“I don’t want to bulk up.”

Appraising Your Success
The end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.
How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week – “I don’t want to bulk up.”

As a Personal Trainer, I hear this from most women. Of course, we don’t want to bulk up. Recently, I came across Muscle & Body magazine, “Official Magazine of the Arnold Sports Festival” with a cover photo of the man himself, Mr. Universe, Gov. Schwarzenegger. Granted, I would not be the Personal Trainer of choice for anyone interested in bodybuilding. However, there was an article about the basics of bodybuilding, so I read it, thinking I should know how to bulk up in order to know how to advise people not to bulk up.

If you want to bulk up:

• · You must eat more calories than you burn. Eat until you feel full, beyond feeling satisfied.
• · Drink your calories: milk, juice, sports drinks, protein shakes, meal replacement bars, etc. are all great ways to add calories to your daily intake.
• · Eat a lot of protein. You need to eat 1-1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That’s a lot of protein. The magazine was upfront in saying that people can’t eat enough protein, which is why body builders drink protein shakes!
• · Take supplements. Body builders need creatine and extra vitamins C, E & B-complex, in addition to those mentioned above.
• · Work out each muscle group once a week and only 2-3 muscle groups per workout. Yes, I was surprised to read this one.
• · Do 3-4 different exercises per muscle group and “crazy eights.” Crazy eights are 8 sets of 8 repetitions. The famous bodybuilder Vince Gironda created the concept, which is very successful for bodybuilding.
• · Focus on the concentric phase, which is the “hard” part of the movement, when you are “concentrating” the muscle fibers together. The easy part of the movement, is called the eccentric phase.

Lessons Learned:

• · If you want to slim down, you must eat fewer calories than you burn throughout the entire day. Eat until you are satisfied, but not stuffed.
• · If you want to slim down, drink water so that you don’t add liquid calories.
• · If you want to slim down, eat some protein. It makes you feel full longer than other types of foods. More importantly, it’s a basic building block of nutrition. Keep it lean and eat it from a variety of sources: chicken, eggs, fish, nuts, soy, beans, cottage cheese, pork, beef, etc.
• · If you want to slim down, don’t base your diet on supplements, protein shakes and meal replacement bars. Instead, eat a wide variety of nutritious foods.
• · If you want to slim down, do strength training 2 or more times per week, using a variety of major muscle groups each time. Strength training once a week is torture to your body; it’s like starting over every time you work out. Doing it at least twice a week, you’ll see your body become concentrated. You’re building muscle, which is small and dense, and increasing metabolism, which allows you to burn off fat, which is big and soft. Just make sure your muscles get 48 hours rest between strength workouts.
• · If you want to slim down, do 1-2 different exercises per muscle group and 3 sets of 10-15. Some people do 1-2 sets of 10-15, but that doesn’t challenge your body very much. You’ll see better results if you do at least 30 total repetitions. If you feel it takes too long, do as many as you can in one minute without stopping.
• · If you want to slim down, focus on both the concentric and eccentric phases of the movement and get as much range of motion as possible. These will help develop long, lean muscles.
• · If you want to slim down, do cardio, too. That wasn’t mentioned in the articles I read, but it’s what most people do the most of anyway. Cardio, as the name cardio respiratory implies, develops your heart and lungs, and it burns calories while you are doing it. Shoot for 30-60 minutes, 3-5 times per week.

In addition, some recommendations for gaining muscle mass also hold true for losing fat mass:

• · Eat 5-7 times per day, paying attention to total calorie intake.
• · Eat whole grains and fiber.
• · Eat healthy, unsaturated, fats
• · Take a multi-vitamin daily.
• · Drink 8-10 cups of water daily.
• · Warm up at the beginning of every workout.
• · Use moderate to heavy weights. Lift enough weight so that by the time you’re done, you’re pooped out.
• · Stretch. A lot of people skip this or only do a couple cursory stretches; however, it should be a definite component of your workout, not an overlooked one. Besides helping with overall flexibility, stretching helps make your muscles long and lean. It also releases the lactic acid that builds up in your muscles during a workout, which helps prevent muscle soreness.
• · Take a day off a couple times a week.
• · Change workouts now and then.

In the end, the main contributor to bulking up is eating more than you burn off, so learn your lessons above and don’t bulk up.

Sources:

Orsi, K. (March 2008). Crazy Eights. Muscle & Body. Vol. 3 issue 3. p. 92-99.

Team M&B. (March 2008). Bodybuilding 101. Muscle & Body. Vol. 3 issue 3. P. 22.

Look for another topic next week, and keep living the SWEET Life!

Suzanne
Weekly Encouragement history: http://sweetlifeweekly.blogspot.com/
The SWEET Life of Suzanne blog: http://thesweetlifeofsuzanne.blogspot.com/
Website: http://livingthesweetlife.net/

Copyright © 2008 Suzanne Fong. All rights reserved.

Hot Days, Cold Foods

Appraising Your Success
The end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.
How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week – Hot Days, Cold Foods

I’ve had this idea for a cookbook for a few years, but I’ve never found it or anything similar in a bookstore. I may have to write it myself, although I am not a recipe-creator; I am a recipe-follower. The cookbook I want is: Hot Days, Cold Foods, a cookbook for those days, like Saturday, that are so hot that you don’t want to cook or create heat in your kitchen.

There are certain requirements for these recipes. They can be cooked, as long as they don’t create a lot of heat in the process. For example, cooking in the microwave doesn’t create heat in the kitchen. Ditto for a rice cooker, slow cooker and other self-contained, small appliances. The stove and oven, of course, create a lot of heat in the kitchen; however, a toaster oven doesn’t generate a lot of heat. Moreover, something that can be prepared quickly on the stove won’t heat up the kitchen too much.

Most picnic cookbooks or outdoor cookbooks don’t meet my requirements because they include things baked in an oven, like scones, roasted or broiled meats or vegetables, casseroles, pizzas, or things cooked on the stove, like boiled eggs, pastas, potatoes, or vegetables; or soups.

Williams-Sonoma has a lovely book, “Complete Outdoor Living Cookbook”; however, the recipes don’t make me think of outdoor living at all! Finally, I read the introduction to find out that the idea is “eating with the outdoors as the backdrop.” Well, shoot, my kitchen table is near a window; just about anyone’s got the outdoors as a backdrop!

Some hot days, cold foods are obvious. Marinated salads, cold sandwiches, and sushi come to mind. Also, eggs cook quickly on the stove. Sandwiches are infinitely diverse by changing sliced bread to a pita, tortilla or other type of wrap, bagel, focaccia, roll, croissant, etc. Sandwich spreads can go way beyond mustard and mayonnaise to hummus, pesto, barbeque sauce, pickle relish, salsa, salad dressing, and specialty mustards or mayonnaises. Vegetables can include much more than lettuce and tomato, like cucumber, roasted peppers, avocado, sun-dried tomatoes, olives or tapenade, etc. All of this, of course is in addition to the usual array of meats and cheeses. The same is true of salads. After choosing your salad base, be it lettuce, spinach, potatoes, pasta or macaroni, couscous, rice, bread chunks (for panzanella), etc., there’s an unlimited variety of salad vegetables, meats, cheeses, dressings, etc. to combine together.

Other hot days, cold foods require a little thought. For example, couscous is great because you only boil a little water, and then turn it off, so the stove is only on for about 5 minutes. In addition, sweet potatoes, sliced, or Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into chunks, are great grilled. There are also waffles, which cook in their own machine. Moreover, build your own burritos don’t create a lot of heat because you can cook thinly sliced meat quickly on the stove, heat refried or black beans in the microwave, and cook Mexican rice in a rice cooker. Another idea is a “leftover salad” with last night’s leftover meat, veggies, and starch, chopped and tossed with oil and vinegar. For example, I made one the other day with leftover: grilled sausages & asparagus, microwaved acorn squash, and couscous; tossed with Trader Joe’s Lemon Dill sauce. They were all “hot days, cold foods” the night before, and became a delicious all-in-one lunch salad the next day. In addition, the night before, you can marinate salads or meats to grill the next day. You can also make coffee the night before and refrigerate it; then drink it iced with breakfast.

Grilled foods are included because that’s the one time many husbands will volunteer to cook. Personally, the idea of cooking on a hot grill outdoors in the heat sounds like a double disaster to me, but I’ll plan an entirely grilled meal, if I know my husband will gladly cook it. That meal could include any grilled meats; a variety of grilled veggies, and starches might include grilled potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic bread, etc. I try to be creative and put as much on the grill as possible so that I have less to cook myself!

If you have any ideas for hot days, cold foods, recipes or cookbook suggestions, please let me know. I’d like to have a repertoire of choices to have and to share when these hot days come around!

Source:

Williams, C. (ed.) (2002). Complete Outdoor Living Cookbook. Menlo Park, CA: Oxmoor House. p. 11.

Keep living the SWEET Life!

Suzanne
Weekly Encouragement history: http://sweetlifeweekly.blogspot.com/
The SWEET Life of Suzanne blog: http://thesweetlifeofsuzanne.blogspot.com/
Website: http://livingthesweetlife.net/

Copyright © 2008 Suzanne Fong. All rights reserved.

Skinny-fat

Appraising Your Success
The end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.
How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week - Skinny-fat

I learned the term “skinny-fat” recently, referring to people who are skinny but out of shape. Supermodels and actresses fit into this category, as do most men, it seems. “Skinny-fat” probably refers to most of the thin people we see on the street, considering Americans penchant for fast food and a sedentary lifestyle. Fat people hate them for being naturally thin, but they are not necessarily fit. They don’t necessarily have a faster metabolism than the rest of us, just as overweight people don’t necessarily have a slower metabolism than the rest of us. However, “skinny-fat” people succeed in the most important component of maintaining weight: the number of calories consumed equals the number of calories burned.

So the question of the week is: Are “skinny-fat” people living the SWEET Life? Let’s see . . .

Do they get 7-8 hours of Sleep per night? There is a lot of research showing a connection between lack of sleep and weight gain, which is why Sleep is an important aspect of the SWEET Life! Therefore, my guess is that “skinny-fat” people sleep enough.

Do they drink 8-10 cups of Water per day? Dehydration causes the body’s functions to slow down and work inefficiently, including metabolism. Ample hydration helps all the body’s functions run smoothly and efficiently and prevents you from retaining water as a survival mechanism. Therefore, I’d say that “skinny-fat” people drink enough water to keep their metabolisms running smoothly.

Do they Eat a balanced, healthy diet? They may or may not eat well. Most Americans don’t eat a balanced, healthy diet, despite the huge amounts of food available to us. Most importantly though, “skinny-fat” people don’t eat too much; they eat only as many calories as their bodies burn off.

Do they Exercise? “Skinny-fat” people don’t exercise. If they did, they would be “fit” not “fat.”

Do they have Tranquility? Since research shows that chronic stress causes weight gain and slower metabolism, I would say that “skinny-fat” people have their stress under control. They have Tranquility.

In sum:

Sleep – yes

Water – yes

Eating – maybe, maybe not

Exercise – no

Tranquility – yes

Surprisingly, diet and exercise, which most people think of as the keys to weight loss and staying skinny, are the two aspects of the SWEET Life that “skinny-fat” people are least likely to do! I must say, I’m very surprised by these results!

Sources:

· Google search for “lack of sleep and weight”:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lack+of+sleep+and+weight&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

· Google search for “stress and weight”:
http://www.google.com/search?q=stress+and+weight&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

· Inch-aweigh.com: Why drinking water really is the key to weight loss:
http://www.inch-aweigh.com/water.html

· Natural News.com: Healing with Water:
http://www.naturalnews.com/003202.html

Look for another topic next week, and keep living the SWEET Life!

Suzanne
Weekly Encouragement history: http://sweetlifeweekly.blogspot.com/
The SWEET Life of Suzanne blog: http://thesweetlifeofsuzanne.blogspot.com/
Website: http://livingthesweetlife.net/

Copyright © 2008 Suzanne Fong. All rights reserved.

The Fatosphere

Appraising Your Success
The end of the week is a good time to review the past week of your SWEET Life and count up your accomplishments. Your goal is 5-6 times per week for each aspect of the SWEET Life: Sleep, Water, Eating, Exercise, and Tranquility. If you didn’t achieve some of your goals for the week, then next week, focus on those areas more and think about how to fulfill them more consistently.
How do you feel at the end of this week? Are you better rested? Do you feel relaxed? Are you more energetic? Do you feel generally healthier? Continue with the SWEET Life and you’ll experience all of these feelings!

Topic of the week - The Fatosphere

I happened across an article in the New York Times online about the Fatosphere, a term I’d never heard of. Apparently, blogs about fat acceptance are becoming very popular, and overweight people are finding solidarity in the blogs of others who are overweight. It was interesting for me to read about it because it’s a foreign concept to me to accept myself being fat or to encourage others to remain overweight. I’d have no Personal Training clients if I were overweight, and I can’t see overweight people wanting to use a Personal Trainer if they wanted to maintain their weight.

The article made me think about the relationship between the fatosphere and the SWEET Life. I’ve never called the SWEET Life a weight loss program because the program is designed to be a balanced, healthy lifestyle, appropriate for everyone. However, I’ve always believed that if you were overweight and started living the SWEET Life, you would lose weight as a side effect. So are these people in the fatosphere living the SWEET Life? Let’s see . . .

Do they get 7-8 hours of Sleep per night? Well, research shows that overweight & obese people tend to have more problems with snoring, sleep apnea and other sleep problems, so they may not be getting a good night’s rest.

Do they drink 8-10 cups of Water per day? I have no idea, but my guess is that they do drink ample fluids; however, they might be fluids with calories, sugar, caffeine and other unhealthy ingredients.

Do they Eat a balanced, healthy diet? They may or may not. Although overweight people have all sorts of reasons why they are overweight, the main reason is that they consume more calories than they burn off, whether they consume a balanced, healthy diet or not.

Do they Exercise? Of course there are overweight people who exercise, even those who exercise a lot. However, the fact remains that Americans, in general, are sedentary and don’t even exercise the minimum that is recommended by the American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine, which is 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise, 5 days a week.

Do they have Tranquility? Good question. I would think that anyone who is content with his/her life has Tranquility, regardless of his/her size.

In sum:

Sleep – no

Water – yes

Eating – no

Exercise – no

Tranquility – yes

So, I would say that overweight people are like the general population, who follow a couple aspects of the SWEET Life easily, one intermittently, and a couple with difficulty.

Sources:

· About.com: Sleep Disorders: Does Losing Weight Really Help? http://sleepdisorders.about.com/cs/diet/a/talk_weight.htm

· American Heart Association: Exercise and Fitness: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=1200013

· Fatosphere Blog: http://fatosphere.blogspot.com/

· In the Fatosphere, Big Is In, or at Least Accepted: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22fblogs.html

Have a SWEET week!

Suzanne

Copyright © 2008 Suzanne Fong. All rights reserved.