Healthy

So far I've managed to stay away from sodas. It hasn't been that bad but I do go through cravings. We gave up sodas, I refer to them as cokes, for Lent this year and enjoyed the feeling so much that I thought I would finish the remainder of the year without them. I have read that when you are sleep deprived that your body craves carbohydrates and while it could very much be all in my head, I have noticed that when I'm sleepy or didn't get more than 6 hours of sleep the night(s) before I really NEED a coke. I also crave candy more than I usually do when I'm sleepy.

So far though this week, I've drank at least 16 ounces of milk at night which is big for me because I don't really like milk. I've also drank at least 80 ounces of water per day and sometimes more. The water part isn't actually new, I've been drinking at least 64 ounces for a while but what has changed is drinking water at night which just adds to my total. I've also managed to be very sparing when it comes to adding sugar or salt to what I'm eating or drinking. I make it as the recipe calls and that is it. Sometimes I leave it out entirely if it doesn't affect the taste.

One very large change has come with eating fruit throughout the day. I've managed to eat at least 1 banana and either a plum or apricot but usually it is two of each. This is a big change because I don't usually eat fruit throughout the day and I think it is the biggest reason for my curbed sweet tooth.

My wife as done well too, we both have been support each other through the process. I've felt much better and hopefully with the training for the half-marathon in October we'll see some differences in our overall health in the upcoming weeks.

Diet, exercise and racing

What people hear me say, "diet" they usually quip back with a, "you're too skinny for a diet" or something like, "because your SOO fat!" But I think of diet as something you're on all the time. You can have a bad diet or a good diet or a balanced diet, whatever kind of diet you want. No matter the name a diet is something you have all the time. Since the baby has come into our lives we've been eating a good or at least decent diet nothing just outright horrible, BUT we've dropped the exercising from our routine once we started getting ready to sell the house.

This week was 16 weeks until our next half-marathon. My wife and I would like to get back towards our PR times and for that I've decided to do some work on my diet. This week we also started our structured run training, so I decided to lay some ground rules somewhere to help keep me accountable for my actions.

1.) No drinks other than water or tea
2.) 1 hr of exercise per day (more on this in subsequent posts)
3.) Nothing with added sugar
4.) Nothing with added salt
5.) Vegetables or Fruits with every meal.

It is a simple straight forward diet that doesn't involve doing or eating crazy things. It is just back to basic good balanced dieting. Right now my daily caloric goal is 2200kcals. This is a fair amount of food for a person who is eating healthy. I'm looking forward to getting back into a routine that leads to a healthy lifestyle.

Eating Right

I have been reading and hearing more and more about "clean" eating. Maybe it has been around for a while or maybe it is some new movement brought about by the rise of organic food.

I agree with most of all the ideas of clean eating and organic food only diets. In fact, I even tried growing all our vegetables (totally organic of course) for a month one summer which unfortunately coincided with a 25 month long drought in Central Texas. It was a miserable failure except for cucumbers which were a hit even among the squirrels. However, I do wonder how much of it is based on irrational fears and how much of it is really based on truth. I'm ok if the idea was born out of a simple existence or drive to return to a simpler life or how things were "meant to be." Some say that means how nature intended it, which I would re-word how God designed creation be function. If there is no real good reason to eat organic other than that mindset, then I'm ok with it and I agree with it.

Here's the main problem: I love processed foods!

I loved Mrs Baird's Fried Cherry pies. OMG!! I love them!! I like coke I really like RC Cole. The way the fizz (acid) eats at the top of my tongue feels great! I love spaghetti O's probably more than is healthy for a grown person. Really anything that is high in refined sugars and fat (animal or vegetable) is great to my pallet. Most people savor things they think taste good... not me, I eat them gorge style. Because why savor one when you can eat 10 and have the same taste the whole time?

Here's the other problem: Organic is expensive!!

Grass fed beef and really wild Salmon cost almost twice the hormone fed stuff. Part of me really wonders if soy fed farm raised Salmon is really all the different from whatever real wild Salmon eat. I know it is, but is it bad for me or just bad for the fish? Same with the beef. Does plain ole' grass just mean my cows don't get to enjoy the more fattening (probably better tasting see point 1) cow feed? Is it just bad for the cows or me? Sure you can search the Internet and find articles about how this is all better for me to eat organic but they seem more based on fear than facts. Or at least small lab rat type results that are extrapolated to apply to humans. Again I'm fine with just believing it is better because that's how God intended cows to grow but at twice the price I'm tempted to say, "oh well."

I would use the excuse moderation to say well I'll eat some organic and some not, but I can't. Really, I can't. Put me around something that tastes good and I'm like a crack addict who just left rehab and found some crack on the ground. It is just not something I can do. As soon as I taste the crack I go buy more and more until I find something else that tastes good. Right now, I'm in the rehab, trying to get myself off the cokes and processed Spaghetti O's partly because I'm getting ready for my 70.3 but also because I just want to live in a sustainable healthy life style, and with us down to one income I am trying to save as much money every where so we can continue our to meet financial goals. I've been doing a lot of cooking and making my own meals to help cut out all the "bad stuff" but I secretly long for Mrs Baird's chocolate covered mini-donuts or some Oreo cookies in milk... as you can see I've got a long way to go.

Let's be realistic here

When I was in high school the first week of x-country practice was really hard. You go from not really running to running 10-12 miles per day. So by the end of the first week, you hurt. All over, your biceps, your abs, your shoulders, your neck and those are the things that just swing, you can imagine what your legs are like. While I was in High School I discovered a secret to beat all this.

Protein shakes! Sure they don't taste great, but being someone who likes to cook I doctored them up into something delicious! I made protein shake root beer floats, with cookies-n-cream ice cream because that's my favorite, or if I didn't have root beer then a Protein shake malts.

Annnnddd... They were amazing you could literally feel the soreness go away. I would drink 5 serving per day. Sure maybe it was placebo, but it worked and they were a whopping 3000 calories but I am pretty sure we were burning that during our workouts. Anyway, it was like an ace in the hole. Guys would be hurtin' but I would feel only mildly sore and I could finish the workouts hard.

SO fast forward to today. Yesterday I ran 5 miles for the first time in over a month. It was probably the 10-15th time I've run since the baby was born. I was sore, I could feel it the moment I got off the treadmill. It was that kind of sore that you instantly know you're gonna hurt tomorrow and makes you scared of the next 36 hours. So, I resorted to my old trick, though not as big because 3000 calories today will just make me fat. Within hours the soreness started receding, and this morning I feel 90%, today I'll run 5 miles again. It is part of my plan to shock my body and to at least get it ready to survive some of this 50k, but lets be realistic I'm gonna need a lot of protein shakes to recover from this dumb idea.

Eating not so processed

Ok so I not only want to be a fast runner/triathlete, I really want to be sustainably healthy. I know I'm not always going to be able to run 5min/miles although I know a guy in his 60's that can. I'm not always going to have the time to "train," as I like to call it, but I can do things to help keep me healthy without spending a lot of time training.

I heard a motto from someone who is extremely into the healthy eating organic vegetarian crazy. Which by the way I am not. However, it did make me re-think, ok scratch that, actually think about what I'm eating. The motto was, "I avoid eating anything with a barcode." I had mostly been eating small pre-made meals, like SmartOnes or other lean options. They have a lot of salt and you really can't control any part of how it is made except how hot it gets in the microwave. Now again I'm not an extremist but it got me to think about my food choices and how fresh they are. My first attempts were to eat more fruits instead of hard candy. I had some varied success, mostly eating more fruit, which was good, but not necessarily cutting out the candy.

I don't really like salads, so I resorted to cooking and grilling vegetables or steaming frozen vegetables. This worked well up until the baby was born. Then I ate everything people brought over and didn't exercise. I gained 9lbs. Now I've started eating more salads because I'd like to lose some weight and I want to keep my salt and carb intake down. Plus I want to make sure I get all my nutrients in without vitamins. This coupled with the fact that my wife and I have less money, we've had to really plan better for our meals. Last month, not so good. This month, we've done great so far. One of the benefits of planning is we could buy fresh things to eat at home and take to work. Everyday I eat a salad, and take some kind of vegetable. Today I ate a tuna fish sandwich and a chicken sandwich to help get some protein.

It still has a lot of processed stuff, like the tuna, the chicken and the bread, but remember I'm not an extremist but I have added the vegetables and salads so that I'm not eating ALL processed foods.