Why I Don't Like Runner Chicks, But Want to Be One, Anyway

RUNNING: What I think I look like

What I really look like

Does the cover of Runner's World Magazine ever strike anybody as some cruel form of false advertisement? I always feel so inspired looking at the perfect forms of chicks half my weight and twice my speed. Though I *do* get mad when they finish a race and down a half-dozen bagels and *still* look better than I do, even though they probably don't have the faintest idea of what the GL of an average bagel is.  I get out there and try to move with the same grace and speed, picturing myself with that sports-bra only physique, and the fact that I missed out on the opportunity to land my Dad's athletic genes strikes me again with fresh force. (Please see photo above for a study in contrasts.) Nevertheless, I just finished an 8-mile run. But before you lump me in with those people and start writing me nasty fan mail advising me to only talk about the superiority of Oreos to pretzels, let me tell you my story.

I've NEVER been a runner. I was one of those smart kids who never failed any test but the Presidential Physical Fitness Test because I would take too long to complete that seemingly endless mile we had to do to show we were fit. Or I couldn't do that one pull-up required of 6th-grade girls. Or I got obliterated in the sprints. Either way, I was the quintessential dweeb who knew that I wouldn't be getting to any college on an athletic scholarship, unless there was one for playing whiffle ball in a skirt. Which would have been totally awesome.

I should have known something was wrong when we went to the gym and did some running on our honeymoon. I quickly discovered that the problem with being married to a Type-A like Jon is that all his Type-A friends only fed into his goal setting trends. Three months after our wedding, Jon came home excited to tell me that his work team wanted to do a 5K together. I thought 5Ks were something only real athletes did, not two geeky kids who had had spent their high school years at band camps and piano recitals.

Enter the Couch to 5K Plan. It took me from pathetic girl who felt winded after a 30-second sprint to someone who could endure 30 minutes of one of my least favorite activities.  While I beat Jon at our first 5K, and kept trying to run with other friends who seemed to love it, I always found myself having to *try* to like it. At the most, I could handle 4 miles without dying of either exhaustion or boredom.

So don't ask me why I thought that running a half marathon sounded like a good idea. I'm not sure if I have a little more of Jon's Type-A than I care to admit, or if all my running friends finally rubbed off on me, but I decided late last year that it was worth checking off my bucket list. Having a few girls who were crazy enough to agree that it "sounded like a good idea at the time" helped me start to enjoy getting out there three days a week and running just a few miles. From there, we've added a mile to our last run of the week until a girl who had never moved anywhere beyond four miles just finished a run twice that length.

Do I still get winded? Um, yes. I live for the walk break that comes after my first two miles. Am I fast? Um, heck no. I've seen people complete marathons in less time than it will probably take me to finish half that distance. Do I still look as awful as that retina-burning picture in the upper right corner? All the time. My endurance is way better, but my Irish skin is pretty unforgiving, and whether I run a mile or eight, I always look like I've been burned in a horrible tanning bed accident.Will I ever look like the girl on the cover of the magazine? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "NEVER."

You know the crazy thing, though? I'm really starting to like it. And even if I didn't, seeing a drop of 4% in my body fat percentage on the scale the other day is motivation enough to keep at it. And it's coming off from my most prominent feature, a derriere that makes even Beyonce's bootylicious figure look boyish.  And my family inheritance of thunder thighs and hippo hips seems to be diminishing, too. I like to flatter myself and think that I am doing the world a favor by making myself a little less startling to look at for everyone.

Not that the results should surprise me. There's a reason your doctor tells you diet AND exercise are the key to long-term weight loss. And it may not be as simple as the calories in, calories out we've all been conditioned to believe. Actually, any aerobic activity we do actually boosts our body's sensitivity to insulin. Remember insulin from our last talk? That's the stuff our body tries to dump into muscles, who sometimes have a nasty habit of rejecting them. Well, when we do an aerobic activity like running--or even walking--our muscles are forced become a lot more receptive to the insulin, and we don't end up feeding our unwanted fat cells (insulin's preferred home-away-from home) quite so much. And in case you think I'm making this stuff up, check out the results of this study: people who walked 5 days a week for 30-40 minutes a day actually lost an average of 13 pounds over 3 months without changing their eating habits. AND they had a marked increase in their insulin sensitivity. The bottom line: their bodies were delivering insulin way more efficiently than they had done before without consistent aerobic activity.

It kind of explains, too, why all those skinny runner chicks seem to be able to eat whatever they want without gaining weight. Their bodies are just better at not storing up their food as fat, but as a usable fuel for their muscles. Case in point: On a recent vacation, Jon and I consistently hit the gym in the morning to go running. When I went and hit up the breakfast buffet afterward, those waffles--considered a forbidden fruit under normal circumstances-- had about half the effect on my blood sugar (and consequently my waistline!) as they would have without my insulin sensitivity being raised.

So the next time you find yourself like me *trying* to like walking or running, think about your body thanking you with a runner chick metabolism.  While our bodies will thank us in so many ways--better heart health, less stress, improved circulation--let's face it, wearing the skinny jeans make the challenge *really*  worth it.

Write vs. Might

I almost took a swig of my husband's Dr. Pepper 10 this morning. Almost. Theoretically, as a wellness teacher, I am vehemently opposed to all forms of soda, especially those containing fake sugar with whacky chemical side effects.  As a single girl, I knew better than to drink the stuff. But I married a Southern boy from Alabama, where Dr. Pepper and sweet tea are preferred to water by a ratio of 999:1. I would like to think of myself as a victim of Jon's attempt to brainwash me into becoming a real Southern lady. That soda was just part of a larger ploy that includes learning to enjoy BBQ date nights, accepting the fact that watermelon can be salted and potato salad can be warm, and adopting Crimson Tide football as a second religion.  While we have made a lot of breaks from the bad habits of our youth, the complete and utter elimination of the bubbly (that's Baptist-speak for "soda," since we don't do champagne) hasn't been one of them. Honestly, I'd found it sneaking into my diet way more than I'd care to admit here on paper.

Which is exactly why I took a pass on it today. You see, today I am starting to keep a food journal for the first time in a long time, in partnership with my health class students who are doing the same. This week, we are just supposed to practice writing down everything we eat and drink so we know where to clean up our habits next week. But there was NO WAY I was going to let them see that I--their revered, beloved, disciplined, amazing health class teacher (I just spoke in, like, a thousand hyperboles there)-- had a random swig of soda on Day One of food journaling. Besides, I already know with the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, I will have plenty of examples for them of what NOT to do when trying to lose weight. I've got to save face where I can, my friends.


Apparently, I'm not the only one who will change their food decisions just so they look good on paper. It looks like there may be more to this ego-trip than meets the eye. The big wigs at Kaiser Pemanente Hospital conducted a study in 2008 which showed that those who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as their less literary counterparts.  Why? Because it's so easy to think you're doing all right with your food until you see it  written down in black and white. One of my students said it best: "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen." That bag of Cheetos? Don't know what you're talking about...  Cookies for dinner? A second slice of cake? Not my problem... But, while you can pretend that those unrecorded forays into the fridge didn't happen, that Shakira song with those lyrics, "My hips don't lie," will come back to bite you in the...um, hips.

And just in case you have a personal grudge against Kaiser Permanente and refuse to validate their study, I'll give you the results of a similar study: this one showed that you had a measly 20% chance of succeeding in your weight-loss goals if you didn't keep some sort of a food journal. Right now,  while I am pursuing a vanity goal of getting down to my wedding weight for our fifth anniversary in April, I value the 80% chance of success that journaling gives me. But, I've been meaning to work on this goal for awhile; I just haven't gotten around to it. I've put it off until it was convenient, which basically meant I let myself cheat when the Spirit led me, because there was zero accountability to myself or anyone else for what happened.  I absolutely know that writing it down makes all the difference between starting on that goal today and putting it off until some other time. I either "write" now or I "might"  start on the goal tomorrow.

Well, food isn't the only thing worth making lists of. I am off to accomplish the other tasks on my to-do list today. Which no longer includes Steak N Shake Happy Hour.

Bonus Tip: Looking for a techie way to keep a food journal? Try MyFitnessPal.com, which even offers a great app that tracks your daily GL intake! If you don't know what GL is, you clearly didn't pay attention to my previous post. And you are probably at Steak N Shake drinking that half-priced milkshake.

Hey, Y'all! Butter Didn't Give Paula Deen Diabetes

A lot of buzz has been created since America's most famous Southern cook announced that she has Type II Diabetes. She's been the butt of a lot of "Well, it's no wonder--she uses three sticks of butter in every recipe!" jokes. And, while I have to admit, that I have found it amusing that her line of cookware is the ONLY one I know of that contains a butter pan instead of a sauce pan, I feel kind of bad for all the flack she's been getting about her health.

I also feel kind of bad for everyone who thinks butter causes diabetes. 

When it comes to diabetes, butter is NOT the problem. In fact, in a weird way, it is closer to being an asset than it is to being a problem. Sure, excessive use of butter is associated with a million other health problems, like heart disease, elevated cholesterol, and UTC (unsightly thigh cellulite), but it's not really what got a nice girl like Paula into trouble. Remember the glycemic index thing? Well, a number of factors in a food can lower the GI of a meal, and among them is fat content. While fat isn't typically thought of as a good thing, it actually slows the process of food being broken down into glucose, creating a more gradual spike in blood sugar instead of the rapid rise and fall that wears out our body's defense mechanisms against diabetes. That's one reason why the Oreos ended up registering less on the GL spectrum than the pretzels--that Double Stuf cream is pure, fatty goodness.

BIG CAVEAT HERE: This does not mean you should smother your vegetables in butter just to get them lower on the GL, or that you can atone for any sugary wrong by eating butter by the stick.

The truth is, fat doesn't cause diabetes, and it really doesn't even make you fat . In fact, the main culprits that are doing Americans just like Paula in are usually relatively low-fat, low-sugar carbohydrates (with the exception of stuff like Paula's hoecakes or McDonald's French fries, neither of which are low fat!). Haven't you ever noticed how your jeans fit tighter after a big bowl of pasta with a (just a few) slices of bread? And aren't bread and pasta both low-fat, low-sugar foods? Hmmmm. Let's see if I can explain this phenomenon as well as one of my mentors does:  Everything you eat eventually is converted into sugar in your blood (glucose). By design, your body is equipped with the hormone insulin, which has to dump the sugar somewhere, anywhere it can find that will take sugar out of your bloodstream. Its first choice of a dump site is in your muscles. Well, sometimes, your muscles reject the delivery of glucose, usually for one of two reasons: a) you don't really *have* any muscle, per se, so there really isn't any demand there for energy or b) you completely overwhelmed your system with too many carbs that converted into sugar too quickly, and, seeking vengeance, your body is now asking you to take your sugar and shove it elsewhere. Not to be daunted, the sugar continues its quest for delivery and finds the nearest available fat cell to deposit the sugar into. Not enough fat cells? No problem! Your body just makes more to compensate.While we can commend our bodies for their resilience and resourcefulness, we don't get any healthier challenging it day after day like this. Eventually, it just waves the white flag of surrender and you end up with some disease like diabetes.

So let's just stop blaming butter for all our problems and start looking at the real culprits of disease. And maybe we should stop making fun of Paula, too. Because she probably knows how to kill us all with comfort food.