Shrinking Sisters

Whee! Watch it drop!

I know it's not much, but I was never more happy to see that quarter pound drop than I was this morning.

Those three numbers above were last Friday, this Monday and today, which I finally was surprised with that think that sorta rhymes with "consternation" or "frusTRUation." Just one of the thrills that comes with being 51.

Like I always say, it's not a cycle, it's a roulette wheel.

Anyway (TMI, right?), I adjusted my calories from what My Fitness Pal was telling me I COULD eat, and I'm sticking with what I SHOULD eat, which is 1,400-1,500 a day. I'm drinking lots more water, fitting in more vegetables and sleeping more.

Y'know, all those crazy, sensible things.

I'll be spending the weekend flushing out my PMS bloat and will check in with Mr. Withings (my scale) to see how the de-bloat is coming along.

The weather has been pretty swampy and rainy so today's walk is out of the question but that doesn't mean I need to sit here on my caboose.

So if you'll excuse me, I think I'll fire up the DVD player and have a pre-dinner Zumba dance party with my oversized maracas (no, really, they are maracas -- what did you think I meant?).

I bought them last year at Fitbloggin' from Zumba instructor and force of nature Sue O'Lear, aka Mrs. Fatass, who just opened her own fitness studio in Wilson, NC, with her partners from Trio Fitness -- is that cool or what?

Seaweed and eggs? Trust me on this

I love seaweed, so much so that I once nibbled on some at the beach. I don't recommend it -- way too gritty and not very tasty.

I used to buy toasted nori sheets and make snacks with them by ripping them into squares but lately seaweed snacks have soared in popularity so I don't have to do that anymore. 

The array of seaweed snacks is growing and recently Vitacost sent me a pack of gimMe seaweed crumbles. It's one of the new products that Vitacost.com has added to its product lineup. I've been shopping at Vitacost.com for YEARS (they have great prices on supplements) and I never really thought to order food with them.

The entire bag is 100 calories and it's really good. Seaweed is one of those foods that lends umami to foods. What's umami? In Asian cooking, it's known as the "fifth taste,"  the other four being sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

I tried the sesame flavor, but gimMe also comes in very un-Asian flavors like cheddar cheese and honey dijon. 

I was eating it straight out of the bag but I wondered what I could do with the fine, little shreds of seaweed, speckled with sesame seeds. They'd be great on a salad or sprinkled over a salmon fillet, but something about the combination of eggs and seaweed spoke to me.

Turns out, that very combination is also called gaeran mari, or a Korean stuffed omelet. And I also found out that gim means seaweed in Korean, hence the name gimMe.

There's really no recipe -- just make some scrambled eggs and sprinkle the seaweed on the finished eggs. The salty, crunchy seaweed is a great contrast to the soft and rather bland eggs and adds just a few calories. It's also a great way to add trace minerals to your diet and cut down on sodium.

Disclosure: Vitacost.com sent me the product but I was not compensated in any way for this post and all opinions are mine.

Tunes for Tuesday: Save the World, by Swedish House Mafia

This song makes me feel like a superhero.

Fixing it!

After the weekend scale freakout, I focused Sunday on eating real food in small amounts, and distracting myself at night. 

Turned out, I didn't need to distract myself at all -- I simply wasn't hungry!

Weird!

I checked the My Fitness Pal pie chart and saw that the carbs, protein and fat divided into a perfect Zone -- 40 percent carbs, 30 percent protein and 30 percent fat. And I was floored to see that I kept my calories around 1,300. I really didn't plan on that but at the end of the day, that's where I wound up.

And when I got on the scale this morning, I had knocked off a pound and a half from Saturday.

I'm fixing it.

I did finally start something that I have been meaning to do for months -- cracking open books that focus not on the "what" but on the "why" and "how" of losing weight. Believe me, I know what to eat -- I need to master why I eat when I eat and how to focus on needing to eat instead of wanting to eat.

Last night I started the book "Thin Side Out: Stop Binge Eating, Overeating and Dieting For Good Get the Naturally Thin Body You Crave From the Inside Out." It's written by Josie Spinardi, a behavioral change specialist. (It's only available as a Kindle book.) I'm only a couple chapters in but I love the book so far.

The premise is that conventional "dieting" turns our brains and psyches into neurotic mush and ruins our ability to eat like a normal person. 

I was talking about my new nighttime immersion reading gameplan with the Weight Shrink today and she asked me what I thought about retraining my brain to do things differently. I likened it to learning a completely new language because I've never known anything but being "on a diet" since the age of 10. 

Really.

I don't know how a naturally thin person eats because I've never been one, so I know it's an uphill battle. But I'm up for the challenge.

 

I saw this coming and I'm going to fix it

Aww, poo. Yeah, that's 3 pounds up this week. I can chalk this up to a couple things:

• The prolonged PMS/bloating thing (put up or shut up, ovaries!)
• Following the caloric advice of my phone app.

Hey, when something or someone tells me I have 200 calories left to eat at the end of the day, who am I to say no? 

{Derp.}

My Withings scale and my Fitbit One are connected to the My Fitness Pal app, which calculates how many calories I can eat based on my Fitbit reading and my weight-loss setting on My Fitness Pal, which I have set to the max (2 pounds a week).

Obviously, I don't metabolize like most humans because the 2-pound-a-week weight loss somehow turned into "gain 3 pounds in a week."

So for now I'm going to ignore what the app says and stick to around 1,500. I went back into the weekly calorie tallies and saw that a couple weeks ago when I actually lost weight I was averaging that. 

Finally figured out how to get a screenshot on my phone.

 I also took a peek at the pie chart of carbs, protein and fat and saw that the "loss" week was 47 percent carbs, 22 percent protein and 31 percent fat. I mention that because I don't remember being physically hungry. Then I looked at this past week and it was the same and I was hungry. Gaaah!

But I do notice that if I focus on a "healthy fat" snack -- something that contains nuts, avocado, or seeds -- it really shuts off my hunger. And while it seems counterintuitive to focus on fat (oh, how wrong you were, Susan Powter!), when I eat more fat within my calorie allowance, I'm more satiated.

Notice I said eat more fat. It's not oils and dressings, it's that fat bound up with fiber and/or protein that does the trick. 

Today, for example, I had a Perfect Foods Fruit & Nut bar for breakfast and it's got 17 grams of fat coming from peanut butter, walnuts, flax, and sunflower, sesame, olive and pumpkin seed oils. It kept me full through a great CPR-training seminar I took with other South Florida-based bloggers at One Beat CPR (more on that Monday).

From my fave comic strip, Mutts.

 When I got home I made myself a green smoothie but it was missing any sort of fat so within a couple hours I was grumbly in my tummy. I remembered to have a "fatty snack" so I sliced up a really great tomato and added a couple ounces of turkey breast and dolloped a Wholly Guacamole 100-calorie pack on top. Totally did the trick.

So bring on the guacamole!

... I guess. (Geez, what a frustrating, inexact science this losing weight is.)

I'm being a big, bloaty baby today

Yeah, today's my weigh-in day but I wasn't going to get near the scale this morning. I'm in one of those over-a-certain-age prolonged PMS fiestas and I woke up looking and feeling like a Macy's balloon with a raging back-of-the-neck headache.

After an Aleve and an Extra-Strength Bayer the headache is pretty much gone but I'm going to weigh in tomorrow and will report the results regardless of the outcome.

But today? Waaaah.

See ya tomorrow.

Wordless Wednesday: Found on my walk today

This freaky little thing -- the size of a ping pong ball -- is an air plant. The weather had been pretty stormy today and I had squeezed in a walk between downpours. You can see that the little guy was still clinging onto a bit of tree branch.

Tunes for Tuesday: Podcast roundup edition

Gotta be honest -- I've been listening to podcasts more than music on my walk/jog adventures.

(I was going to regale you with my favorite baseball walkup mariachi song [Adrian Gonzalez's "El Mariachi Loco"] but I thought better of that. Some people just don't appreciate mariachi music.)

So while there's not much music going on, there is a whole lot of fun, informative information going on. Here's what fills my Nano these days (they're all available through iTunes but I'm linking to the podcasts directly if you need other ways of listening):

The Jillian Michaels Podcast: I've been listening to Jillian since she had a Sunday radio show in L.A. Those shows were made into podcasts, and after she discontinued them, fans were in a fitness funk. But in February 2011, Jillian resumed podcasting and posts a new 45ish-minute edition nearly every Monday. Her show offers much more than the "toughest trainer" persona. Jillian and her sidekick Janice chat about fitness, of course, but also food, family, emotional issues and relationship advice (Jillian half-jokingly has added a "Love Doctor" segment to the show.)

Dr. Fitness and the Fat Guy: Another longtime favorite, this podcast features the two title dudes (plus "Mighty Mom" Katie Scharf), talking to fitness DVD stars, authors, star trainers and athletes. The hourlong weekly podcasts offer lots of fit-living info with a liberal dose of humor.

Robert Ferguson's Diet Free Life: Robert is one of my favorite "diet gurus." I'm reluctant to use the term "diet" because his whole philosophy is to live diet free. Robert, who has a master's degree in counseling psychology and certifications in fitness and performance nutrition, blends all those specializations into his Diet Free Life System, which he does talk about at length in his podcasts, which are recordings of his weekly Internet radio show. I love how motivating and funny Robert is and how he makes losing weight very realistic and stress-free.

Nacho Mama's Podcast: Margo Porras is a weight-loss blogger who lost over 70 pounds. She blogs and also has a podcast, where she discusses everything from Weight Watchers to reality TV to fitness with chatty humor. Her podcasts are every other week and are about an hour long. And I'm really psyched that we'll get a chance to meet in person next month at Fitbloggin'!

I've been scouring iTunes for other podcast ideas and have a few loaded up on the iPod but I haven't listened to those yet. I'll let you know how those stack up.

Until then ... oh, heck, enjoy the mariachi music!

Do I have fitness performance anxiety?

Well, it happened again last week. I took a wonderful class at the schwanky Exhlale Spa in Miami and halfway through I felt that old feeling, which I described in the post: Pei Wei and Zumba: A Cautionary Tale.

That time I chalked up the "bottom dropping out" feeling to working out really hard immediately after eating. 

This wasn't the case this time -- I had eaten Greek yogurt mixed with oats and walnuts. Not too big, not too small. 

Last week's barre class wasn't high impact but it was pretty high intensity. Plus the class was full and it took place in a very sunny, slightly warm room filled with young, fit and experienced exercisers -- and me. And once again I felt the need to keep up with everyone. I was wearing the wrong socks (you need grippy socks and I was wearing running socks), I was probably dressed a little too warmly (long yoga pants and a black T-shirt made me a solar collector in that window-filled room), I was dripping sweat, and I frankly felt like a big ol' fish out of water (emphasis on BIG and OLD).

So I was doing my best, which wasn't good enough for perfectionist me. I pushed and pushed and 30 minutes in, it hit me again -- woozy, nauseous, light-headed and wobbly.

I smilingly gathered my stuff, left the workout room and headed to the hotel's gym, where I guzzled down cup after cup of water, put my head between between my legs and thought to myself "Don't puke, don't pass out, don't puke, don't pass out."

And I didn't. I walked back to my car but first stopped at a drugstore for a protein bar and a big container of coconut water, which I drank on the drive home.

Did I mention that the same thing happened to me around this time last year in another group fitness setting? Well, yeah, but that time I put on a show for some people, projectile vomiting and ending with a knee-buckling pass-out, which I had never done in my life.

Thankfully the fitness event was at a public beach and a bevy of lifeguards rushed over with water and ice. After drinking about a half gallon of water and being ice-packed all over, I felt just fine, if not supremely embarrassed.

After I got back home (it was an out-of-town gig), I made sure I saw the doctor, who signed me up for an echo stress test, which I passed with flying colors (seriously -- even the techs said I did super well for someone my, ahem, age and size). The results sheet even said "good exercise tolerance."

My doc's diagnosis -- syncope (fancy word for fainting). It's a temporary loss of consciousness due to the sudden decline of blood flow to the brain.

It can also "almost happen." I'll let Alexandra and Kymberly from the wonderful blog Fun and Fit explain:

 Pre-syncope is when you have signs that you’re about to faint, but manage to recover before fainting occurs.

I found their blog post after I got back from Miami last week. It was just the thing I needed to read to slap some sense into me, and give me perhaps another clue.

I had all the same variables that I had the other two times: overexercising, dehydration (oh, the sweat!), overheating. But the one variable I didn't think about until recently -- stress and anxiety -- made me think that I have an issue with "playing with others." 

I can jog in 90-degree heat, I can Zumba with friends (I'm the one in the white shirt and purple headband in this video from last year's Fitbloggin'), I can do a Hip-Hop Abs or TurboFire DVD in the comfort of my home -- all without passing out or even feeling like I'm going to.

Only time this happens is when I'm in a big class of skinny strangers.

So here's where we all get to play armchair exercise psychologist:

Is "performance anxiety" that one piece that sets my Jenga tower of fitness toppling over?

 

I'm OK with the status quo this week

Exactly the same this week, which is totally OK, since I was expecting disaster. I'm REALLY salt sensitive, it's "that time of the month" and last night involved a few fried pickles and a restaurant meal. We pretty much never go out to dinner during the middle of the week but the kid was in Orlando on a school trip (for the second time this month) so we went to our favorite neighborhood "gourmet sports bar" (Bokamper's).

So when I got on the scale this morning, I was good with the number because I know that after a few days, any extra bloat will magically vanish.

Guys don't have to worry about this nonsense, do they?