SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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I always thought that the old cemetery across the road was just another neglected London landmark. That it may be, but amongst its overgrown shrubs and creepy crawly vines are blackberry bushes galore. Say what you will about foraging for food in a cemetery, but I feel pretty darn lucky. Their luscious fruits are just beginning to ripen and I suddenly find myself with more blackberries than I know what to do with.

The skinny on blackberries

• The blackberry season is from late July to early October
• Blackberries get kind of gross after a day or two, so eat them straight away or freeze them
• Blackberries are rich in antioxidants, including vitamin C and ellagic acid, and their seeds contain high levels of omega-3 and -6 fats, protein, and dietary fiber
• Superstition in the UK holds that blackberries should not be picked after Michaelmas (29 September) as the devil has claimed them, having left a mark on the leaves by urinating on them

I have a few months before season’s end, and I’m all about a.) hoarding blackberries in my freezer and b.) experimenting with as many blackberry recipes as possible while there are still fresh blackberries to be picked. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so I like the idea of a blackberry vinaigrette for salads. Even so, I really want to try my hand at jam, and I can’t resist a good cobbler. Here are some other recipes I look forward to experimenting with:

Blackberry recipes

• Blackberry Slump - An American version of a fruit cobbler - just dripping in hot fruit sauce
• Apple and Blackberry Pie - a simple pie with simple ingredients from delia
• Spicy Blackberry Chutney - I can see this going well with cheese, or deep-fried Indian samosas!
• Vegan Apple and Blackberry Pie - a pie without butter? The author almost has me convinced: “The apples and pear were all warm and cinnamon-y, while the blackberries just exploded in your mouth with their tart sweetness. mmmm.”
• Quick Bramble Jelly - I somehow doubt this would be quick, but I bet the results would be worth it
• Blackberry-Lime Tartlets - these just look cute
• Blackberry Tart - a decadent tart made with mascarpone, cream, and mint!
• Blackberry Sorbet - It sounds so refreshing!
• Blackberry Vinaigrette - It’s an Emeril recipe. Bam!

Readers, I need your help! Do you have any blackberry recipes you can recommend? Send em’ over! I’m dying to try them!

In this commentary in Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson equates the Weight Watchers program to a role-playing game (RPG).

The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That’s why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life’s drudgery more bearable.

I’ve never used Weight Watchers but I know people who have lost weight with the program, both through diet and exercise. Most of these people have been women - I wonder if Weight Watchers could gain a whole new market by targeting overweight gamers? Of course, this isn’t a marketing blog, this is a fitness blog, and this article highlights a very important point:

The key to getting fit is to have fun while you’re doing it.

Believe it or not, people can get as hooked on fitness as they do to RPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft.

I’m in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics — and fun — of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind.

As J.D. points out on Get Fit Slowly, the one hundred pushups challenge operates on this principle.

…make the gradually increasing pushups into a challenge in order to motivate participants. It works.

It’s true. I’ve been having loads of fun with the one hundred pushups program and look forward to “beating my max” at the end of a set (if I can). It’s amazing how these little “semantic” tricks work to keep me motivated through each set. None of this feels like “exercise” to me. Sure, it feels like hard work, but it’s definitely not a chore. And isn’t that the point?

Exercise shouldn’t feel like “work”. Life is short, and we already spend too much time working and doing chores as it is. Shouldn’t we spend our precious free time doing things that contribute to our happiness? Exercise can be one of those things, the trick is finding a way to make it fun that works for you. Some use Weight Watchers, others keep a journal, others run with friends.

How do you make exercise fun?

Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG [via Get Fit Slowly]

Chapatis are an Indian flatbread, much like a flour tortilla, and are typically eaten with dal and curries. As these are two of my favorite foods, I’ve been pretty keen to learn how to make chapatis on my own. Plus, they’re a pretty good substitute for flour tortillas. Tacos here I come!

So far, my experiments with home-cooked chapatis have been average at best. I don’t have a gas stove OR a cast iron skillet - two kitchen tools that are pretty darn helpful in firing up a surface HOT enough to cook the chapatis on. Instead, I’ve been using an electric stove and a non-stick pan. The chapatis are certainly edible enough, but I can never get them to puff up to the pillow-like proportions that the recipes describe.

Today I learned a trick from Mark Bittman: use the grill! Mark Bittman has a recipe and video that demonstrates how to cook chapatis on an outdoor grill. For lack of an outdoor grill, I decided to try it for myself using the stove’s grill setting (equivalent to a broiler), and turning the heat up as high as it goes. It worked marvelously! It was so exciting watching them puff up in the oven. They looked just like Mark’s and tasted fab with my lentil dal.

Grilled Chapatis Recipe
Grilled Chapatis Viedo

Men’s Fitness reckons there are 5 seasonings that “you should always have on hand to make nutritious and delicious meals”: onion powder, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, garlic powder and oregano.

I agree with the cinnamon, oregano and cayenne, but I’ll take fresh onion and garlic over the powder any day. This did get me thinking about my staple spices, which totally reflect my dependency on Mexican and Indian food. Here they are, in order of importance:

• Cinnamon
• Oregano
• Red Chili Flakes
• Cumin Seed
• Mustard Seeds
• Curry Leaves
• Turmeric
• Fennel Seeds
• Cumin Powder
• Bay Leaves

What about you? What’s on your spice rack?

Spice of life: 5 seasonings you should start using now [Men’s Fitness]

Here I was all set to blog about my current moratorium on caffeine when I noticed this article in the New York Time’s, Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions. The article highlights a report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest which reviews the general findings of scientific research on caffeine. Inspired by the general public’s misguided information, the report aims to dispel some of the myths surrounding caffeine.

For instance, many folks believe that caffeine can aid weight loss, but so far there isn’t any research to back this up…

Although caffeine speeds up metabolism, with 100 milligrams burning an extra 75 to 100 calories a day, no long-term benefit to weight control has been demonstrated. In fact, in a study of more than 58,000 health professionals followed for 12 years, both men and women who increased their caffeine consumption gained more weight than those who didn’t.

The news isn’t all bad though…

For the active, caffeine enhances endurance in aerobic activities and performance in anaerobic ones, perhaps because it blunts the perception of pain and aids the ability to burn fat for fuel instead of its carbohydrates.

Recent disease-related findings can only add to coffee’s popularity. A review of 13 studies found that people who drank caffeinated coffee, but not decaf, had a 30 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Another review found that compared with noncoffee drinkers, people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, had a 28 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. This benefit probably comes from coffee’s antioxidants and chlorogenic acid.

So caffeine might have some benefits, but I’m still not convinced that it’s an addiction worth keeping. I’ve been caffeine free for THREE MISERABLE DAYS (ok it hasn’t been that bad) and while I’m not exactly trembling for coffee, I have definitely suffered headaches and a tightness in the head that I can only assume is withdrawal. Do I really want to be dependent on a substance that makes me feel like poop without it? I’m excited to find out how I feel once this weird withdrawal period wears off. Sound sleep here I come!

Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

You might be interested in this from Peta Bee at The Guardian:

“We evolved from hunters - we had to run and chase animals on the hot African plains. We didn’t have time to pause for a drink,” he says. “Physiologists developed an unproven hypothesis that to become even the slightest bit dehydrated during exercise would kill you. The sports drinks industry then used this bad science to market their products.” Runners have died from hyponatraemia, but Noakes says he “has yet to find a death from dehydration in the history of competitive running”.

The article talks about different rates of dehydration for different people and a bit about how to predict how much water you should drink based on your weight difference before and after running.

Link to full article

I think it is worth reading this article from Marina Hyde in the Guardian:

Every morning, shortly after sunrise, this former factory worker and up to two thousand mostly retired Chinese descend on Ditan Park in the city’s Dongcheng district, where they spend between one and three hours exercising amongst the trees. “No absence,” says Jiao, “no matter the weather.” The ritual - frankly astonishing to Western eyes - is replicated all over town, as some participate in dance, or the traditional game of ti jian, where a sort of shuttlecock is kicked around like a hacky sack. Others stick to the Chinese tradition of tai chi, and the rest use the simple public exercise contraptions that positively litter Beijing, spread through the parks or fixed in trails down the quieter streets.

My sister lives in Macau, a SAR near Hong Kong. When I visit her I often wander up the hill behind her apartment where there is a park with exercise machines and a running track at the top. Striking, there, is the age of the athletes, it is really great to see the older folks walking to the top of the hill in order to do more exercise.

“I can’t say that you Westerners are wrong,” one Ditan regular explained recently, “but you pursue a different objective. Whereas we aspire to health, you aspire to size, speed and strength.”

Link to article

Link to slide show

Signal vs. Noise is a blog about business and design, but this recent post has some interest parallels to fitness that are worth mentioning.

David writes that the success of the popular “for Dummies” books demonstrates that people identify with being an idiot. This is as true for fitness as it is for plumbing, car repair, C++, and banjo.

How many of us have put off a run or avoided the free weights simply because we don’t consider ourselves to be a “runner” or a “weightlifter”? We feel like we don’t know what we’re doing and, therefore, we don’t do it, thus failing before we’ve even begun! But as David points out, success is not intangible:

I’ve met far too many people who seem so certain of their lack of abilities that they curb their chances of success before they’ve walked the first step…Just because you don’t know how to program or design or lead or do anything doesn’t make you a dummy or an idiot. Mastery is probably closer than you think.

David’s advice is as good for entreprenuers as it is for all of us wanna-be athletes:

If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new. Set your ambition to that of equality: There’s no reason I couldn’t be as good as that guy or girl doing what I want.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to learn the banjo!

Don’t be so quick to embrace your own ignorance [via Tim]

In 1970 the average American ate 16.4 pounds of food per week. By 2006 this had increased an additional 1.8 pounds per week.

What changed?

This nifty info-graphic by the New York Times shows some interesting trends.

• We drink 74% less whole milk but eat 180% more cheese
• Consumption of corn sweeteners is up by 373%
• We eat 14% less butter and 48% more added fats

The data made to create the graph is available from the US Department of Agriculture as Excel spreadsheets. I created the graph below a spreadsheet that contained our average daily per capital calories by year from 1970-2006.

It’s interesting to note that consumption of Fruit, Vegetables, and Dairy has been reasonably consistent, but check out that spike in added fats from 1999 to 2001. Our average daily calories from added fats went up from 497 to 616 in just one year! Any food detectives out there have any idea why?

The Overflowing American Dinner Plate[via DietBlog]
USDA Loss-Adjusted Food Availability Dataset

Today’s Guardian features an article whose headline reads “Soya-based foods may harm male fertility, say scientists”.Scared?Yeah, it worried me, too.The article, based on research by Jorge Chavarro at the Harvard school of public health, says that “the apparent fall in sperm count is unlikely to make healthy men infertile, but some experts said it could have a significant impact on those already with lower than average sperm counts.” Furthermore, “men who consumed at least half a portion of soya food a day had the lowest sperm counts.”But this isn’t the whole story.A read of the article reveals some interesting facts about the study:

• 72% of the men in the study were clinically obese, and thus more susceptible to soya effects
• 26% were or had been smokers, which may also effect fertility
• The list of soy foods assessed included processed soy foods like TVP burgers, soy cheese and soy protein powder

An article in The New Scientist offers more complete coverage of the story, including this quote from Chavarro who stresses that his research is inconclusive:

There’s no reason to panic at this moment. It’s still way too early to draw any strong conclusions about whether soya foods affect male fertility.

But if you want the real proof, read some of the comments on the New Scientist, like this one from damon:

I’ve practically eaten soy three meals a day for almost 10 years and I’ll be a proud dad come Sept!!! And.. if it’s not too much info.. it only took one try! I imagine that if there is a reduction in sperm it would only be noticeably negative for men with already low sperm counts, where every sperm counts.. so to speak. Cigars anyone??

Tom also makes an interesting point:

As this report comes form the US we can assume that the soya used was US soya and therefore almost certainly GM soya.I’d like to see it re-run with non-GM soya.

The paper touches on the last point, pointing the obesity factor as a possible explanation (26% of Chinese adult males have a BMI over 26 compared to 71% in America).What are your thoughts?