Fitness - My Focus For March
Previously I’ve spoken about the idea of choosing a focus for each month. Last months focus was nutrition and I’ve definitely found some potential benefits from that and will be continuing to strive for better nutrition in the future. The focus for this month though is fitness … I find increasing my fitness levels to be great for providing more energy and greater confidence. The main reason I’ve chosen fitness for this months focus is that I’ll be spending 3 weeks in the south island of New Zealand (I live in New Zealand) and I plan to do a lot of tramping and a bit of kayaking.
Measuring Exercise
A theme that often comes up in any discussion of goal setting is that of measurable results. I find a great way to quantify amounts of exercise is to use a combination of duration and intensity. I’ve been keeping track of my exercise for 3 years now and I find it a great way to get an idea of my activity levels.
I use this spreadsheet to keep record everything. Just fill in a description of your exercise for each day along with duration in hours and minutes and RPE to get a total exercise level for the day with weekly totals also calculated for you.
RPE is an abbreviation for rated perceived exertion. I use a scale of 1 to 10 for RPE and find that works well. 1 would be something like painting, 5 is moderate aerobic exercise and 10 is as hard as you can go. I sometimes think a scale of 1 to 15 or 20 might be more accurate for taking into account extremely intense exercises like weight lifting where a short burst of activity places a great deal of stress on the body … I’m sticking with the 1-10 though for consistency, so I can compare easily to my old data. You might want to try a different scale. Main point though is that we now have a way to measure exercise levels.
60 + Exercise Points Per Week
My goal for the month of March is to get 60+ points per week using the system mentioned above. This equates to about 12 hours of moderate aerobic exercise (12h * 5rpe = 60 point). My general goal over the past year has been to get in 20+ per week which I have been doing fairly consistently with some weeks much higher than this at around 90. I think the goal of 60+ should be quite attainable given that I have three weeks off work which affords me more time to exercise and to recover.
Summary of Diet Plan Trial
As you may know for the last month I’ve been trying out a new diet plan. This plan is loosed based on “The CR Way” diet. In particular I’ve been striving for two main goals.
1. Get more vitamins and minerals without increasing the amount of calories I consume.
2. Keep my blood sugar levels down by consuming foods that have lower glycemic indexes.
I have been reasonably successful in implementing these changes, although there have been numerous slip ups. During the times where I was sticking to the guidelines I really did feel like it was making a difference. I found my thoughts were clearer and that I could get out of bed more easily in the morning. These benefits could just be placebo effect or merely coincidental. However I think the results thus far definitely warrant further exploration.
CR Way Progress
So last month I talked about starting a new diet based on that in the CR Way book, essentially I’m trying to get a high amount of vitamins and minerals while keeping calorie intake relatively low. One of the main goals in the CR Way is to get glucose levels down. Monitoring fasting levels can be a good indicator of how one is doing in this respect. Fasting levels are those reached after eight or more hours without food.
Glucose Testing
I’ve purchased a testing kit for about $40nz. The testing is quite simple although it does feel a little strange pricking your skin to get the blood sample. It’s similar to what they do when they check your iron levels before you give blood. Pricking in the fleshy pad at the base of the thumb is less painful than using a fingertip and it gives good results for fasting glucose. If you’re trying to monitor the immediate effects of food apparently the blood in the fingertips responds faster and gives a more accurate picture.
My Fasting Glucose Levels
My fasting glucose levels have ranged from 80 - 108 mg/dl. Anything over 100 is considered above normal and at risk of diabeties while over 126 is diabetic. The CR way recommends aiming for 74-88 mg/dl for longevity and alertness. So it’s fairly apparent that according to this philosophy my fasting glucose levels are too high sometimes.
Controlling Fasting Glucose Levels
It’s very easy to see the difference my diet makes to the levels, when testing the morning after following my guidelines I would test somewhere in the 80’s which is pretty much where it needs to be. But on other days when I would eat more higher gi food like muffins, bread and potato I would notice the difference the next morning with levels up around 100.
It’s good to know that I can control my glucose levels now all I need to do is stick with the plan.
Effect on Alertness
I really do think I feel more alert on days where I’m eating high nutrient/low gi food. Of course it’s always hard to tell whether it’s a real difference or just a placebo effect. It’s not a bouncing off the walls kind of energy but rather an increase in clarity of thought and ability to concentrate.
Summary
So far the experiment is going well. I’ve been doing the testing consistently and the days where I haven’t followed my diet guidelines have shown measurable differences in glucose levels. The perceived increase in alertness is very welcome as I’m probably more interested in that outcome than I am in increased life expectancy. So I will be continuing with the experiment and likely try to adopt the guidelines permanently.
My New Diet Plan
I’ve relaxed a bit on the food logging for now, I think I’ve certainly gained a reasonable insight into what I need to eat to get a good mix of nutrients. Not surprisingly it requires a balanced diet including vegetables, low gi carbs, fruit, animal products (for B12 debatably), nuts and beans.
Over the next month I’ll be sticking with a high nutrient and low gi diet. To make things simple I’ve come up with a set of guidelines that I will be adhering closely to, the main exceptions will be eating food prepared by others as I enjoy sharing meals with people and I’m certainly not crazy enough to expect other people to change their ways (not yet anyway!). So here’s my “diet plan”
- Lot’s of veges! Not sure how to quantify this yet. Including them with breakfast, lunch and dinner is a good start.
- Low GI Carb Sources - Barley, Quinoa, Swedes/Turnips, Kumara (sweet potato)
- No Added Sugar and avoid products high in sugar. The only excepton here would be fruit which is “allowed” because it has lot’s of nutrients and tends to be higher in fibre than processed sugary foods.
- Eat some nuts 5+ days a week
- Have small amount of meat, milk or cheese every day
I’ve booked in for a health checkup so I can get an idea if there’s anything in particular I should be working on, if there is I’ll probably go back to recording my food intake again. But if not my plan is to follow the guidelines above.
Weight Loss
Looks like I may have lost 2kg in the last 10 days, perhaps it’s just a random fluctuation but it could be to do with my change in diet. I wasn’t trying to lose weight as I’m already quite skinny at 197cm and 77kg … all I wanted to do was increase my vitamin intake. However I do think I may have been influenced by reading the CR Way book and haven’t been to worried if I get hungry here and there. So perhaps I have been consuming less calories than normal. Whatever the case is I’m definitely not keen to lose any more weight so I’ll increase my intake to around 3000 calories per day for the next week or so and see how that goes.
I have been eating around 2700 calories per day for the last 10 days. My Energy levels haven’t been low or anything, in fact I was quite pleased with how well the tramp on saturday went and how quickly I recovered from that. I’m just really not keen to lose anymore weight.
Vitamin E
Today was quite an active day for me with 6 hours of tramping on a great track, check out some photos if you’re interested. Interestingly with all that walking I’ve still only eaten slightly more than normal at 2,911 calories and I’m certainly not feeling hungry now. However I haven’t had much in the way of fruit or veges this shows up in the nutrient profile with low levels of vitamin C and E. The vitamin E was particularly low.
The function of vitamin E is to protect read blood cells and prevent the destruction of vitamins A and C. It is also an antioxidant which can make your skin healthier and possibly reduce the chances of getting cancer. Good sources of Vitamin E are seeds, nuts, green leafy vegetables and olives. So seeing as I didn’t have any of these it’s not surprising I was low on vitamin E.
It’s really interesting to monitor my food intake and see that difference in nutrient intake from day to day. As of yet I haven’t really been able to feel any difference with the increased vitamin intake, it has only been a week though and many of the benefits of increased vitamin intake will take longer to show up. Hopefully I will experience more energy and less illness.
A Focus For Every Month
There seems to be a general consensus that most habits start to become set after 30 days. So it has become popular in personal development circles to speak of 30 day trials. It also helps to have a main focus at any one time, this doesn’t mean you don’t do anything else at all but just that you are making a concerted effort in a particular area.
Tim ferris shared a chapter of Leo Babauta’s book which raises the idea of picking a new habit/focus for every month of the year. So why not give it a try by choosing 12 habits you’d like to have or skills you’d like to improve and focus on one of them each month. Even if you don’t have much spare time you can achieve a lot in 30 minutes a day.
I’ve made an initial list of things to focus on for each month of 2009. A lot of the ideas will need to be made more concrete before the time comes. I’m quite excited about the prospect of making improvements in all of these areas, so choose some goals and join in … let me know of the ideas you come up with.
January - Nutrition research and experimentation
Develop a diet plan to implement in February. This has been started and is going well, recording food intake each day and looking at the data from fit day about nutrition, will include a doctors visit to see if there are any particular health/nutrition problems I need to address.
February - Nutrition plan implementation
March - Fitness 50+ exercise points per week
I will explain the points system further in future but it’s basically intensity * duration. For three weeks of march I’ll be off work in the south island which should give me a good chance to increase my fitness levels.
April - Rank that site
Work on getting rank that site running well with a good firefox plugin.
May - Friendships
June - Start work at 7:30am every weekday
July - Cleanliness 15minutes per day cleaning plus dishes.
August - Software design concepts
This is likely to include furthering my knowledge of unit testing, design patterns and refactoring.
September - Knowledge of tree and edible plant species.
October - Gardening
Get a good vege garden started for summer.
November - Charity
Do charity work 3 times per week.
December - Meditation
Mediate for 15 minutes every morning.
Low GI Carb Substitues
Todays calorie intake was a bit lower than usual at 2,489. But interestingly I had a good amount of all the main vitamins, click on the image below to see a summary of the food I had.
My dinner today was a swede and parsnip bake. That’s basically turnip and parsnips with a cheese sauce thrown in the oven for 45 minutes or so. I couldn’t find swedes in the fitday database so I substituted turnip which is fairly similar. The swedes where quite tasty with a lot more flavour than potato’s.
So this week I’ve tried 3 low gi carb sources that also contain more vitamins and minerals than the the normal carb sources. Barley, Quinoa and Swedes/Turnips can be used instead of rice or potatos. Kumara or sweet potato are another option if your after lower gi with more nutrients.
Health Checkups
Had a fairly active day today with calorie intake of 2,857. Met the RDA’s for all of the main vitamins for the first time since I started keeping track. So far I’ve been doing a fair amount of estimation with food amounts, now I will start to weigh a lot of my food portions to make sure I’m getting an accurate picture of my diet.
For some time now I’ve been thinking a yearly health check at the doctors would be good. So I’ll be doing that soon, I will get measurements on several basic health indicators like blood pressure, cholesterol and other information from a blood sample. This should give me a good idea of where I can make improvements.
Quinoa
Today I tried using quinoa in place of rice in an Indian style meal. Quinoa is low GI and as I found out today it’s also really tasty. So this week I’ve tried two new low GI carb sources; namely quinoa and barley, and they’re both really tasty.
Today I consumed 2,748 calories and was only deficient in vitamin B12. However I was well below the recommended intake of B12 having only 50% of the RDA. Most of the B12 I did get came from the grated cheese I had with breakfast. The main sources of B12 are meat, fish, poultry and dairy products. This means it’s quite hard to get enough B12 if you’re on a vegan diet, it is speculated that the body can synthesise B12 itself if necessary but I’d rather not take my chances.
