weigh-2-go.org

With 27 days to go before the 60-mile Breast Cancer 3-Day walk, today I did a training walk of 18 miles, and tomorrow I will do 15.  If I can get through this weekend in decent shape, and do it agian in 2 weeks, I will feel confident about the actual event.

This past Thursday evening, I joined my coworkers on a team for the Kaiser Permanente 5K in downtown Atlanta.  I pushed hard, but managed 10-minute miles for a final time of around 32:00.  That isn’t stellar by the standards of serious runners, but I’m proud enough of it, since I hadn’t exercised at all the previous week while I was on a road trip for work.

Today’s 18 miles generated more pain than I would have liked.  Fortunately no blisters, but sore crampy muscles for sure.  Tomorrow’s walk might make that better or worse–I’ll have to see.  But it’s just a preview of doing 3 20-mile days in a row.  Better to get an idea of how that will feel now, rather than later.

Please save the date to attend my Breast Cancer Fundraiser for the 3-Day Walk.  I’ll be hosting a benefit concert on Saturday, October 18 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett.  Featured artist is Jeff Silver, a local singer/songwriter and recording artist whom you may have caught at Eddie’s Attic or Ragamuffin in Roswell.

Opening act is the UUCG House Band featuring The Browns (of which I am one).  I’ll do a few old-timey vocals as well as some pop tunes with my brother, Charley and the House Band.

Suggested donation is $10, but $20 is better.  Donors on my Breast Cancer 3-Day page will get a free pass, but I hope they will bring a friend.

More details soon.

The National Weight Control Registry is an ongoing study of long-term successful weight loss maintenance.  By joining the registry, members participate in research studies that are used in academia.

The content of these research studies, however, is really meant for the academic community.  The most helpful information on the site, to you and me, is this page of aggregate findings, which has some hard-core statistics about what successful weight losers do to be successful.

This is the real deal–the researchers use the data collected from the questionnaires to develop scholarly articles for publications like International Journal of Obesity and Obesity Research.

I signed up for the Registry and received an initial short questionnaire and release forms.  With those in hand, the NWCR will send me their full-fledged survey.  I will blog about that when I get it.

For my readers who have lost weight and kept it off for at least a year, I urge you to add your experience to the NWCR’s database by signing up here, and while you’re on their site, take a look at some of the research.  Academic, but cool!

Last week I blogged about losing my Workout Mojo–that I was violating my own rules (the rules from the Weight Loss Seminar) by losing touch with my people and doing the same thing over and over again.  OK, I see the problem.  Why is it so hard to fix it?  I know how to get my mojo back–why don’t I?

Dang, I’m tired.  At the end of a work day I just want to go home and eat a cheeseburger in front of the TV. So sometimes I do.  Fortunately, it’s a low-fat Bubba Burger with just a smidgin of cheese, on a bed of lettuce (no bun) with tomatoes and cucumbers.  But I digress.

However, there were a couple of days this week, when, after a particularly long and stressful day at work, I either had evening commitmentsor I made myself exercise.  And guess what?  I actually felt better after the additional non-work activity!

So I realized this week that I am operating on yet another one of my bad assumptions, and this this:

Myth: Fatigue is fatigue, no matter how I feel, or how I got tired.

Wrong!  Work fatigue is not the same as physical fatigue.  In fact, I personally tend to worry too much about work…and other activities help me to stop worrying.  If I rest after a long day at work, my brain actually keeps the work momentum going!  It takes an equal and opposite force in my mind to stop me from obsessing about my silly job.

Unfortunately, this week I am traveling, so my workout schedule will be catch-as-catch-can.  But next week I will put a new theory to the test and try to debunk what I think is a myth about fatigue and rest.

Lately I’ve set up my blog emails to come out “Weigh-2-Go Wednesdays.”  I thought that, since I wanted to ramp up my posting, maybe my email subscribers would rather get spammed every time I publish, but just get a weekly update.

So what do y’all think?  Would y’all rather get my emails once a week or every time I post?

Please comment on this topic!  Thanks!

Hungry Girl is the toast of Weight Watchers.  Her recipes and tips get discussed at many a meeting. She has great information, loads of calorie saving tips, and product recommendations, all in a fun format.  And she is, along with Grammar Girl, my blogging idol.

Here’s a sample of the kind of information–and influence–of Hungry Girl:

Trader Joe’s Update – Earlier this summer, we warned you that we had suspicions about the accuracy of the nutrition info for Trader Joe’s Chili Lime Chicken Burgers. Immediately after our email went out, the burgers were pulled from shelves. The owner of the company that manufactures the product (who was extremely concerned and is an all-around genuine and lovely fellow) had the product re-tested, and the burgers are now back on shelves with new nutritional stats. They went from having 110 calories, 3g fat, 4g carbs, and 1g fiber (POINTS® value 2*) to having 150 calories, 6g fat, 3g carbs, and 2g fiber (POINTS® value 3*). Thanks to all of you for following up at your local TJ’s. And GO US! We’re all really making a difference — let’s keep it up!

Is that cool or what?  Not only is she reporting the healthy products, she is even challenging the nutrition labeling!

If you haven’t already signed up for Hungry Girl’s emails, I recommend you check out her site and give them a try.

Well, you can, but if you do you will usually get a bunch of crap.  There are so many products being hawked, and so many web sites using weight loss as a “Google magnet” to sell pay-per-click advertising, that looking on the web for advice on how to lose weight responsibly is an arduous task.  So, I am taking on that task as a service of Weigh-2-Go.org.

I will start reviewing web resources here, and compiling a list that will be a permanent resource on this site.  View the “resources” category to see them all.

I’ll start tomorrow with my review of one of my favorite web sites about food–especially great for Weight Watchers POINTS counters.

In January 2006, I started going to the YMCA regularly, at least once a week on Mondays with my friend Jill.

In May, I joined the Ladies Get Fit class, and was going to the Y at least 3 times a week.

Last year at this time, I was still going 3-4 times per week, minus days when the weather was nice and I did my hour of cardio outdoors.

Now I can tell I’m losing my mojo.

Today at lunch after church, though, someone asked me whether I played volleyball, and then later whether I played tennis.  [Now I wish I had an mp3 of Carrie Bradshaw/Sarah Jessica Parker saying:] And that’s when I realized…I’m in a rut.  The exercise has gotten boring and it is up to me to make it exciting again.

By going to the gym over and over again, doing the same stuff for 2+ years, I have actually violated–partially–two of my weight loss seminar tenets.

1. It’s About People. Now that I am no longer in a class, except for Monday (now it’s moved to Tuesday) night with Jill, I have lost the social aspect of the Y.  I don’t make any drop-in exercise classes often enough to get familiar with my classmates.  And, my activities are mostly anti-social–weights and cardio.
2. By doing the same thing in the same way over and over again, I am inadvertently subscribing to The Bowflex Myth that I can get results by doing the same thing repeatedly.

Instead of the mythical linear course, wherein I do one hour of cardio machines 3 times per week and 40 minutes of FittLinx (weight machines) two times per week for the rest of my life, I gotta mix it up.

In a few days I’ll post about why this is particularly hard for me right now.

I am worried that I have a long road trip with work coming up in a couple of weeks, and I am afraid it will be difficult to carry snacks and get exercise.  This particular trip involves travel by car across the Midwest to film food factories–so it is not your average business trip with urban hotels and restaurants.  I’m tempted to find some sort of cooler/backpack and keep it stocked with fruit and veggies, and lots of water.

Will my coworkers think I’m weird?  Definitely.  Will they make fun of all the salads and apples I’m gong to eat?  Oh yes, probably: which is all part-and-parcel of a phenomenon that I have noticed profoundly, and that I think we, as Americans, are not quite ready to admit out loud, but that we already tacitly accept as truth:

Good health is radical.  To practice it is to rebel against our mainstream culture.

And I’m not even talking about some sort of vegan, wheatgrass-juice-drinking, New Age, all-organic, or macrobiotic thing.  I’m talking about simple diet and exercise that’s in line with the way our bodies are made.

If you take a look at the book Younger Next Year (see also my Amazon picks, right sidebar), you will read some techniques for good health that will simultaneously astound you, and make you rap your head with your fist and say “Of course!”  They are only astounding because hardly anybody does them–yet they make uncomonly good sense.  And they are hard to practice: things like exercising 6 times a week, and cutting down on meat.

So, as I blog about health, I realize I am going down a radical path.  And as I go out into the world with my cooler stocked with celery sticks, peach wedges, and rice cakes, I am setting an example not just as a healthy and viable human being, but as a bit of a weirdo.

Today I walked 7 miles, and Saturday I walked 15 miles on a training walk for the Breast Cancer 3-day.  This group I train with is mostly 3-day walk veterans.  They go at a moderate pace (everybody has stuff to get done on the weekend anyway), and they know all about preventing blisters with Vaseline, how much water to drink, how to stretch, and so forth.  So I am learning a lot about 3-day walk survival.

I’m doing fine on these long walks, and I always feel fine afterwards–no terrible cramps or muscle soreness.  But I wonder how much different it will feel to do 4 times as much walking in the span of 3 days.  Will I just fall into a “zone” where the 40th mile feels sort of like the 20th?  Or do I just now know until I do it?  The anticipation is mounting.

Meanwhile, I am not making much progress in Weight Watchers.  This past week I vowed to count my points more rigorously, and then broke my vow.  I at least did stay more conscious.  The scale says I gained weight, but the other day my jeans were loose, so go figure.  Thee are multiple ways to measure success.