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 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.

I am soooooo glad to be eating food again. 2 days is a long time to eat a few veggies and water. I fixed the Chick Pea recipe posted here on the blog and ate that several times. It makes 4 servings and I ate it all over the weekend. Besides that, it was all ice water.

I drank a little over 3 gallons of ice water (16 – 24oz bottles of water: which adds up to almost 400 extra calories burned heating the water). I was peeing like a racing horse. I’m sure you wanted to know that!

With the workouts that I did, lots of yard work, a little walking, and a half hour on the stair climber mode of my elliptical I burned a total of 1800 calories over the weekend.

I consumed approximately 600 calories each day with the Vegetables. The Isagenix Cleans drink and the Isagenix “snacks”.

I’m not 100% sure what my stable metabolic rate would be, but the FDA estimates that the average body needs 1800 calories each day. I think that I need less than that because of my sedentary life style in front of a computer all day. But we’ll go with 1800 for arguments sake. So, that means that I was short 1200 calories each day that my body needed to get internally instead of from food, and that tallies 2400 short fall over the weekend.

So, total calories expended is

400 – water heating

1800 – workout

2400 – diet shortfall

4600 – Total Calories burned over the weekend.

That means I should have lost just 1.5 lbs. And just about any one would tell you that most of what I would have lost over that amount would be muscle or water.

Here is what happened to me.

I lost a little over 8 lbs and the body fat measurement dropped by 2%.

Basically my body was able to give up more fat than the standard mathematics would have otherwise suggested would have happened. To me this is further proof that one of the many reasons we have a hard time losing weight is because of toxins in the body that the fat is required to store away to protect us. As we cleans our bodies of the toxins our bodies are able to release more fat simply because it is not needed any more. I highly doubt that it was water weight give the total amount of water I ingested. I could be wrong, but I would have had to peed about 11 gallons of water over 2 days. That seems even less realistic to believe possible than just losing 8 lbs over the weekend.

Now, I’m not a doctor so I cannot give an official position or recommendation on this, but it sure works for me and it makes sense to me.

I also found that despite the very hard weekend (stress wise), I was able to stick to the cleans a lot better because I knew I was going to have to report it today. So thanks for your help! You kept me honest.

To our future success.

Well, since the beginning of the blog I have been posting about several different topics (recipes, weigh loss, supplements, etc), but there has been little rhyme or reason to when I would post any particular topic. In an effort to make this site more useful to those faithful visitors and poster I am going to implement the follow strategy.

Monday: Weekend weight loss reports and Diet tips. Weekends are the hardest for me – like everyone I suppose – so I am going to use the blog as a reporting mechanism to help me keep to my regime. I know that there will be some of you that will look at this blog every Monday for inspiration and I want to be able to give that to you. So I will report on how I did over the week weight loss goals and any tips I can provide to help you through your next weekend.

Tuesday: I’m going to cover a weight loss work out strategy. This will cover various exercises and techniques to make the most of a home gym and get the most calories burned for the effort expended.

Wednesday: This is going to be recipe night. I love food. I think that we should all have a very healthy relationship with food in our lives and I believe that starts with the most delicious food we can find. And there is no reason we should not get the best tasting food and have it be nutritious too.I’ve been losing a lot of weight and eating some of the best food of my life!

Thursday: In these posts I will cover supplement news. Some of these will be products that I recommend and the testing results I have had with them personally. And I will sometimes cover general news that I find on the industry. As we know there are some unscrupulous peddlers out there and I will do my best to help us all find the best supplements to help us lose weight. And this will give all of you a chance to post comments on the good and bad that you have found as well.

Friday: Going into the weekend we all need to have a plan. If we do not – we’re doomed. So I’m going to post my weekend strategy and tips and then on Monday you will get the report on how I did. And you will be able to post on your results as well.

Saturday: This will be whatever I happen to feel like talking about. Granunteed it will have something to do with weight loss as well, but it will be what is on my mind, not a specific topic each week.

Sunday: This day I will generally take off. But since I am a religous fellow I will be thinking a lot on this day every week and I may post a comment or two now and again. But expect it to be more life oriented and not as frequent. You can of course pick up any Sunday comments on Monday. The posts will still be there for sure.

This is one of the hardest obstacles to weight loss that I can think of. I love my family, and I love to do things together with them. But I am the only one in my immediate family that needs to lose weight. So no matter what diet I pick I have to deal with the fact that my family will not need to be a strict as I will need to be and there is likely going to a lot of food that they will eat that I cannot, and food that I should eat that they will likely not enjoy at all (they are pretty picky eaters).

This is where so may people get killed in their diet and weight loss goals because they simply cannot integrate life into their weight loss needs.

And this is where Isagenix comes in really handy. The weight loss plan is very simple and very easy to add to any life style that you and your family might have.

I’m not sure what your mornings are like, but in my house they are insane. There is barely time for any breakfast, let a lone a sit down one. So there is mot much temptation here. I just do a shake while they are going out the door. They get their Eggo Waffles and I get a great tasting shake.

Then sometime in the morning I will workout. I usually go fairly intensely for 30-60 minutes, and intersperse that with a 1.5-2 hour long walk about once as week.

After the workout I will take a few of the IsaSnacks to help tide me over until lunch.

Now at lunch Janille and I will eat together. There are several meals that I like to take out of the Eating for Life book, that my whole family does enjoy and are still nutritious. I put it in a small bowl and/or plate so my portions stay small. Typically this will put me in the 250-300 calorie range.

Then I will do a shake for a mid afternoon snack.

And for dinner another meal the whole family will enjoy.

And then before bed I will take a few more of the snacks to help curb the appetite so I do not eat too late in the day.

2x Meal

2x Snack

2x Shakes

Not too hard to follow at all. The Isagenix supplements really help control the appetite and the addition of real food with the family in small portions helps me live a regular life while losing weight at the same time.

That is something that I can live with!