakthroughs have brought us much closer to figuring out how, when, and why the creature must be fed.
In a perfect world, two to three and a half hours after eating breakfast, your empty stomach secretes ghrelin, which travels to the brain and triggers your appetite. You begin to feel physically hungry, you think about lunch, and pretty soon you're eating. The food then signals your ghrelin levels to drop off, decreasing your appetite.
As you eat, other molecules and hormones--including PYY, which was recently found to have a role in hunger--tell your brain to stop eating: Your stomach expands, and nerve impulses from the stretch receptors there, as well as hormones stimulated by food in the intestine, alert the brain that you're full. Together, ghrelin and PYY are part of a tag team of hunger, turning appetite on, then off.
Leptin also turns your appetite off, but in a longer-term way than PYY: It lets your brain know how much fat you've stored in your body. Leptin is made by the fat cells, and as fat stores rise, more leptin is secreted, traveling to the brain with the message You're fat enough--stop eating so much. If fat levels fall, so do leptin levels, and appetite increases. Mice that are genetically unable to produce leptin grow enormously obese because they never get the word to stop eating.
This elaborate chemical dance is a brilliant system, capable of balancing food intake with what Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD, who led the team that discovered leptin, calls "an extraordinary level of precision." Unless, that is, there's a glitch in your particular system. One glitch, says Friedman, a medical researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University, is that "for some reason, obese people appear to be resistant to leptin, which is probably part of the reason they're fat": The leptin message--to eat less--isn't getting through. Another problem isn't really a glitch as much as a very clever (too clever) refinement of the system. Lots of evidence now suggests that your genes determine your personal ballpark body weight, or set point, and that hunger is one of your body's tools to keep you right there. When you try to diverge from your set point by becoming thinner or fatter than nature decrees, your entire chemical system kicks into gear to pull you back.
When you diet, your metabolism slows down to conserve calories. At the same time, your hunger increases dramatically, regardless of your need to lose weight. "The 300-pounder who goes to 285 will feel very hungry," Cummings says. "The 100-pounder who goes to 95 will also feel very hungry."
One reason, he explains, is that when you lose weight, ghrelin levels not only spike before mealtimes but also rise overall. "You'll still have three spikes a day, plus the whole level shifts upward," Cummings says. "The troughs and peaks are all higher than before losing weight. And these changes appear durable--they don't seem to go away even if you stay below your natural point for more than six months. Over time, they erode willpower." As fat stores go down, so does leptin, and your brain gets an unrestrained hormonal signal to eat more. "The evidence suggests," Friedman says, "that people who have lost weight below their personal set point are hungry a lot of the time."
You can probably guess why all these systems kick into gear when you lose weight: To your genetic code, this restraint looks like starvation. "People have an illusion that they can consciously control their food intake," Friedman says. "That's true over the short term, but over the longer term the biological drive to eat enough to get your weight back to your individual level almost always overcomes your conscious control."
OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
WAIT A MINUTE--WE'RE MORE THAN just animals, right? We've got highly evolved brains full of thoughts and emotions and plans for a bikini summer, and surely we can tell our bodies what to do. It also seems clear to our logical brains that there are other things besides hormones that prompt us to eat. The biggest factor, even die-hard biologists like Cummings and Friedman say, is the environment--everything from food smells and portion sizes to emotional connections to food dating back to childhood.
It's well documented, for instance, that an environment of many flavors prods us to eat more and keeps us hungry. Megan McCrory, PhD, a nutritional scientist at Tufts University, puts hunger and appetite into separate categories. "Hunger is a physiological feeling, while appetite is the desire to eat a certain food or foods," she explains, and that desire--that craving--gets turned on by our having lots of choices. "We want to try all of the great variety of flavors available," McCrory says. "And when we eat a little bit of everything, we tend not to keep the calories the same as when we're eating only one or two foods." She says that studies have shown that we eat 25 percent more, on average, in a single meal when more variety is available.
This so-called buffet binge may help explain why some restrictive diets, like Atkins, work--at first. How many meals of steak and eggs can you eat before you lose interest in eating them, and are driven to eat carbs?
An environment that constantly offers lots of carbs can also spur hunger. High-glycemic-index (GI) foods like potatoes and white bread break down quickly into glucose, which causes a spike in blood sugar levels, followed by insulin release, which pushes blood sugar down. Your body wants to bring blood sugar back up to normal--and what quicker way than with another cinnamon bun or bagel? "Of all the studies that have shown the effects of GI on appetite," says David Ludwig, MD, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston, "virtually all showed that high-glycemic-index meals make you hungrier sooner after eating. In our own study of obese teenagers, after a high-GI meal they wound up eating many more calories than if the previous meal was low-glycemic-index."
MIND OVER STOMACH?
WHILE OUR CULTURE OFFERS INFIN-itely more temptations than the prehistoric world of our ancestors (they didn't watch commercials for hamburgers at 9 P.M.), what about the environment in our minds? Any number of forces conspire to lure us to the fridge: stress, boredom, celebration, misery, and that old standby "It's time to eat." Whether it's our psychological state or our hardwired nature that predominates is the question that most divides biologists and behaviorists, with the former saying that most of our eating habits are preordained and the latter believing that much about hunger can be taught, controlled, or unlearned.
Susan Head, PhD, a clinical and health psychologist in private practice in Durham, North Carolina, helps patients with the emotional side of obesity and dieting, as she previously did at the Duke Diet & Fitness Center. Head identifies two misuses of hunger, both of which lead to overeating. One has to do with that enticing exterior environment, where portions have expanded and food is everywhere. "A lot of people are eating unconsciously these days," Head says. "They don't wait till they're hungry. They're eating like robots. The doughnuts are there--say, at a meeting--and people eat them." For them, eating is about availability, appetite (desiring food), and scheduling ("Lunchtime!"). Hunger has nothing to do with it.
The other kind of overeater has absorbed the ambient cultural anxiety about weight and enjoys the feeling of being hungry (or at least of being "not full") because, Head says, "being not full means I'm losing weight--hunger is good." So she puts off eating through the early stages of hunger--which include having thoughts about food and a vague empty feeling--until she reaches the growling-or aching-stomach stage, at which point she could eat a horse, and often does (or the equivalent in pizza).
Taken to the extreme, such hunger denial is expressed as anorexia, which is an example of the power of the mind, or will, over the demands of the body. Anorexics, Head says, don't even admit they're hungry; they define that starving feeling as "success." Their eating experience is so dominated by rules, and has so little to do with what their bodies are telling them, that they have redefined all the terms to express it. "Anorexics are way too insensitive to hunger and way too sensitive to fullness," Head explains. "Any absence of hunger is 'full'"--and while full feels comforting and soothing to most people, it feels terrifying to the anorexic.
Head believes that all of these habits--unconscious eating, hunger denial followed by overeating, and eating disorders like anorexia--can be broken. Both overeaters and undereaters are trying to ignore what's actually an essential internal meter for good eating. Head works with tried-and-true tools to get the hunger apparatus working again. (See "Hunger Management," below.) Patients use hunger scales to rate their hunger and fullness from 1 to 10, relearning what hunger feels like and when to respond to it. They also learn to redefine fullness or satisfaction so that it doesn't mean "stuffed."
PILL POWER
SOME PEOPLE CAN GO A GOOD PART of the day without food; others become ravenous without regular feeding. Some are full after half a cheeseburger; others finish one and want a few more. Are such differences all in our heads?
Our minds and bodies are so linked that sometimes what seems psychological is almost completely biological or chemical in nature. This became clear long ago in regard to hunger, when an American researcher during World War II put a group of volunteers on a semistarvation diet to study how to help victims of wartime famine. As the men lost an average of 25 percent of their body weight, they became not only sluggish and cold (signs of a slowed metabolism) but also obsessed: They were constantly hungry, they talked and thought and daydreamed about food, they read cookbooks and fantasized about meals, they carefully guarded their rations from others, they became increasingly irritable with one another.
Eating-disorder experts have come to recognize, in light of this study and others, that some psychological symptoms of anorexia nervosa--obsessing about food, hoarding it--occur as a biological response to deprivation. Rather than stemming from some neurotic fixation, these symptoms appear because the body is screaming "Eat!"--as it does whenever a person's weight has dropped below the set point.
This could all sound depressing to anyone who has been battling her own hunger cues for years, but researchers like Cummings have a different view. "If you're born with obese genes," he says, "now you know it's not your fault. A lot of overweight people realize that their bodies have fought their efforts to lose weight, but those around them have always faulted their willpower."
For people to really curb hunger, Friedman anticipates drug therapies that manipulate (and outsmart) chemical signals--therapies that are already in the animal-testing stage. "We're looking at it the way you'd look at any other medical problem, like cancer," Friedman says. "You figure out how the system normally works, then figure out what's different when you have the disorder, then develop therapies." For hunger and overeating, Cummings says, one very promising research direction is a ghrelin blocker, now in preclinical studies, that would stop ghrelin from acting on the parts of the brain that trigger hunger. Researchers are also pursuing the use of PYY as a possible long-term treatment for obesity.
Once we have "the equivalent of Prozac for obesity," Friedman says, people may finally begin to believe that big appetites and big bodies are the result of more than "simply a set of bad lifestyle choices." But if, in the view of biologists like Cummings and Friedman, hunger is primarily an unbending fact of nature, how do they explain the enormous rise in obesity over the past two decades? It's not that our genes have altered in 20 years to make so many more of us fat, Friedman says. Rather, across the population there has been an average weight gain of seven to ten pounds in the past decade that's still within the approximately ten-pound range of variation that many people's set points allow them. This overall weight gain, attributable mainly to environment, he says, has pushed a certain percentage of the population over the border into the range of obese. Those whose genes gave them a blueprint for slenderness, meanwhile, have remained at much the same weight.
So how might a Prozac for hunger change this situation? Those who have a major wiring problem will benefit from drug treatment, and the rest will have to cope on their own--the same way people with the ordinary blues rather than clinical depression come to terms with their problems and learn behavioral strategies to feel better. Mentally, that could mean shooting for a reasonable, livable weight toward the low end of your set point. Practically, it means avoiding buffets or big loads of refined carbs, becoming sensitive to your personal hunger-rating scale, and simply stopping to think before over-eating. "If you're craving a half-gallon of ice cream every night," Head says, "I wouldn't trust that craving." She suggests asking yourself, What else is going on in my life? Am I feeling lonely and depressed? If so, a half-gallon of ice cream isn't going to solve that--although a dish of ice cream, eaten slowly enough so that all those little satiation nerve signals get activated, might make a tasty compromise.
RELATED ARTICLE: HOW TO EAT A TREAT
A piece of chocolate, a scoop of ice cream, potato chips--to eat anything like this without giving it total concentration is foolish. It's wasting the joy. The richer the food, the more heightened attention it merits. Turn off the TV, close the book, and just take a few minutes for you and your treat. Feel the texture in your mouth, how the flavor bursts and fades. Focus. Make the most of it. Wallow in it. You might be surprised at how it really tastes. We often eat in a trance, unaware of what we're putting into our mouths, and for reasons that food ultimately can't satisfy. The most exquisite chocolate can leave you wanting more because you missed the experience by not paying attention. Eating mindfully breaks the trance. It lets you know when you've had enough to make you happy and when having more will make you unhappy. Wake up and eat!--Amy Gross
RELATED ARTICLE: HUNGER MANAGEMENT
Hormones, hardwiring, and set points aside, hunger isn't completely beyond our ability to control. Clinical and health psychologist Susan Head, PhD, suggests several ways to stave it off when we know we've already eaten enough:
* Have a drink--water, coffee, tea, club soda with lime. Often what initially feels like hunger is thirst, and the liquid can temporarily fill your stomach.
* Eat breakfast. Many people who skip it eat much more later.
* Delay. If you're hungry even though you think you've eaten enough, give yourself 20 minutes to consider whether you're feeling real hunger or boredom, stress, or unhappiness.
* If a mealtime is coming up in an hour or so, remind yourself of that. Just knowing there's only a short wait can give you incentive to hold off a little longer.
* Chew gum. It can quiet hunger aches for a while.
* Avoid processed foods, which are usually stripped of filling elements like fiber and water.
Stop me before I eat more! Who's in charge--you or your appetite? Eating right would be a piece of cake if it weren't for that overpowering urge called hunger. But where do those "feeeeed me!" signals really come from? Your genes? Our culture? The mysterious hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin? Michelle Stacey helps you get a handle on the Big Pang.
LIKE THE INSATIABLE HOUSEPLANT IN LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, our bodies send a message to our brains: "Feeeeed me!" The monster within us makes its relentless demand, we comply, and soon enough it rears its ugly head yet again and roars for more.
We're supposed to feel hungry when we need fuel, but hunger has become so fraught, so linked to our collectively ballooning girth, that it often seems less like a finely tuned bodily function and more like a beast in need of taming. Who's in charge--our appetites or our brains? And is there really such a thing as willpower?
The answer to the second question is yes, of course, but if we try to live by will-power alone--to eat less than nature intended us to eat, to be thinner than our genes meant for us to be--we're in for a struggle. The sad truth is that for some people, staying thin means going hungry. The much happier truth is that scientists are beginning to understand much more about how we know when, and how much, to eat. Millions of people, from the clinically obese to those struggling with an extra five pounds, stand to gain (and lose) from the researchers' insights.
A major advance in Big Pang theory came in 1995, with the discovery of leptin, the first recognized hormone that regulates body weight. "Since then, the pace of change in understanding appetite control has been exponential," says David E. Cummings, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Two years ago, Cummings himself reported that surges of another hormone, ghrelin, prompt hunger before meals. Both breakthroughs have brought us much closer to figuring out how, when, and why the creature must be fed.
In a perfect world, two to three and a half hours after eating breakfast, your empty stomach secretes ghrelin, which travels to the brain and triggers your appetite. You begin to feel physically hungry, you think about lunch, and pretty soon you're eating. The food then signals your ghrelin levels to drop off, decreasing your appetite.
As you eat, other molecules and hormones--including PYY, which was recently found to have a role in hunger--tell your brain to stop eating: Your stomach expands, and nerve impulses from the stretch receptors there, as well as hormones stimulated by food in the intestine, alert the brain that you're full. Together, ghrelin and PYY are part of a tag team of hunger, turning appetite on, then off.
Leptin also turns your appetite off, but in a longer-term way than PYY: It lets your brain know how much fat you've stored in your body. Leptin is made by the fat cells, and as fat stores rise, more leptin is secreted, traveling to the brain with the message You're fat enough--stop eating so much. If fat levels fall, so do leptin levels, and appetite increases. Mice that are genetically unable to produce leptin grow enormously obese because they never get the word to stop eating.
This elaborate chemical dance is a brilliant system, capable of balancing food intake with what Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD, who led the team that discovered leptin, calls "an extraordinary level of precision." Unless, that is, there's a glitch in your particular system. One glitch, says Friedman, a medical researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University, is that "for some reason, obese people appear to be resistant to leptin, which is probably part of the reason they're fat": The leptin message--to eat less--isn't getting through. Another problem isn't really a glitch as much as a very clever (too clever) refinement of the system. Lots of evidence now suggests that your genes determine your personal ballpark body weight, or set point, and that hunger is one of your body's tools to keep you right there. When you try to diverge from your set point by becoming thinner or fatter than nature decrees, your entire chemical system kicks into gear to pull you back.
When you diet, your metabolism slows down to conserve calories. At the same time, your hunger increases dramatically, regardless of your need to lose weight. "The 300-pounder who goes to 285 will feel very hungry," Cummings says. "The 100-pounder who goes to 95 will also feel very hungry."
One reason, he explains, is that when you lose weight, ghrelin levels not only spike before mealtimes but also rise overall. "You'll still have three spikes a day, plus the whole level shifts upward," Cummings says. "The troughs and peaks are all higher than before losing weight. And these changes appear durable--they don't seem to go away even if you stay below your natural point for more than six months. Over time, they erode willpower." As fat stores go down, so does leptin, and your brain gets an unrestrained hormonal signal to eat more. "The evidence suggests," Friedman says, "that people who have lost weight below their personal set point are hungry a lot of the time."
You can probably guess why all these systems kick into gear when you lose weight: To your genetic code, this restraint looks like starvation. "People have an illusion that they can consciously control their food intake," Friedman says. "That's true over the short term, but over the longer term the biological drive to eat enough to get your weight back to your individual level almost always overcomes your conscious control."
OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
WAIT A MINUTE--WE'RE MORE THAN just animals, right? We've got highly evolved brains full of thoughts and emotions and plans for a bikini summer, and surely we can tell our bodies what to do. It also seems clear to our logical brains that there are other things besides hormones that prompt us to eat. The biggest factor, even die-hard biologists like Cummings and Friedman say, is the environment--everything from food smells and portion sizes to emotional connections to food dating back to childhood.
It's well documented, for instance, that an environment of many flavors prods us to eat more and keeps us hungry. Megan McCrory, PhD, a nutritional scientist at Tufts University, puts hunger and appetite into separate categories. "Hunger is a physiological feeling, while appetite is the desire to eat a certain food or foods," she explains, and that desire--that craving--gets turned on by our having lots of choices. "We want to try all of the great variety of flavors available," McCrory says. "And when we eat a little bit of everything, we tend not to keep the calories the same as when we're eating only one or two foods." She says that studies have shown that we eat 25 percent more, on average, in a single meal when more variety is available.
This so-called buffet binge may help explain why some restrictive diets, like Atkins, work--at first. How many meals of steak and eggs can you eat before you lose interest in eating them, and are driven to eat carbs?
An environment that constantly offers lots of carbs can also spur hunger. High-glycemic-index (GI) foods like potatoes and white bread break down quickly into glucose, which causes a spike in blood sugar levels, followed by insulin release, which pushes blood sugar down. Your body wants to bring blood sugar back up to normal--and what quicker way than with another cinnamon bun or bagel? "Of all the studies that have shown the effects of GI on appetite," says David Ludwig, MD, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston, "virtually all showed that high-glycemic-index meals make you hungrier sooner after eating. In our own study of obese teenagers, after a high-GI meal they wound up eating many more calories than if the previous meal was low-glycemic-index."
MIND OVER STOMACH?
WHILE OUR CULTURE OFFERS INFIN-itely more temptations than the prehistoric world of our ancestors (they didn't watch commercials for hamburgers at 9 P.M.), what about the environment in our minds? Any number of forces conspire to lure us to the fridge: stress, boredom, celebration, misery, and that old standby "It's time to eat." Whether it's our psychological state or our hardwired nature that predominates is the question that most divides biologists and behaviorists, with the former saying that most of our eating habits are preordained and the latter believing that much about hunger can be taught, controlled, or unlearned.
Susan Head, PhD, a clinical and health psychologist in private practice in Durham, North Carolina, helps patients with the emotional side of obesity and dieting, as she previously did at the Duke Diet & Fitness Center. Head identifies two misuses of hunger, both of which lead to overeating. One has to do with that enticing exterior environment, where portions have expanded and food is everywhere. "A lot of people are eating unconsciously these days," Head says. "They don't wait till they're hungry. They're eating like robots. The doughnuts are there--say, at a meeting--and people eat them." For them, eating is about availability, appetite (desiring food), and scheduling ("Lunchtime!"). Hunger has nothing to do with it.
The other kind of overeater has absorbed the ambient cultural anxiety about weight and enjoys the feeling of being hungry (or at least of being "not full") because, Head says, "being not full means I'm losing weight--hunger is good." So she puts off eating through the early stages of hunger--which include having thoughts about food and a vague empty feeling--until she reaches the growling-or aching-stomach stage, at which point she could eat a horse, and often does (or the equivalent in pizza).
Taken to the extreme, such hunger denial is expressed as anorexia, which is an example of the power of the mind, or will, over the demands of the body. Anorexics, Head says, don't even admit they're hungry; they define that starving feeling as "success." Their eating experience is so dominated by rules, and has so little to do with what their bodies are telling them, that they have redefined all the terms to express it. "Anorexics are way too insensitive to hunger and way too sensitive to fullness," Head explains. "Any absence of hunger is 'full'"--and while full feels comforting and soothing to most people, it feels terrifying to the anorexic.
Head believes that all of these habits--unconscious eating, hunger denial followed by overeating, and eating disorders like anorexia--can be broken. Both overeaters and undereaters are trying to ignore what's actually an essential internal meter for good eating. Head works with tried-and-true tools to get the hunger apparatus working again. (See "Hunger Management," below.) Patients use hunger scales to rate their hunger and fullness from 1 to 10, relearning what hunger feels like and when to respond to it. They also learn to redefine fullness or satisfaction so that it doesn't mean "stuffed."
PILL POWER
SOME PEOPLE CAN GO A GOOD PART of the day without food; others become ravenous without regular feeding. Some are full after half a cheeseburger; others finish one and want a few more. Are such differences all in our heads?
Our minds and bodies are so linked that sometimes what seems psychological is almost completely biological or chemical in nature. This became clear long ago in regard to hunger, when an American researcher during World War II put a group of volunteers on a semistarvation diet to study how to help victims of wartime famine. As the men lost an average of 25 percent of their body weight, they became not only sluggish and cold (signs of a slowed metabolism) but also obsessed: They were constantly hungry, they talked and thought and daydreamed about food, they read cookbooks and fantasized about meals, they carefully guarded their rations from others, they became increasingly irritable with one another.
Eating-disorder experts have come to recognize, in light of this study and others, that some psychological symptoms of anorexia nervosa--obsessing about food, hoarding it--occur as a biological response to deprivation. Rather than stemming from some neurotic fixation, these symptoms appear because the body is screaming "Eat!"--as it does whenever a person's weight has dropped below the set point.
This could all sound depressing to anyone who has been battling her own hunger cues for years, but researchers like Cummings have a different view. "If you're born with obese genes," he says, "now you know it's not your fault. A lot of overweight people realize that their bodies have fought their efforts to lose weight, but those around them have always faulted their willpower."
For people to really curb hunger, Friedman anticipates drug therapies that manipulate (and outsmart) chemical signals--therapies that are already in the animal-testing stage. "We're looking at it the way you'd look at any other medical problem, like cancer," Friedman says. "You figure out how the system normally works, then figure out what's different when you have the disorder, then develop therapies." For hunger and overeating, Cummings says, one very promising research direction is a ghrelin blocker, now in preclinical studies, that would stop ghrelin from acting on the parts of the brain that trigger hunger. Researchers are also pursuing the use of PYY as a possible long-term treatment for obesity.
Once we have "the equivalent of Prozac for obesity," Friedman says, people may finally begin to believe that big appetites and big bodies are the result of more than "simply a set of bad lifestyle choices." But if, in the view of biologists like Cummings and Friedman, hunger is primarily an unbending fact of nature, how do they explain the enormous rise in obesity over the past two decades? It's not that our genes have altered in 20 years to make so many more of us fat, Friedman says. Rather, across the population there has been an average weight gain of seven to ten pounds in the past decade that's still within the approximately ten-pound range of variation that many people's set points allow them. This overall weight gain, attributable mainly to environment, he says, has pushed a certain percentage of the population over the border into the range of obese. Those whose genes gave them a blueprint for slenderness, meanwhile, have remained at much the same weight.
So how might a Prozac for hunger change this situation? Those who have a major wiring problem will benefit from drug treatment, and the rest will have to cope on their own--the same way people with the ordinary blues rather than clinical depression come to terms with their problems and learn behavioral strategies to feel better. Mentally, that could mean shooting for a reasonable, livable weight toward the low end of your set point. Practically, it means avoiding buffets or big loads of refined carbs, becoming sensitive to your personal hunger-rating scale, and simply stopping to think before over-eating. "If you're craving a half-gallon of ice cream every night," Head says, "I wouldn't trust that craving." She suggests asking yourself, What else is going on in my life? Am I feeling lonely and depressed? If so, a half-gallon of ice cream isn't going to solve that--although a dish of ice cream, eaten slowly enough so that all those little satiation nerve signals get activated, might make a tasty compromise.
RELATED ARTICLE: HOW TO EAT A TREAT
A piece of chocolate, a scoop of ice cream, potato chips--to eat anything like this without giving it total concentration is foolish. It's wasting the joy. The richer the food, the more heightened attention it merits. Turn off the TV, close the book, and just take a few minutes for you and your treat. Feel the texture in your mouth, how the flavor bursts and fades. Focus. Make the most of it. Wallow in it. You might be surprised at how it really tastes. We often eat in a trance, unaware of what we're putting into our mouths, and for reasons that food ultimately can't satisfy. The most exquisite chocolate can leave you wanting more because you missed the experience by not paying attention. Eating mindfully breaks the trance. It lets you know when you've had enough to make you happy and when having more will make you unhappy. Wake up and eat!--Amy Gross
RELATED ARTICLE: HUNGER MANAGEMENT
Hormones, hardwiring, and set points aside, hunger isn't completely beyond our ability to control. Clinical and health psychologist Susan Head, PhD, suggests several ways to stave it off when we know we've already eaten enough:
* Have a drink--water, coffee, tea, club soda with lime. Often what initially feels like hunger is thirst, and the liquid can temporarily fill your stomach.
* Eat breakfast. Many people who skip it eat much more later.
* Delay. If you're hungry even though you think you've eaten enough, give yourself 20 minutes to consider whether you're feeling real hunger or boredom, stress, or unhappiness.
* If a mealtime is coming up in an hour or so, remind yourself of that. Just knowing there's only a short wait can give you incentive to hold off a little longer.
* Chew gum. It can quiet hunger aches for a while.
* Avoid processed foods, which are usually stripped of filling elements like fiber and water.
Making progress
July 2005...............August 2006..............October 2007
It's a slow process for me to put on muscle, and I sometimes wonder if I've made any progress at all. So today I pulled out some of my pics to compare. It's nice seeing that I have changed a bit and hopefully I'll see even more changes over the next 12 months.
Make it Happen
I will step up to the plate every day. EVERY day.
I will squeeze every ounce of potential out of every cell of my body.
I will not make excuses.
link
I will squeeze every ounce of potential out of every cell of my body.
I will not make excuses.
link
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Welcome Ursula!
I competed with Ursula in the INBA Victorian Figure Novice Class on October 6. She won our class and has some great plans for 2008. She is stuck in Tassie, so please give her lots of support!
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Consistency
Remember that CONSISTENCY IS KEY. Start making daily habits out of doing the things you know you need to do. Successful days turn into successful weeks, which turn into successful months. It is this CONSISTENCY that will allow you to build your ultimate physique! (Russ Yeager)
Friday, October 26, 2007
Advice from Experts: How to Control a Rebound
Lee Labrada, President of Labrada Bodybuilding Nutrition:
When done correctly, a methodical reduction in the amount of carbohydrates can help you achieve your ideal shape. To maintain your physique after a competition, you have to follow the natural laws of metabolism: base your diet on small, frequent feedings, consume adequate protein to maintain muscle mass (the foundation of metabolism) and manipulate carbohydrate and fat calories to meet your energy needs.
Keith Klein, founder of the Institute of Eating Management:
Even if your intentions are to stay lean after a contest, when you start eating more normally, your brain is going to turn up your appetite. The body doesn’t know the difference between true starvation and the purposeful withholding of food. Have an exit strategy with a formula that will work for you. For example, when the competition is over, celebrate and eat whatever you want that night and for brunch the next day. But on Monday, resume your clean eating, except for a “cheat day” once per week.
Hal Louis, founder of Better Reflections:
If it took you 12 weeks to get into contest shape, allow at least 8 weeks to return to an eating program that you can maintain for life, slowly adding back small portions of “normal” food. Continue with your cardio and weight training, and strive to stay within 10-15 lbs. of your competition weight. Remember that you have achieved what millions fail to do every day!
See here for the full article.
When done correctly, a methodical reduction in the amount of carbohydrates can help you achieve your ideal shape. To maintain your physique after a competition, you have to follow the natural laws of metabolism: base your diet on small, frequent feedings, consume adequate protein to maintain muscle mass (the foundation of metabolism) and manipulate carbohydrate and fat calories to meet your energy needs.
Keith Klein, founder of the Institute of Eating Management:
Even if your intentions are to stay lean after a contest, when you start eating more normally, your brain is going to turn up your appetite. The body doesn’t know the difference between true starvation and the purposeful withholding of food. Have an exit strategy with a formula that will work for you. For example, when the competition is over, celebrate and eat whatever you want that night and for brunch the next day. But on Monday, resume your clean eating, except for a “cheat day” once per week.
Hal Louis, founder of Better Reflections:
If it took you 12 weeks to get into contest shape, allow at least 8 weeks to return to an eating program that you can maintain for life, slowly adding back small portions of “normal” food. Continue with your cardio and weight training, and strive to stay within 10-15 lbs. of your competition weight. Remember that you have achieved what millions fail to do every day!
See here for the full article.
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