A Lifetime of Diets and Fitness: Part 1

Weight management wasn't an issue for me for most of my life.  At eighteen I was 183 cm (6') tall and weighed 59 kg (130 lbs).  After I joined Hap Ki Do my weight climbed to a mighty 61 kg (135 lbs) and stayed there for years.

I ate whatever I wanted and considered body fat to be a problem for others.  My weight climbed as I put on muscle in my late twenties but as I entered my thirties the fat started to creep in too.  I was disturbed to see my 86 cm (34") waist become an 89 cm (35") waist that refused to shrink.  Since my father had died suddenly a few years earlier from a heart attack, I understood the consequences of letting your weight get away from you.  I decided I needed to pay attention to my body composition and started looking for ways to deal with my creeping waist line.

Before being confronted by my swelling waist, I had always assumed exercise alone would be sufficient to keep excess fat from accumulating.  Since my regular training regime was four 1-1/2 hour hard training sessions every week, it never occurred to me gaining fat could be a problem.

A little clarification on "hard training".  The normal forty minute Hap Ki Do warm-up sent fit twenty-somethings to the washroom to throw up from lactic acid build up.  On more than one occasion, I saw athletic, stubborn people drop to the floor in mid-workout, unable to proceed.  Strong guys mopped sweat puddles off the floor with their uniforms to prevent people from slipping when we started moving around the room.  It was hard, even for people who had been doing it for years.

And when we finished the warm-up we still had skills training for another fifty minutes.

I couldn't face an increase in exercise given that baseline and it  wouldn't have made any difference anyway.  Exercise helps, but ultimately it is how you eat that decides your body composition.

There was weight (i.e. body fat) management information floating around from the Canadian government and medical associations at this time, so I listened to it.  Paraphrasing their advice, the message seemed to be "follow the Food Guide" and "fats are bad".

So, I cut fats out and added more vegetables.  Some fat removal was easy, as I'd never eaten fat on the edges of my steak or enjoyed deep fried chicken skin anyway.  I just got more aggressive on avoiding such things.  Other fat sources weren't so easy to say goodbye to though. I love cheese, at the time I loved ice cream in large quantities, and I soon discovered many delicious foods are delicious because they contain fat.  Still, with my pants cutting into my middle, I resolved to remove the fat from my diet and to a very large extent, I did.

Confident I'd solved my problem, I accepted the need for 89 cm (35") pants and cruised along for awhile, wishing I could eat more delicious fat-filled foods.

Then one day I woke up and found I needed 91 cm (36") pants.

So, not only was I eating bland food, but I was gaining fat.  It was pretty clear avoiding fats and eating according to the food guide wasn't working.  I needed to try something else.

Opso: His Diet and Your Health

Meet our mascot, Opso.  He's over there to the left waving at you.  You may not know it, but Opso (in one of his innumerable incarnations) lives with you and has lived with you all your life.  The degree to which Opso gets to express himself varies from person to person, but he's been part of pretty much every human being who's ever lived.

Opso gets his name from opsophagos, an ancient Greek term for someone obsessed food, and in our society he faces many temptations aimed at his basest desires.  If you listen too closely to him and indulge without limits you will find yourself gaining fat and facing an increased risk of chronic diseases.

Given that listening to Opso can have serious consequences, there are those who recommend banishing him from your life, or caging him up so he never tempts you. I don't like this advice.  He's fun to have around when celebrating with friends and family, travelling to new countries, or you need a reminder life is more than work and chores.  What is important is that you be firm and set some boundaries so you can handle him.  You need to prevent Opso from overeating the sugary, calorie-filled food all around us and guide him instead to nutrition and flavour.

So, just how do you do that? The most effective approaches seem to have some common elements:

1. Get him to drink water rather than high calorie, sugary drinks.
2. Remove simple carbs that rapidly metabolize into glucose from his diet
3. Insist the day start with a good meal to set the dietary tone
4. Only feed him to the point where his hunger is addressed, rather than letting him eat until he can eat no more
5. Be aware he will take the opportunity to eat everything he can when alcohol reduces your inhibitions
6. Stay vigilant or he'll stuff you with the basest foods he can find

You can establish the necessary discipline with diets I'll discuss (along with giving you some sample recipes) in future posts here at NutritionLogic.  Hopefully you'll find one that works for you, because letting Opso do whatever he wants is too dangerous, and driving him away would be tragic.

Your Home for Flavourful Nutrition

NutritionLogic is a personal project I've decided to share on the Web in the hope that contributions from others interested in great recipes, health, fitness and nutrition will improve the final result. I also hope sharing what I've learned will help others stay fit, trim and active without reducing meals to a mechanical exercise in chewing.

A few words on my educational and professional experience would probably be helpful to understand where my research is coming from. My undergraduate courses were varied (chemical engineering, biochemistry and kinesiology at a couple different universities) but they ultimately came together for me in a Masters of Engineering in Chemical Engineering with a specialty in Bio-engineering. I'm not a nutritionist or medical expert, but I can follow scientific papers and will attempt to use my background to explain findings I post here. My professional experience can be found at my LinkedIn profile, a brief summary being I am a software development manager and advisor with a particular interest in start-ups and small teams.

When I wasn't in school or at work during the last thirty years, I spent twenty years training in Hap Ki Do, a Korean martial art, to obtain a 4th Dan Black belt and Instructor ranking. This experience gave me good body awareness (useful for evaluating diets and exercises), and it taught me how to train and stay fit.  I've also done a lot of weight lifting and yoga over the years.

On the epicurean side, I have had a passion for food since childhood. As an adult I've traveled to many places and enjoyed their cuisine (France, Japan, Italy, the Canadian West Coast, Mexico, the Southern US and Southern India to name a few).  I've taken several different cooking courses and experimented with different styles on my own to create personalized recipes.

NutritionLogic brings all these disparate interests together in a single project. I am working to combine my scienctific, martial arts and software development knowledge with my love of great recipes to build tools that support my goals in health, fitness and food enjoyment.

I plan to extend the site capabilities to be useful to those who aren't developing the code (i.e. everyone other than me). Since this is a part-time project for a single developer I'm afraid I can't promise rapid progress but I hope your patience will be rewarded in the long run.

In the meantime I will share my discoveries with you on Blogger and at NutritionLogic. I hope you will be able to participate in the blog comments and with the diet, recipe and ingredient tools as they mature.  Please join me in a quest for the most delicious ways to maintain optimal health we can find. Hopefully, success will take a while because the journey should be more interesting than the destination.