Along the same lines, one of the things that regularly frustrated me was my kitchen scale. It wasn’t annoying enough to motivate me to actual action, but it was one of those nagging frustrations, and every time I used it, I made a mental note to replace it.

It’s not that the scale was that bad; it just wasn’t very good. It was an old-school spring loaded beastie that constantly had me questioning its accuracy; consecutive weighings produced wildly different numbers, and trying to “zero” it (or “tare,” as I now know that function is properly called) was counter-intuitive and subject to the same accuracy concerns.

I’d been annoyed by the scale pretty much as long as I’ve had this blog (it didn’t matter before I started using it for dieting!), so when a guy by the name of William Geronimo wrote to me and offered to let me review a new “nutritional scale,” you can bet I jumped at the chance.

I’d heard of nutritional scales before and knew the general premise (it has a built-in database and tells you the nutritional content of the food you weigh) but had never played with one. When the EatSmart Nutritional Scale arrived, I spent quite a bit of time testing out different foods, entering in their codes, and comparing the results to other calorie data (it looks like most everyone uses the USDA database as a starting point).

As it turns out, after several weeks of using the scale, it’s not the food database that I’ve found most helpful, but the general ability to get accurate information easily with just one tool. First, the scale itself seems to be very accurate in that it produces repeatable results and makes it easy to tare (compensate for the weight of the container).

Beyond the accuracy of the scale itself and the nutritional database, it also has several features I find particularly helpful. First, it’s dead easy to switch between grams and ounces. This is great because most foods’ nutritional label show the serving sizes in grams, but for things like beverages, ounces are more common.

Second, it has a built-in calculator feature where you can put in the serving size (as determined by the nutritional label) and then the nutritional label value of the nutrient or measurement you want to know. For instance, if I have a can of apricots, I enter 122 as the serving size (that’s what’s listed on the label, in grams) and then enter 60 (the number of calories in an official serving). If my serving is more or less than 122 grams, the scale tells me how many calories are in my actual serving. This is immensely helpful for the real world where we don’t always follow the exact serving size.

Now in both cases, you could use your computer to do the same thing. A quick Google calculation will convert grams to ounces and vice versa. A basic calculator can help you adjust your numbers for a different-sized serving. But the beauty of it is that you don’t have to use yet another tool; it’s all built in! One of my biggest dieting complaints is that there are so many steps, so many things to keep track of. This scale is both helping me get better information, and it’s simplifying my dieting process. I’m a big fan!

One of the things that I like is their little affirmations that they show periodically throughout the workout and when you’re done. My favorite to date:

Enjoy the rest of the day as a fitter version of your former self.

This follows the second workout, and every time I read it, I thought, “That’s true! I’m fitter than I was 40 minutes ago!” A little cheesy, possibly, but very encouraging to me.

So, why do I want to lose weight? Your reasons might be different, but here are some that resonate with me (and my rating of how important each one is to me):

• I’ll be more attractive to others, especially Daniel: important
• I’ll be able to keep up on the bike: very important
• I’ll get more compliments: somewhat important
• I’ll feel better, physically and mentally: important
• I’ll feel more in control: important
• I’ll prove I can achieve difficult goals: important
• Daniel will think I’m awesome : very important
• I’ll enjoy food in a healthy way: somewhat important
• I’ll make other women look like slackers in comparison : somewhat important

The next step is to actually write these reasons on my card in order of importance, and set up a reminder system that will ensure I look at the card at least twice a day. The author places great emphasis on actually doing this, rather than just thinking about it. After all, if you can’t do a simple exercise like this, you probably won’t do any of the hard work of weight loss.

I’ve made three copies: one to carry, one to post on the bathroom mirror, and one for my computer monitor. This will ensure I look at them many times a day, and I will commit to reading the one on my computer every time I check my email (that’s a lot!).

I don’t remember how I first heard about this book, but it was probably one of many that I find while playing on Amazon (I know, some people play cards, and I play on Amazon…). My general Amazon policy (central to me actually retaining some of my income) is that I only buy books that aren’t available at the library. In this case, it meant I waited on hold for this book for a month or two, and that I need to decide whether to buy it or not in the next few days, since I have to return it on July 5th.

The premise of the book is straightforward: it’s difficult or impossible to maintain the healthy behaviors that result in weight loss if you don’t change the way you think. Dr. Beck’s father is also the father of the Cognitive Therapy school of thought, and this book is essentially Cognitive Therapy applied to weight loss.

The Beck Diet Solution is made up of six weeks’ worth of daily exercises. The first two weeks are focused on preparing to diet. I’m already dieting, but Dr. Beck says it’s incredibly important to do those, regardless of current dieting status. That makes sense because those weeks are about establishing the habits and knowledge that help with actually sticking to a diet.

Week three is about understanding your body while dieting—learning to accurately interpret its signals and be realistic about progress. Week four deals with sabotaging thoughts (a major focus of the book, based on the introductory chapters), while week five tackles various challenges that can ruin a diet (food pushers, eating out, traveling, and emotional eating, among others). Finally, week six is about fine-tuning your dieting skills for the long haul.

I’ll have more feedback as I go through the book, but my first impression is good. As I mentioned, I’ve got some issues with food and taste, so I hope that working through this book will not only help me see food more accurately but will also help me want to make changes for the better.

The Amazon reviews for this book are very encouraging. Reviewer after reviewer reports success, and many of them are the “I tried everything, nothing worked, and then I found this” type. I also like that the book is compatible with any diet (since I like to try them all!) and develops lifetime skills. I’ll be working through some of the exercises here on the blog (when it makes sense to do them that way) so you’ll be able to see if the book might be helpful for you as well.

My contact at PUSH.tv told me that the DVDs usually arrive very promptly (and that was my experience with the initial DVD, just not month two) but that it can take up to 12 days with the postal system. Given the four weeks I ended up doing what was supposed to be a two-week workout, I’d rather they either sent the new DVD earlier (say, at the end of the first two weeks on a new DVD) or sent it via more reliable mail, even if it cost a couple of dollars more.

Aside from the delay, I’m pleased with the new DVD. Like the second workout on the first DVD, this new workout is a challenging-but-achievable step up from the exercises I got used to. The incremental changes keep it from being overwhelming. I’m vaguely dreading the day we do full-body push-ups on the floor, but I feel like the step push-ups I’m doing now are preparing me.

With this DVD, I’m also starting to use the “Area of Focus” section in addition to the main workout. I switched my area of focus from legs to abs (because as it turns out, my legs are killer-strong from biking, but my abs are just sad), which was good, since I never bothered with the Area of Focus segment when it was legs.

The Area of Focus is basically the same thing as the general workouts (at least for me, since I have Jessica Smith as my trainer and she also leads all of the Area of Focus exercise), except that each two-minute bit is focused on an ab exercise. The result is a tough workout, even though it’s only about 10 minutes long.

I read recently that “cycling requires core strength but doesn’t produce it.” That hadn’t really occurred to me, particularly that cycling won’t make my abs measurably stronger, hence my new focus in the workouts. I’m continuing to do the regular workouts three times a week, and then doing the abs Area of Focus on alternating days.

An indication that this PUSH.tv thing really is working: Daniel did the abs workout with me yesterday and I was stronger. Not to gloat; it’s just that I’m hardly ever stronger than him. He’s going to join me on that workout regularly, so I have no doubt he’ll be whooping up on me shortly, but it’s nice while it lasts…

The book itself is a quick read: it’s 158 narrow pages of loosely-spaced text (the designer in me loved the unusual format!), so it was easy to breeze through during “found moments”. The conversational writing style helped, too.

The premise of the Shangri-La Diet

This book and theory have two basic tenets:

1. Each person has an individual weight “set point,” a specific weight that the body attempts to maintain by increasing or suppressing hunger, depending on the current distance from the set point.
2. There are techniques that can lower your set point, causing your body to want to eat less to reach that point.
3. The taste of a food is strongly associated with its calorie content, and we tend to like the taste of foods that contain many calories.

There seem to be folks who will argue with these conclusions, but the author, Seth Roberts, Ph.D., has valid scientific reasons for these claims (in my non-science-trained opinion, so take it with a grain of salt). These three points are drawn from rat studies and, more significantly to me, personal experience. I know, scientists would rather have human studies and lots of them, but short of that, my bent toward experimentation likes the overwhelming anecdotal success reported with Shangri-La on blogs and forums.

If you accept those three assumptions, though, you’ll find Seth’s resulting conclusion interesting: eating foods with no flavor but high calorie content lowers your set point and suppresses your appetite.

For this reason, Seth recommends drinking two to four tablespoons of flavorless oil every day, and not worrying about what else you eat. This sounds absurd to most dieters, who know that oil is pure fat and high-calorie. However, the reported result is that those 240-480 “extra” calories make you less hungry for other things (because the oil moves your set point down), causing your calories to drop even with the oil calories figured in, resulting in weight loss.

One important note: to avoid associating the calories with a flavor and undoing your effort, the diet requires that you have your oil at least an hour (in both directions) from anything else that has a flavor (food, toothpaste, everything).

The Shangri-La Diet in practice

One of the nice things about this diet is that it can easily be used in conjunction with other diets (well, except for the alli drug!). I decided to give it a go and see how it works for me.

I started last week with some olive oil we have around the house. Unfortunately, it’s extra virgin olive oil, the strongest tasting of the olive oil bunch, so I had to hold my nose while drinking it to get the taste-free experience that is central to the diet. It still had a bit of an aftertaste, so I drank lots of water afterwards.

The first time I tried just drinking a tablespoon of it straight. Uggh. Based on my current weight and my weight loss goal, I’m doing two tablespoons a day (at separate times to keep the tummy happy), and I really wasn’t excited to do the second “dose.”

One of the other options on the diet is to use white sugar instead. However, it’s not ideal to consume a tablespoon of sugar in one go, because it messes with the blood sugar and insulin response and all that. I read the suggestion to put the tablespoon of sugar in a quart of water and sip it for a while. I like sugar, I like water, so it sounded like a good idea.

It really, really wasn’t. Obviously some people like it just fine, but I thought it was worse than straight oil, because at least I was done with that quickly. The barely-sugared water tasted like a diet soda gone horribly wrong (and I think diet sodas are nasty to start with), and after realizing that in my first drink, I still had 28 ounces to go. I finished it (eventually!), but I wasn’t happy about it.

The next day, I tried another suggestion and put the tablespoon of oil in a cup of cold water. I held my nose and drank it all down, and realized that this was not nearly as gross as I expected. This was a method I could happily use indefinitely, so that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Because I didn’t like the lingering flavor of the extra virgin olive oil, I stopped in at the local health food co-op when I was in the area on Sunday and picked up a bottle of refined walnut oil and a bottle of canola oil. These both are much lighter in taste (almost no flavor), color (they’re very pretty, actually), and consistency (I feel like less sticks to my lips and more just goes down with the water).

Between the two bottles, there’s 64 tablespoons, so enough to give it an honest try for a month. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m still sticking to my calorie-deficit goals, but adding the oil in as part of my menu. I’m not sure what to expect since I’m already on a low-calorie diet (is it possible that my rather meager portions will actually seem like too much?), but it might help with cravings and general hunger.

I haven’t felt any noticeable difference yet, but it sounds like many people take a week or two to experience a change, so I’ll wait it out and report back.

Yesterday, though, the bodybugg let me down.  Here’s the scenario.Daniel and I had been planning for a while to do what he calls “the big Hard Guy loop.”  As I mentioned in another post, Hard Guy is an advanced mountain biking trail that has long been held up to me as one of the most challenging partial-day rides around here.  A couple of weeks ago we did the Hard Guy trail itself, but were waiting for a Sunday when we would have abundant time to do the big loop.

The big loop starts with three miles of constant climbing on the road to get to the beginning of the dirt trail.  It then proceeds as we did it before, with a little over six miles of almost constant uphill on a dirt trail (sometimes single-track, sometimes old Jeep trail).  When we did it before, we turned around at that point, and rode back down to the pavement where we’d parked.

Instead of stopping there, though, the big loop climbs a dirt road for another 500 feet of altitude in about a half-mile of distance.  Yeah, that hurt.  We stopped to let the nausea pass and had a quick snack, and then rode down the other side of the summit for a while on road, hit a couple of single-track trails with downs (Scott’s) and ups (Corrals), climbed back to the road, went down a short trail, and looped back to our original starting point on one of my favorite trails (Crestline-Kestral).

All said and done, it comes to about 22 miles (as opposed to the 12 or so for just the Hard Guy trail).  I had extra motivation, too, because Daniel bribed me with a rain shell if I did the whole loop.  I felt like I did reasonably well, not taking any breaks (even though I was so tired) except for the one at the summit, so I deserved my prize.

When we finished up, Daniel looked at the Polar heart-rate monitor he was wearing and read off the stats: 4 hours, 25 minutes of riding; 2550 calories; average heart rate (which I can’t remember, but know was annoyingly low because he’s annoyingly fit).  I was very tired and looking forward to getting home and syncing my bodybugg to see how many calories I’d burned.  Considering that the much shorter Hard Guy ride a couple of weeks ago burned 954 calories, I was also looking forward to a good lunch.

Imagine my surprise (read: freak out!) when I downloaded my data and was told I’d burned just 1212 calories!  In four and a half hours of killer hard work!  (Okay, some of that was downhill… but only about an hour of the total.)  Arrggg!

I felt terrible.  I’d put in this ton of effort, and apparently it was really minimal in the end.  I was ready to go all out depressive.  Fortunately, Daniel popped in to see the results and immediately protested their accuracy.  I argued feebly for the accuracy for a little while, and he asked how the results are calculated.  I pulled up bodybugg’s “The Science Behind bodybugg” page and had him read it.  There were a few things that bugged his engineer-brain:

•  The “Heat Flux” metric that’s a core part of the way the bodybugg calculates work.  One thing I didn’t mention above was that the temperature was mostly in the 90s (Fahrenheit) for our ride yesterday (as opposed to 60s and 70s a couple of weeks ago).  Daniel thinks that maybe the bodybugg wasn’t accurately recording this metric since the air temperature was about the same as the heat I was dissipating.
• The bodybugg doesn’t seem to track heart rate, which is a pretty accurate indicator of cardio exertion.
• The accelerometer seems like it would be less helpful on a bike, particularly on uphills where the forward progress is extremely slow, but very steady in both forward speed and on the various axises (axes?).  I expect that the accelerometer actually has more relevance going downhill, when there’s a lot of motion in all directions (especially on my hard-tail bike!), but the effort level is just a fraction of the climb.

Honestly, we have no idea why the numbers were so low.  I’m going to ask my bodybugg trainer about it on our call tomorrow.  But Daniel (together with the comparison data from the shorter ride) has persuaded me that the numbers really are low.  Even bodybugg’s calorie calculator suggests I should have burned at least another thousand calories.

At this point, my biggest question is: if it doesn’t give me accurate data for my chosen sport (cycling in various temperatures!), should I try to return it and get my money back (and buy a sweet Polar HRM), or keep it for rest days?  What do you think?

Here, for your comparative pleasure (and my record-keeping), are the numbers thus far:

Hey, maybe that’s why I don’t like measuring! That was slightly depressing. I’m not sure what to make of it, just because my weight and body fat is going down, but a good number of my measurements are going up. (Of course, it may just mean that my self-measurement techniques are screwy, too.) I guess another month will be enlightening… especially since that month will contain another metric century on the bike, and lots of hard mountain biking.

For one thing, I received these resistance bands in my PUSH package; you know, those long, thin, stretchy sheets of some wonder-material (they always make us think of the movie Ski Patrol…).  They weren’t used in the first workout, so I thought maybe in this one…

Well, no.  It may very well be that they’re actually for the cardio or the ski workout that are also on the DVD and that I haven’t tried yet.  (It may also be that they’re really just for tormenting your cats, which is the main thing we’ve been using them for…)

Fun resistance bands aside, I was pleased with the second workout.  PUSH did a very good job of making it a natural progression from the first workout.  There were two segments that were repeats, a bunch of new and different exercises, and (my favorite) several segments that were “upgrades” of segments in the last workout.

For instance, in the first workout, there was a segment called “Forward Stepups,” where you put a step on its highest setting, kept one foot on the step, and moved the other from the floor to a knee-raise above the step.  There were a bunch on one side, a bunch on the other, and then a break, before doing a set on each side again.

In the new workout, the segment is repeated, but there are no breaks, and you hold your arms in the air the whole time.  It’s a small change, but it makes the exercise more difficult while still keeping it doable.  Similarly, we’ve moved from knee-pushups to full-body pushups using the step to make the transition gentler.

I really like these incremental changes in difficulty, because I feel like I’m making noticeable progress, but I don’t feel overwhelmed.  As I mentioned yesterday, I think these workouts are improving my health and fitness ability in general, and that’s a very good result for a practical girl like me.

My only gripe with the second workout (beyond my general list ) was that there seemed to be something wrong with the video on a few segments.  I’m not an A/V geek, but I’d say that the frame rate was too low; Jessica seemed to be having a bit of a strobe effect.  I only noticed it on two or three segments, but it was pretty distracting.

Other than that minor annoyance, I’m very happy with my PUSH experience and looking forward to seeing how they’ll challenge me next.

If you’re not familiar with the bodybugg, it’s a nifty little gadget that tracks actual calorie expenditure (or as close to it as you can get outside of a lab setting). There are two parts: an armband that you wear during all waking hours (except when you’re wet, so not in the shower or the pool), and a website that tracks the data. The big benefit is that it’s possible, with consistent food logging, to know exactly what your calorie deficit (and expected weight loss) is.

I’d been pining after one of these toys for a couple of months, and tried to convince Apex, the manufacturer, to give me one to review on this blog. Sadly, they completely ignored me (didn’t even write back to say no, which I though was somewhat rude).

Eventually I gave up checking my spam folder “just in case” and decided to plunk down the substantial chunk of change ($399) and buy the dang thing. One of the trainers at my local health club was nice enough to spend an hour showing me the bodybugg a month ago when I was looking at starting the Johnson UpDayDownDay diet, so I bought it through him (I’m assuming he gets a commission).

Setting the beast up was a bit annoying. First, I followed the included directions and logged into the site. I wasn’t very far into it when I encountered the following:

The bodybugg system will not work with the operating system you are currently using. You’ll need to upgrade your computer.
To learn more, click here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/howtobuy/default.asp

Given that I’m on a Mac, I found the statement about upgrading my computer a little insulting. (Understand that I’m OS-agnostic; the language just seems a little rude.) I hadn’t realized that it was Windows-only (given that it’s web-based, uses Java, and syncs through USB). I don’t usually worry about that since I also have a laptop running Windows Vista; I just would have liked to connect the USB sync device to my desktop, since it’s not constantly being moved.

No matter–I grabbed my laptop and proceeded to set up there. Only… the site suggested that Firefox is an option (it tested for browser compatibility as well as the OS, and Firefox passed), but it got increasingly buggy as I went through setup. One particularly bad window used only about a 150×250 pixel space to display everything (despite maximizing the window) and required a ridiculous amount of scrolling to answer the large number of questions… only to do nothing when I hit the “Done” button.

It eventually occurred to me that even though they seemed to support Firefox, their odd attachment to Microsoft might imply that Internet Explorer would work better. I pulled up IE7, logged in, and wha-la: success. Turns out that they have designed so thoroughly around IE that it’s pretty much inoperable in other browsers, which is poor design (in this web developer’s opinion) but manageable since I actually have the required hardware and software.

Once I got that all sorted out, I got asked about food preferences, goals, all that good stuff. I’m now the proud owner (no, wait, the site is subscription-based…) of a page with little charts on it.

You can definitely tell it’s an up day! No exercise, and a lot of food… but in my defense, I logged all the food I’m planning on eating today, not just what I’ve eaten so far. Guess I’d better get jogging or something!

Now one of the disappointments of the bodybugg (but I knew it before I bought it) is that it only tracks calories used, not calories consumed. I know, I’m kind of just nitpicking at this point, but logging my food is always the hardest part of dieting for me, and the bodybugg ad on the official site kind of seemed to imply that it tracked intake. I figured out early on that it doesn’t, but it’s still kind of sad for me.

However, one of the things that sold me on the bodybugg is how easy their food tracker is to use. They seem to be using the Java equivalent of AJAX to quickly pull up foods and make adding them a breeze. I’m interested to see how well their “frequent foods” stuff works, but that will take a couple of days of using it. In the meantime, the food database seems reasonable complete and I’m feeling hopeful.

More updates to come as I actually get data!