Diet & Exercise update - Week 13

A fairly good week, exceeding my daily step count target on all but one day last week. But in the first half of the week I had several days where I overate, which made my average daily calories too high overall. I had an a appointment with a specialist doctor on Friday, and the results of some recent blood tests strongly suggest I have Coeliac disease (yet to be confirmed by an upper GIT endoscopy and biopsy - a fun addition to my overdue 'colonoscopy day'). So I've been told to stop eating ANY wheat containing products and I will also need to avoid Rye and Barley gluten. Since I typically ate Weet-bix for breakfast, and wheat pasta for dinner, this will require making some changes to my diet (and a lot more careful reading of ingredient labels). On the plus side, perusing the labels of various confectionery products on the weekend I found that nearly all of them contain glucose from wheat, so I'll have to eliminate them completely (which I find easier to do that 'cutting back' a bit).

Apparently around 1 in 100 people have Coeliac disease, but around 75% of them are un-diagnosed (and they often have no obvious symptoms). I had heard of this condition before, but didn't think eliminating wheat was likely to help my eczema much, as I only have a 'low' allergy to wheat according to previous blood tests. However, it turns out that Coeliac disease is not an allergy to wheat per se, but an autoimmune disease. Coeliac disease is often thought to be associated with being underweight (as it causes malnutrition), but studies have found that a large proportion of undiagnosed patients are overweight or obsese at the time of diagnosis. One worrying finding was that ~80% of patients gained weight after a couple of years on a gluten-free diet. [I suspect that un-diagnosed Coeliac sufferers may naturally eat more calories in order to get adequate nutrition, and that once the gluten-free diet has allowed their small intestine to recover they will tend to put on weight if they continue to eat the same quantities of food as before -- so I'll have to be especially vigilant to avoid overeating once I'm on a gluten-free diet].

I went for a hike in the local national park with DS2 (with his cub scout group) on Saturday, and we did quite a bit of extra walking when we (I) got lost on the way back to our car (we had gotten off at the wrong bus stop). And on Sunday I did some walking in addition to the weekly squash session with DS1, so I'm feeling relatively fit and slim at the moment (although I'm still on the borderline betweem being merely 'overweight' and 'obese' according to my BMI -- so a long way still to go).

.             Fibre      Carbs    Fat     Protein    kCals     Wt       Steps
              g/dy       %        %       g/dy       /dy       kg       /dy
Week 10       31.3       59.6     24.1     98.4      2436      94.7     11,811
Week 11       39.2       65.6     18.4    102.9      2752      95.0     9,196
Week 12       38.6       65.2     17.1    106.5      2570      94.2     11,751
Week 13       25.6       64.5     18.8    102.5      2789      93.9     12,589


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Diet & Exercise update - Week 12

Quite a good week, meeting my calorie and step targets most days, and ending up with reasonable averages for the week. My average weight for the week was the lowest this year, and I ended the week at my lowest weight since 2012. I still haven't got into a regular habit of doing 5BX, so that's the next thing to work on. The new Milo activity band has been working OK, although it does record a few 'phantom' steps (when moving my arm rapidly), which the Aldi tracker didn't do. And the Milo app is rather useless (it takes ages to 'sync' despite the app only displaying daily total step, and not a graph of five minute totals which the Aldi device/app did).

.             Fibre      Carbs    Fat     Protein    kCals     Wt       Steps
              g/dy       %        %       g/dy       /dy       kg       /dy
Week 10       31.3       59.6     24.1     98.4      2436      94.7     11,811
Week 11       39.2       65.6     18.4    102.9      2752      95.0     9,196
Week 12       38.6       65.2     17.1    106.5      2570      94.2     11,751 

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Diet & Exercise: Every step counts

An alternative title for this post would be "Every step is in the right direction when it comes to health benefits" - but that doesn't scan as well ;) I must admit that aside from being overweight (OK, obese) since my undergraduate days, and always hating getting sweaty due to my eczema, I had also had the preconception that to be of any real benefit you had to do do substantial amounts of vigorous exercise, otherwise it wasn't worthwhile. For many years this meant I'd alternate between periods of gym membership (when I'd do more than an hour of weight training and brisk aerobic conditioning using a mix of stationary bike, rowing machine and treadmill, three times a week) lasting from several months to a couple of years before 'dropping off' and becoming almost completely sedentary again.

However, a recent online course I did on EdX ('The Body Matters') helped convince me that while it might be best to be of ideal weight/BMI and doing the recommended minimum of 3x30 min sessions of vigorous exercise a week, it is still important to do regular exercise when overweight. Indeed, according to Dr Steven  Blair, being 'fat and fit' you can be as healthy as being 'lean and fit' (although personally I think it would be easier in the long term to maintain a high level of fitness if you are in the 'normal' weight/BMI range than if you are overweight/obese). This encouraged me to pursue a daily walking regime immediately, rather than postpone 'getting serious' about my fitness until after I'd shed my excess weight.

However, I still thought that simply walking, while being 'better than nothing' was a poor substitute for real exercise - such as going jogging or running. But with my weight, history of knee and foot problems, and tendency to get heat rash and eczema problems when jogging or running, I thought I'd just have to 'make do' with walking at least 10,000 steps/day.

But apparently walking can be JUST AS GOOD as running in terms of health benefits! This article reported research results (studies of 33,000 runners and almost 16,000 walkers) that found that walking had essentially the same risk reduction effects as running for Hypertension, Cholesterol, and Diabetes Mellitus. To quote the abstract:

"The risk reductions were not significantly different for running than walking for diabetes mellitus (P=0.94), hypercholesterolemia (P=0.06), or CHD (P=0.26), and only marginally greater for walking than running for hypercholesterolemia (P=0.04)."

One proviso is that this was the case when adjusted for equivalent energy expenditure - so you'd have to spend more time walking than running to gain the same health benefit (for example, the MET (metabolic equivalent) rating for brisk walking at 4.8 km/h is 3.3, whereas the MET value for running is around 8.0 - so walking 10,000 steps in around 90 mins would only be as beneficial as running for 40 minutes or so.

So, while it is nice to supplement my daily walking regime with a weekly hour of squash and the occasional kayaking trip, I no longer feel that walking isn't 'real' exercise. And my focus is now to increase my weekly average for daily step count, and to increase the pace of my walking as I get fitter. Of course I'd also like to get into the habit of doing an 11 minute '5BX' session every evening if I can manage it.

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Diet & Exercise update - Week 11

I was going reasonably well until Friday afternoon, when I bought some confectionery and also didn't go for my evening walk. My eczema was really bad as we had been rearranging office cubicle allocations at work and with all the 'tidying', packing, unpacking, and vacuuming being done at work my allergies were really kicking in. I've noticed that when I'm really sick and sorry for myself I tend to over eat. I also ate junk food and didn't get enough walking done on Saturday, but by Sunday I was feeling better and got a lot of walking done, in addition to playing squash for an hour with the boys and even doing my 5BX on Sunday night. Overall my average daily calories for the week were too high, and my activity (walking) too low, but it wasn't too bad.

I somehow managed to misplace my Aldi activity tracker on Saturday evening,  and couldn't find it on Sunday morning despite looking everywhere for an hour or so. In the end I decided to buy another 'Milo Champion Band' activity tracker from Woolworths for $30, and I used an 'Exacto' hobby knife to slice a window into the black Aldi wrist band as it was the right size to fit the Milo device. It looks quite cool (just like a proper FitBit) and the 'band' works quite well, although the Milo app is nothing flash. I managed to clock up 14,644 steps on Sunday, and my weight was down to 94.1 kg this morning, so this week is off to a good start.

.             Fibre      Carbs    Fat     Protein    kCals     Wt       Steps
              g/dy       %        %       g/dy       /dy       kg       /dy
Week 7 (STD)  28.9       67.2     16.4    108.5      3121      96.3     3,973
Week 8 (STD)  32.1       65.2     16.0    128.4      2884      96.3     8,378
Week 9 (STD)  37.8       61.8     22.2    106.5      2748      96.2     8,560
Week 10       31.3       59.6     24.1     98.4      2436      94.7     11,811
Week 11       39.2       65.6     18.4    102.9      2752      95.0     9,196 

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