According to eDiets.com the average American eats at a restaurant 159 times a year!

That is an amazing statistic if it is accurate. I looked up how many calories it takes to cook a meal and for me it is about 140 cal, for 1 hours worth of food preparation. If I made just one complex meal a day (typically I do two), then I will have burned enough calories to just changing from eating out, to making my own, to peel off about 14 lbs of fat a year.

For some this will be the difference between obesity, and health, for others it will be the difference between stabilized weight and gaining each year – like most of us do. Just looking at it on the surface makes makes a good case that we should try to make all the food that we can. But that is only half the story. Eating out is only part of the problem. Cooking with whole foods is another step we need to make.

Over the last 50 years the average diet, according to FAO, has changed significantly  – and it is not because of all of the eating out alone.

Here is just a quick run down.

We consume almost 900 calories more a day than we did 60 years ago.

Most of increase has come from refined foods and vegetable oils.

We are eating few complex carbohydrates

We are drinking alcohol slightly more (well – not me anyway – so that is a "we" that really means just you:) )

We eat 2x as much chicken and a little less beef.

Anyway, the list goes on, but the bottom line is that we are consuming more, and more of those things that hurt our bodies worse – all the refined pre-packaged foods. Basically what it amounts to is that we really did not eliminate anything out of our diets, we just added to them all "healthy" stuff that we buy in boxes at stores and snack on all week long. Sure it is low in fat, but it is HIGH in sugar (to try and make it taste good) and that has lead to many of our current health problems according to several government, and intergovernmental groups.

Here is just an example. When I eat at McDonalds I typically order a Double Cheese Burger, a McChicken, a medium fry, and a medium drink. That will fill me up nicely for less than $5 – and 1400 Calories! I will have take at least 1 hour to drive and get it and get back to my home/office.

Whereas if I fix my salad at home – and I make a mean salad – I can put anything that I want on it practically (My typical salad will have the following; spinach, sprouts, cottage cheese, tomatoes, celery, jalapeños, avocado, coconut, raisins, rice noodles, red onions, green onions, carrots, mushrooms, paremsean cheese, almonds and a vinaigrette) and it will not even top 400 calories. Plus, it will have taken me about 1 hour to make and eat (I cut it all from scratch), which burns about 140 calories by itself.

Now, I will be full for hours because there’s over 12 grams of fiber and protein in that salad. It will have taken the same amount of time to go to McDonalds and get fat – as it did to make a really healthy meal and works towards being skinner. I’d have to work out on my elliptical for about 1-2 hours to simply catch up.

So how much time did I save? I thought it was supposed to be more convenient. When we factor in the whole cost there is not really anything convenient about restaurant food.

A commitment to cook more of our own foods from their natural state means that we will not only burn more calories to begin with, but the foods that we chose to cook with will be much more filling and healthy for us.

Be Healthy – Enjoy Life!

Matthew Stearmer

Where has all the weight lost gone? Start singing that to “I need a hero”

In some of my posts I have mentioned not only that I am losing weight, but that I cannot account for where it is all going. I can only see the evidence that what I am doing is not losing helping me lose weight, but it is also helping me do it faster than I can account for.

My friend politely asked for an accounting. Which I did not mind at all. He is right. The body is part of system and systems must be balanced. There is no magic that makes fat just disappear contrary to what all the late night infomercials might say.

So let me share what I know, and what some possibilities might be.

The body has 3 primary systems for generating energy. Phosphagen (short burst sprints), Glycogen (0.5 to 20 minutes) and Aerobic (longer than 20 min). Each has it own purpose to helping the body function at its best.

The last two are where we lose weight during workouts so I will focus on those. In the first 20 minutes 95% of he energy expended is from glycogen – 5% from fat.. Then up to 4 hours of Aerobic exercise will burn up to 60% of the energy from fat (the rest from glycogen), and after 4 hours, if your even more insane than I am, your body will be burning 85+% of energy from fat.

The body can store 1-5 lbs of glycogen depending on how big you are. An average around 2 seems normal based on what I could find. And for each pound of glycogen there is 3-4 lbs of water.

Let’s take as an example a workout that I did the other day. I jumped on the elliptical machine and went for a solid 2 hours at a sustainable pace. I bumped up the resistance and just went a little slow than normal – about 130 revolutions per minute (for comparison on my sprint workouts I will alternate between 150 and 200 revolutions per minute). I burned off a little over 2500 calories. Let’s just say for this simple purpose that the calories were burned consistently through the workout. Here is how it works out

2500 calories divided by 120 minutes = approx 21 calories per minute.

At 20 minutes I burned off 420 calories – but 400 of those calories came from glycogen and only 20 from fat. At this rate, unless it was a really intense 20 minutes to boost the metabolism, I will not make much progress in weight loss.

But I still put in another 100 minutes. That was another 2100 calories and up to 60% of that came from my fat stores. That is 1260 calories directly out of my fat. If I do that 3x a week, then I will be losing a pound of fat every week. Even if I do nothing else over the course of a year just about anyone can lose all the weight that they need just adding a good long power walk to their workout.

Now, over all weight loss at the time of exercise is different. Calories from glycogen are not quite as dense as fat. So, there is not a 1 to 1 comparison in their calories. 400 calories of glycogen will give you about the same amount of weight as 1200 in fat. Plus you add to that the water loss of 3-4 times more weight than the glycogen itself and viola! I lost 5 lbs.

Only about 1/3 of that may be fat. So I will gain all of that back after eating. But that is still 1/3 of a lbs in fat. The point is to weight yourself under as close to the same conditions as possible each time. So you do not catch the swings, but the incremental process. You can also see that it would not help very much to constantly look at the scale and the mirror. That can just lead to disappointment as you see the weight go up and down.

This type of fluctuation is perfectly normal. It is not part of the yo-yo effect that you have to worry about.

Now, I have also mentioned that I cannot account for all of the weight loss that I have had over the last few months. Even taking into account all the variables that I can I still appear to be losing more weight than the energy expended. Granted, I have no proof of that, it very well could be a measuring error. I have to concede that point. But there does seem to be some evidence in my life to support an alternative medicine theory.

I’ll just give a brief overview here and will post more on it later.

The fat in your body stores energy and tries to contain free radicals (this is not disputed). Alternative medicine approaches claim that if you can beat back the free radicals then you can coax the weight to come off easier, and the body will just release the fat into the excretion systems to get rid of it without having to burn all the calories.

I’ll provide some more evidence of that in my other posts, but I’ll just conclude with my results that show that have lost about 2x as much weight as I can account for. So I either have some really serious accounting issues (just call me Enron), or there is something to be said for alternative theories.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Matthew Stearmer

This weekend I gained some practical knowledge about the term “starvation mode” and weight loss.

Starvation mode basically means that your body thinks that you’re trying to kill it, so it stops listening to the weight loss signals you’re giving it – like eating less, exercising more etc – and starts to consume muscle and store fat. It makes since when you think about it. If your body has to survive why keep muscle that uses more energy when it can be used for energy now? So you begin to cannibalize yourself. Pleasant. At least it doesn’t use a fork and a knife!

By losing muscle and preserving fat your body can make sure that you go 30 days without eating food. Which is a pretty amazing feat when you think about it.  So you will lose weight – but it will be all the wrong stuff. Muscle first – fat last. And the metabolism slows down so anything you do consume gets stored in favor of burning muscle. Not exactly the way you want to go.

Saturday I ate too much pizza (Conner’s birthday party), then I did a true fast for 24 hours, and the end result is Monday my weight is basically unchanged – but my body fat percentage has gone up. I can correct that easy enough, so I am not disappointed. This is just another experiment for me to figure out. But now I know how things work a little better by my own experience.

Cleansing on the other hand allowed me to eat less food, but food that was good for me, and lose more weight -while at the same time just dropping the fat. Seems like a good deal to me!

On my goals.

I succeeded on the miles one. I put in just shy of 15 miles. So I feel good about that one.

I drank lots of water. I did not measure it as well this time, but taking into account the true fast on Sunday I feel that I did good here.

As noted above – my weight loss goal was not met. But it was part of an experiment as well, so I’ll mark it up as a success, because I did accomplish something here (knowledge wise). Just not 100% what I wanted.

And I failed miserable with sleep. I’ve been trying to help get some products launched with work, and there are been some extenuating circumstances that have contributed to me getting even less sleep than I usually do. So, I went backwards on this one. Not good. Sleep is critical to weight loss. So I will HAVE to do better on this if I’m going to keep losing the right kind of weight.

I’d give it about a B in performance for the weekend.

How did you all do? I’d love to hear your success (and struggles even) as well. We’ll all work on it together.

Make it a great week!

Matthew Stearmer

Well, last week I rated myself in the B-ish range for reaching my goals. I’m feeling better about things this week so I’m not feeling the need to get over zealous this weekend. I have a tendency to do that as you may have noticed.

This is going to be a slow and steady weekend I think.

It was my oldest son’s birthday on Thursday and since it was in the middle of the week the party celebration have lingered on a little, and I’m sure there will be a littlre more parting this weekend as well. Now, I feel like I’ve done pretty good so far. He got to pick a place to eat out, and I got online and looked at the menu and decided before hand what I would order to stay on track. And then I only ate about 2/3 of that amount anyway (and still felt crappy afterwards). It’s funny, the more you get into shape, and the more you could actualy afford to endulge – the less like you are to actually do it.

I think that is going to be another law of weight loss dynamics.

By I digress for this post.

I’ve already put in about 7 miles for the day. Tomorrow I’m going to work around the yard and move a lot of dirt. But I will not be doing quite as many miles. So here are the goals.

1) 15 total miles

2) 3 lbs weight loss

3) 3 gallons of water

4) 8 hours of sleep! – I’m really going to do it.

The drinking of water is one of the easiest. I already do about 2 in that same time frame, so I only need to drink a few more bottles a day to get there.

In order to get to 15 miles I am going to have to walk to church. And in order to walk to church I’m going to have to get to sleep on time. If I can accomplish goal #4, I will have the time to get out of the house early and still make it to my early morning meetings (7am!). Life and weight loss result are always doing to be tied together. The way we diet will effect how and what we eat. When we sleep will effect what we can accomplish the next day etc.

If we try to set goals without understanding how the rest of our life will integrate into it, we will be setting ourselves up for failure.

That will be another law of weight loss dynamics.

On the difficulty side there are two things that come to mind.

1) It is still my son’s birthday, and tomorrow he will have a donut cake. Normally I might be tempted by the donuts, but I am still recovering (gastrointestinally speaking) from that one. So more fried food just isn’t that appealing. But if I do get the urge tomorrow I will simply cut it in half and enjoy a little indulgence.

2) Getting enough sleep will be critical.

So with that in mind – I’m off to bed. At this point I may only get 7 before I have to get my son up for a Scouting hike – but maybe I can slip back into bed before the girls get up! If not there is always that small – ever so unlikely – chance that I might get a nap!

How are you going to control you’re weekend?

Matthew Stearmer

This is a big concept that we really need to get our minds around. Like it or not we are subject to the rules of cognitive dissonance regardless of whether we know about it or not. So the best thing we can do is become more aware of how our mind works so we can gain more control over the only environment we have even the slightest chance of controlling and understanding. Mentally we cannot be at peace until we understand the full implications of the concept.

In a nut shell here is what it means, Cognitive Dissonance is s state of mental disruption where the outward behaviors are not consistent with tightly held inner beliefs.

Where is the fall out: The mind wants to be at one with itself, it has several ways to deal with being out of alignment, only one of which has a positive outcome in our lives. For example the brain may expend an enormous amount of energy trying to make it self believe that it is in line by creating a series of justification that allow it stay on a trajectory contrary to its beliefs at least for a time. We may also begin to exhibit passive aggressive tendencies where we act out against the action in spurts – ie secretly sabatoging ourselves or projects we are involved in.

This is a scary concept actually. So many people, including myself, may have to completely rearrange their lives so as to bring themselves into congruence. Stability then becomes pitted against success. We want success, but in order to achieve it we have to face the possibility that we will have to give up things that we have staked a claim on.

The energy that it takes to not only find the right wall to climb, but then to realize you might have to come down from the one you are on may be an enormous  burden. And one has to ask themselves if they are really up to the challenge. Too often we just build a fort at the top and try to defend the ground we are currently on.

The hardest part of this whole process is to be able to give up the superficial stability for something real, more substantial, but also more scary because you will have to face reality head on without any more protective shields.

Matthew Stearmer

This is not exactly a health food. This one is just for fun. I’ve been talking about this cheese dip for a few days now and how it has plagued my diet goals a little. I’m exaggerating a little I know. I did good on my weight loss over the weekend. This is more just a symbol of things are can be distractions if we are not careful.

It is my firm belief that moderation in all things can allow us to have a healthy relationship with food. It will allow us to lose weight, allow us to feel good about ourselves, and it will allow us to live a comfortable life that does not outlaw food simply because it is not the most health around.

I do think that we have to be careful of these foods. I for one have had to avoid them for a while in order to develop more control over them. I still over indulge on the crunchy and salty items. I just cannot get enough chips! So dips are dangerous ground for me. Now that I recognize that I can plan for it and mitigate the potential atom bomb that this can be to a diet

The first line of defense is portion control. The recipe will be for just 2 servings. I don’t know about you, but if I have more lying around after my first serving – I will inevitable eat it. This is what I call the Second Law of Weight Loss Dynamics: You will eat whatever is on the plate – so control the plate.

The second line of defense. Modification. I will give you two recipes below. If you want to full flavor and calorie version you can do that. You can also add the substitutes and enjoy basically the same food with almost 1/2 the calories.

Low fat Velveeta Cheese: 1 oz (about 1 Tablespoon) – double it for the full recipe (62 calories)
Fat free Cream Cheese: 1 oz (about 1 Tablespoon) – double it for the full recipe (14 calories)
Low Fat Cottage Cheese: 1 oz – omit for full recipe – (20 calories)
Frozen Spinach: thawed. – put in an equal option to all the cheese combined (14 calories)
Canned tomatoes and green chillies – about 2 Tablespoons (5 calories)
Some bacon bits – omit for the “healthiest” version (25 calories)

Now, mix it all together in a small bowl and microwave until it is warmed and throughly mixed together. Be careful not to let it boil over the sides while microwaving. Which it will have a tendency to do.

Now, grab an hand full of chips. A bunch of celery stalks, and enjoy. Per serving this dip is just under 70 calories. It will be the chips that will kill it now. 1 oz will be about 140 calories (typically about 16 or so chips). So you can see how that adds up.

But if you’ve controlled the portions from the start there will not be as much dip to eat to begin with, and if you add celery, there are even fewer to consume. Anyway, you can end up with a 200 calorie snack easy enough. Just make sure it is a snack! As a full meal this would move from just scrumptious to sinful:)

Enjoy!

Matthew Stearmer

Generally speaking I’m fairly please with my weekend results. I was not perfect, but I did have some good success.

Here is the run down on the goals.

Run/Walk 33 miles: I only made it 24 (73% completed). I was not able to do anything on Sunday. I will get those last 10 in today.

Lose 3 lbs: I only made it 2 (66%). I will likely drop 1 more after these last 10 miles are done, so falling short here is not to bad considering I basically missed a whole day of intense exercise.

Drink 3 Gallons of water: 100 %. Yeah! This is good to help weight loss and also ensures that any weight I lose will not just be water weight.

No Spinach Cheese Dip: 50% complete. Well, I got a little overzealous in my determination to lose weight. And my wife sort of convinced me that a little break is good. So I did make the dip – and it was delicious! I did however control the portions really well. I ate only 2 oz maybe. So it was a good appetizer, but not overly indulgent. Since I did not exercise I should have eaten a little less on my meals and then I would feel a little less guilty here. But it was really really tasty:)

I wanted to get 9 hours of sleep, each night but barely managed 7. So this is just right in line with the average. So I made 0% progress here.

And finally on the back. I have started to work with it a little more to make sure that it stays healthy. I even helped move a piano over the weekend for a friend and did that without any sort of hitch developing, so I consider this a success. I’ll score it at about 80% because I need to give it more rest and I need to specifically do a few more exercises to keep from re-injuring myself.

So the average success rate over the weekend was about 65%. If this were a football team – I would not even make it into the playoffs. But if it was a batting average, I’d be the greatest hitter of all time. I’m not sure which is the better comparison – likely it is neither – but it does cause one to reflect on how to judge progress.

I did not accomplish my goals from an absolutest stand point. But since I do not believe it is possible to be perfect, I want to concentrate on being perfected. Which is a much longer process and allows for ups and downs and partial successes are even rewarded.

So here’s to the success that I had, and here’s to hopeing for a better week!

Matthew Stearmer

This week has been the most frustrating one so far on this journey. The back injury has been a real problem and my general moral has been effected. When I look at it quantitatively I have to be pretty satisfied. This is the first time in years that I have been injured and did not quit. And although my weight loss has stalled a little the very fact that I have not back tracked is evidence that what I am doing is working. If I were already at my ideal weight I would not be complaining at all.

But with quite a ways left to go I feel immense pressure to keep progressing.

There are a few things that i have noticed that I think that I need to do better in order to make the progress I desire.

I have been laxed in my eating. Not so much what I am eating – that part has been good. But when I am eating is the problem. Today is a good example of this. I woke up in the morning and had a ton of work to do right off the bat. So instead of working out I sat down to work. Now, I know that it is best to not eat before working out so the body is forced to burn energy from the stores in place and not the food that just entered. So I waited and waited and waited. Before I new it noon had rolled around and I had an appointment. So I rushed out the door. Now, while I was away from home I resisted the temptation to eat out because I knew that would not be health, but I had forgotten to bring anything health to eat instead of fast food. So I continued to fast.

Before coming home I did about a 6 mile walk with a pretty steep incline for the last half. I’m doing this on nothing but water for the day. When I finally got home about 6pm I was craving food. Again, I resisted the temptation to just eat something easy and bad for me and opted just for some yogurt. But just because I was able to resisted does not mean that I truly accomplished my goals.

Eating so sporadically will only  increase my bodies desire to hold on to the weight and prevent me from really getting into a much healthier lifestyle. That is completely counter productive, so I am going to start planing out my meals and days a little better so that I can have more control because I have though things through.

No one is ever perfect I and I am trying to be patient, but I know I can be better and that is what I am going to strive to do

This week has been a little harder for me. I injured my back at the beginning of the week and I’m still recovering from that. There were only 2 days where I was not able to do much at all, but really even the rest of the week was a lot slower.

Generally I try to do work outs throughout the day to keep the metabolish up as much as possible. But when I could barely get through my cardio, it was hard to then keep pushing my back. I keep hoping that by losing weight I will eventually get my back in order again, but I have a feeling it will always be a curse. It will get better of course, but I suppose never the same. The consequence of my decissions in the first place I guess.

Well, on that slightly depressing note here is what I am going to do about it.

I can continue to lose weight.

I can redouble my effort and not sink into discouragement

I can think of innovative ways to work around my injury

I can reduce my calorie consumption to insure that I lose weight on reduced activity.

This weekend I was going to indulge a little more. I was going to take a break, but I feel like I need to push myself a little more now since I missed too much in the middle. I am going to set a goal to do 33 miles from Friday-Sun. That will put me over 100 miles for the month, and will be a 50% increase over what I have done thus far in milage. It is a huge goal. I typically will do that over the course of a week with smaller shorter work outs in the middle, but I feel like I need to really push myself and get back on track.

I need to wait another week before I can do another Isagenix cleans. So I will set a more reasonable weight loss goal. I’m going to lose 3 lbs over the weekend.

This means that I will have to put off my spinch cheese dip that I was going to endulge in while watching a movie. And I will have to spend some more time workout out. But I will do it.

I’m going to shoot for 3 gallons of water consumtion as well. Since I will be home all weekend I can so that easily enough and I will be workout hard the whole time so my body will need it.

I am also going to shoot for 9 hours of sleep a night. I need the extra time to help recover. I’ve not been gett more than 6-7 at the most for several nights now. That never helps with weigt loss.

I am also going to look up my old rehab program for my back and start putting that into practice. The doctors said before that one of the main problems was that my larger muscles were out pacing the core muscles that help hold the bones in my spine in alingment. So I would really tweek things by getting into only partially better health. I need to get everything up to par again.

Well, that is the plan. I’ll report on Monday.

Well, today I’m supposed to review a supplement, but this is not going to be a regular supplement review. It is partly going to be how to overcome obstacles to weight loss. Yesterday I hurt my back. ouch! And I was making such good progress.

Now, in the past this has been bad new for weight loss. Typically I will get depressed. Eat badly and just give up. But not now. I know that people are looking at these results and I do not want to let anyone down let alone myself. I’ve come to far to stop now. And I do not want to go back to where I was.

Now, add to that, I had a business breakfast meeting this morning. So I had a double whammy. Little exercise, and high fat/large portions of food.

Now, let me first say that if you get injured don’t just take my advice. If you do not get a doctor’s opinion you could really damage things. This is just what I did and remember that I an not a physician.

Next, let me say that Aleve is a miracle pill. It will not help you lose weight, but it will help you work through minor injuries that might otherwise keep yo down. It has been a life saver.

The other day when I was doing my snatches I knew that I was pushing myself. I could feel my butt and hamstring really tighten up. So I knew that was going to wreak havoc on my back. Whenever those muscles tighten up it puts a strain on my back until they loosen up (48-72 hours later). Now, 2-3 days is too long to be out of commission for me.I took the aleve before the swelling an tension started to preempt the pain. It sort of worked. I also started to stretch out the muscles as best I could to try to get them to loosen up as well. And then I laid out flat on my back and tried to sleep that way for most of the night.

When I woke up this morning things were tight, but I felt that I could do a little exercise on the elliptical. It is a very controlled movement and not jarring at all. So I got on for some sprints before going to breakfast. I knew that I would need to burn some extra calories to make up for the breakfast. As I got going on the elliptical machine I could feel things start to loosen up and I was able to go faster and faster with each passing minute.

I decided to not go very long since I just wanted to get the metabolism going, and not kill myself and make the injury worse.

I drank an extra 24 oz of ice water and then went to breakfast. I ordered a breakfast food of Ham, Eggs and Rye toast. There were some cheesy potatoes there as well, but I did not eat much of them. I gave one of the slices of ham away and ate only a few potatoes, the ham slice and 1 of the slices of rye bread. It was a sensible meal, and with the extra water I had taken in I felt full. So, crisis one – successfully navigated.

Now, on the back injury. I cannot move fast or turn easily, but I can move. So I walked a little more this evening as well, and even with the injury I have still put in a few miles today.I guess the point of all of that is, an injury is what it is. I cannot change that. But I can look at what can be done and without causing more harm than good, I can look for ways to still progress.

Also, knowing that I am going to be burning fewer calories, I made a conscious choice to consume a lower amount of food to match my expenditures.

Bottom line, if you need pain relief, try the aleve. I think that is just great. But most importantly, do not give up. There are may ways to beat the weight back if you plan a head. I knew this was going to happen, so I thought through everything that I would do. If I had not been able to walk well enough I was going to go to the pool. Nothing was going to stop me.

So, think it through

Plan ahead the actions you will take to over come an injury

Seek medical help

Execute the plan to the best of your ability

Aleve