Sunday yet again, and time for my weekly weigh-in post.
Well, this week has been one much like many others. The main difference was that some apartment hunting happened. But I also picked up something for my wife, and got directed at a few blog posts from feeds I read, that got me to thinking about a post for this week. So, here goes.
Take a look at your feet. What do they look like? I don't mean generally, they'll be foot shaped and all, but specifically right now. Do they look like feet or do they look like shoes? Those of you who know me at all can probably guess my answer to that question, they look like feet. For as long as I can recall I spend all the time that I'm at home, and usually at anyone else's as well, barefoot and loving it. It's comfortable, natural, and leaves me feeling lighter and more maneuverable than where I to be wearing shoes. These goals have impacted my choice of casual footwear at least as heavily. My feet developed a deep rich tan matching whatever my current sandals were. But recently that tan line has been changing, a trip to Disneyland helped with that.
What has brought about this change you might wonder, and to what. Well, a change in footwear of course. Around 8 months ago now I picked up a new pair of shoes from the REI that had just opened in Tucson. A pair of Black Vibram Fivefingers Classics. At the time I picked them up to use as running shoes, and that was pretty much their exclusive use for me until mid-January or so. They did very well at that and when it warms up enough that I get back out running in the mornings again they will resume being used for that if things continue as they are now. But last month I started wearing them as my wearing around shoes instead of the Birkenstocks I had been wearing. I don't regret this at all and I don't plan to go back.
Now, a lot of you will look at these and wonder how on earth anyone could wear those. They look ugly you might think, they can't possibly be comfortable, you'll hurt yourself if you run in them, they'll destroy your feet, ruin your arches, etc. Well, I can gladly report that I've found that, potential ugliness aside, after the first week or so there was no pain at all, and the other possible issues were also non-existent. The pain was something I fully expected, and it was much reduced as I had worked out most of the kinks in my stride during my running in them. If you look at most tennis shoes and various other types of footwear you'll likely find that there is a lot of padding in the heel of the shoe and that the insole has a very defined arch built in. These things have a couple of effects. The heel cushioning reduces the impact force of your heel hitting the ground first when you walk in an effort to minimize the amount by which you are damaging your leg joints and hip joints. The defined arch keeps your foot in an arched shape at all times rather than letting it flex downward over the course of your stride. Compare those behaviors to how you walk when you are barefoot, you land further toward the front of your foot (personally, I land on the balls of my feet but others seem to land with the ball and the heel at around the same time) and your arch flexes to absorb impact.
There have been a number of studies on human strides that I won't delve into too much here, though you will find links at the end of this post, but suffice to say that the more natural impact, and the lowest force applied to the joints, happens when you don't land on your heels. As to the arch, the human body is a funny thing about that. While you might think that you need arch support to keep your foot functioning properly, structurally speaking supporting an arch is the worst thing you can do for it. Support in the middle of the arch actually weakens it dramatically, which in the case of your foot means weakening the muscles and tendons in the area and limiting how well they can do their job. In this case that's a very important job. Your foot is built so that the arch acts like a spring, absorbing impact force and then letting it back out when you take your next step. Using this absorption in your arch your stride becomes more energy efficient and you can keep walking or running over a much larger distance.
The Vibrams, and other shoes like them, have almost no cushion on them at all, and minimal structure let alone arch support. This forces your stride into a mode that better mimics the barefoot behaviors, but has the benefit of that rubber sole keeping you from cutting yourself on the glass and rocks that are so often strewn about in our modern environment. I love these shoes and can tell you certainly that they are the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn. They may seem expensive at first, but they are cheaper than the Birkenstocks I was wearing before and comparable to standard running shoes and various other high quality footwear, many of which are far less comfortable.
Speaking of comfort, here's a great example of that. I wore these shoes for 5 solid days of walking around Disneyland with minimal pain, certainly much less than I had the last time I was there for 3 days and had my Birks and a pair of sneakers, which is understandable when putting in that much mileage, even still I felt light on my feet to the point of jumping on and over random obstacles as we traversed the park. I got no fewer than 17 people asking me over the course of those 5 days about my shoes, most of whom had never seen them before, and a few of whom had considered them or just didn't think wearing them to the park was a feasible option. I even ran into one woman who also had the idea to wear hers to the park and we had a fun little chat about them with some other guests waiting near us. Shoes that are comfortable, and a conversation starter. Can't go wrong there. Plus, they are machine washable.
Well, having ditched the weight of my Birks in favor of the much lighter Vibrams has left me feeling lighter on my feet, but has it left me lighter elsewhere? Probably not, but let's see what the scale says about it. 199.5 this week, down .1 from last week. Weight staying fairly steady as is to be expected. Well, that's it for this week, until next week, go out and be the you you've always wanted to be.
P.S. For those of you wondering what it was that I got for my wife it was a pair of the Vibram Jaya's in the Black/Grey color. My only complaint from what I've heard about them so far is that they don't come in sizes big enough I could wear them.
Consolidated research on barefoot walking/running:
Unshod.org Research Page
Harvard's Barefoot Running page - amazingly comprehensive guide to what I'm talking about here
New York Magazine Article on Barefooting
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 57)
Sunday yet again and time for my weekly weigh-in.
Been an interesting week for me. Spent a lot of it at Disneyland having a great time. Came back to some work, and honestly been one of the better times for that I've had in a while, and now it looks like I might be coming down with a case of something or other. Luckily that should subside soon and leave me to life again.
So, I've been promising some information about my other experiment from January for a while now, so today here it comes.
Based on some information from some of my various research, and an understanding of how thermodynamics works, I decided to experiment with using cold to increase caloric burn. Now a lot of people would have you think that weight is as simple as calories in and calories out. The in is obviously what you eat, the out is the byproducts of that, and all the various expenditures of keeping the body functioning and how much exercise you do etc. Well I've already found that is overly simplistic, what you eat has a big impact how your body fuels itself. Calories are not all created equal. So what else is there to play with? The out of course.
Sure I could exercise a lot and burn more calories that way, but that's a lot of work and a lot of time to burn an appreciable amount of calories. Perhaps there is another way to tinker with the calorie equation. This is where the thermodynamics comes in. The human body has a very small range of core temperature at which it considers itself comfortable. If it's warmer than that you start sweating or doing various other things in an attempt to lower your temp toward that comfortable range, but if it's lower than that your body starts keeping the blood closer in to your core for warmth, and burning more calories to try and generate more heat. This is what we're after. By keeping yourself cooler could you increase your calorie expenditure and burn fat faster than if you were warmer?
This was where I decided to play around a bit. I took it upon myself to try a few methods of keeping my core temp a bit lower to see what kind of results I could garner. At the outset I decided I'd start my morning, after my weigh-in, with a half-liter of ice cold water. This was slightly tricky to execute and as a result I didn't stick with it long, though I feel like if I had the results I saw would have been improved greatly. I stopped even pretending to carry a jacket and just went with the temp as it was. The last thing I did, and the aspect I stuck with that I feel did the most good, was an ice pack applied to the neck and trapezius muscles for 30 minutes every evening, as my research indicated this would be the best place for impacting my core temp and also the best time of day for calorie burn due to increased glucose sensitivity.
So, the testing protocol, the first ten days of January I did no cold application to help ensure that I had a baseline and because I wanted to make sure my testing period happened while I was better acclimated to my dietary experiment for the month. The second ten days of the month I did my 30 minutes of icing each evening. The last ten days I did no icing but kept up the dietary shift to make sure I had accurate information from later on in the same end of that experiment to control for. So, what do the numbers show? The first ten days I lost a total of 4.6 pounds, 3.08 of which were fat and 1.52 of which were lean. During the icing phase I lost 1.7 pounds total, but a total of 4.107 pounds of fat and gained 2.407 of lean. During the last 30 days I lost a net 1 pound, but 2.75 of fat and gained 1.749 of lean. During the first ten days of February when I was back to my more normal diet I gained .4 pounds, having lost 2.342 of fat and gained 2.742 of lean. That's an awful lot of numbers. What do they have to say? I lost nearly twice as much fat during my iced segment than I did during the normal period in February or the latter part of January when I was still doing the Primal experiment. I also gained the second most lean that I gained at any point during this experimental setup.
So, what's the take away from this? The icing helped, and though I didn't test it specifically, I would wager that the icing with the primal eating would do better than either the primal diet or icing with a normal diet would do. So while icing can help increase what you are already doing in terms of burning fat, it's not going to fix anything on it's own. Get your intake taken care of first, and then work on your output, whether that be in the form of exercise, icing, or ideally both. So that's what I have to say about this for now. If you have suggestions on other things I could experiment with, or ideas on how to improve my testing let me know in the comments.
Well, now that we've seen a bit more of how I went about getting to the weight where I am now, let's see what exactly I am now. 199.6, down .5 from last week. Keeping up in the right neighborhood, and the fat is still slowly but surely coming down. Keeping on with life and thriving in it. Be the you you've always wanted to be, because if you don't you've noone to blame but yourself.
Been an interesting week for me. Spent a lot of it at Disneyland having a great time. Came back to some work, and honestly been one of the better times for that I've had in a while, and now it looks like I might be coming down with a case of something or other. Luckily that should subside soon and leave me to life again.
So, I've been promising some information about my other experiment from January for a while now, so today here it comes.
Based on some information from some of my various research, and an understanding of how thermodynamics works, I decided to experiment with using cold to increase caloric burn. Now a lot of people would have you think that weight is as simple as calories in and calories out. The in is obviously what you eat, the out is the byproducts of that, and all the various expenditures of keeping the body functioning and how much exercise you do etc. Well I've already found that is overly simplistic, what you eat has a big impact how your body fuels itself. Calories are not all created equal. So what else is there to play with? The out of course.
Sure I could exercise a lot and burn more calories that way, but that's a lot of work and a lot of time to burn an appreciable amount of calories. Perhaps there is another way to tinker with the calorie equation. This is where the thermodynamics comes in. The human body has a very small range of core temperature at which it considers itself comfortable. If it's warmer than that you start sweating or doing various other things in an attempt to lower your temp toward that comfortable range, but if it's lower than that your body starts keeping the blood closer in to your core for warmth, and burning more calories to try and generate more heat. This is what we're after. By keeping yourself cooler could you increase your calorie expenditure and burn fat faster than if you were warmer?
This was where I decided to play around a bit. I took it upon myself to try a few methods of keeping my core temp a bit lower to see what kind of results I could garner. At the outset I decided I'd start my morning, after my weigh-in, with a half-liter of ice cold water. This was slightly tricky to execute and as a result I didn't stick with it long, though I feel like if I had the results I saw would have been improved greatly. I stopped even pretending to carry a jacket and just went with the temp as it was. The last thing I did, and the aspect I stuck with that I feel did the most good, was an ice pack applied to the neck and trapezius muscles for 30 minutes every evening, as my research indicated this would be the best place for impacting my core temp and also the best time of day for calorie burn due to increased glucose sensitivity.
So, the testing protocol, the first ten days of January I did no cold application to help ensure that I had a baseline and because I wanted to make sure my testing period happened while I was better acclimated to my dietary experiment for the month. The second ten days of the month I did my 30 minutes of icing each evening. The last ten days I did no icing but kept up the dietary shift to make sure I had accurate information from later on in the same end of that experiment to control for. So, what do the numbers show? The first ten days I lost a total of 4.6 pounds, 3.08 of which were fat and 1.52 of which were lean. During the icing phase I lost 1.7 pounds total, but a total of 4.107 pounds of fat and gained 2.407 of lean. During the last 30 days I lost a net 1 pound, but 2.75 of fat and gained 1.749 of lean. During the first ten days of February when I was back to my more normal diet I gained .4 pounds, having lost 2.342 of fat and gained 2.742 of lean. That's an awful lot of numbers. What do they have to say? I lost nearly twice as much fat during my iced segment than I did during the normal period in February or the latter part of January when I was still doing the Primal experiment. I also gained the second most lean that I gained at any point during this experimental setup.
So, what's the take away from this? The icing helped, and though I didn't test it specifically, I would wager that the icing with the primal eating would do better than either the primal diet or icing with a normal diet would do. So while icing can help increase what you are already doing in terms of burning fat, it's not going to fix anything on it's own. Get your intake taken care of first, and then work on your output, whether that be in the form of exercise, icing, or ideally both. So that's what I have to say about this for now. If you have suggestions on other things I could experiment with, or ideas on how to improve my testing let me know in the comments.
Well, now that we've seen a bit more of how I went about getting to the weight where I am now, let's see what exactly I am now. 199.6, down .5 from last week. Keeping up in the right neighborhood, and the fat is still slowly but surely coming down. Keeping on with life and thriving in it. Be the you you've always wanted to be, because if you don't you've noone to blame but yourself.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 56)
Sunday again and time for the weekly weigh-in.
Alright, short post this week. I know I said there would be data from the experiment I ran on myself in January, other than the dietary shift, but I didn't get the chance I expected to write that up into a post this week, and today I'm gonna be too busy having a great time to do it, so you get a short post with numbers.
Pretty average week in terms of my food intake, though I did try some homemade indian food for the first time, an activity I will likely repeat in the future. So I don't expect much change in the weight. 200.1, up half a pound since last week. While the average has been trending up slightly over time my daily readings are actually staying fairly consistently right around 200. I'm perfectly happy with this as my system seems well adjusted to maintaining this weight with little difficulty, and sometimes that's better than losing those 5 extra pounds. Anyway, have a great week and I'll have more for you next time.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 55)
Sunday yet again and time for the weekly weigh-in.
This week I've been eating a lot differently than I was the last month and I can feel the difference. Other than that life is settling down and looking up and I'm feeling good about it.
So, last week I talked about what eating Primal is all about, a little about why you'd want to do it, and mentioned that I had. This week, in a shorter post, I'll talk about the results that I got eating this way during January, and what impact it's likely to have on my eating going forward.
So, firstly some of the more "intangible" benefits I found eating primal last month. At no point, except once on a cheat day, did I ever get a bloated feeling of being too full that I had gotten rather often on similar amounts of food before. Likewise, I noticed that I had fewer intestinal disturbances during this month than I had in previous months, not that the other months are really that high but still, none is better than even a small number. I felt full without being bloated, had no trouble later on, more energy with fewer crashes in my energy level, and felt more rested on the same or in some cases less sleep per day. Now maybe not all of that comes from diet, but those are all benefits I like and I feel confident that I can track at least some of them to the change in diet.
Now the numerical things I can report. I will admit these cannot be entirely tied to the shift in diet, January was also when I switched from running as my primary exercise to resistance training to fill the same niche which will impact these numbers somewhat. Also beginning the middle of the month I was experimenting with some other things that may have improved my results slightly. Regardless of either of these other factors, diet is the cornerstone of any sort of body recomposition, you can't outrun, or in this case out-lift, a bad diet, and you for sure can't ice it away.
So, numbers. At the first of January I weighed 206.8, at the end of January I weighed 199.5, which is a decrease of 7.3 pounds in total weight. Start of the month my body fat percentage was around 18.6, end of the month it was 14.3, a decrease of 4.3%. So using those numbers and some easy multiplication my lean mass went from 168.3 to 171.0, and my fat mass went from 38.5 to 28.5, which for those of you keeping up at home means that in January I lost 10 pounds of fat, and gained 2.7 pounds of muscle.
Looking at graphs of the values I track over time I can say that this didn't start showing up on the graphs until probably 10 days into the month. Now part of that is because the way I do my tracking smooths out local fluctuation intentionally so any small changes take a while to accumulate while big changes show up faster. Looking at the day to day instead of the trends which I graph I can say that it looks like there were noticeable improvements almost immediately, but I can't stand as confidently behind their accuracy as I can the trend numbers quoted above and of which I reference the graphs.
Would I recommend this dietary plan to others? Absolutely, if you are at all curious try it out and see what happens, you might feel better, you might not. Worst case it will at least give you a different appreciation for your food than you have now. What am I planning to do with these results in the future? Well, I can't say that I will commit to going fully primal from now on, that would be too difficult to do in practice and I don't like any solution that causes me to feel deprived if I can avoid it. So what I will probably do is a complicated split of meals which are Primal, meals which are "cheat" meals, meals on which I just plain fast, and meals which meet my adapted psuedo-Primal plan.
What is that plan and what does it look like? As little gluten as possible, I will still let myself have it on my cheat meals but for my pseudo meals I want to try to keep it out entirely, related to that minimal grains glutenous or not. I don't have any open reactions to corn so I'm going to allow it at least in moderation, but in continuation of my reduction/elimination of processed sugars I will be avoiding corn syrup and especially HFCS. I like rice and will be allowing that in my adapted plan, though with a preference for wild rice, and behind that brown rice. I'm going to continue to avoid peanuts in favor of healthier and tastier nuts, and reduce and ideally eliminate potatoes from the pseudo meals as most applications of potatoes tend to be rather bland or merely nutritionally devoid. Soy will be allowed, though the less processed from it's natural form the better.
Well, that should about do it for this week. Next week, barring any other things coming up, I will have some stuff to say about the other experiment I mentioned.
So what does the scale have to say for my return to a "normal" diet? 199.6, up .2 from last week. Moving in the wrong direction sure, but only barely, and my body fat is still moving in the right direction so I'm not at all concerned. The future holds many wonderful things in both the long and the short term, stay tuned to see what some of them are. Until next week, be the you you want to be.
This week I've been eating a lot differently than I was the last month and I can feel the difference. Other than that life is settling down and looking up and I'm feeling good about it.
So, last week I talked about what eating Primal is all about, a little about why you'd want to do it, and mentioned that I had. This week, in a shorter post, I'll talk about the results that I got eating this way during January, and what impact it's likely to have on my eating going forward.
So, firstly some of the more "intangible" benefits I found eating primal last month. At no point, except once on a cheat day, did I ever get a bloated feeling of being too full that I had gotten rather often on similar amounts of food before. Likewise, I noticed that I had fewer intestinal disturbances during this month than I had in previous months, not that the other months are really that high but still, none is better than even a small number. I felt full without being bloated, had no trouble later on, more energy with fewer crashes in my energy level, and felt more rested on the same or in some cases less sleep per day. Now maybe not all of that comes from diet, but those are all benefits I like and I feel confident that I can track at least some of them to the change in diet.
Now the numerical things I can report. I will admit these cannot be entirely tied to the shift in diet, January was also when I switched from running as my primary exercise to resistance training to fill the same niche which will impact these numbers somewhat. Also beginning the middle of the month I was experimenting with some other things that may have improved my results slightly. Regardless of either of these other factors, diet is the cornerstone of any sort of body recomposition, you can't outrun, or in this case out-lift, a bad diet, and you for sure can't ice it away.
So, numbers. At the first of January I weighed 206.8, at the end of January I weighed 199.5, which is a decrease of 7.3 pounds in total weight. Start of the month my body fat percentage was around 18.6, end of the month it was 14.3, a decrease of 4.3%. So using those numbers and some easy multiplication my lean mass went from 168.3 to 171.0, and my fat mass went from 38.5 to 28.5, which for those of you keeping up at home means that in January I lost 10 pounds of fat, and gained 2.7 pounds of muscle.
Looking at graphs of the values I track over time I can say that this didn't start showing up on the graphs until probably 10 days into the month. Now part of that is because the way I do my tracking smooths out local fluctuation intentionally so any small changes take a while to accumulate while big changes show up faster. Looking at the day to day instead of the trends which I graph I can say that it looks like there were noticeable improvements almost immediately, but I can't stand as confidently behind their accuracy as I can the trend numbers quoted above and of which I reference the graphs.
Would I recommend this dietary plan to others? Absolutely, if you are at all curious try it out and see what happens, you might feel better, you might not. Worst case it will at least give you a different appreciation for your food than you have now. What am I planning to do with these results in the future? Well, I can't say that I will commit to going fully primal from now on, that would be too difficult to do in practice and I don't like any solution that causes me to feel deprived if I can avoid it. So what I will probably do is a complicated split of meals which are Primal, meals which are "cheat" meals, meals on which I just plain fast, and meals which meet my adapted psuedo-Primal plan.
What is that plan and what does it look like? As little gluten as possible, I will still let myself have it on my cheat meals but for my pseudo meals I want to try to keep it out entirely, related to that minimal grains glutenous or not. I don't have any open reactions to corn so I'm going to allow it at least in moderation, but in continuation of my reduction/elimination of processed sugars I will be avoiding corn syrup and especially HFCS. I like rice and will be allowing that in my adapted plan, though with a preference for wild rice, and behind that brown rice. I'm going to continue to avoid peanuts in favor of healthier and tastier nuts, and reduce and ideally eliminate potatoes from the pseudo meals as most applications of potatoes tend to be rather bland or merely nutritionally devoid. Soy will be allowed, though the less processed from it's natural form the better.
Well, that should about do it for this week. Next week, barring any other things coming up, I will have some stuff to say about the other experiment I mentioned.
So what does the scale have to say for my return to a "normal" diet? 199.6, up .2 from last week. Moving in the wrong direction sure, but only barely, and my body fat is still moving in the right direction so I'm not at all concerned. The future holds many wonderful things in both the long and the short term, stay tuned to see what some of them are. Until next week, be the you you want to be.
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