Strickland Fitness

Happy March everyone! Spring is almost here and this month there will be a lot of celebrating going on, courtesy of St. Patrick's Day. As with other special days we commemorate, St. Patty's usually calls for hanging out with family and friends and eating special meals – this time heaping servings of corned beef and cabbage, shepherd's pie, soda bread and beer. Lots and lots of beer. It's easy to get off your healthy kick when this Irish holiday comes around every March 17, but with some planning, you can avoid the pitfalls of these celebrations. It doesn't mean you should enjoy the festivities less. We're just offering a few suggestions that will help you feel better about what you eat and continue to stay active.

Above is a great video on a few useful tips that you can try when preparing your St. Patrick's Day meal. Since it's best to keep things in moderation and to never feel like you're "missing" out, it might be a good idea to incorporate a few of these ideas in your meal while leaving the most important dishes (i.e. the infamous corned beef and cabbage) in tact. Meanwhile, below is a short workout that you can do the day after eating all that yummy food (you can substitute the keg for weights). Enjoy.

How many calories are you eating these days? Is it working for you or do you think you need to cut down or add more? Whatever your question may be about calories, here's a useful video that has tips on how many calories one should be eating. Please share and comment. – Best, Chad

We're well into autumn and even though it's sunny in Southern California, other parts of the country are already experiencing very cold weather. With cold weather comes the sudden need to miss workouts. Since this is a society that is moved by technology (did you see those lines for the iPhone 5), here's a great story on some gadgets that will help you keep track of your active time. – Best, Chad

by MIchael Felberbaum / Business Week

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Many of us know firsthand that losing weight and staying fit can be tough.

For me, I started a journey a little over a year ago to get in better shape before my 30th birthday. While diet and exercise were the ultimate keys to my success, technology played an important role in keeping me accountable, tracking my progress and making my workouts more effective.

Now that I've reached some of my fitness goals, I'd like to share the tools I used. These will be more important to me than ever as I try to maintain my weight loss and improve my strength and endurance. (Cue the "Rocky" theme song).

ACCOUNTABILITY:

Diet and exercise are the most important parts of losing weight or staying in shape. Technology helped me keep tabs on what I was eating and how many calories I was burning.

I used MyFitnessPal, a free service that lets you maintain a digital diary of your food choices, cardio work and strength training.

The service is very simple to use. Because you can update entries using a phone app or a website, you have almost no excuse not to enter the information no matter where you are. Apps are available for the iPhone, the iPad and Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

When first using the program, you're prompted for such information as weight, height, age and activity level. That's used to create a plan for how many calories you should eat and what percentage should come from protein, fat or carbohydrates. You can also set your own parameters.

You then enter what you're eating (and drinking) for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snacks, throughout the day, and the app records the calories, fat, protein, carbs and vitamins. MyFitnessPal has an extensive list of fresh and packaged foods to choose from. Choose an apple or a can of Campbell's soup, and MyFitnessPal will add the nutritional information to your count. The database also includes popular recipes found in magazines, so you don't have to enter the ingredients individually.

You can even copy an entire meal to another day if you're a creature of habit like me. Or use your phone's camera to take a picture of a barcode and have the app look up the nutritional information for you.

But food is half the battle. MyFitnessPal also lets you enter your workouts and strength training. Just as you do with food, you simply select the activity, such as cleaning, walking the dog, taking a spinning class or, for me, playing ice hockey. Based on your personal health information, the service calculates the number of calories burned. While the numbers are only estimates, they provide a pretty solid guideline.

Once you're done entering your information, you can look at charts, graphs and lists of your diet and exercise to get a better view of your day or week.

The app will project your weight in five weeks and tell you whether you're eating too few or too many calories on any given day. You can even connect with friends and relatives who also are using the service to help keep you even more accountable and get ideas of different foods to try or activities to do.

PROGRESS:

While recording my food and exercise choices became part of my daily routine, tracking my progress helped motivate me to stay on track to getting in better shape.

For this, I enlisted the use of the Withings WiFi Body Scale ($159.99).

This is no ordinary scale. It not only measures your weight, body fat, lean muscle and Body Mass Index, but it also connects to the Internet so you can keep track of your measurements through its website or an iPhone app (iPad and Android versions are coming soon).

You can see how you compare to your personal goals and recommended health zones. You can have the scale automatically share your data with other online health coaching programs, or post results to a blog, Facebook or Twitter. There are no subscription fees.

The scale can track up to eight different people, with separate accounts for each.

A new version of the scale will be able to connect directly to your phone via Bluetooth. For those with iPhones or iPads, there also is a companion blood pressure monitor that hooks directly to your device and lets you know how your rates compare with normal ranges.

There's really nothing like checking out the different fruits and vegetables at a Farmer's Market or even your favorite grocery/natural food's store. The colors, the textures, the way you feel healthier just by looking at them. Well, eating them will probably make you healthier, so instead of just admiring, why not make an effort to permanently add more fruits and veggies to your diet? Here's a short piece on how doing so could help folks keep the pounds away for good. – Best, Chad

By Mary MacVean /Los Angeles Times

Some new research tried to figure out what might help post-menopausal women achieve long-term weight loss. And it turns out that adding produce to their diet didn’t show up as especially helpful in the short term, but in the long term it mattered.

The researchers didn’t find that eating fried chicken was just fine as long as it came with a side of broccoli. What they found was that some behaviors are hard to maintain forever, and adding produce might be easier than avoiding all fried foods for the long haul.

“People are so motivated when they start a weight-loss program. You can say, ‘I’m never going to eat another piece of pie,’ and you see the pounds coming off,” Bethany Barone Gibbs, the lead investigator, said in a statement. “Eating fruits and vegetables may not make as big a difference in your caloric intake. But that small change can build up and give you a better long-term result, because it’s not as hard to do as giving up French fries forever.”

The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, looked at overweight post-menopausal women.

Barone Gibbs, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh department of health and physical activity, said several factors work against long-term weight loss.

“Not only does motivation decrease after you start losing weight, there are physiological changes, including a decreased resting metabolic rate. Appetite-related hormones increase. Researchers studying the brain are now finding that you have enhanced rewards and increased motivation to eat when you’ve lost weight,” she says.

For older women, the additional decline in energy expenditure makes maintaining weight loss even tougher. Traditional behavioral treatments for obesity, focused on calories, have had poor long-term results.

A group of 508 women from the Pittsburgh area were divided into two, one group of which met regularly with nutritionists, exercise physiologists and psychologists to reduce fat and caloric intake, eat more produce and grains and exercise regularly.The second group was offered some general health seminars.

The researchers looked at what happened after six months and after four years. At four years, most of the intervention group had lost some weight, compared with about a third of the other group. Barone Gibbs noted that the women all had wanted to lose weight and sought help.

For the six-month mark, the researchers found that weight loss was associated with eating fewer desserts and fried foods, drinking fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, eating more fish and eating out less.

At the four-year mark, some of those things still mattered. But eating more produce and less meat and cheese emerged as important predictors of long-term weight loss.

“If the goal is to decrease the burden of obesity, the focus must be on long-term strategies because changes in eating behaviors only associated with short-term weight loss are likely ineffective and/or not sustainable,” the researchers wrote.

Restaurant visits went down for women who lost weight and those who did not; the researchers speculated the economy – not the study – was the cause.