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You are here: Home / 2015 / Archives for April 2015

Archives for April 2015

The Great Diet Con

Zoey · April 30, 2015 · 7 Comments

diet-lie

How many times have you heard someone say that a diet ‘worked’ but then later on they put the weight back on? Seems to me the diet didn’t work so well.

First Lie: Weight Loss is a Diet’s Success, Gaining the Weight is Your Failure

It’s kind of perfect isn’t it? If you lose the weight, the diet is proven effective, but if you put it back on it’s because of your own personal failure. But the reality is, for everyone who goes on a diet about 90% of them will not only put back on any weight they lose, they will put on a bit of extra weight as well. Diets are probably the only product you can sell to a consumer that doesn’t work but will still have them coming back for another round.

Second Lie: Just Count Calories and Exercise

It sounds easy, but really you know it’s not true. Because to believe this you have to believe that all calories are created equal. And they can’t be. Because the fact is that eating a chocolate coated ice cream is not the same as eating a vegetable stir fry. But the calories say they are the same. And it’s just not true.

Third Lie: If you are slim, you are healthy

This isn’t exclusive to the diet industry. There is a pervasive belief that how you look is an indicator for how healthy you are. But the fact is that you can be slim and internally obese and you can be obese and internally fit. There is no real way of knowing how healthy or unhealthy you are based on how you look. But it’s convenient to sell you this idea because then you have to be a certain weight to achieve a certain health factor. But the reality is that generally health benefits are linked to activity level, not weight loss.

Fourth Lie: Fat is bad for you.

If you believe this then it might shock you to know that low-fat dairy is a risk factor for obesity. It destabilises blood sugar, which is a key factor in food cravings. Because low-fat foods tend not to taste as good they often have added sugar and are less satisfying so you eat more.

Fifth Lie: Weight Loss is a Good Goal

It can seem like a good goal when part of what you want is to lose weight, feel a bit more comfortable. But the thing is, when you achieve that goal you don’t have it anymore, so you lose incentive and you lose motivation and you put on weight because food is yummy. And guess what? Come back, here is another diet for you.

Sixth Lie: You can train like an athlete and diet like a celebrity

Unfortunately you can’t. Eating for weight loss and eating for training are two very different things with very different goals. And you probably can’t do both at the same time. If you eat for training you will probably have very gradual weight loss, but that is all. And you would only want it to be very gradual because otherwise you would not be physically capable of getting the most out of your training. And if you severely restrict calories you just aren’t going to have the energy to train.

Seventh Lie: You don’t need to lose weight to start your life.

You don’t need to look a certain way to walk into a gym, or go for a run. You don’t need to look a certain way to get married or wear a bikini or wear a fancy dress.

Eighth Lie: The scales tell you what you need to know.

They don’t. They are probably the most inaccurate measure of where your body is at. They fluctuate based on hydration, what you ate, what you’ve had to drink, muscle composition and any manner of a million other things. So basing a set of goals based on that is a recipe for failure.

Ninth Lie: There is such a thing as ‘toning’

There isn’t. There is no such thing as toning. There is building muscle. Apparently ‘toning’ is the word used when describing women building muscle but there is no difference, it is all just building muscle.

Tenth Lie: Shame will Motivate You

Shame will not motivate you. Self-loathing will not inspire change. There is nothing wrong with you. Your body is capable of so much more than you believe it is.

If you want change, you have to love the body you have right now for everything it has already done for you and everything it is capable of doing in the future. You have to respect it. And appreciate it. And you have to believe in it. Food and exercise are not reward and punishment. There is no punishment. And you are the reward, just like you always have been.

So where does that leave you?

A while back I read a comment (I can’t remember the author unfortunately!) that said in response to restrictive diets that you should live the healthiest life you can enjoy, not the healthiest life you can. And that has stayed with me.

I think over the four years since I had my youngest I’ve made a lot of changes and they stuck because I enjoyed them and because they were small and just built up over time. The other part was that I set goals that weren’t weight-based. They were things like run further or run faster. Things that were easy to measure as a matter of performance, not aesthetics.

There is nothing wrong with weight loss as a goal – plenty of us at any given time might think I’d feel a bit more comfortable if I lost a bit of weight and there is nothing wrong with that. But often it’s actually representative of a different goal it might be that we want more energy because we are feeling sluggish, or we want to be able to have more stamina to keep up with our kids or it might be that we want to run a little faster or have more confidence in ourselves. So my approach is that I focus on those things and everything else follows.

If you want to change, a diet is a setup for failure. Start by choosing the life you want and see where that leads you instead.

Depression Doesn’t Look Like You Think It Does

Zoey · April 24, 2015 · 4 Comments

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In 2013, Kate and I suffered from depression at the same time. When we came out the other side of that, we said we would never go back. But Kate had to for a time. And I probably knew before she did. It was probably as far back as October of last year or a bit before. Depression doesn’t always look like you think it does. Just because someone is happy, doesn’t mean they aren’t depressed. Depression isn’t always unending, bottomless sorrow or deep, paralysing fear. Sometimes it starts in a more insidious way than that. Often it starts that way, I think. It sneaks in, like it was there all along, or like it was invited and it lies in wait before revealing its true form in all of its brutal ugliness.

At a certain point, I guess I noticed that she couldn’t feel or express empathy towards me. I think that’s when I noticed, because you take notice of things when they are so far outside someone’s character. It can be a tough thing to be a friend to a depressed person. Just because it isn’t personal, doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply hurtful. And it certainly feels personal. But it isn’t. There is the person, and then there is the disease and they are not the same thing. If you are going to be a friend to someone who is depressed, then you need to be able to figure out the difference between the two.

Because you aren’t depressed it can be easy to fall into unrealistic expectations or unfair comparisons. You aren’t in the box, so you can’t possibly know what that person is capable of. Sometimes all they will be capable of is feeding themselves for the day and sometimes that might even be a stretch. So there where lots of gaps to fill in Operation Move, and I was so happy to do that. Because when you are friends with someone who is depressed you cling for dear life to anything practical that can be done. Anything at all. There’s nothing you can do, really. All you can do is smooth out some of the rough edges.

Partnerships are like marriages. When something happens, the other one will pick up all the slack, but it is a temporary measure, because a marriage doesn’t work with one person, it needs two. It can be a lot of pressure in those temporary periods. Because there is no fallback position from you. So it doesn’t matter if you are having a fight with your husband or your kids are feral or you are working more than is healthy – things still need to be done. And you cling to that because it’s the one thing that you can fix.

And then you wait. You wait for them to accept they need help. You wait for them to see the disease. And then you wait for that person you know to shake the disease loose. And you hope. You do a lot of hoping.

As a coach, looking after someone with depression is an exercise in nurture and intuition. Before Kate made the decision to have some great half marathon runs this year instead of spending so much time on marathon training, I knew. I’d been pushing her to run some moderate speed workouts for a couple of months because I knew the reason she didn’t want to do that was the reason she didn’t want to run a marathon.

My theory in training and in life is choose your hard. Sometimes there is so much hard in your life, that your training has to be easy. When you’ve used up all of your hard elsewhere, it has to be fun and joyful. It has to be capable of giving you more than you give it.

As a friend, you can’t keep those deep wounds in your heart, they belong to the disease and you have to let them go.

Treacy’s Story

Zoey · April 21, 2015 · 5 Comments

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I have always wanted to be a runner. Growing up I’d watch people running and I’d think about how freeing it looked. I have had severe depression for most of my life and I think I saw running as a way to run away from how I was feeling. I remember a couple of times as a teenager running and trying to become a ‘runner’ but would die before getting around the block. I didn’t know how to pace myself or how to breathe. I’m quite tall and have long legs and was always tripping over myself and being generally uncoordinated.

When my marriage ended I tried to do all these things that previously seemed too difficult, group sport being one of them. I joined a netball team and started working out at the gym. I judged my success on how long I could be active before I felt like I wasn’t going to die. I was an endorphins junkie straight away and it still is the main reason I exercise.

I met Zoey on twitter when my son was a baby (so 6 years ago!) and I watched as she started running on the treadmill and getting better and better.One day I was chatting to another mum whilst our children ran around one of those noisey indoor play centres. I still hadn’t given up on my dream of running and mentioned ‘how do you become a runner’? Julie was a runner before kids and she said ‘you just run’. That night I went to the 24 hour gym and ran on the treadmill for about 30 minutes, I wasn’t fast but I did it. I kept this up for months.

One day I decided I should go outside to run but I was terrified of it and how I would pace myself. I tried using the C25K app but because I already had a level of fitness and ability it held me back. I just started running until I had to stop. I taught myself to run about 5kms outside.

During this time I had been reading Kate’s blog and still friends with Zoey and I stalking Operation Move and I wanted to become a better runner, so I signed up for Far and Fast and then later Far and Fast platinum. I have achieved my goal of running 10ks and now I’m working on a half marathon. I love running, for once in my life I feel like I’m good at a sport. Yes I know I’m not the fastest runner or running ultra marathons in the back of Mexico but I’m running and I can do it. I can chase my son around for hours and keep going. I have something that I can keep setting goals for and something to focus on when everything in my life seems to be falling apart and I’ve made awesome friends in this wonderful community.

At the moment my training focus is completing three half marathons this year but my biggest challenge is working out how I’m going to fit in my training once I move out of my mums house and can’t leave my son in bed at 4.30 in the morning knowing that someone is in the house with him. I love how supportive the women in Far and Fast Platinum are, always hints on how to get out the house, ready to hand you a cup of cement when you need it or to hand out the hugs, but my favourite is how they make me laugh.

Being part of Operation Move keeps me alive, literally and gives me something meaningful in my life, that’s about me and noone else.

When failure isn’t failure

OperationMove · April 15, 2015 · Leave a Comment

mountain

When I was in High School I worked really hard to get into law. Really hard. I remember calling up the results line sometime after midnight and the palpable relief that a TER of 93.5 would be enough to get me in. Not into Sydney or NSW, but for other universities it would be enough. It was the culmination of years of work. Some people are naturally gifted with book smarts and I am not, my gift is hard work.

So, the decision to quit half way through my law degree was a hard one. It felt like a really big failure. It felt like falling deep into a bad habit of mine which is to start big things and never finish them. It was hardest telling my mother. Who was a single parent from the time I was about 8, and she worked three times as hard as I did. She worked probably three or more jobs and still found time to force-feed me breakfast and fresh orange juice before I went to school.

But the thing is, the poor decision wasn’t quitting. To find the poor decision you had to go back a lot further than that. The decision to get into law was based on one thing. That I never wanted to struggle to pay a phone bill. That was it. The poor decision was not trying to do something that would look after my financial future. It was misunderstanding myself. I though that financial motivation would be enough. But it just wasn’t. And barring criminal law and indigenous land law I hated studying law. I had to accept that if I didn’t enjoy studying it, I wasn’t going to enjoy practicing it. And that was a tough pill to swallow.

But I did. And I learnt to live with never having finished my law degree. Eventually I used my credits and a bit of extra study to get an Associate Degree qualification, which helped for it to feel done.

A lot of the time I am coaching people to achieve things that they think might be beyond their reach. Or things that they think are beyond their reach. But that only works if you enjoy the process. If you don’t enjoy training for a marathon or a half marathon or a 10k or a 5k or whatever it is you aren’t going to enjoy running one that much. In fairness no one enjoys long hill sprints and if you do you probably need a steeper hill. But there is some part of you that has to love doing the hard work. Long training runs in marathon training are long. They are time consuming. If you want to train for a marathon you need to find some joy in those 3 hour runs, otherwise it looks a whole lot like hard work. And it also looks a whole lot like maybe you misunderstood yourself further back.

So sometimes my job as a coach is to say ‘Do you really want to train for this marathon?’ and give permission for people to say ‘No. I don’t.’ It is not a failure, or a failing. It is not admitting defeat and it is not a weakness. It is embracing who you are. Or even, who you are right now. A marathon is not by default better than a half marathon and a half marathon isn’t better than a 10k. Distance is not the same thing as joy or achievement. Dragging your feet through a training cycle you don’t enjoy is not an achievement.

You can train for anything you want to, but it is far better to train for something you can love.

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