The Year of Having More Fun: The 2013 Non-Resolution Update

Why, hello, long lost readers. For the five of you who follow and hang on my every word, I have to apologize for the long time between posts. I guess, in one way, it's a positive sign that I've been making good on one of my 2013 non-resolutions: to have more fun. Not that writing this blog isn't my idea of great time, but I've actually been up to some pretty interesting things lately. Our weekends have been full of activities other than watching Netflix, making for a very exciting 2013.

Here's a picture diary of what we've been up to in the past few months:

I spent the better part of 3 Saturdays helping folks move and proving that girls are good for more than just bringing the lemonade to a moving party. Lesson learned: Eight hours of heavy lifting= day off from yoga.  Sometimes being a decent friend and daughter has its fringe benefits.

The Hubs and I participated in his company's annual family 5K. Despite the fact that I forgot to wear my ghetto fabulous earrings, I still managed to beat him to the finish line. Lesson learned: While wearing earrings during workouts may make me *feel* fabulous, they clearly aren't very aerodynamic. Also, having someone to beat makes running worthwhile.

My running buddy Rebecca and I pulled off a 10K together, even managing to score some sweet finisher medals, despite our less-than-thrilling finish time of 1:17, a full 10 minutes slower than I completed this same course last year with another friend. Did I mention that *both* friends became pregnant when they started training for this race with me? Lesson learned: I think someone should make a classy bronze statue of me with the title "Fertility Goddess of Running." Also, spending close to an hour-and-a-half of my life sweating and pounding my joints doesn't seem nearly as tedious when done with a friend.

The Hubs and I spent a couple of hours at an indoor trampoline gym with good friends of ours bouncing around like kids. And, yes, this is probably the best picture of me available. All that bouncing doesn't make for great photo composition, my friends. Lesson learned: Clearly neon shoes are making a comeback. Also, sometimes having fun is a far better workout.

Also on this same trip, we managed to hike down 480 steep steps in the rain to see one of Costa Rica's most beautiful sights, the La Fortuna Waterfall. This photo was *clearly* taken before I recalled that we also had to go up those same 480 steps to exit the park. Lesson learned: Glute and thigh workouts come in all forms, and this was definitely the prettiest way to cripple myself for the next three days!

 My friend Allison and I decided to hang with our Peeps (yes, those are blue marshmallow chicks). We actually didn't get a workout in during this photo shoot, but we *did* manage not to eat a single one of those fluffy little bits of sugar comas. That in itself was a victory for yours truly, and proof that all fun with food does not necessarily involve eating it.

The Hubs and I took a vacation to Costa Rica, where we walked along a series of super cool suspension bridges to explore a rainforest. Despite the fact that the entire Arenal Hanging Bridges only covered a 3.1K loop, it was a lot more challenging than any 5K we had done. Lesson learned: Having fun can be hard work. Nature is a beast.

During this same trip to Costa Rica, we also went rappelling down waterfalls. Let *that* sink in for a moment. It was clearly one of the most epic adventures we've ever had, despite my knee injury from treading in water that was unexpectedly deep, and not from the exciting activity itself. Lesson learned: If there is a way to sustain an injury, I will find it; so I might as well get hurt doing something fun. Also, I learned just how much better The Hubs looks in pictures than I do. Which is why his photo is here, and not mine.

So this wasn't exactly my usual blog post, but I hope these photos inspire you to go out and have some fun this weekend. Who knows? You may just get a workout in the midst of making memories!

Move happy, my friends!

You Can't Believe Everything You Read on the Interweb....

 I just love our sixteenth President. Honest Abe was a man with wisdom beyond his time. I mean, how did he even *know* about the Internet, considering he died 100 years before Al Gore even had a chance to dream it up? Remarkable, really.

The internet holds a wealth of information, but it can also spread a lot of crap unbelievably fast. Look at Facebook: you have people trying to get a million likes so Josh Groban will take a girl to her senior prom (or was that just me?), and telling people to "remember to SHARE if you want to keep this recipe in your photo album." I guess people don't know about right-clicking and Save As to keep a file on their own hard drives. Or the beauty of copying photos to your iPad. Nice underhanded tactic for getting people to give your business free advertising, guys.

You know, one area I find this disturbing trend of false information to be mushrooming is in the wellness industry. An abundance of exaggerated claims abound, both from alternative practitioners who want you to believe that their magical mix of herbs can cure every ailment, to more traditional doctors who think that all nutritional products are snake oil. Neither one is completely true, and I'd like to set the record straight on a few them now so you know what to watch out for the next time you see a news headline or cute little picture like this pop up on your Facebook newsfeed:

I found this little gem recently, and it just reminds me of how many exaggerated claims are out there about the benefits of healthy foods. That may sound a little ironic, coming from a girl who has a blog about healthy eating; but, in the interest of full disclosure, I believe that even the healthiest eater isn't going to get all of these benefits from a good diet. I watch what I eat for my blood sugar (and my vanity), but I am a big believer in getting a lot more additional nutrition from my daily vitamin tablets.

Let's face it: that picture of asparagus is pretty sketchy. Relieves pain? Prevents birth defects? Fights cancer? Those are some pretty tall orders, my friends. And while I wholeheartedly agree that asparagus contains the nutrients attributed to these health benefits, you have got to get those key nutrients at the right levels before you can experience the benefits. It's not that I don't think asparagus can be a great staple food for people wanting to enjoy good health and have healthy babies; but I certainly don't want an expectant Mom thinking that if she just munches on a cup of asparagus every once in a while her baby will be some perfect little munchkin and her labor will be painless, either. Bottom line: 1 cup of asparagus has 267.8 mcg of folate in it, a nutrient known to be vital to a developing baby in the womb.  But, unless you want to eat 4 servings of asparagus everyday, you still can't match up to the multivitamin I take with 1,000 mcg of the good stuff in it. This is good in two ways:

1)I don't have to worry if I'm getting enough folate. Ever.
2)I don't have to worry if asparagus will taste good dipped in my lunch's strawberry Greek yogurt. Ever.

Here's another gem that is true, but pretty misleading. There are a ton of health benefits from curcumin, an antioxidant most commonly found in tumeric, used in a lot of Indian and Asian dishes. Again, this picture kinds of leaves you thinking, "Oh, we'll just order Indian every weekend, and we'll be fine." Um, nope. Turns out that there are only about 30mcg of this powerful antioxidant in every milliliter of turmeric spice, so that's going to be some pretty spicy chicken if you want to compete with the 15 mg of turmeric I get from my multivitamin, or the 247 mg of curcumin available in my favorite joint supplement. For the mathematically challenged, 15 mg is 15,000 mcg of turmeric. And it's a whopping 247,000 mcg of curcumin. Your curry chicken wants to be my vitamins when it grows up.

Believe me when I say that it's not just the alternative medicine fan girls in the wellness field making unwarranted claims. The medical headlines you see everyday from "major studies" are pretty misleading, too. Have you heard the latest?

Note: This is probably not a real image of a recent headline. I don't think the New York Times uses emoticons.

I think this one scared a lot of women who have been taking calcium to try to prevent osteoporosis. Calcium is a critical part of retaining bone mass, and I would hate to think that women dedicated to enhancing their bone health stopped before they looked into the matter more closely.


Know the major problem with this study? The researchers only studied the effects of calcium taken alone, not with the critical addition of magnesium that is supposed to accompany every dose of calcium in a ratio of 2:1. Any decent calcium supplement manufacturer should know that. And in case you don't know, calcium is responsible for contracting muscles, and magnesium is known to relax them. So, yeah. Only taking a pill that has muscle-contracting properties without muscle-relaxing abilities could kind of become a problem on an important muscle like the heart. Just saying.

And this next little report is a real doozy. You probably saw this headline recently:

If you're just a headline skimmer, that's probably as far as you got. Or you might have read these ominous findings, which sound far more serious just because they use all those sciency words. Read it to yourself in your best Tom Brokaw voice:

...randomized clinical trials cast doubt on the efficacy of vitamin E supplements to prevent CHD [18]. For example, the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE) study, which followed almost 10,000 patients at high risk of heart attack or stroke for 4.5 years [19], found that participants taking 400 IU/day of natural vitamin E experienced no fewer cardiovascular events or hospitalizations for heart failure or chest pain than participants taking a placebo.[emphasis mine]

Further down the study, however, almost as a side note, was this statement:

However, the study did find two positive and significant results for women taking vitamin E: they had a 24% reduction in cardiovascular death rates, and those ≥65 years of age had a 26% decrease in nonfatal heart attack and a 49% decrease in cardiovascular death rates.


Oh, so I guess improving your odds of living by up to 50% is no big thing, right? 


My best pieces of advice for anyone wanting to get to the bottom of all these claims and find out what is really best for your health:

1) Learn to read all the lines and in between the lines, and find a few experts whose knowledge you really respect. It's amazing what you can find out when you don't take headlines as Gospel. But, because even a health blogger like myself doesn't spend all her leisure time reviewing medical journals, I have a group of go-to experts whose information and opinions I really rely on to help me sort through the mumbo-jumbo. There are a few doctors whose works I will eat up faster than a Snickers bar. Which, as you know, is saying something. I trust their medical background (they are all MDs, DCs, or PhDs), and their common sense approach to nutrition.  Believe me, scoping out my own sources before sharing health advice works a lot better than using a photoshopped picture referencing a non-existent study from Copenhagen from one of my 456 Facebook friends who is always posting pictures of Crisco-baked peanut butter cake and now wants to talk about natural cures for arthritis.

2) Always read my blogs and hang on every word I say.
So maybe I'm not your first choice of expert. That's OK. But, as fun as this little blog is to write, I do some serious hunting before I put anything down here. If it's not something I've looked into myself, it's a study that one of my admired experts has referenced, with sources, and that makes me feel good about it. I don't like bad information any more than you do, and I'm not interested in spreading it. Because researchers in Copenhagen found that those who spread bad information while taking high doses of Vitamin E were 270% more likely to die than those who ate curry and took a calcium placebo.....



Full Disclosure: Yes, I am paid to recommend a particular brand of multivitamin. Which is pretty cool, because I've seen people have super rad health improvements by taking the right nutrients in the right doses instead of just eating curry-spiced asparagus once a week. So far, I've yet to discover a more rewarding way of making a living than helping people feel better.

Is Your Breakfast Ruining Your Diet? Become a Cereal Killer in Four Easy Steps.

Hey, there. How are the New Year's reso annual changes coming along? If you've stuck with any resolves at all, you've kept at it nearly two months longer than the rest of society. Kudos. But if you're like most of us and need little encouragement to keep going or simple steps to get your willpower back on track, you're in luck. And if you are barely literate serial killer thinking this is some sort of nifty forum for guys like you, you're out of luck. Cause it's not. And that's creepy. And you should probably leave now.

Anyway.

If you find yourself battling with your willpower and struggling with temptations throughout the day, the solution may be as simple as changing what you eat first thing in the morning. Turns out that, in a study done on school age boys, children who consumed a typical American high-glycemic breakfast ate up to 80% more food throughout the day than those who were fed a low-glycemic breakfast. Additionally, kids with low-glycemic breakfasts were shown to have better concentration and performance in schools, too. Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but doesn't it stand to reason that we adults might be susceptible to those same plagues of hunger, cravings, and distraction when we feed our bodies improperly? I think it's time we take a look at some craving-combatting options and figure out what health impostors are stopping us from having our healthiest year yet.

If you're ready to make a change to your morning, follow these guidelines on

How to Become a Cereal Killer in Four Easy Steps:

1) Get Down to Business. Fast.

What's the first thing to go on any new diet? Unnecessary calories. And what does this sometimes result in? Skipping breakfast to give ourselves the benefit of a deficit for later on in the day. Oh, man. If there's one thing that can set you up for failure throughout the rest of the day, it's skipping breakfast. I know we've all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and if you're a non-breakfast-eater, you're probably sick of it. 

I'm sorry to tell you that your body really doesn't care about your personal preferences. Not only does your metabolism remain in a sleep state until you feed it something, it also goes into a self-preservation mode, meaning that it clings tenaciously to every calorie you consume and actually perceives it as more calories than the label states. Don't believe me? One study revealed that those who ate only two meals a day gained more weight than those who ate three meals a day. I know what you're thinking: "Well, maybe they pigged out the rest of the day. Not me. I'm soooo much better than that." Prepare to be knocked off your high horse: The study I just referenced compared people who ate the same exact amount of calories. You just got myth-busted, my friend.

Just don't skip breakfast. And don't wait more than a half-hour to get around to it. It'll make you more vulnerable to temptations later in the day (like we need more of those!), and it is the metabolic equivalent of burning daylight. And besides, you don't want to get myth-busted again, do you?

2) Don't go for a soft target.

Maybe the only thing almost as detrimental to your dieting success than skipping a meal is loading yourself up on the wrong stuff at breakfast. Most Americans choose quick fixes like cereal, a coffee and pastry,  OJ and a bagel, or other foods that can be snapped, crackled, popped, or toasted. Turns out, most of our favorite breakfast foods are serious sugar spikers that cause the 10:00am candy drawer raid, the 11:00 am slump in productivity, and the 99-cents upgrade to your Extra Value Meal at lunch. All of these actions are the results of a vicious biological cycle that keeps our body in a perpetual craving state until our blood sugar reaches a balance point. But by making smarter breakfast choices, we may be able to eliminate this chain reaction altogether.

I realize not everyone is getting their breakfast from a box with a cartoon character on it, or dunkin' a donut in a sugary beverage masked as coffee; but before you go around tooting your own horn about how you don't feed your kids Fruit Loops and only consume flakes that contain the words "bunches of oats" on the box, let me give your mind a little food for thought:

• Fun Fact: Special K has the exact same glycemic index as Fruit Loops. I repeat: exactly the same glycemic index as a food-colored cereal touted by a toucan that leads little children into jungles. Toucan Sam probably is a serial killer, if you ask me.
• Fun Fact: Cheerios (with its low sugar content) and Shredded Wheat (with its notable fiber content) fall into the same glycemic category as Cocoa Puffs (with its super annoying bird mascot).
• Fun Fact: A piece of whole wheat toast with jelly has a higher glycemic load than two Oreos. And not nearly as much creamy goodness.
• Fun Fact: A bagel with cream cheese has a higher GL than a Snickers bar. And no caramel filling, either.

Turns out that America's obsession with "whole grains"--which, by the way, usually consists of nothing more than white-wheat bread and Big G cereals that mix in a little corn kernel with their food-colored loops--has left out one pretty important component: any source of sustained energy and satiety. Our bodies are begging for more substance from our breakfast.



3) Rough 'em up.

Before you go into a panicked tailspin about how I am advocating the abandonment of all cereals, relax. While I don't believe cereal is really the best choice you can make in the mornings, there are a few brands that pass muster and a few tricks to make subpar varieties just a wee bit better. First, here are my top picks for cereals that have a pretty decent GL, mostly because their manufacturers thought that leaving grains largely unprocessed and fortified with protein and fiber was a good idea:

• Uncle Sam's Cereal*-- Ok. Admittedly, the stuff has a mild cardboard texture and is best when left to soak in milk for a few minutes before eating. BUT, it is one of the only grains I have ever found that actually flattens my tummy, thanks to an impressive 7 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber per serving. And, it makes a great crunchy topping for Greek yogurt or apple crumble. Who doesn't love that?
• Steel Cut Oatmeal--This delightful,largely unprocessed version of oats the way God intended them to be is a real gem. Full of nutrients that the quick oats and those little instant packets leave out, its GL is exponentially better than either of its more instant counterparts. It takes a while to make, which puts it out of the running for my morning pick-me-up, but it's worth the effort if you have the time!

Finally, on those days when you simply have to indulge in that Special K or Cocoa Puffs--because it really makes no difference which you choose--there is something you can do to salvage your decision: add Fibergy to your milk. Yes, the same magic powder that works wonders to counteract the sugar-spiking effects of a slice of cake can easily be mixed into a cup of milk and then added to cereal for a sneaky, tasteless way of boosting satiety without boosting blood sugar. That stuff is pure magic.

4) Pack a Lean, Mean Punch

Finally, the last tip for making a better breakfast is to include plenty of lean protein in your first meal of the day. Not only will you feed your muscles instead of your fat cells, but you'll make it through that 10:30 meeting a whole lot better, too. Note I said plenty of lean protein. Most people err either on the side of too little protein--obviously, pouring milk into Fruit Loops does *not* adequately curb the sugar spike--or go for sources that don't exactly qualify as lean--a Sausage McMuffin does *not* qualify as lean. (Nor do the 13 grams of protein from my Cinnabon last April.)

You know what does qualify as a lean protein source? Veggie omelets. Scrambled eggs. Crustless quiche. Cottage cheese and fruit. Stuff with good old dairy products and not a lot of fluff. These things can take time to prepare, but at least it is time well spent.

However, I'll be the first person to admit that the reason I used to reach for the toast and a bowl of cereal was because it was a quick fix to start my day. I hate mornings enough to allot only about 3 minutes for breakfast each day. Now that I know how much damage I was doing to my productivity and my body,  I'll let you in on my biggest breakfast lifesaver: Chocolate Nutrimeal Shakes. Even with me stumbling around in the morning, trying to blink my contacts into place while questioning the Hubs' remarkable zest for life before daylight, they take all of 45 seconds to prepare. It's so fast to whip up that it makes eating cereal seem tedious. Plus they have all four stomach-slimming components of a balanced meal--carbs,fiber, protein, and good fat-- and are loaded with vitamins that actually wake me up and teach me to love again. And did you catch that first word? Yeah. Chocolate. Life *is* worth living after all. Even in the mornings.

So get out there and slaughter some cereal this weekend, my friends. Your waistline will thank you. And Toucan Sam will be defeated for good. Sounds like a weekend well-spent to me.

Seriously, did no one teach those cereal commercial kids about stranger danger?

 

* Editor's Note: Uncle Sam is in no way affiliated with Toucan Sam.

Things I Will Do Differently in 2013. These are *not* resolutions.

Well, here we are at the start of another year. I can't believe it's been almost 365 turns of the sun since I started pestering you people with my health facts and dietary foibles. And, yet, you're here today, for reasons unknown to most of mankind. Which is why I would like you to take a moment and answer this simple multiple choice question below and write your response in the comment box:

I continue to read the Waist Management blog because 

A) I have gleaned a lot of information about my food choices that keeps me coming back for more.

B) I am constantly looking for ways to justify my love of Oreos and Snickers. You had me at hello.

C) I don't really *read* the blog, per se. I just like the Doodle Buddy pictures. Although my 5-year-old is a better artist, frankly.

D) Actually, my life really is *that* boring.  

Well, whatever keeps you here, welcome back. I hope we'll have a great year together. Can I let you in on a secret? I'm planning some pretty awesome new articles and features for the blog this year. And I'm pretty stoked about it. I hope you will be, too, once they are revealed in all their weird glory.

Can I let you in on another secret? I'm planning some pretty awesome new features for myself this year, too. To be truthful, 2012 was pretty sketchy for me. It had its high points, like running my first half-marathon, but it had its ugly points, too, like the whole Cinnabon escapade. I didn't really believe that the whole Mayan apocalypse thing was going to happen, but, when I look at the year in review, it didn't seem like I was doing a whole lot of planning for the long term, either.

I want this year to be different. And, no, I'm not talking about resolutions here. You should know by now how I feel about those. I'm simply talking about purposeful healthy living starting now. Or maybe Monday. IDK. And <--that is why I had to come up with a game plan. Here are three key steps I'm going to take to make this year better than the year before:

1) Eat less register candy. Um....somehow this shouldn't be enough of a problem to make it to my list, but it was in 2012, my friends. I don't even know what started the rash of last minute additions to my grocery basket, but I think I managed to eat more candy in 2012 than I had in the past decade combined. This might not even be an exaggeration.

Jennifer's 2012 Grocery Basket:

Sing it with me now: "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong...."

We all have little habits that can add up to big problems. Consider this fact: Just 10 jelly beans a day--or 100 extra daily calories--results in packing on an extra 10 pounds in the course of a year. Frankly, I probably should have tried jelly beans before I indulged in those Snickers. Or M&M's. Or whatever the flavor of the month happened to be. But that little fact *does* help explain why my legs have a little extra jiggle in them, doesn't it?

This year is about eliminating just one vice and seeing what happens. That might be register candy for me, and soda or that dangerously delicious Carrabba's bread for you. But I bet we'll both be surprised when we drop weight almost automatically by eliminating just one thing.

2) Have more fun. Does anyone else find themselves waiting for the weekend to arrive and then getting to the end of it without having done a single fun thing? That was pretty much our 2012. Well, actually our Saturday schedule look something like this:

Step 1: Get up and run our local causeway at 7:00 am. This is not my idea of sleeping in on a Saturday.
Step 2: Watch Netflix the rest of the day. And, yes, we *just* discovered Netflix last year. Hello, 21st century.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, there's just one small problem with that plan: a sedentary lifestyle--especially one that involves a lot of TV watching-- slows down your metabolism and basically cancels out the benefits of vigorous physical activity. You read that right. Our hours of Netflix slowed down our metabolisms enough to cancel that extra burn we felt we got on our 3 mile causeway run.

While spending time with our TV land friends was all well and good for last year, the Hubs and I were talking about getting out and adding a bit more variety to our weekends this time around. While our primary motive was simply to get out of the rut we found ourselves in, as we make plans to go to a trampoline gym and use the indoor ice rink (the only way a Floridian will ever have a chance at the Winter Olympics), I realized something else, too: sometimes burning calories can be pretty fun.

I think most Americans--myself included--limit their concept of exercise and calorie burn to a regimented workout time. But that's not really what an active lifestyle is all about. It's really about creating time for enjoyable activities that have the fringe benefit of counting as exercise. Believe me, I have no idea how many calories I'll actually burn clinging to the wall of the ice rink as I get passed by a bunch of six-year-olds, but it really doesn't matter. The point is that I will be having a good time not thinking about exercise, but getting the benefits of it anyway. Besides, if I burn 100 calories more than I did watching Lost  marathons, I'll be ahead of the game.

Fun fact: An hour of ice skating can burn up to 500 calories. An hour of drawing yourself clinging to a wall in an ice skating rink can only burn like 30, the same amount you expend blushing each time another child passes you on the rink.

We all have things we like to do, yet never seem to find time for. My encouragement to you in this time of new beginnings is to get out there and do it! I don't care if it's nature walks, gardening, family ping pong matches, or joining a bowling league--this year's challenge is to rediscover a fun activity that keeps you moving without feeling like a chore.

3) Eat more fiber. Well, something has to replace all that register candy....
Last year, I started being more conscious of adding more fruits into my snacking routine, and adding my company's fiber powder to just about any liquid, and I can't even tell you how much better I feel. With all the research pointing to fiber being a key in insulin control, reduced cholesterol, a cancer preventative, and better blood pressure, what's not to love about it?   It may not be my most exciting goal ever, but I'm pretty sure my body will thank me for it, both in the short run with a flatter gut, and in the long run with better health. Now that we've dodged the Mayan apocalypse bullet, it seems worth planning for the future again.

Positive Peer Pressure to Help Keep Me on Track: I'll admit that my resolve to eat less register candy might be a little weaker if there wasn't a super cool competition that my company is hosting to incentivize it. The Hubs and I are signing up for the USANA RESET Challenge: Destination Transformation, a flipping awesome 90-day stint that rewards 30 winners with a trip to an exclusive wellness spa in Baja, Mexico. We love to travel, and the word "spa" works wonders on the Hubs, so we are all in. And you can be, too. It takes a simple sign-up, and a before-and-after picture, along with a weekly online weigh-in, and you're pretty much there. And let's face it, even if we were not among the lucky 30 winners, we'll have joined a community dedicated to getting our health back to where we want it, and that is its own reward. Though, if we find out that one of my readers has surpassed us in a fight for the prize, there may be some revenge exacted in the form of an unflattering Doodle Buddy picture in the blog.

Here's to a healthier 2013 for all! Don't forget to answer the survey question.