I’m VERY sedentary; always have been, really. I’m not overweight, but I eat a lot of pasta, and I am pretty weak physically, and it’s difficult for me to get motivated (potential employers: this doesn’t count for anything work-related! :)). That got me concerned about diabetes, not to mention all sorts of other things that could follow from the previously mentioned facts.
I’d love to find some way to exercise more that could be done no matter what the weather, and where I didn’t have to endure jeers and/or condescension from idiots passing by in cars or elsewhere in the gym (both of which have happened to me before). The apartment complex I live in has facilities, but I really don’t know how/where to start, what to use, how to stay motivated, and how to know if I’m doing “enough.” Any good resources or suggestions for me?
BTW, speaking of diabetes, when “excessive urination” is listed as a symptom, do you actually have to PRODUCE anything for it to count, or is increased urges, even if the bladder isn’t actually full, enough? Just curious, since my own instance tonight could’ve been just the Cokes I drank…
And I would perhaps break your pasta addiction … get away from refined grains and back to whole grains. Same goes for bread, rice - anything over refined actually.
Instead of a pot of spaghetti, how about a lovely minestrone, heavy in beans and tomatoes, onions, zucchini, celery and maybe kale, with a restrained amount of sausage and a small amount of whole grain pasta? Still gets you the tomatoey basiley italian flavor, lots of legumes and veggies for fiber, lower carbs than spaghetti.
And I used to crank music and dance around the house while cleaning it. Hey, what can I say - cleaning is boring. At least getting my boogie on to good music made it less boring =) Heck, crank tunes and boogie for the hell of it, dancing is fun.
No offense, but are you a man over 35 years old? The urination urge w/o production may be coming from your prostate being larger than usual.
I know you don’t want to Jazzercise in your living room, exactly, but even knee-ups and jogging in place in front of the TV will get your heart rate up; if there are people living below you be mindful of how hard you step. You’ll find dozens of videos on Youtube showing exercises you can do w/ a chair or a wall to stretch and tone, no need to go to the gym.
But when you do feel confident enough to go to the facility at your complex, start on the machines that make you sweat - treadmill, rowing, bike, elliptical. Think of it this way - you pay for those things in your rent, why let them go to waste?
Right now, grab a sheet of paper and write down what you’re eating and the calorie content as you go. Many websites will track this for you if you’re so inclined but it will feel more real if you physically write it down and can glance at it throughout the day. See where your calories come from; they should rarely if ever come in liquid form. Any food is OK in moderation.
Switch from Coke to water; there are plenty of fizzy, flavored waters if you find the immediate transition yucky. Kroger has a brand called Crystal Clear that comes in 1 liter bottles and uses Splenda rather than aspartame; when you finish it, refill w/ plain water and go from there. But the best case scenario is to get a reusable water bottle and keep refilling it. Even the nicer metal ones can be had for a quarter and up at any thrift shop - bleach is your friend.
If you don’t have insurance or are loathe to go to your doctor for whatever reason, your county health department probably offers a test called A1C which will help you see what your immediate risk of diabetes will be.
Good on you for thinking about your health BEFORE it becomes a life-altering problem!
I dunno if it’s a prostate thing; I did get SOME urine out, but not as much as the urge seemed to indicate. It was also extremely sudden, and may be one off. I usually don’t drink a lot of soda, but I did tonight because I was in a bar and I don’t drink alcohol, and I also knew I’d be up late.
(And I don’t HAVE to eat zucchini, right? As an aside, it’s sort of a sad comment on American food corporate culture that one of the most basic foods imaginable [bread], a staple of an entire region’s diet for hundreds of years [rice], and the key part of a lot of more than one major country’s cuisine [pasta] have been turned by food manufacturers into evil that must be avoided at all costs.)
When you live in a consumerist society the more you consume the better, right? The more you can consume the higher your status. Moderation is for socialists! /bat-shit crazy off/
If you like zucchini, eat it; Costco sells a vegetable lasagna full of zucchini that’s delicious and you never know it’s in there. I’ve pureed squash to add to bean dishes for sweetness and you can’t tell it’s in there. Great soluble fiber, squash.
For me, the big breakthrough on exercise was to quit the macho bullshit. I always pushed myself way, way, way too hard because everything I read was like “if you aren’t keeping your heartrate in the target zone for 25 minutes, you are wasting your time” and I just couldn’t do it, so I quit.
This is what I did: I went on Craigslist and bought a cheap exercise bike and put it in front of the TV. The first time I got on it, I did it for as long as it was easy, which was about 5 minutes. After that, I started to feel it physically, but especially mentally: I just hated it SO FUCKING MUCH that all I could think about was stopping. I was bored and miserable at the same time. But that didn’t kick in until 5 minutes, so I decided to do 5 minutes twice a day, because that seemed easy.
Then I inched it up. And I mean inched. I added a minute or two every couple weeks. But the great thing was that since it was easy, I never, ever skipped–and I mean ever. Every other time I’d started an exercise routine, I’d be so miserable that I’d be excited if I got sick, or had to work a 16 hour day, or my mother came into town because those were “legit” excuses, and those excuses kept the habits from forming. When my commitment was tiny, nothing stopped me, and good habits formed. More importantly, my brain learned to entertain me while I exercised, so it was no longer a tortuous interval of boredom, resentment, and pain.
All the inching really adds up. Eventually I was up to two hours a day (stepped back once I reached my goal weight and now that I am pregnant) and I swear, those two hours were far easier than the first five minutes.
So don’t be afraid to start slow. It’s really about forming habits. It doesn’t matter how much you exercise tomorrow: it matters how much you exercise over the next year.
No you don’t have to put zucchini in your life, I happen to hate it, personally. It just seems that a lot of people like it in minestrone.
I make my minestrone by getting a bag of <insert number of types of beans> bean soup “mix”, raid my freezer for chicken stock [use chicken, vegetarian,beef, whatever trips your trigger] a few onions chopped coarsley, a whole bunch of celery chopped, leaves and all, 8 or 9 carrots peeled and chopped, the largest can of diced or stewed tomatoes [squoodge the stewed ones into smaller bits if they are the whole tomato kind] about 2 tbsp of italian seasoning, peel and chop a whole bulb of garlic, 4 or 5 bay leaves and simmer 5 or 6 hours. When it is about done, I boil enough water in a different pot to cook up a cup of dentili or acini di pepe pasta and turf it in just before serving. If I am making for vegetarians, I use vegetarian broth, for carnivores chicken broth and I will fry and drain sausage and pop it in at the beginning of cooking. Not a traditional recipe, but it works for me.
People stop exercising cause it’s BORING. I found books on tape to be my answer. I know “read” all the classic books I wanted to but never found time to do. It makes the time go by quick. And since my library has a lot of books on tape, it’s free.
And remember if you’re out of shape, it can take a year or more till your able to do an hour of aerobic exercise.
If you can get to a pool do it. Swimming is EXCELLENT exercise and many people overlook this. Just make sure you’re actually swimming and not floating. But it’s low impact and you can incorporate lots of ways to swim those laps.
It’s nothing to do with food manufacturing. Food traditions based around starches were typical of times and places where people worked much, much harder than you do at subsistence. “Getting enough food” has been a problem throughout much of human history. Now that it isn’t a problem, it makes sense to eliminate something that contains the least nutrition and the dense calories: white starches.
If you burned 6,000 calories a day farming or mining you could eat all the bread or pasta you wanted. But you don’t so you can’t.
A very simple dietary change you can make is to switch from white pasta to brown rice, quinoa or whole wheat pasta. Some of the brands out there are better than others, but we’ve been eating alternatives to white pasta for a couple of years now and I don’t even notice a difference.
True. But even the doc when I first went in didn’t count it as anything to worry about. It was too slow and too little to spark any real attention. You gotta drop like 25 pounds in a couple weeks to get doctors attention apparently, and I had lost about 17 or 18 pounds over 6 or 8 months. Add in that I had been bicycling a ton and doc didn’t really think it was all that unexplained. He mostly did the blood tests because I hadn’t had any tests in a long time, and he figured he might as well look for anything uncommon.
And to expand, looking back, I do think I had symptoms, but none of them were scary enough or common enough that anyone (including 2 doctors) thought anything was wrong. Two that come to mind are that I suddenly couldn’t wear my wedding rings because they gave me a rash, and I developed a really crazy (for me) sweet tooth. Both went away as soon as I got my blood sugar under control.
If I’d’ve been running to the bathroom a lot, or losing weight a lot faster, or any other number of things, maybe the docs would have caught it.
Go to any store that sells exercise DVDs. (I bought my last DVD at Target, FWIW.) Check out the titles and see what appeals to you.
I recommend starting with exercise DVDs for several reasons. (1) If you’re sedentary, sometimes it’s hard to get active because you don’t know what to do and it can be embarrassing to go out in public and clearly not know what you’re doing. Getting a DVD will both provide detailed instruction and save you the embarrassment of looking clueless in front of other people. (2) There are enough options that you can probably find something that appeals to you, and if it appeals to you you’re more likely to stick with it. (3) You can do it in the comfort of your own home in any weather. (4) It’s portable, so if you go on vacation you can bring the DVDs with you and work out wherever you’re staying.
My personal recommendation is Billy Blanks’s Tae Bo.
Thanks for the tips so far! The two things I want to focus on are what to do (the DVD idea is a very interesting one) and how to get motivated. Hopefully, getting motivated on this topic will help me get it in others.
My advice - unless you do yoga or swimming - is to get some good shoes. Spend $100+ on them. I like New Balance. It helps if you go to a store to buy them the first time to get the right fit.
Then, anything you decide to do will at least be kind to your feet, knees and hips.
I LOVE Manda Jo’s advice. She is spot on. The best exercise is whatever you’re willing to do, that you can keep doing.
I just got back to the gym today after a month of being benched (I had surgery a month ago) and it felt so GREAT. I don’t know if I could have gone another day without it.
I think really just understanding yourself is the first step to success. What works for one does not work for another, but it’s not like one way is “wrong” and the other is “right.”
I simply cannot work out alone, or at home. Period. When I stopped pretending I was going to work out at home, or alone at any time, I started having much more sucess in working out consistently.
Don’t laugh but I was watching an episode of “The Biggest Loser” when I realized that I simply am not internally motivated and need someone to tell me exactly what to do at all times in my workout. Since I can’t afford to hire Jillian to scream at me (LOL) I joined a karate school, and that works for me. If the instructor tells me to do 10 knee kicks left then 10 knee kicks right, I do it. If he tells the class to do 40 sit ups, I do 40, and if he tells us to do 80, then 80 is what I do. On my own I’d do 20 and call it good.
We often say the hardest exercise is opening the dojo’s front door. I really enjoy the community spirit, take advantage of meditation classes when I’m able, and have made some good friends.
I go to karate 3x/week, and recently added a yoga class on Saturdays.
As an aside, it’s sort of a sad comment on American food corporate culture that one of the most basic foods imaginable [bread], a staple of an entire region’s diet for hundreds of years [rice], and the key part of a lot of more than one major country’s cuisine [pasta] have been turned by food manufacturers into evil that must be avoided at all costs.)