Category: Motivational

Hi guys! Honestly, I’m too busy at work to notice if anyone is listening out in blogger-land, but I’ll just keep yappin’ away!

Very hectic time of the year for me. I’ve decided to postpone celebrating my first year on Project Waistline until after things calm down, early this summer. I’m going to have some medical tests done in order to compare the before & after numbers (LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc.)

With all this rush-rush scuttling about I often grab something quick to eat after work. It’s always healthier & less costly if I cook, but not much time for that right now!

El Pollo Loco is my favorite fast food option. I order two customized BRC (beans, rice, cheese) burritos, requesting:

* no tortilla (serve it in a bowl)

* black beans (pintos have added fat)

* replace cheese with raw cabbage

* at salsa bar I add onions, cilantro, red & green salsa

Unfortunately the rice is processed white, and the food is a bit salty. This costs about $4. (I don’t know where else you can get take-out lunch for under $5 these days.) It’s a lot of hassle for the staff to do it “my way”, so I like to ring their gratitude bell on my way out the door:

Other times I bring home Mongolian bbq restaurant food, loaded with great veggies, served with (white) rice instead of noodles because their noodles are made with eggs. I have to say “cook with NO OIL, plez… and package rice on the side”.

Cost is about $9. I usually save side of rice for later, and serve veggies over my own egg-free high fiber wheat noodles at home:

Trader Joe’s has a delicious vegan eggplant wrap. It comes with a fatty oil-based dip which I try to avoid (often unsuccessfully). It’s served in a low fat wheat wrap. (During the week I avoid processed carbs like bread, so that’s a drawback.) It costs $4.++ because I usually buy extra sides (chopped raw veggies, edamame, etc) & stuff them inside:

The local Japanese restaurant makes me a delicious vegan sushi roll sometimes. It has (white) rice, cucumber, celery, carrots, high fat avocado, wrapped in Nori seaweed. This costs somewhere between $8.-$10.

I enjoy Chipotle’s veggie bowl. I never add their processed vegan “meat”, too fatty. But I usually indulge in their lovely high fat avocado. This is pricey at about $9. if I add avocado… but hey, the rice is brown!

Okay, so those are my reasonably healthy “uh-oh, I’m starving & have no time to cook!” options.

For a change I’ve decided to try some frozen entrées from PlantPure Nation. (Note: They are now only available as shelf-stable meal starters.) I just ordered the 20 meal pack @ $6.89 each:

Here’s a description.

CLICK HERE

Here’s where to order:

CLICK HERE

Scroll down the page, read the details, watch the brief videos. This is a program designed by a team of lifestyle professionals, including T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Study – a twenty year collaborative research partnership including Cornell, Oxford & the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine. There’s nothing “crack pot” about it. This is the decades long culmination of hard science, not the soft & fuzzy kind.

If you order the JumpStart package you get the same 20 meals + an electric warming tray for frozen meals, & lots of literature (books, cookbooks, videos, online communication). I just went with the food.

They’re pretty hefty, so here’s my plan:

* Oatmeal & fruit w/ Martian milk (that’s almond milk blended with green leafy veggies) for breakfast
* PlantPure frozen entrée w/ side salad/veggies for lunch
* Snack of fruit/veggies
* Repeat entrée & salad/veggies for supper

On heavy workout days I’ll probably increase portions. Kickboxing can really rev-up the old appetite. Try it & see!

Hasta luego, baby…

Okay, so I went a little too hard the other day and injured my foot during a kickbox routine. Didn’t really hurt at first, but in the middle of the night I had a stabbing pain which caused me to jump out of bed and do the crazy dance in the dark! The next day it was fat. The next day it was even fatter. And by the end of that day it was fat AND black & blue!

Nooooooo! This can’t be happening now, not NOW when I’m in the big finale, the final stretch, the three-month push to my first Project Waistline anniversary weigh-in event! I have been XL-partying a bit too much the last week or two, what with the holidays. I was going to use my foot (and the *rest* of my body, for that matter) to work off some of those extra calories I had been indulging in. Now I’m sidelined for a spell. I’m going to have to use my wits to stay on pace.

Hmmm… this may just be the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Now I get to dive into this program (and see what could be the most dynamic results) by adjusting my eating habits alone. I just hope my foot recovers soon. I’m like a little kid…I LOVE my exercise. Sitting still is like containment in a medieval torture chamber for me!

Searching YouTube for encouragement I stumbled upon two excellent ideas. The first is a short presentation about caloric concentration. Remember, we should always be gravitating to the low calorie concentrated foods, and shying away from the high calorie concentrated foods. Here is a quick, concise, visual explanation of this concept from the Small Step Advocate, Nutritionist Sid Garza-Hillman:

CLICK HERE

For a deeper understanding of the “why” I found this humorous talk by one of the authors of The Pleasure Trap, Behavioral Psychologist Doug Lisle:

Have you taken notice how restaurants play into our weakness – the human pleasure trap? They serve us tiny anemic house salads with gobs of high fat dressings, then a gigantic plate with limp over-cooked veggies on the side like an afterthought, punctuating the mountain of higher calorie dense food (usually meat & taters). The quantity of raw salad & cooked veggies are insignificant enough that they leave plenty of space for those high density main courses… quite the opposite of where we want to be.

The video links above emphasize a few simple & effective power strategies that we can incorporate into our lives, particularly if we have limited mobility at this time:

* Stop focusing on weightloss (okay, okay, okay… I’m listening!)
* Focus on healthy lifestyle… strength, endurance, flex-mobility, disease/pain free living
* Make morning oatmeal a HABIT !!!
* Eat your main meal in this order, in descending-sized servings:

– HUGE SIZED: raw salad
– MEDIUM SERVING: cooked veggies
– ALL U CAN EAT (w/out exploding): starchy main course (beans, potatoes, pasta, etc)

Don’t you just love this concept? It makes the high starchy main course act like your dessert. You fill most of your belly with the nutritionally dense raw salad and lightly steamed veggies, then you get to reward yourself with the higher calorie starchy foods (which I, for one, crave more than I do a sweet dessert!) It’s as though I can tell myself, “YES, you may have that pasta, you may have that slice of avocado toast… just be sure to eat it when your tummy is nearly full

Okay, so I’m going to incorporate these ideas into my eating routine until I’m back on my feet again, kickboxing away the calories. Even if I do not separate my food and eat it in this order, I will combine it in proportions in line with the concept.

Hasta la vista baby!

Hello all!

Things have been hectic on the job lately, but I’m very excited about a special countdown anniversary thing starting today. I am exactly 100 days away from my one year Project Waistline anniversary! I have not touched animal products & significantly reduced salt, oil, sugar for 265 consecutive days. I have also exercised consistently (modifying somewhat during my busy work schedule), and in 100 more days I will finally reach the one-year milestone.

My plan is to do a simple, lighthearted, before & after photo thing on my anniversary in March…. and do a long awaited statisticaI update (waist-to-hip ratio, weight). Recall that I stopped tracking these statistics five months ago. The results will be a big surprise to me, if no one else!

At the one year mark I will also conclude my daily diary posts of food/exercise, and devote more time to analyzing and adjusting the program, as needed.

It certainly doesn’t mean I’ll stop eating and exercising this way, it just means I’ll be able to take the time to create some other types of content for my blog and YouTube channel.

I have been somewhat distracted during the last several months, what with the demands at work. However, I do have a holiday coming up in a few weeks at which time I will be able to devote more of my attention to the project.

If you look over my daily menu you’ll see I’ve had lots of XL items of late, probably more than I should have. This may have slowed down my progress, so I am making the decision here & now to eat even *cleaner* than ever over these last 100 days! You will see fewer XL items on my daily menu, and I will try to limit most of these extravagant items to one or two days per week. It’s just my attempt to get “splurging” back under control.

Fact is I probably haven’t lost as much fat as I had hoped to. Yet I have often had this fantasy, “What will I do if I start losing too much weight?” It seems silly because nine months ago I began at a hefty 170 pounds! I’ve eaten plenty, never went to bed hungry. It just seems silly that I would ever be in a situation where I would lose *too* much weight. I have carried excess weight as far back as I can remember in my adult life… at least ever since I started having babies.

Seems like the way to slow weightloss would be to continue the liberal pattern I have developed these most recent months… be more liberal with the XL items that are relatively healthy, the plant-based XL items like avocados, dates, a few more nuts & seeds, more coconut, whole grain bread, etc. I mean, I *know* these things are not the best choices, but I consider them acceptable on rare ocassions. I’ve just had too many “rare ocassions” in my life lately

Knowing how to slow down the weightloss can be helpful in knowing how to kick it up a notch. That’s what I’m going to be majoring on for the next 100 days…fewer avocados, dates, nuts, seeds, coconut, bread… and for certain fewer sugary beverages.

Okay, sleepytime. Party-on…

Here’s some great motivation for my “rock bottom” workout today… an article from the NY Times:

BRAWN AND BRAINS

by Gretchen Reynolds
November 18, 2015

Sturdy legs could mean healthy brains, according to a new study of British twins.

As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declines in memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old.

But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment also might have influenced those exercise habits, as well as how their bodies and brains responded to exercise.

In other words, genes and environment can seriously confound experimental results.

That problem makes twins so valuable for scientific purposes. (Full disclosure, I am a twin, although not an identical one.) Twins typically share the same early home environment and many of the same genes, and if they are identical, all their genes are the same.

So if one twin’s body, brain and thinking abilities begin to differ substantially over the years from their twin’s, the cause is less likely to be solely genetic or the early environment, and more likely to be attributable to lifestyle, including exercise habits.
It was that possibility that recently prompted Claire Steves, a senior lecturer in twin research at King’s College London, to consider twins and their thighs.

Muscular power, especially in the legs — which are the largest muscles in the body — is widely accepted as a marker of healthy aging. Older people with relatively powerful leg muscles get around better than those with weak legs. They also tend to have sharper minds, studies show.

But whether people’s lifestyles, and in particular their exercise habits, had provided them with good legs and minds, or whether they had won the genetic lottery, remained unclear.

So for the new study, which was published this month in Gerontology, Dr. Steves and her colleagues turned to the TwinUK registry, which includes health and fitness data for thousands of British twins.

The scientists pulled records for 162 healthy, middle-aged, female twin pairs, some of whom were identical and some not.

The scientists looked for twins who, 10 years previously, had completed extensive computerized examinations of their memory and thinking abilities, as well as assessments of their metabolic health and leg-muscle power, which measure muscles’ force and speed.

The scientists focused on the twins’ muscles rather than their exercise habits largely because the power measures were objective, unlike people’s notoriously unreliable recollections of how much they have worked out. (There was a correlation, though, between more self-reported exercise and sturdier legs.)

The scientists then asked the twins to visit a laboratory and repeat the cognitive tests.

Twenty of the identical twin pairs also completed brain-imaging scans.

Then the researchers compared leg power 10 years earlier with changes in brain function over the same time period.

They found that of the 324 twins, those who had had the sturdiest legs a decade ago showed the least fall-off in thinking skills, even when the scientists controlled for such factors as fatty diets, high blood pressure and shaky blood-sugar control.

The differences in thinking skills were particularly striking within twin pairs. If one twin had been more powerful than the other 10 years before, she tended to be a much better thinker now.

In fact, on average, a muscularly powerful twin now performed about 18 percent better on memory and other cognitive tests than her weaker sister.

Similarly, in the brain imaging of the identical twins, if one genetically identical twin had had sturdier legs than the other at the start of the study, she now displayed significantly more brain volume and fewer “empty spaces in the brain” than her weaker sister, Dr. Steves said.

Over all, among both the identical and fraternal twins, fitter legs were strongly linked, 10 years later, to fitter brains.

Of course, this study involved only a single snapshot of the brain health of middle-aged female twins. The scientists did not directly study the effects of exercise on the women’s brains, or look at changes in muscular health over the 10 years and whether that affected how well the twins could think.

The study also was not designed to uncover how muscle power builds brainpower, Dr. Steves pointed out, although she said she suspects that working muscles release biochemicals that travel to the brain and affect cellular health there. And the sturdier the muscles, the more of these chemicals they create.

More experiments obviously are needed, however, to understand these mechanisms.

For now, she said, the results imply that whatever your genetic make-up, building muscles can strengthen your mind, and should your legs currently be spindly, you might want to consider walking, running, standing or dancing more often.

“I was quite surprised by the strength of the findings,” Dr. Steves said, “because to be honest, I am someone who has always in the past prioritized work of the mind over work of the body. This study brings home to me that the brain needs exercise to keep fit.”

mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/11/18/brawn-and-brains/

My commitment to this Low-SOS (salt, oil, sugar) vegan journey began on March 16, 2015. I have completed 134 days. Soon I’ll be celebrating my 20TH WEEK ANNIVERSARY… and I’ve lost approximately one PAINLESS pound per week.

I had been eating sparkly clean, until I picked up this nasty summer strep throat a few weeks ago. It really threw off my groove. I stopped exercising (too tired). I stopped munching on raw veggies. I ate too much bread. I cheated on the sugar as I pounded down far too many sweet sodas to soothe my miserably ragged throat. But during this illness I only gained a few pounds, much fewer than I felt I deserved! Still I worried. I found myself doing something I don’t believe I’ve ever done, I was worrying about the scale!

I’m over these wacko two week weigh-ins!!! Numbers freak me out. I want to live free of them! Weigh-in days are becoming far too stressful. I feel like I’m working madly just to reach some silly magical number. I’ve decided to stay away from the scale, and to NOT wrap a measuring tape around this waistline for many months! I won’t even say how many, just until the spirit moves me.

Click here to listen to what youtube’s High Carb Hannah (who lost 50 pounds in one year living this way) has to say about weighing ourselves:

HIGH CARB HANNAH

She recommends an average weight loss of one pound per week… hey, that’s what I’ve been doing on accident! And like Hannah I’ve done it eating all I want, and exercising just as I see “fit”, and no more.

EATING ABOVE THE LINE

Yes, I am committed! I will continue this lifestyle forever, making most of my food selections ABOVE THE GREEN LINE in this table:

(Or you may CLICK HERE to download this table)

Not detailed enough for you? How about THIS version:

(Or you may CLICK HERE to download this longer version)

The key is something called calorie density. This is a measure of calories per pound of each food item in the list. The items higher positioned on the chart have fewer calories per pound, so we can eat one POUND of the higher positioned items & be consuming fewer calories than eating the same amount of lower positioned items! You might tell yourself: ALL U CARE TO EAT, ABOVE THE GREEN LINE… AND ONLY OCCASIONALLY BELOW IT!

A fellow who really promotes this concept of eating plant dominant, low calorically dense, minimally processed foods (mostly above the green line on my chart) is psychologist Dr. Doug Lisle. Here’s his highly sophisticated version of my food density table:

He and Dr. Alan Goldhamer describe in their best selling book The Pleasure Trap a “fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being.”

I love this guy and I can’t really say why. He draws me in when he explains his theories, and he often makes me laugh because some of his ideas I find delightfully silly! Here he describes how freely eating certain foods (the ones listed above the green line on my chart) will automatically regulate your weight, “…if you’re a relatively young person (your weight) will regulate down about two pounds per week, so literally in the 20 years it took you to gain 40 pounds you can unwind it in 20 weeks!”

Okay, maybe I’m only “relatively young enough” to effortlessly lose one pound per week, instead of two… or more likely it’s my tendency to dip down below the green line a bit too often. I do, but what the heck, I’m still losing the pounds and I’m having fun doing it!

Take a listen to Dr. Lisle, he’ll make you laugh! And print out my calorie density chart, paste it to your refrigerator door, and eat most often ABOVE THE GREEN LINE!

Chow! …oops, I mean CIAO!

Figured you’d enjoy this:

Question.  My Cholesterol is Just Fine.  My Weight’s Fine, I Exercise, and I Eat a Healthy Mediterranean Diet.  Why in the World Would I Need to Eat This Way (Esselstyn nut & oil free plant based diet)?

Short Answer from Dr. Esselstyn:  Unless you are one of the lucky few and none of your relatives have ever had vascular disease and they all lived to be a healthy 100, then you more than likely already have some degree of vascular disease.  Unless, of course you’ve been eating like the Papua New Guinea Highlanders or the Tarahumara Indians all your life.

There are countless autopsy studies (click here for a few) of young adults from age 15-34 showing that everyone who eats our Western diet has heart disease.  It’s a given. 

If you eat a healthier Mediterranean diet with olive oil, fish & chicken you’re better off than someone who is eating cheeseburgers & fries–and you may be able to put off the likelihood of getting those nasty imperceptible tiny strokes (Dr. Megan Cleary of California examined over 11,000 MRIs of the brains of 50 year olds & found many had tiny white spots that indicated that they had unknowingly experienced tiny, imperceptible strokes.  These “brain attacks” have the same history and cause as heart attacks), heart disease or vascular problems until your mid-70s or 80s–but just think about spending your last years in a wheelchair, immobile, befuddled, and mute–or think about the erectile dysfunction, slowed mobility, balance and cognitive  problems that are all caused by impaired circulation and could be prevented. 

And then there’s a whole host of other problems, like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, constipation, and some cancers that could be avoided if you changed your diet.  Not to mention the side effects to all the medications you’ll likely end up taking to keep heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, aortic valve stenosis, and erectile dysfunction at bay.  Diet can do a much better job.

Click here for entire article

Last week I started my post with photos of plus size fashion models & proclaimed, “These are all exceptional people!”

Well, I’m an equal opportunity blogger and I want to make it clear that in my eyes THESE are also exceptional people!

Last week we decided to redefine beauty in terms of health, healing, wholeness, empowerment and to pursue this new “beauty” together! Our physical starting point is irrelevant. How many times have you seen gorgeous human beings, gussied up to the hilt, but who turn out to be internally under/overnourished, cardiovascularly challenged, and not at all fit? I’m just musing over the way our culture (magazines, websites, films, television) is embarking upon a valiant attempt to embrace the Endomorph (overnourished body type), but have become quite vocal in its campaign to ‘skinny-bash’ and shame the Ectomorph (undernourished body type). Why the difference?

VEGAS HEALTH CONFERENCE

I’m sitting here in Las Vegas today attending the big annual plant based nutrition conference: Health, Healing & Happiness. Speakers include Youtube personality John Kohler (of “growing your greens” fame);

SOS-free weightloss coach Chef AJ; lifestyle physicians Michael Klaper,

John McDougall, Joel Fuhrman, Evan Allen; athletic trainers Robert Cheeke,

John Pierre, Coach Joshua (Keep It Real Wellness) DJ-ing the event:

… and many more!

Each day I’ve been dragging my lazy butt downstairs to my hotel gymnasium. Yesterday I noticed many overweight patrons walking in the door (very cool that they’re working toward wellness!)… and one extremely underweight woman came in with her mom (equally very cool!) I believe all of us were consciously pursuing the same (Project Waistline) definition of beauty – health, healing, wholeness, empowerment. The comradery in the common cause invigorated my workout!

SAD NEWS

Then last night on the local news it was announced that a woman was found deceased in her Vegas hotel bed, and her death was attributed to anorexia nervosa! Wow…

It stopped me cold in my tracks. Undernourishing our body will lead to illness and an early death. But honestly, overnourishing (given enough time) will make us just as ill and kill us just as dead. Of course, (and perhaps the reason our culture is less apt to embrace the Ectomorph over the Endomorph) undernourishment kills faster than overnourishment. Youngsters are often the ones who die from undereating, while older folk are usually the ones who die from overnourishment. It just takes longer to manifest the damage from overeating!

Enough.

Love thyself… for where you are today AND for where you’re going tomorrow. Make that future in the direction of total wellness!

BACK TO CONFERENCE

Some well known plant based chefs created & shared some mini-meals with us: Chef BeLive’s raw vegan Caesar salad:

Raw green smoothie w/ avocado PIT from Chef Shane Stuart, and Chef Stacey Dougan’s coconut flake “bacon”, broccoli, carrots, snap peas, zucchini salad w/ Thai chili lime sauce:

Whole Foods had a vendor table offering free samples of their Cali Quinoa Salad:

The head banquet chef at the Vegas Tuscany resort, Chef Lonnie Beals, took me on a personal tour of the buffet spread on both days of the two day conference.

Here is one day:


(cilantro lime salad, pinto beans, rice, black beans enchilada, guacamole, eggless potato salad, avocado chickpea salad)

Here is a serving from the other day… yes, that’s Joel Furhman (of PBS programming) “dining with me”:

(romaine, carrots, celery, potatoes, squash, mushrooms, Jazmine XL-white rice, red pepper, onions, brocolli, cauliflower w/ curry)

Chef told me this was his first ever purely plant based buffet event. He enjoyed the experience so thoroughly that he’s going to go into vegan food prep big time… making delicious meals for his patrons, and extending their lives at the same time!

I bought Coach Robert Cheeke’s great new fitness book, Shred It… yes, he is curling YAMS in his right hand:

All speakers were excellent, full of vital information, and I particularly enjoyed the final uplifting presentation by Coach John Pierre. I think he & I were raised by the same mama!

GOTTA HIT THE SACK

Okay… sleepytime. Checking out tomorrow & heading home, so I’d better get some rest.

Say Nay-Nay-Nay to corporate foods!

Say Aye-Aye-Aye to simple stress free living!

Before we start I just want to make one thing crystal clear:

Yeah sister, neither am I… but seriously:

These are all exceptional people!

I am not about fat bashing here. How hypocritical would that be? Once weighing in at 240 pounds, how could weight shaming make sense to me? I’m also not about political correctness. I just want the truth. After 35 years of age most of us realize it’s not about beauty anymore. Life makes athletes of all of us, and our sport is long distance wellness! Project Waistline, and lifestyle fitness in general, is all about health, healing, wholeness, empowerment. Let us redefine beauty in terms of these qualities, and let us all pursue this new “beauty” together!

I have created Project Waistline as a personal scientific research assignment, with an infinitesimally small sample space of one. After studying the concept I am fully confident these lifestyle modifications, if applied in a consistent fashion, will yield optimal results.

Is it the only approach to wellness that will work? Let me save you the trouble of digging up the answer… of course not. There are other methods to shed excess weight, reduce blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, blood sugar. How about some bariatric surgery, followed by extreme calorie restrictions? Some constant calorie counting without the surgery? How about adding 8 sweaty hours per day in the gym? You could try eating freeze-dried cardboard nutri-food delivered weekly in the mail. How about wiring your jaw shut and not eating at all, just drinking your calories? You could always try a drug… Fen-Phen anyone? (Would you like a little heart valve damage and Primary Pulmonary Hypertension with that little pill?)

None of these methods will work if they are unsustainable. I just believe the Project Waistline approach is the most efficient, least expensive, most enjoyable, natural, ecologically responsible, animal compassionate, most corporate-independent path to optimal health. For the past 73 days I have embraced it to prove to myself (and to anyone else who cares to follow along) that it yields results.

As with any research, the work would be meaningless without forthcoming analysis of the data. Statistical changes have come slowly in this project. It’s likely because I am doing the Low-SOS (salt, oil, sugar) version, as opposed to No-SOS. Okay… so is that a bad thing? I think not. After all (as I continue to remind myself) this is a journey, not an event! I’m not on-a-diet. Since it took years to put on the weight that made me unhealthy, and my unfit condition continued steadfastly for many years, I extrapolate that if I slowly reverse the damage done, the positive results will prove to be equally enduring. This project is best described as a self-evolving lifestyle commitment. It’s growing increasingly effortless as the weeks pass, and I’m loving it!

So maybe the trade-off is the joy-factor in exchange for slower results. Going slow suits me well because I don’t feel restricted, I don’t feel deprived, I actually enjoy eating low-SOS vegan, drinking mega-water, exercising daily… and of course I enjoy my periodic XL-party days (Woo-Hoo!)

The limit of acceptable trade-off for me is a slower march forward, just as long as I’m not moving backward!

However, if your own Project Waistline journey was prompted by severe health issues, or if your food addictions are not yet under control, it would be best if (with the approval of your nutritionally minded physician) you cut out a few party items to implemented these changes more strictly than I have.

SO WHAT ABOUT THE NUMBERS?

Keeping statistics is not altogether a pleasant venture. It’s a new concept for me. I rarely ever measured myself in the past… too depressing.

Over the last ten weeks there were some fortnights (two week measurement periods) when, despite my relatively clean living, the numbers were not changing. I felt frozen in time and questioned my laid back laissez-faire attitude toward portion control and XL-party (Woo-Hoo!) treats.

One problem was (and likely will continue to be) that I was too close to see the big picture. So let’s take a step back and look at that now.

WEEK 0:
waist: 33in
(@ navel): 40.5in
hips: 43in
Min whr = 33/43 = .77
Max whr = 40.5/43 = .94
Avg whr = (.77+.94)÷2 = .86
(height: 5′ 9″)*
(weight: 168lbs)*

WEEK 10:
waist: 30in
(@ navel): 35in
hips: 41.5 in
Min whr = 30/41.5 = .72
Max whr = 35/41.5 = .84
Avg whr = (.72+.84)÷2 = .78
(height: 5′ 9″)*
(weight: 153lbs)*

Turns out that after ten weeks I’m nothing but a loser (good thing here!)

waist: lost 3in
belly: lost 5.5in (yeah!!!!!)
hips: lost 1.5in
Avg waist-to-hip ratio: lost .08
weight: lost 15lbs

Wow… seriously WOW!! Maybe I ought to only measure myself once every ten weeks! This is the first time I’ve calculated these cumulative numbers. Yes, they could be better, I could move faster, yet I am so very pleased because getting to where I am today was essentially painless!

Although I did not measure my lunch sisters (upper arm circumference) and thighs, those have really slimmed down. Sometimes the jumping jiggle test is all we need to know how our body has changed. Despite only losing 1.5 inch in the hips, I know those areas are firmer and more muscular than they were ten weeks ago. And the loss of 15 pounds is deceptive because with such consistent weight lifting some of that fat has surely been replaced with denser muscle fiber.

Most important figure is the belly girth. Don’t forget that visceral fat (the dangerous stuff that gravitates to our midsection) is not really the flabby-grabby stuff. It’s often firm, and thus deceptive. Have you ever wondered how our bodies tend to grow wide within our skeletal structure as we age? We just tend to morph into widebody versions of our younger selves. It’s because the visceral fat is packing in firmly around our internal organs, which causes our rib cage, hip girdle, etc to expand.

“I think that the primary fallout from increasing obesity is probably not going to be some huge hit to mortality. It’s going to be disability.” Dr. Virginia Chang, demographer at New York University.

(Click here for a discussion on the healthcare costs dilemma of obesity + aging)

This widening organ packing is bad on multiple levels, not the least of which is the propensity for abnormal cell growth (cancer) in the vicinity of excess fat. But my dear reader… this body type is a fully reversible condition.

JOURNALING

One very cool aspect of documenting my daily eats is that I am able to better understand how my body responds to specific foods. This would normally be a major chore, but I just snap a photo of my meals with my phone, and record the verbal description later. How easy is that? If I feel water-retentive, crampy, puffy, belly-achie, scratchy throat, stuffy sinuses (or whatever) the next day it’s so easy to look back at what I put in my body that activated such a response.

For example: I don’t always eat organic, I mix it up. Sometimes I noticed my throat was getting scratchy, and a post nasal thing was happening. I traced this reaction back on my journal to the consumption of watermelon. I thought about the high water content in this food and reasoned that it must surely pick up a huge chemical residue from pesticides. So the next market day I purchased organically grown watermelon… and sure enough, no allergic reaction!

No need to share with the whole world, but doing your own personal meal journal is enormously helpful. Be honest! This will be your source for analysis of the program. You need accurate information to form future adjustments.

FACIAL EXERCISE

Have you noticed the addition of facial workout routines listed in my daily journal? “Why such vanity?” you may ask. “What do facelines have to do with waistlines??”

Well, I actually know people who refuse to lose fat for fear it will cause an outcrop of visible wrinkles and droopy cheeks & jowls. Now listen! I don’t want anything coming between a man/woman and optimal health! I’m not suggesting, nor do I desire, the obliteration of all wrinkles. I love my character lines! I’m not so in love with the sun-induced etchings, or with droopy, sleepy facial muscles. We can do something about these. First we zero in on the muscular foundation.

I have developed two categories of facial exercises to tighten up our muscular underpinnings: HANDS-ON and HANDS-FREE. I want to share these with you as I incorporate them a few minutes each day in my regular Project Waistline regimen. I’m in the process of creating a few Youtube videos to share the details and my own personal progress with you.

Okay… so that’s it for now. Back to the studio today to start filming & editing Project Waistline Videologs.

Now you stay strong and committed!

Keep saying NO to corporate foods!

Keep saying YES to simple stress free living!

It’s really worth listening to… I agree with her! Consistency is the key.

Tip #1: Eat more fruits & veggies

Tip #2: Eat last meal lightly, 2 or 3 hours before bed

Tip #2: Do regular cardio exercise

Tip #3: Build muscles (weight resistance training)

Now make yourself this awesome jicama ceviche “tostada”!