Ground hog says only 6 more weeks of winter

Got to love that hairy creature. I just hope he is right. I need to see the grass. I need to hear the birds singing. I need to get my dog out for a walk. He has cabin fever as bad as I do. 

I try to workout in the winter but I must say that I fall short of a great workout minus the sunshine and fresh air. I put on my ipod and leashed up the dog and went for a walk on Sunday. Not the same thing when you have to go through 18 inches of snow. I am sure it is a workout but not one that I really enjoy.

I should go to the pool and go for a swim but I hate dealing with a wet bathing suit and wet hair when it is freezing out.

OK, enough with the excuses. I am the queen of them after all. To put my fanny in motion, I hired a personal trainer to jumpstart my efforts. She is a walking example of what a well-toned body should look like. I am sure that she is going to kick my butt but that is what I need right now.

I have let too many things get in the way of a great workout and it is time to get back on track. I turn 50 in July and I want to be the best I have ever been. I want to set the tone for what the rest of my life will be like by then. I never want to use a walker and I don’t want to be one of those people that eat pills to stay healthy.

Fabulous and 50 is what I want. The time is now to get back on track and make it happen.

Dieting’s Biggest Taboos and Mistakes

Knowledge is the answer to dealing with any problem and from there you will be able to determine whether or not your recipe for success is appropriate in order to achieve your goals of good health and fitness.  You will discover here as time goes on, that maintaining an exercise program, accompanied by a natural diet will comprise the main ingredients for your success.  But before we go on about how to fix the problem, we first need to fully understand what will not work.  Forgive me if some of these thoughts have already been posted on this site, and if so, a refresher may be helpful regardless.

Beginning a diet by fasting:  This practice is flat-out wrong and will not work.  It indicates a lack of basic knowledge about the problem.  Initially more water is lost than fat during the first week of dieting or fasting so that little benefit is achieved by the use of this self-abusive technique.

Skipping meals:  Healthy eating demands three, if not six, meals per day of varying caloric content spaced throughout our waking hours.  Skipping meals merely results in eating more calories when we do eat or eating when we should not, as during television viewing time.  On the other hand, television viewing should be kept to a minimum since it is one of the main causes contributing to obesity. 

Fad diets:  These come and go like the wind.  The grapefruit diet, the high carb diets, the high protein diets, and others of their ilk are examples of unsustainable diets that will ultimately fail with time.  Failure means you will lose weight but gain back what you lost and often then some.  All diets with only one exception will fail within nine to twelve months.   Which diet will work?   Hmmmm.  You will see if you stick with this column.

Yo-Yo dieting:  This practice implies that brief attempts at dieting for one or two weeks before falling off the wagon will work.  If it did, we would all be trim.  It implies a lack of understanding of the problem, and even worse, a lack of committment.  Obtaining a normal weight and the health that accompanies it will take at least as much time as it took to gain the weight.  There is no quick fix as you have already learned.

Impatience:  The average dieter wants impressive results too quickly and easily becomes discouraged.  Consistency, time in action, and eating the correct foods and amounts will carry the day.

Diet medications:  These fail to work over the long haul, if they work at all.  Most have long term adverse consequences, are expensive, and do not provide for the fitness part of the equation which as you will learn is the most important part of achieving good health and a normal weight and figure.  There are new medications on the horizen, though they will prove to be even more expensive and once again will not provide for all of the health benefits of exercise such as raising good HDL cholesterol, lowering blood sugar, lowering triglycerides, lowering blood pressure, and lowering heart rate, to name a few.

As Josh Billings once said,  “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than t0 know what ain’t so.”

It is time for all of us to sit up and take notice.  The standard 27 inch casket has jumped to 33 inches.  We now even have up to 57 inches of casket room available to the needy.  Wheelchairs are thirty percent larger.  Car seats require seat-belt extenders and chairs need to support as much as 600 to 1000 pounds to avoid collapsing.  Solving the weight problems we have is an investment in our future.  It is the biggest health issue confronting us today and adds to the health care budget more than any other factor including cigarette smoking.

The next installment will list about twenty questions we need to ask of ourselves to solve the problems of obesity.  I will provide the answers to these questions as time goes on.

Dr. Philip

His blogs are his own opinions and do not reflect those of his current and past employers. 

 

Emily Minor on Emily Minor

Hi. Emily J. Minor here, longtime journalist, South Floridian, mom, wife, sister, Marlins baseball fan, NPR radio commentator and Type I diabetic.

Oh, I forgot the most important part for today’s purposes.

Dysfunctional eater.

This was ridiculously clear one recent weekend when we were planning to go to the movies on a Saturday night and I started thinking about movie popcorn that morning.

Feet on the floor, coffee on, newspaper in. Bam. Movie-popcorn-thing going on inside my head.

I mean, come on. Do skinny girls do this?

As it turns out, I think they might. Skinny girls like popcorn at the movies, too. But they probably don’t torture themselves about it all day, waffling back and forth, listening to the devil within, then the angel, then the devil again.

In the end, I had the popcorn and it was actually tasty - sometimes it isn’t, and that is such a waste - and I was happy. 

But that daylong debate demonstrated, once again, one very simple truth about myself.

As if I needed a reminder.

I have never been able to re-train my brain about food. Ever.

Oh, after taking a year and losing 50 pounds - I did it in 2007 with practically no processed foods, no alcohol, very little salt, exercise and menus that laid it all out - I definitely eat differently now. I want to keep it off. But there is a part of me that is static and unchanged and set in her ways.

It’s the part that got me up to 195 pounds.

I would still prefer the mini-Snickers over the grapes, the french fries over the fresh fruit and the bun over the bare burger. 

That means I have this good-choice, bad-choice argument with myself All The Time. And, believe me, my devilish side can get quite creative. I deserve this. I deserve that.

Sweet potato fries aren’t that bad. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Sometimes the wrangling starts with my morning coffee. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until much later in the day.

And sometimes it never happens at all. I just breeze through my waking hours, eating my Special K and my half a turkey sandwich and my New York strip steak with cauliflower for dinner. (Yum.)

Sometimes it’s easy and I look great and I feel great and I go to the movies with my bottle of water and the one - OK, two - Twizzlers that I score from the husband.

It’s a little boring, frankly. But I still like those days best.

A girl and her cake

Beth Geiger’s dreams of cake

Last night, I was dreaming about cake.  Yes – literally dreaming about cake – a wonderfully light, fluffy yellow cake with thick chocolate frosting. I woke up, the dream still lingering, and trudged into the kitchen to cook my oatmeal.  And as I waited for my breakfast, I started thinking about how the dream probably came from all the post-holiday challenges in “retraining” myself to resist the treats I had gotten used to.

These past weeks have been hard.  Since the start of the New Year, I have found myself daydreaming about food all-too-often.  It’s definitely the worst at work.  We have a small kitchen on the floor of my office.  And during the holidays, whenever I’d go fill up my coffee or water, I would be greeted with one holiday treat after another.  And I would tell everyone that I couldn’t wait for the treats to be gone so that I could get back into a healthy routine, and stop facing temptation.

But the treats are long since gone – and the temptation remains.  In my mind, I still picture those treats on the counter.  So when I turn into the kitchen and see only empty space before me, I get disappointed. It’s almost physical – like it’s my body that’s missing the treats and not my mind.

I’ve heard that it only takes 21 days to “retrain” the brain to new habits.  I’m not sure how that applies to weight control and food cravings, but I do hope that it does.  Obviously, switching someone’s life to a deeply healthy lifestyle is an evolution – a journey made of small, individual steps.   But as Day 21 of the New Year approaches, I hope that the resolutions we’ve formed over the past three weeks are starting to become “habit”…so that it once again becomes easier to enter the kitchen without hopes of cookies, and contain the dreams of cake to the sleeping hours (if at all!).

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