I've mentioned a pretty dramatic shift in the way that I eat, and now the time is right to go into all the explaining of that. But first... I thought I'd open with a fun little video that will make my life a little easier.
A lot of the concepts in there aren't new-- I've mentioned them here before, but now we'll get a little (wait for the caveman humor...) meat on the bones of the topic.
The Paleo diet-- I often like to start describing this as what I don't eat and then building it back up from there. SO... my list of Don't Eats:
- Dairy
- Grains
- Legumes
- Processed Foods
It's a short list, right? But that short list includes a lot of the typical American fare, so I'll break it out a little more. I don't eat bread, pasta, milk, yogurt, cereals, tofu, peanuts and beans. I don't eat things that start or end life in a box.
If you've known me over the past 20-something years you will recognize how very fundamental that shift is for me. When I took this challenge on in November, I did so knowing that my eating stood to be a lot healthier. In August I made the first fundamental shift in that-- I gave up being a vegetarian-- something I had been for most of my adult life. In November I took up the remainder of that shift-- away from all the grains and dairy I had lived on for most of my life. I was one of those vegetarians that described myself as a "dairy-tarian" or a "grain-atarian." I wasn't too big on green things much less things with mothers and faces. So this was a very big shift for me-- I was literally giving up everything I had spent 35 years eating.
Now what is in the Paleo diet.
- Naturally produced meat (grass fed cows, pastured chickens, wild-caught fish)
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Nuts
- Fat (yep... it's not a bad word when its the right kind of fat.)
I've talked evolution before, and the video certainly spoke to it, but these are the kinds of things our bodies evolved to eat-- provided we, to put it in the words of Joel Salatin, "respect and honor the pigness of the pig" or any other living thing we take into our bodies. The meat I buy at the local supermarket bears no resemblance to the meat we all evolved to eat and as a result the nutritional content of that meat is radically different. When you hear the "dangers of eating red meat" it is most often tied to the effects of the production of our meat. By respecting and honoring the cowness of the cow and eating grassfed beef, those dangers seem to disappear. The same holds true for chicken and fish. If the chicken can live its life like it evolved to live it, it will grow up healthy and therefore make the people who evolved to eat it healthy. We'll talk more on this topic later-- remember, rabbit hole. We'll also talk more about fat, but in the meantime, let's talk about how this shift went and why I went this way.
For starters, I don't do anything without reading and learning alot. Before I took on the idea of the paleo shift, I had a lot of questions that needed answering. My biggest concern, as a woman in her 30s, was around removing dairy and whether I would be affecting my calcium stores at a time when I needed it most. And I was also concerned that there may be other vitamins I was going to be losing as well-- what would this mean to my overall well being? So I started to read.
If you look at the statistics for Osteoporosis, you'll see something kind of interesting. North America and Europe have the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world, with North America running right in there. When you look at consumption of dairy on a global scale you notice something similar-- Europe and North America account for the highest amounts of dairy consumption. Doesn't it seem strange that the people eating the most dairy are the ones that have the worst osteoporosis?!
As it turns out the typical western diet is highly acidic with all those grains going on. As a result, during digestion, the kidneys are recruited to help balance the acid/alkaline levels (remember that homeostasis thing I talked about). Calcium salt in the body is one of the best alkaline sources there are, so as the body acidifies, that calcium is recruited to restore the balance. Which basically means that even though we are taking in copious amounts of calcium, it's being used for other things than making bones stronger. Sure calcium does that but only when it's not being used first. Milk itself is ever-so-slightly acidic. If you think of 7.0 as acid/alkaline neutral and anything below 7 is acidic and above 7 is alkaline, milk is a 6.7, which is likely helped by the calcium content of it. But when the rest of the diet is highly acidic that calcium is always being used. The chief sources of alkaline are... vegetables! So the more vegetables you eat, the more alkaline your blood. The more alkaline your blood, the more your body can store additional alkaline agents like calcium and therefore the stronger your bones will get. But the typical western diet is so highly acidic that it actually leaches the calcium from your bones themselves and makes westerners among the most prone to osteoporosis.
And what about fiber? The supermarket shelves are loaded with grain-based products promoting themselves as "high fiber" like Fiber One cereal, breads, etc. And with the recent push for whole grains, everyone is eating whole wheat everything... whole wheat pasta to whole wheat pizza dough-- it is everywhere. So it turns out there are 2 kinds of fiber-- soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers can break down, mix with water and help lower that bad LDL cholesterol that I told you a few days ago builds up in your arteries in case you spring a leak and keep your heart warm through the cold months of fall, winter and spring. Insoluble fibers, on the other hand, cannot be broken down, and provide bulk, but pass through the digestive system largely unprocessed. These are the things you eat to feel full, but because your body cannot break them down, they cannot pull nutrients out of them. Soluble fibers are found in things like vegetables, citrus fruits, oat and rye, strawberries, beans and peas, and apple pulp. Insoluble fiber is found in things like whole-wheat breads, wheat cereals, wheat bran, cabbage, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, turnips, cauliflower, and apple skin. So while you are correct in the observation that both grains and vegetables cross those lines, adding in the acidification aspect makes things a little more clear. I can eat insoluble vegetables without upping my blood acidity-- I can get the calories and the bulk without the negative consequence. But I can't eat the grains and beans that are soluble without making my blood more acid. As a result, The veggies and fruits come out on top for fiber and the grains aren't giving me a net positive (yes, oats may help with the LDL cholesterol, but they offset the alkalinity).
I went into my Paleo shift in early November after requesting my doctor do a full blood panel on me. We recorded my cholesterol levels, my calcium levels, my triglycerides... all of that. My goal was a month or two of paleo, because it seemed awfully restrictive at first glance, and then we'd look at my blood results again and see how things shook out. My first week, I will confess, was awful. My first 3 days I felt openly hostile and the following few days I felt insatiable-- I wanted to eat everything around. Eventually things began to quiet and I got used to how to eat-- including how to eat without cooking all the time. It was definitely a lifestyle change for me-- I needed to figure out paleo convenience, which becomes a little more challenging. I'll get into more of that later, but eventually something unsual happened. I felt awesome. I felt better than I had ever felt before. And I stopped resisting the diet and feeling like I was being deprived and no longer craved grains and dairy. And then came Thanksgiving.
It's hard to hold Paleo over Thanksgiving, and truth be told, I gave myself the day as a cheat day with no cause for concern. The next 3 days, however, I felt awful-- I felt weak and heavy and bloated and just kinda bummed out. I don't think I ever appreciated the food-mood connection until post Thanksgiving. And since then I have not looked back. As for the blood work, I decided to wait until the one year mark to see how it all shakes out. In general, I live by the 80-20 rule and every now and again don't say no to a big piece of chocolate cake, but I gotta say, I've given myself a few outs that just lacked appeal when it all came down to it. I remember one night in particular when I was too tired to make dinner and gave myself permission to have some pizza. I really thought this would excite me, but it just didn't. And in the end, I went home and quickly cooked up a salmon filet and made a salad and was quite happy and content with myself. It was a day I never expected to see.
I am entering into my 7th month of this diet now, and I have to tell you, I will be eating this way for the rest of my life-- no question about it. I feel energized all the time. And dare I say it, I feel happier. I've gone from vegetarian to cave-dweller-- my diet could not be more night and day from where it was a year ago. It has given me lots of interesting thoughts on the topic of vegetarianism that I will share with you another day. I believe my diet has largely accounted for the dramatic shift in body composition I blogged about recently. I look and feel a lot better and for the first time in my life, I am developing muscles, which is not easy for a relative ectomorph. In a couple more months we will see what the blood work shows once and for all, but back to the very question that opened this chapter 2 blog... Am I Healthy?? The answer comes back a lot more firmly in the yes category with this new shift in eating.
Read more!
Showing posts with label Body Composition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Body Composition. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
A History Primer of Food and Survival
Cause its a right good place to start. And the journey is kinda long and wonky and crazy-- it will take me a few days to get this one through.
So I left you with this weird kind of epiphany that I was the obese size 4 person. I was small but I was, for lack of a better way of saying it, soft. My body doesn't distribute fat well at all. Much like my father, I have what I like to call chicken legs. It doesn't matter how big or small I am, my legs don't change-- they are sticks. Same with my arms. And so you take out those key pieces of real estate and I have very few places to store fat-- my torso is the main one and my face and neck a little less-- but enough that when I lose weight people always comment on my face-- my jawline being more prominant, etc.
Belly fat is scary fat. It didn't used to be. Our bodies evolved to store fat in our bellies because it protected our vital organs against exposure to the cold-- so back before we had central heating and good lighting to all those long dark winter nights when freezing to death was a real concern for human survival. (think back to cave times... we'll be talking alot about cave times in this blog, rest assured.) So imagine a gorgeous summer day-- everywhere you look in the hours of abundant sunlight are plants and vegetables that are sources of carbohydrate (you know... the real carbs... not the bread carbs that came much later in human evolution). Summer is all about carbohydrates-- fruits and vegetables are abundant. And carbohydrates do two things for you-- one, they get converted into 'right now' energy and whatever else gets stored in body fat-- around your vital organs in your core. See, the body evolved to do that because when carbs are plentiful-- its summer time... which means that the cold of winter is just around the corner and you need every bit of help you can get. (Interesting side note about all this evolutionary stuff... your body also evolved to get cholesterol... that artery clogging stuff, because it fuels your heart and can keep your blood warm and flowing throughout the winter and patch your arteries any time of the year if you "spring a leak." But come spring time you are supposed to be pretty much depleted of cholesterol from the long cold winter.)
Some people distribute fat a little better than others-- storing deposits in their legs, their butt, their arms, etc. and the point is still the same-- its a reserve your body evolved to call on during the harsh conditions when food wasn't available. And now we don't have to contend with that lack of food and harsh cold. So we never have a period of utilizing that fat store for survival. In the grand scheme of things the evolution of not needing to protect ourselves against the harsh winter is infinitesimally short in comparison to how long we did need it. Homo sapiens first showed up as the new kid in town approximately 250,000 years ago, the first real evidence of a hearth fire some 125,000 years ago and the lightbulb in 1879 (130 years ago). All this is to say that the whole protection from the elements and abundance we expect now isn't in our DNA. And our DNA has not changed since homo sapiens came along. We got the same stuff going on that our cave-dwelling brethren did some 250,000 years back.
So we evolved to need fat. And cholesterol. But we only had exposure to it during one season and the storage was to fuel life for the remaining 3. We've kind of fallen off that bit.
So now let's think about today's food choices-- and what better a place to look than the trust food pyramid that the US Department of Agriculture puts out. Here... we need a fun graphic.
Here's what I find really interesting about this picture. See the base of our pyramid-- the grains? Those grains really only appeared, like, yesterday in the grand scheme of evolution... and grains cannot be eaten raw, so we know that in order for our cave brethren to use them, they needed true control of one more thing-- cooking. Ever try eating a raw corn cob? Notsomuch. Grains required cooking in order to make them edible to homo sapiens... by themselves many grains are actually toxic until the bad stuff is cooked off. Actual agriculture and the cultivation of this new food source didn't really show up until some 10,000 years ago when early people caught on to this idea of cooking off the toxins so that they could really eat some of these weird grain things. All things considered, in terms of homo sapiens the species, that's like... yesterday. So while there was the convenience factor of growing our own stuff, our ability to process and consume grains is a new realization.
(Quick jarring leap forward in time-- there is the whole weirdness about conflicts of interest with that funny pyramid thing. Who here is a lawyer? Doesn't it seem weird that the US Department of Agriculture is telling you to eat more grains? Of course they want you to eat more grains-- they're marketing their wares. But let's not go there for now...)
It gets interesting when you start comparing the amount of carbs people take in as a result of that emergence of agriculture. Just for fun I pulled out some interesting comparisons-- on the order of number of carbs per 100 grams of food:
brussels sprouts: 8.95 grams
carrots: 9.58 grams
mushrooms: 3.42 grams
apples: 13.81 grams
figs: 19.18 grams
you get the point. Now let's look at the same measure for grain-based food:
whole grain wheat flour: 71.58 grams
corn: 74.26 grams
long grain brown rice 77:24 grams
so here's my point-- I'm not a big "don't eat carbs" person and often find myself quietly laughing at the irony of Dr. Atkins himself dying of the impact of his own diet, but at the same time, there's a startling differential there. When agriculture came along a fundamental balance shifted such that we are absorbing more carbs faster than ever. And if you follow the wisdom of the food guide, you are eating 6-11 servings of that stuff. Which, as I mentioned earlier, evolved to be used for short term energy and then stored for the long haul. It's dense and sciency and all, but you can get a decent overview and details on wikipedia if you want to understand it a little more.
My point here is this-- we are, metabolicly speaking, the same as we were the day some 250,000 years ago when a switch was thrown that made homo sapiens emerge. We still employ all the strategies that got her through survival and haven't really adapted to this abundance we have right now. Our bodies either need to catch up or we need to start aligning our food with what helped us evolve and survive in the first place.
Ultimately, I chose the later. The results of that decision have been powerful. And therein lies a large part of the journey.
Read more!
So I left you with this weird kind of epiphany that I was the obese size 4 person. I was small but I was, for lack of a better way of saying it, soft. My body doesn't distribute fat well at all. Much like my father, I have what I like to call chicken legs. It doesn't matter how big or small I am, my legs don't change-- they are sticks. Same with my arms. And so you take out those key pieces of real estate and I have very few places to store fat-- my torso is the main one and my face and neck a little less-- but enough that when I lose weight people always comment on my face-- my jawline being more prominant, etc.
Belly fat is scary fat. It didn't used to be. Our bodies evolved to store fat in our bellies because it protected our vital organs against exposure to the cold-- so back before we had central heating and good lighting to all those long dark winter nights when freezing to death was a real concern for human survival. (think back to cave times... we'll be talking alot about cave times in this blog, rest assured.) So imagine a gorgeous summer day-- everywhere you look in the hours of abundant sunlight are plants and vegetables that are sources of carbohydrate (you know... the real carbs... not the bread carbs that came much later in human evolution). Summer is all about carbohydrates-- fruits and vegetables are abundant. And carbohydrates do two things for you-- one, they get converted into 'right now' energy and whatever else gets stored in body fat-- around your vital organs in your core. See, the body evolved to do that because when carbs are plentiful-- its summer time... which means that the cold of winter is just around the corner and you need every bit of help you can get. (Interesting side note about all this evolutionary stuff... your body also evolved to get cholesterol... that artery clogging stuff, because it fuels your heart and can keep your blood warm and flowing throughout the winter and patch your arteries any time of the year if you "spring a leak." But come spring time you are supposed to be pretty much depleted of cholesterol from the long cold winter.)
Some people distribute fat a little better than others-- storing deposits in their legs, their butt, their arms, etc. and the point is still the same-- its a reserve your body evolved to call on during the harsh conditions when food wasn't available. And now we don't have to contend with that lack of food and harsh cold. So we never have a period of utilizing that fat store for survival. In the grand scheme of things the evolution of not needing to protect ourselves against the harsh winter is infinitesimally short in comparison to how long we did need it. Homo sapiens first showed up as the new kid in town approximately 250,000 years ago, the first real evidence of a hearth fire some 125,000 years ago and the lightbulb in 1879 (130 years ago). All this is to say that the whole protection from the elements and abundance we expect now isn't in our DNA. And our DNA has not changed since homo sapiens came along. We got the same stuff going on that our cave-dwelling brethren did some 250,000 years back.
So we evolved to need fat. And cholesterol. But we only had exposure to it during one season and the storage was to fuel life for the remaining 3. We've kind of fallen off that bit.
So now let's think about today's food choices-- and what better a place to look than the trust food pyramid that the US Department of Agriculture puts out. Here... we need a fun graphic.
Here's what I find really interesting about this picture. See the base of our pyramid-- the grains? Those grains really only appeared, like, yesterday in the grand scheme of evolution... and grains cannot be eaten raw, so we know that in order for our cave brethren to use them, they needed true control of one more thing-- cooking. Ever try eating a raw corn cob? Notsomuch. Grains required cooking in order to make them edible to homo sapiens... by themselves many grains are actually toxic until the bad stuff is cooked off. Actual agriculture and the cultivation of this new food source didn't really show up until some 10,000 years ago when early people caught on to this idea of cooking off the toxins so that they could really eat some of these weird grain things. All things considered, in terms of homo sapiens the species, that's like... yesterday. So while there was the convenience factor of growing our own stuff, our ability to process and consume grains is a new realization.(Quick jarring leap forward in time-- there is the whole weirdness about conflicts of interest with that funny pyramid thing. Who here is a lawyer? Doesn't it seem weird that the US Department of Agriculture is telling you to eat more grains? Of course they want you to eat more grains-- they're marketing their wares. But let's not go there for now...)
It gets interesting when you start comparing the amount of carbs people take in as a result of that emergence of agriculture. Just for fun I pulled out some interesting comparisons-- on the order of number of carbs per 100 grams of food:
brussels sprouts: 8.95 grams
carrots: 9.58 grams
mushrooms: 3.42 grams
apples: 13.81 grams
figs: 19.18 grams
you get the point. Now let's look at the same measure for grain-based food:
whole grain wheat flour: 71.58 grams
corn: 74.26 grams
long grain brown rice 77:24 grams
so here's my point-- I'm not a big "don't eat carbs" person and often find myself quietly laughing at the irony of Dr. Atkins himself dying of the impact of his own diet, but at the same time, there's a startling differential there. When agriculture came along a fundamental balance shifted such that we are absorbing more carbs faster than ever. And if you follow the wisdom of the food guide, you are eating 6-11 servings of that stuff. Which, as I mentioned earlier, evolved to be used for short term energy and then stored for the long haul. It's dense and sciency and all, but you can get a decent overview and details on wikipedia if you want to understand it a little more.
My point here is this-- we are, metabolicly speaking, the same as we were the day some 250,000 years ago when a switch was thrown that made homo sapiens emerge. We still employ all the strategies that got her through survival and haven't really adapted to this abundance we have right now. Our bodies either need to catch up or we need to start aligning our food with what helped us evolve and survive in the first place.
Ultimately, I chose the later. The results of that decision have been powerful. And therein lies a large part of the journey.
Read more!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2
I coined the term "adult onset athlete" a couple of years ago as my way of describing the stumble I took into the world of fitness. It was literally a day when I picked myself up off the couch and put out a cigarette and decided to try my hand at running. Chapter 2 starts out with yours truly now fully what one would describe as an athlete... post marathon, day 1.
Here's me on the morning of the marathon, trying to stay warm in the athletes village. This photo was taken about an hour before the race. What do you notice. Marathoner? Fancy utility belt? Goofy anticipatory smirk? Randomly stretching her shoulders when her legs are gonna be getting the workout? Check. Contributing factor to the obesity epidemic? Um, notsomuch. And yet...
See that number I am wearing? On the back of it you are supposed to write down all your emergency information should something happen to you out on the course... you know, like keeling over from the exhaustion. One of the pieces of information they encourage you to put on there is the weight on the morning of the race-- the thought being that if you gain weight while running its likely due to excessive consumption of water and therefore related to hyponatremia-- where your blood becomes thinned and has too few electrolytes. It's a bad condition, so people are highly encouraged to track that information. Me being the generally law abiding citizen that I am, I wrote it down. And that's where things got weird.
See, as I started debating health and wellness and knowing I wasn't feeling optimally well, I started looking at how other well respected people and organizations define fitness, and I stumbled into the American Council on Exercise. There are a lot of organizations that profess to be the authority on fitness, but these guys are one of the most prevalent and well respected and many a trainer carries an ACE certification proving a certain standard depth of knowledge in the field of fitness and training. And when I stumbled into one of their articles I found a notation on what is considered a healthy body composition. Thinking not much of it, I proceeded to compute my own Body Mass Index. Imagine my surprise when it came back that I had a BMI score of ..33-- I had a 33.05% body fat composition, in the day that I ran the marathon, and anything above a 30 is considered obese. Yep, you heard me right, or I guess read me right... on the day in question I was obese.
Now before you start thinking I am slipping into some crazy body dismorphic disorder, rest assured, I find this as crazy as anyone. I wore a size 4 when I was running the marathon. Sure there had been times in my life where that label was appropriate... but clearly not at this point in my life. I mean, come on!
Imagine.
So I learned about the phenomena of being "skinny fat." Yep, its a real thing. With a name. And there are a lot of people out there who are skinny fat. It's even made it into the Urban Dictionary. We've jumped the shark before I even knew what was going on.
So my point here (and yes, I actually have one) is that skinny does not equal healthy. or fit. or well. it means skinny. And if you follow that chain of logic, it also means that size and weight isn't the right determinant at all. It's body composition. And mine put me solidly into the obesity category.
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2 for me really has been a trip down a rabbit hole. I mark a year later having radically altered that body composition. As of today, I am now well into the normal category, with a .22 BMI, or roughly 22% body fat. I can tell that that shift isn't complete and I still have some work to do, so I am thinking that healthy for me is going to be more along the 17-19% body fat ratio, but we'll see how that plays out. In the meantime, some numbers for comparison.
I don't think that weight is a good measure of health, so thinking about body composition requires a few additional measures to really tease it all out. I thought these 4 really paint the best picture. So some definitions, again:
Lean Mass is basically the weight of the non-fat parts of your body. This includes muscle, bone and bone density, fluid, etc. It is one of a better series of measures of health. The higher your lean body mass, the healthier you are and the better you look.
Fat Weight. It's exactly what it sounds like-- the pounds of fat you have on your body. For women, in general, the essential fat weight is usually around 12%. This accounts for the basics... bone marrow, the fat necessary for proper organ function, female reproductive systems, etc. So keeping body fat above 12% is critical to keep the body running smoothly. Any my current weight, that's about 15 lbs of essential fat.
Given all these numbers you can see something fairly interesting-- while I have lost only about 6% of my overall weight, I've lost more than 10% body fat, gained more than 11% lean mass and lost more than 35% of my fat weight. That's big. So my 9.8 lbs lost may not seem like a very big deal until you account for the radical shift in my overall composition.
The process of creating that change has been multi-fold. It's meant radically altering my diet, radically altering my exercise methods, radically altering my thinking and learning and engaging in the world. It's still a work in progress, for sure-- I still have a long way to go, but I am sure you can see, I'm moving in the right direction.
Call this the framework for many an entry to come-- I promise to get into the details of how I've made some of these shifts. Like I said... make sure you are ready for a fall down the rabbit hole.
Read more!
Here's me on the morning of the marathon, trying to stay warm in the athletes village. This photo was taken about an hour before the race. What do you notice. Marathoner? Fancy utility belt? Goofy anticipatory smirk? Randomly stretching her shoulders when her legs are gonna be getting the workout? Check. Contributing factor to the obesity epidemic? Um, notsomuch. And yet...See that number I am wearing? On the back of it you are supposed to write down all your emergency information should something happen to you out on the course... you know, like keeling over from the exhaustion. One of the pieces of information they encourage you to put on there is the weight on the morning of the race-- the thought being that if you gain weight while running its likely due to excessive consumption of water and therefore related to hyponatremia-- where your blood becomes thinned and has too few electrolytes. It's a bad condition, so people are highly encouraged to track that information. Me being the generally law abiding citizen that I am, I wrote it down. And that's where things got weird.
See, as I started debating health and wellness and knowing I wasn't feeling optimally well, I started looking at how other well respected people and organizations define fitness, and I stumbled into the American Council on Exercise. There are a lot of organizations that profess to be the authority on fitness, but these guys are one of the most prevalent and well respected and many a trainer carries an ACE certification proving a certain standard depth of knowledge in the field of fitness and training. And when I stumbled into one of their articles I found a notation on what is considered a healthy body composition. Thinking not much of it, I proceeded to compute my own Body Mass Index. Imagine my surprise when it came back that I had a BMI score of ..33-- I had a 33.05% body fat composition, in the day that I ran the marathon, and anything above a 30 is considered obese. Yep, you heard me right, or I guess read me right... on the day in question I was obese.
Now before you start thinking I am slipping into some crazy body dismorphic disorder, rest assured, I find this as crazy as anyone. I wore a size 4 when I was running the marathon. Sure there had been times in my life where that label was appropriate... but clearly not at this point in my life. I mean, come on!
Imagine.
So I learned about the phenomena of being "skinny fat." Yep, its a real thing. With a name. And there are a lot of people out there who are skinny fat. It's even made it into the Urban Dictionary. We've jumped the shark before I even knew what was going on.
So my point here (and yes, I actually have one) is that skinny does not equal healthy. or fit. or well. it means skinny. And if you follow that chain of logic, it also means that size and weight isn't the right determinant at all. It's body composition. And mine put me solidly into the obesity category.
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2 for me really has been a trip down a rabbit hole. I mark a year later having radically altered that body composition. As of today, I am now well into the normal category, with a .22 BMI, or roughly 22% body fat. I can tell that that shift isn't complete and I still have some work to do, so I am thinking that healthy for me is going to be more along the 17-19% body fat ratio, but we'll see how that plays out. In the meantime, some numbers for comparison.
| Month | April 2008 | April 2009 |
| Weight | 133.4 | 123.6 |
| Body Fat | 33.05% | 22.93% |
| Lean Mass | 85.7 lbs | 95.3 lbs |
| Fat Weight | 43.7 lbs | 28.3 lbs |
I don't think that weight is a good measure of health, so thinking about body composition requires a few additional measures to really tease it all out. I thought these 4 really paint the best picture. So some definitions, again:
Lean Mass is basically the weight of the non-fat parts of your body. This includes muscle, bone and bone density, fluid, etc. It is one of a better series of measures of health. The higher your lean body mass, the healthier you are and the better you look.
Fat Weight. It's exactly what it sounds like-- the pounds of fat you have on your body. For women, in general, the essential fat weight is usually around 12%. This accounts for the basics... bone marrow, the fat necessary for proper organ function, female reproductive systems, etc. So keeping body fat above 12% is critical to keep the body running smoothly. Any my current weight, that's about 15 lbs of essential fat.
Given all these numbers you can see something fairly interesting-- while I have lost only about 6% of my overall weight, I've lost more than 10% body fat, gained more than 11% lean mass and lost more than 35% of my fat weight. That's big. So my 9.8 lbs lost may not seem like a very big deal until you account for the radical shift in my overall composition.
The process of creating that change has been multi-fold. It's meant radically altering my diet, radically altering my exercise methods, radically altering my thinking and learning and engaging in the world. It's still a work in progress, for sure-- I still have a long way to go, but I am sure you can see, I'm moving in the right direction.
Call this the framework for many an entry to come-- I promise to get into the details of how I've made some of these shifts. Like I said... make sure you are ready for a fall down the rabbit hole.
Read more!
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