Rajiv's Blog

Whatever your goals are, the key to reaching them is accountability. When you’re accountable for you choices, you’re more likely to make the right choices.

In the context of health, weight, nutrition, and physical activity, this remains an especially daunting task. Personal health tends to be an intimate topic to most, so when I write accountability,  I really mean self-accountability. No one else is monitoring you, but you.

This problem is most apparent with food. When you eat something you neither wanted nor intended to eat, the guilt is almost completely gone immediately. I think this is because the short term pleasure derived from eating matches the resulting short term guilt. In a way, the evidence disappears.

In the past, experts have suggested keeping a food journal, hoping it would get people to realize what they were consuming. So it’s not so easy to forget. Maybe they’re old technology, but the traditional food journal is out of vogue.

What you need is a system by which you can keep abreast of your food choices, a system that removes the veil of anonymity from your decisions. This way, you’ll remember, which means you’ll make better decisions. By making these decisions public, you’ll have some incentive to do so (Do you really want the whole world to know you had 2 Snicker’s bars?)

Use your twitter account for something useful. =P

Photo by kozumel

Snacking is something I struggle with. If you were or are overweight or otherwise unhealthy and aware of that, then you know what I mean. As you adopt a healthy lifestyle, it’s a good idea to cut out snacking completely because it’s hardly ever beneficial and usually adds only empty calories to your daily intake. But that’s not where my struggle is, per se. Cutting out something completely is not foreign to me. 2 years ago, I cut out meat from my diet and went vegetarian. 2 months ago I cut out all animal products from my diet and went vegan. When I’m targeting my weight, I can cut out snacking so long as I stick to my meal plan.

However, I’ve been trying to add snacking back into my diet as of late, just for the sake of experimentation. It’s hard. I have not completely shaken off the binging mindset yet -I think that will take a year or more. When I went to the grocery store the other day, I bought this cheap, Oreo-like knock-product at Safeway. It was about the same package size as Oreos. I must have finished it in less than 2 full days. And then I felt sick afterward and went back to my normal plan. This is neither the first nor the last time I’ve done something like this.

Why snack at all?

If snacking has been repeatedly linked to excess caloric intake, meaning it’s responsible for most weight gain, it makes sense to cut it out completely, right? Not necessarily. Snacking can be an important part of a larger plan to get healthy, however counter intuitive that seems.

1. Stabilizes leptin levels

Research shows that leptin levels help regulate metabolism, which means they are key to weigh-loss and maintenance. Low leptin levels lead to overeating because we lack the ability to tell we’re full. A low calorie food plan sustained for 7 days has been shown to lower leptin levels significantly, sending the body into starvation mode. You don’t want to be in starvation mode: your body begins to hold onto fat for dear life and burn muscle while you exercise.

2. Social and Sanity Benefit

People snack. People snack in groups. I’m not one to fall for peer pressure, but it’s important to mesh well with the people and places that surround you. This comes from the idea that being healthy shouldn’t alienate and isolate one from everything and everyone they like. If you’re able to work something like snacking into your plan, then you’re more likely to stick to it. And you’re more likely to keep your friends.

3. Satiate hunger and cravings

Whether you’re just starting out or maintaining a healthy lifestyle, you will get hungry. And you will have cravings. In this case, you won’t be too keen on cooking or otherwise preparing food -that takes to long. The temptation is to go to a fast food joint, buy something quick and sweet, or snack on whatever might be in the pantry. If you give in, you might end up eating a lot more than you need to satiate your desires. A strategically placed snack mitigates that problem.

How to Snack

1. Plan, parcel and track

You should make this a chant, it has a nice ring to it. The idea is to buy some food in a large pack (it’s cheaper that way) check the label for its serving size, and parcel that up into nice plastic bags. Then, when you get a craving, take out a bag and track it’s calories down where you record everything else. You want to be conscious of everything you’re consuming.

2. Right foods

Snacking on double-chocolate-fudge-mint-ice-cream-cheesecake isn’t the same as snacking on yogurt. It just isn’t. When you go shopping for the ideal snack, focus on minimizing calories and maximizing taste. For me, this means popcorn, Chex Mix, and protein bars.

3. Time it right

There are better times to snack than others. For example, you don’t want to be hungry while you’re grocery shopping. You also don’t want to be hungry as your workout. That makes these two times optimal snacking periods: before workouts and grocery store visits. You also want to snack early in the day, preferably before the afternoon hits. As the day goes on, your body is less efficient in utilizing the food you consume for good.

Give into your temptations, be strategic about it, and make snacking work for you.

Have you ever put off going to the gym because you didn’t have the time? Can’t even jog outside

Credit to Thomas Hawk

because that midterm you have on Tuesday demands your constant attention? This isn’t Family Feud, but I’d be willing to bet that time is the number one excuse for not working out. It’s a good excuse too. So much demands our attention -school, family, friends, even your “me time.”

When I complain that I don’t have time to workout, I usually mean that I don’t have the 1-1.5 hours I usually spend breaking a sweat. I figure it’s the same for most people. This post will cover an effective workout that can be done in 10-15 minutes and still yield results.

But first, a note on workout theory. When you workout for 1 hour, you can afford to jog at a sustainable pace, elliptical (I’m using it as a verb) moderately, or cycle to the extent that you can still read a book. With the workout to follow, intensity and stress are the ruling principles. In many ways, this makes perfect sense: we are just condensing a long aerobic workout. That said, take every precaution to make certain you are in the physical shape to try this method.

HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training

The name entails the essential idea of the workout: you alternate intense training over intervals. This workout should only last for 10-15 minutes, 20 at the max. If you have any energy left after 15 minutes, you’re just not doing it correctly. Apply this to any method of cardio training, like cycling,  elliptical, running, calisthenics -whatever works for you. I prefer running, so I’ll describe it using that form. You’ll be able to see how it applies to other methods.

1-2 minutes:

Start out with a light jog to warm up. It’s always a good idea to do some quick stretches to make sure you’re not stiff or cold.

10-12 minutes:

Okay, you’re ready to begin intervals. Elevate your pace to a moderate level. Imagine what pace you would jog at if you had to jog for 30 minutes, and jog at that pace for 30 seconds. Then sprint as fast as you can for a minute. Then return to that jogging pace for 30 seconds. Then sprint again. Do this for the next 12 minutes. Make every effort to maintain your levels, because they tend to blur together after the third cycle.

1 minute:

Cool down at the lowest pace feasible. For about a minute, you want to walk, focus on breathing in deeply. Stretch if you need to.

You’re done! If you’re completely winded, bent over panting, your heart is about to break out of your chest because it’s beating so hard, and you’re wondering why the hell you even listened to my advice, then congratulations, you did it correctly. If not, try harder next time.

Other Benefits to HIIT

Increased RMR: A study has shown that doing HIIT will increase your Resting Metabolic Rate in the following 24 hours. In other words, you end up burning more fat while you’re not exercising the next day. In some cases, HIIT increases your RMR more than a 60 minute aerobic workout.

Increase VO2: Because you’re stressing your lungs on a HIIT routine, over time you will increase the volume of oxygen intake, which yields other health benefits.

Go ahead, give this workout a try if you’re low on time.