So Easy A Caveman Can Do It

Somehow, one of my kickboxing instructors talked me into doing the Paleo Diet. I had recently come to a plateau...and I was really bitter about it. So I cut back on food, my first (what I thought was logical) decision. I was eating at least 1200 calories a day, but that wasn't sufficient enough for the amount of working out I do a day.

This is definitely a growing experience, weight loss. I don't know a ton about nutrition, I know what's bad and what's good. I've been vegan, vegetarian, I'm gluten free. I've done Weight Watchers, I've been all over the map. I'm a southerner and everything is about food.

So I gave this diet a shot. What do I have to lose? Right? The first couple weeks have been hard. I have had a couple Diet Cokes, a few grains here and there, but not daily. Spending my lunch break today figuring out recipes, because I haven't cooked meat in a very long time. I haven't had red meat since my teenage years (minus my a burger at In and Out when I was in LA).

I'll keep you posted on results and how I feel. Today, the one thing I miss is peanut butter. I really miss peanut butter.

Trust The Process

Each time I take one of these, I feel better. Anyone who struggles with weight understands the up and down of the journey. I haven't been losing a ton of weight recently, I tried a lot of the summer (because I wasn't working) to focus directly on my gym time and my food. I was pulling three-a-days at the gym and cutting back a lot on my calories. It didn't feel like it was working. Once I got a job, I felt like everything stopped. Maybe it was the stress of a new job, maybe it's because I'm super hard on myself, who knows. I don't know how much I've lost because I don't have a scale, but looking at this and measuring myself this morning, I feel like some changes are happening.

The weight loss journey, I believe, occurs in three parts. One being exercise. I know I have written a lot about being active, I don't know how to be more obvious about it. Find something you can stick to, find something you love and start doing it all the time. I get a lot of "you're crazy" when I tell them how often I exercise; I'm not crazy. I love kickboxing, I'm actually pretty good at it. When I plan out my week, I plan a lot of my life around gym time. No, I'm not cutting off friends to get gym time in, however most of my friends know what I do and accept that most of my time goes to kickboxing. I also feel so much better. I feel stronger, everyday. 

The second, and really equal with the first part, is food. Food is my biggest struggle. Not that I overeat, or eat junk food...I tend to under-eat. I have been struggling for a while to learn what to eat, when to eat and how much to eat. It's a daily/weekly process. Luckily, trainers at the gym have been checking my food log, and checking in to make sure that I'm eating enough and the right things. I try to make as much of my food as I can. Like the food gummies above, I made those myself. All fresh ingredients, all things I could pronounce. I'm learning to eat to live and not live to eat. It's a process and a really frustrating one at that. I'll let you know if I come up with any tricks, but all I've found that works right now if someone to keep me accountable and Pinterest for recipes. 

(Best breakfast!! Steel cut oats, blueberries, bananas and some applesauce and protein powder)

Last but not least, having a community to keep you going. 

I enjoy going to the gym (I don't have photos of anyone..sorry, just use your imagination) because I love the community I have there. Even with the people I don't see all the time, or don't know very well, we are best friends for a hour of class. When you can look at the person at the next bag or holding the pads and they know exactly how out of breath you are and how tired you are, but they make you keep going...nothing is better than that. 

(John Wayne Parr from a seminar at Real Fighters Gym. A legend and amazing teacher. We don't train together on a regular basis...I just wanted to post this. I mean, it's JWP.)

(My favorite coach of all time, Eric Haycraft. Eric was the first coach I ever had that treated me like everyone else. I was expected to work, and work just as hard, as any other fighter in the gym. There are some training sessions that I am amazed that I survived, but I always did. I know he believes in me, even though I'm in another city and at another gym.)

There's going to be some bumps along the way, but that helps make all the high points worth it. This journey feels like it's been incredibly long and tiring. I know when I look back on this, it will seem like a blink. 

Good luck to yall. 

Exercise: Does More Than Burn Calories

My supervisor from work sent this in an email to me a couple days ago. The nature of our job is pretty stressful, and she will send emails like this to help us separate work from life. I thought our readers would benefit from reading this too. Enjoy.

-Amos

Exercise: Improve Your Mood and Help Repair the Effects of Stress

By Karyn Hall, PhD

Emotionally sensitive people are often advised to exercise to calm
their anxiety or to help overcome depression. Grandmothers,
psychiatrists, friends and even strangers often suggest, “Exercise.
You’ll feel better.”


In our recent survey, 71.4% of the emotionally sensitive have found
exercise helpful in managing their mood. Turns out the research, as
reported by John Ratey, MD in his book Spark, shows exercise has a
strong effect on mood as well as other important functions of the
brain.


Exercise is effective in treating anxiety and panic.  Getting active
provides a distraction, reduces muscle tension, builds brain resources
(increases and balances serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, all
important neurotransmitters involved in mood), improves resilience by
showing you that you can be effective in controlling anxiety, and
breaks the feeling of being trapped and immobilized.
The effects can be equal or even better than medication. The problem
is that when people are upset or depressed, they don’t want to
exercise.


Establishing a regular exercise program, one that you could maintain
when your mood was unpleasant, may be part of the answer. Continuing a
routine when you are emotionally dysregulated is easier than starting
a new activity.  Regular exercise would also help prevent relapse.
In addition to helping regulate your mood, exercise offers other
advantages that make it well worth the time invested. Only recently
are scientists realizing how extensive the effects of exercise truly
are.


Exercise improves the ability to learn. When you are working on
learning new coping skills, new ways of responding, the ability to
take in information is obviously important. Dr. Ratey describes an
American high school whose students participated in a physical fitness
program. They finished first in the world on science and sixth on an
international test to compare science and math abilities.  As a whole,
US students ranked 18th in science and 19th in math.
Studies have shown that better fitness means improved attention and
improved ability to adjust their cognitive performance following a
mistake.


How does that happen? Exercise reportedly spurs the development of new
nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus. Perhaps most
importantly, exercise is believed to increase BDNF (brain-derived
neurotrophic factor), the master molecule of the learning process. Low
levels of BDNF are associated with depression.
Exercise increases cognitive flexibility. Ratey defines cognitive
flexibility as being able to shift your thiking and to be creative.
Cognitive flexibility would be to apply new strategies to solve
problems and use information in creative ways rather than rote
memorization of facts. Memorizing coping skills may will not be as
helpful as being able to able the information in different situations.
Exercise helps relieve and repair the effects of stress on the body.
When stressed, the body releases cortisol. Ratey notes that high
levels of cortisol make it difficult for the prefrontal cortex to
direct the hippocampus to compare memories, like to determine that a
stick is not a snake. Thus when cortisol is high it’s difficult to
decide what is a threat and what isn’t a threat, so just about
everything seems scary. You can’t think clearly.


In addition, high levels of cortisol kill neurons in the hippocampus
(where memories are stored), causing a communication breakdown. This
result could partially explain why people get locked into negative
thoughts–the hippocampus keeps recycling a negative memory.
Stress overload also creates more connections in the amygdala. The
more the amgydala fires the stronger the stress and the sooner the
stress becomes generalized, as if everything is a stressor.
Exercise helps prevent the damaging effects of stress and can reverse
damage that has been done. Exercise protects neurons against cortisol
in the areas that control mood, including the hippocampus and in that
way helps prevent relapse and evens out up and down moods.
All with very few side effects.

Reference
Ratey, J.( 2008).  Spark. New York:  Little, Brown and Company.