Author: newstasis_waavrk

How I Learn My RPM Choreo

Once every 3 months I receive new music and choreography for LMI for the RPM Group Cycling program I teach. I have about 6 weeks to learn the release and be ready to teach it for the class. It’s a standardized program so I have to teach it a standardized way. That means there is a right and a wrong way to perform the release so it is very clear when I don’t get it right.

My challenge is to learn 9 songs in six weeks. If I do it, I get to lead successful classes and if I don’t, the class is more stressful and a lot less fun.

How do I do it?

1) Listen to the music over and over again so I know the songs inside and out. I need to be able to start hearing a song mid way thought and know exactly how people should be riding the bike. If I’m working too hard, my head can get a little spacey so it helps to know your way through the music. I listen to the music in the car, when I’m riding outside, when I’m working out in the gym and sometimes when I’m writing.

2) Know the profile of each track and of the class. The class profile is always the same so song 4 is always going to bring you the same sort of experience, although the timing of the hills and the racing sections is going to be different. There are patterns within the tracks and once you find them, the profile starts to make sense and becomes very easy to remember.

3) Learn the level of exertion that is required for each track. I only needed to learn this once because it is fairly stable between releases.

4) Practice the release with the music playing through speakers in front of a mirror and verbally cueing and coaching until it flows out of me. Perfect practice makes perfect. I can’t stress enough the impact of an elevated heart rate on ones ability to perform tasks that require thinking. Once it goes above 165, I’m pretty useless at novel tasks.

5) Continue to practice older releases as well because they reveal patterns for particular tracks. Also, it takes a lot to learn them and very little to keep remembering them.

6) Attend as many RPM classes as I can. I’ve noticed that other instructors add different things to the performance of a release, things that I may not have picked up on or things that I may never have been able to think of. Whenever one of these things presents itself to me, I usually remember it because it is so different from anything I’ve thought of.

Admittedly, learning the choreography for RPM isn’t as difficult as it would be for an LMI program like Body Jam or Body Flow, but when you’ve never had to learn choreography for anything before, it can be challenging. It comes down to understanding what you are supposed to do and knowing the music inside and out.

We’re All Equally Alive And Aware, And The Same

I am constantly forgetting that everyone has a unique experience of consciousness. What exactly that is may be the same, but each individual feels as alive and aware as I do. It’s so easy to forget because I’m the only perspective of my conscious experience. It’s hard to believe sometimes but the other people I interact with are not part of the movie I’m watching. They have the same potential for pretty much everything that I do – joy, sadness, learning, injury, cognitive distortions, hunger, dreaming, etc…

Each one of them is as real as I am and they feel too.

When I’m not forgetting that they are real, I am forgetting that they are very similar to me. One of my university professors claimed that all human beings are almost genetically identical to each other, that any diversity we see is the result of differences in a very small percentage of the genetic code, he said less than one percent. That means there’s a very good chance that many people will respond to certain stimuli the same way I do, that we’ll think in similar terms and that we’ll have similar abilities. Why then is it that when someone bumps into me with their shopping card I concluded that they are probably stupid but when I bump into them it’s because I wasn’t able to navigate through the tight aisles? Because of the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for us to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external environmental factors that may have impacted the individual. We don’t judge ourselves like this because we have an understanding of our external environment which clearly explains our behavior. But this understanding doesn’t help us explain someone else behaviour and since we don’t have their understanding we manufacture one that usually has them being a sub par human being.

It works both ways though. Sometimes people will be so taken by another that they are unable to see their internal traits in a negative light and blame the environment for all negative outcomes. The experience of first love can be like this as it is all consuming and often at odds with reality. Another example is the person you know who is just really unlucky and has all the bad things happen to them. At some point it becomes evident that they are making some poor decisions that are leading to very predictable outcomes that they attribute to bad luck. In this case, the fundamental attribution error would not be an error.

Why would it be our tendency to make guesses about others character based on their behaviour instead of the environment, as we do with ourselves? Obviously this tendency kept our ancestors alive through out history. I think it has something to do with magical thinking and our desire to gain an advantage over others. Attributing other’s behavior to their underlying character allows us to determine the motives of others that will help us make predictions about them, these predictions with help us save energy by eliminating the need to think.

I make this claim because it works with both negative and positive behaviours – we will assume someone who does nice things is a good person regardless of any environmental influence. For example, how many times have you heard someone play down their heroic actions by saying “I did what anyone would do in that situation”? Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong, but the sheer number of people who act like selflessly in crisis situations does tend to lend support to their notion that people act with kindness and caring when they are faced with difficult environmental conditions.

It would seem that in our quest to stay alive, we conserve energy in whatever ways we can. One of these ways is to compartmentalize our understanding of people by eliminating the potential role the environment plays in their behaviour. And this makes sense because the environment is ever changing, creating an understanding of others that is static makes interacting with the world that much easier. But, it doesn’t change the fact that others are exactly as we are, alive, aware and full of humanity.

Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes – Why You Need A Food Journal

Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes (and how to fix them) by Michael Roussell of T-nation outlines 3 mistakes bodybuilders make when trying to build mass while keeping body fat levels down. I mention it because body builders are just extreme versions of the rest of us who are interested in getting or staying lean – their goals are the same, their practices are just a little more intense.

1) Focusing too much on Macronutrient Breakdowns

I’m a big believer that the type of calories (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) you eat does matter, but people can overlook the importance of total calories. Yes, it’s possible to manipulate macronutrients percentages so that you can eat more or less food with favorable advances toward your body composition goals, BUT total calories matter. I liken the total vs. type of calorie debate to the diet vs. exercise debate. They’re not exclusive and both matter!

2) Skipping Meals & Eating Unplanned Meals

Not getting the results you want is one thing, but to not know how well you’re following your plan means you’re blindly stumbling around the land of mediocrity with no chance of success.

Lack of proper compliance … is the number 1 reason people don’t reach their physique goals. If you aren’t reaching your goals, yet haven’t filled out a compliance sheet like the one below, I don’t want to hear about how the diet you’re on doesn’t work or that you need a personalized nutrition plan.

3) Not Giving Your Plan a Change – “The best diet is the one you’re not on.”

… today and there’s an overabundance of training programs accessible at your finger tips. In fact, there are so many programs there is a growing population of people who have become training whores, switching to whatever new program has been published that week.

Unfortunately, the same trend has been emerging with diets and nutrition. Internet forums are overwhelmed with people who are “cutting” one week, “bulking” the next, and “cutting” again the following week. If you’ve done the Velocity Diet, Massive Eating, Get Shredded Diet, and the Anabolic Diet in the span of 8 weeks then I’m talking to YOU.

I have gotten my best result when I write everything out to get a calorie estimate and stick to it for a couple of months. I think this is because it’s very easy to forget eating, not eating and what you eat. I’ll admit, it was a pain in the arm the first couple of days but then it got easier because you get better at it. A food journal is a skill, as is a different eating plan and remaining compliant to it, that gets easier the longer you do it.

What Is My Purpose And What To Expect From Me

What is my purpose?

I followed the instructions on How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes by Steve Pavlina and came up with “my purpose in life is to try and create beauty were only its potential exists”.

But what does that mean exactly?

For me beauty is many different things:

  • Energy
  • Happiness
  • Vitality
  • Satisfaction
  • Actualizing potential
  • Passion
  • Confidence
  • Efficiency
  • Symmetry and balance
  • Spontaneity
  • Fluidity of motion
  • Confidence
  • Love

Examples of things I think are beautiful:

  • Good posture
  • Teaching / learning a new task, refining the task and then successfully using the skill
  • The way new mothers look at and engage their children
  • Good scenery
  • Sunshine
  • Laughing
  • Gratitude
  • Creating something – art, pottery, music or writing
  • The prefect line through the trail / down the hill
  • The way people look when they’ve lost a lot of weight
  • The look when someone achieves a goal
  • Seeing two people who are in love
  • Observing two adults engaging each other in a conversation
  • Empathy
  • Synergy or serendipity
  • Open mindedness and non-judgment

Ways to create beauty in the real world:

  • Help someone lose weight
  • Help someone achieve something that they want or one of their goals
  • Help someone increase their energy
  • Make something out of nothing – art, music, and writing
  • Help facilitate a new experience
  • Confirm something that people want to be true
  • Help someone achieve a Zen or flow state
  • Introduce someone in their passion
  • Indulge someone’s passion
  • Have or help someone else have an epiphany
  • Help someone learn something
  • Get someone moving
  • Engage the mind of the willing
  • Make someone laugh
  • Make someone smile

From a practical stand point, everything I do should be facilitating one of these things. Otherwise, I’ll be deviating from my ideal life path and creating karma.

Now as interesting as this whole experience has been, now I am left to wonder and see what I do with this knowledge.

Update – like many articles, I’ve sat on this one of a few months because it didn’t feel finished. It was written in the middle of February 2007 so I’ve had the opportunity to integrate the new information into my world view and to make manifest this understanding. Well, how am I doing? It’s tough to say, but I think it’s going alright.

I’ve see the value of the classes I teach to the participants so I try to get them to have that “oh my God I CAN do this” experience. One person has related to me that they had it, that they “haven’t worked that hard since high school”. That’s delivering one to the gate and allowing them to take the steps in to improve their own life. I felt really good when they told me that it had impacted them so strongly.

I’ve engaged the mind of the willing and let mine be engaged. Rachel and Des have thrown a number of new ideas my way and they’ve changed the way I view the world. These interactions are mutually enlightening.

I’ve become a lot less judgmental, particularly of myself. Learning that I desire to try and help people framed a lot of my history in a different light, one that I have an easier time accepting as a reflection of my true nature vs. the seemingly randomness of my past decisions. There is continuity to my choices and I can understand why I found so many of them unfulfilling, I was hoping that people would be successful as opposed to being happy that I tried to help them achieve success or a new level of awareness.

I’ve had to learn to keep smiling during class so that has made me happier. I’ve also had to perfect and model body position on the bike which has improved my posture. A lot of my coaching to the participants has to do with “keeping proud posture” and being strong while driving power to the peddles.

There’s a lot less cognitive dissonance in my life now, so, if for nothing else, Steve’s exercise has been worthwhile because my life has less stress in it. But since I have taken a lot more out of it, his exercise was been one of the most valuable experiences facilitated by a web page I’ve ever had.

Trying Something New

Doing something new is one of the more challenging things that we do as we get older. It seems that our natural tendency to try and make things as unchanging as possible really hurts our motivation to try new things.

But isn’t this tendency just like most of our tendencies in that it exist only because we allow it to exist? There are people who have learned to do new things all the time so our initial fear is not something that cannot be overcome by direct effort to change.

Looking back, if you do find yourself rather unmotivated to try new things, isn’t it also a fact that you were apprehensive to try the thing you most like doing now? For me it is mountain bike riding and I thought about if for a while before I actually started to ride; my friend Chris hounded me for more than a year to buy a bike from him before I relented. Now I can’t imagine my life without it.

The strangest thing about trying mountain biking is where I am now. My life is completely different as a result of my decision to improve my health and fitness, a decision that was the outcome of me loving bike riding. I haven’t taken to anything else in my life like I have taken to cycling. While it is possible that the athlete in me would have come out some other way, I have not yet found or tried whatever activity that is. Regardless of its eventuality, most of my friends are different, most of my activities are different and most of my time is spend doing stuff that I didn’t do before.

It isn’t worth considering where my life would be now if I had not tried, but it’s safe to assume that it would be different.

At least once every couple of days you should try something new. The LuLuLemon people recommend once a day but I’m going to suggest every couple of days. These things really don’t have to matter all that much but they can be big things if you like. Try tanning, a different type of coffee, make a new meal, talk to someone you want to talk to, eat at a new restaurant, try a different type of squat, etc…. The goal of these small things is to keep your brain used to trying new things. You are facing your fear head on and very frequently.

At least once a week you should do something that you don’t really want to do. For many people this should be to complain about poor service or you not getting what you were entitled to. Don’t be a jerk about it, but stand up for yourself. It’s another conflict situation that many tend to avoid because they don’t like the idea of arguing with someone. It’s about tackling something that you know will make your life better once you complete it.

At least once a month you should try something very new. These things should be a little more significant than anything up until now and they should involve some sort of risk, preferably the risk of embarrassment or making a fool of yourself. Karaoke is a good example here, as would be entering an art show. You could take a pottery class, go to bingo or volunteer at the food bank. The thing is to get well outside your normal way of acting and your comfort zone. The goal here is to increase the range of things you feel okay doing. Again, you’re working to face the fear as you increase your exposure to different things.

At least twice a year you should try something that you’ve always been afraid of doing.

At least once a year you should make a list of things that you want to do before you die and make sure the list is disappearing and growing at the same time.

No matter what, your life should be in constant flux trying new things and exposing yourself to as much as you can. I believe this is the only way you are going to be able to determine whenever you have found true happiness and moved towards completion.

Getting Better Result By Giving Better Feedback

I am a compliance practitioner so it is important for me to be able to get people to do the things I ask them to do. This is not evil because I’m trying to get them to do the things they want to do but may lack the belief that they can do. The key things in achieving these results is to provide good feedback. Here are the 5 key elements to offering effective feedback. For clarity’s sake the two players in the feedback session are the giver and the target.

1) Know your goal and clearly define your expectations. Make sure you know how to clearly explain what you are looking for and be prepared to explain how the new behaviour differs from the old behavior, why it is more appropriate and and how it fits into the process.

When I’m instructing a cycling class, my primary goal is to get the target to work slightly harder or modify their position on the bike. If we use hip position on the saddle as an example, I’ll say “move your butt to the back of the seat to make it easier for the big leg muscles to work”. It isn’t much but I know that the legs are able to drive more power to the peddles when the hips are in the right position so I throw it out there. Anyone who grabs onto the advice will improve more quickly.

2) When it is possible, tell the target how their actions made you feel. We are an emotional species so most of us tend to feel stuff; always assume the target deals with emotions until you learn otherwise. If we realize that the tone of our voice make someone feel like we are angry, we’re able to draw the connection between the stimulus and the response.

Compare the following two statements, “why are you angry?” and “when you use that tone, it makes me feel like you are angry.” Which do you think will facilitate the quickest change?

Letting the target know how you feel also transfers a lot of the responsibility of the outcome over to you. This will help to keep them open to the suggested changes while giving them valuable information to help modify their behaviour.

3) Get them to project themselves into the future to try and feel what it will be like when they are more successful at the task. This will help to motivate the target to adopt the suggested chances because they will pair the changes to the desired outcome.

To go back to the hips on the saddle example, I’ll say something like “strong leg muscles make those hills easier this season” or “work hard like the quality of your life depends on it”. The goal is to try and help them see the value tomorrow of working hard today. When it’s done effectively, facilitating change is a piece of cake.

4) Let go of judgement. Always assume that the target is acting in their best interest and, when their behaviour goes against their best interests, assume it is because the target doesn’t have enough information to make the right decision. The role of the giver is to provide the target with the information they are lacking.

You can say things like:
Did you know that…, here is something that may help…, here is another option for that…, I have found that doing…, that’s the way I used to do it until…,

5) Be honest but caring. People know a line of BS when they hear it and will resent you for it. You need to be truthful with them but you need to be caring about it because the target may take the feedback as a statement that their actions were wrong. If this happens, it can start an unconscious defense reaction that will cause the target to close up. You will minimize the risk of this by telling them how their actions made you feel.

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity X 2

This week Steve Pavlina posted 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity and 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity – Volume 2 and both are exceptional. 66 tips to help you get more out of your life.

My three favorites are:

Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.

Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.

Troll hunt. Banish the negative trolls from your life, and associate only with positive, happy, and successful people. Mindsets are contagious. Show loyalty to your potential, not to your pity posse.

Imagine what 63 more of these could do?

NOTE: there are a lot of trackbacks to Steve’s site so be sure to follow a few of them to see how others are using his information.

Consequences Of The Brain Treating Reality And Thought As The Same

Brain scans can show us exactly which part of our brain is active. One thing that these test have uncovered is that the brain will be almost as active when someone thinks about doing a task as it is when they are doing the task. The motor cortex that controls movement is not active but the rest of the brain appears to be as engaged in the activity as it would be if you WERE engaged in the activity.

Now take a second to think about that. The brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is thought. What is the difference between doing something and thinking about doing it? I think only the movement portion, and the motor cortex is the only portion of the brain that shows a decrease in activity when we only think about something.

Have you ever had a dream that impacted the rest of your day? No matter what you do you’re left with a lagging feeling that started with the dream. Would having that same experience in real life have create a similar impact, maybe not the same but one as equally profound? I’ve had dreams that stayed with me because they felt so real – it was as though I had actually had to run for my life or jump from a building. That’s because my brain DID response as though I was running for my life or jumping from a building. Technology shows us that this is how the brain works.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of thinking about something that makes you angry and gets your blood boiling. The response is exactly the same as the real thing, you get an adrenalin spike as you charge up for action. You’re having a real physiological response to a mental stimulus. You can create whatever emotional response that you like by thinking about things that evoke that response.

It really is a stimulus response world. No matter what it is, it you are old enough to read and comprehend what I’m saying here, you probably have had enough experience to create 10000’s of response / stimulus pairings. Very rarely will you be faced with a situation for which you do not have a response.

If this is how the brain works, how do we put it to work for us?

Start changing your thought patterns. Stop thinking thoughts that create negative emotional reactions. Think of kittens, or stake, or something that causes you to respond in a positive way. Start thinking thoughts that foster the emotional state that you need to perform at your best at every moment. I do my best blog writing when I think of things that give me hope and optimism. My best song writing comes out when I’m feeling down or heart broken. When I’m at the gym trying to lift heavy I need to manufacture feelings of personal injustice to give me something to rise against. When I’m engaging someone in a discussion, I’ll picture myself being open and receiving their knowledge. Whatever it is, if I can perform better in a different state of mind I’ll work to find that state.

It only makes sense to do this. Find what makes your performance better and hack your brain to manufacture the emotional state that will allow you to tap into it.

Finding Control With Food – Eating Disorders

For a very long time I had an unhealthy relationship with food. Since I’m feeling much better about it now I’m going to be honest with myself and explain how and why it was messed up.

My relationship with disordered eating stems from a control issue that I didn’t realize I had. I’m not sure where it came from but I think it has something to do with me moving from Ireland when I was 9 and it was aggravated to problem status when a really close friend was killed by a drunk driver when I was 22.

The death of loved one is pretty hard and particularly so when they are only 21. The seemingly normal and predictable world came undone when I was 22, calling many of my world view rules into question. Natalie was a really nice girl. Liking everyone, she engaged everything with a passion for fun and happiness. I don’t think anyone deserves to die that young and least of all someone who just seemed to light up the world with their presence. It was really sad. Apart from all the grief that her death brought to her friends and family, the world continues to suffers because it goes without her joy forever. It’s really hard not to cry when I think this deeply about it because she had that old soul wisdom that seemed to cut through the unimportant stuff and leave you seeing only the silver lining. I’ve not met anyone who could do this before or since. She had a gift and I wish the world still had her in it.

But it doesn’t and the day she died was the beginning of the end to my control issue. Unfortunately, like most issues, I was years away from seeing it. I needed to hit a bottom before it became visible and I was able to make enough sense of things to move past it.

In the days immediately following her death, I spend a lot of time in my own head. In between bouts of intense pain, I ran through many of my understandings about the world trying to pull something together that allowed me to make sense of what I was feeling and what had happened. First off, I realized that no one was answering my prayers. Secondly, I realized that all the compulsive behavioural patterns that I had developed to safe guard my life from suffering were ineffective. Third, my belief that the world looked after the good and punished the bad was eliminated completely. I was alone and powerless to prevent my death. The understanding of the world that I had been nurturing was wrong. I had no control over anything.

Over the next few years, life recreated itself around me. I had been burned but I went on living because that’s what human beings do. However, things were different. Having lost the sense of control that I had about the world, the rules I created were based on the assumption that I could be killed at any instant. While that is true, it isn’t very likely. It’s so improbable as to be wrong from any practical perspective; logically I knew this but my life experience had shown me something very different. This single cognitive distortion manifest itself all over the new world view rules that I created. I started to do a lot of things that were hurting my chance of living a long time because I believed that there was a great chance that I would be dead well before the consequence came back to haunt me. I took up smoking, skipping a lot of classes, stopped working out and started going to raves. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t think I was going to live that long regardless of what I did.

I became addicted to nicotine during this period of time. This was my first experience with addiction and my first conscious experiences with changing my physiological / emotional state with chemicals. Before the smoking, I got drunk when I drank alcohol, I got full when I ate food and I got tired when I worked out. I hadn’t noticed any emotional change in response to doing these things but with nicotine there was a big difference, the dose frequency. I was smoking about 15 cigarettes a day which loosely equates to about 450 dose per day (I’m basing this on the assumption that I took 30 pulls per cigarette). While I am not sure exactly how nicotine impacts the body, it, like most drugs, stimulates neural activity in the body and brain. Over time and repeated exposure to the drug, the body will adapt to the new internal environment that you are creating. As a consequence, normal function will come to depend upon the presence of the drug. When your body makes this adjustment, you learn very quickly just how chemicals can change your emotional state. The negative emotional state that nicotine withdrawal creates disappears INSTANTLY when you inhale the smoke. It happens so quickly that it’s almost impossible NOT to make the connection that smoking makes you feel better (of course it does, it make you feel normal).

This lesson stuck. I realized that I could bring stuff into my body that would not just make me feel good, but which would change the way I felt emotionally. Hmmmm, that was good because this was the first time since Natalie had died that I felt I had some control over something. What else did I have easy access to that I could use to change my emotional state? Well, food. I could buy a chocolate bar for 50 cents, eat it in 20 seconds and change my blood chemistry in such a way as to experience a physiological reward. That was fun so I did it, a lot.

If you’ve eaten a pound of chocolate, or even just a half pound (about 3 chocolate bars), you may have noticed that logical thinking about what you’re doing begins to disappear. The more you do it, the less you need to eat before your thinking is impaired. You find yourself in the zone and the chocolate stops being chocolate and starts being just something you are consuming because it makes you feel a particular way. I’ve spoken to some gamblers about the sensation of betting chips on poker and they describe it in very much the same way, over time, the chips stop being money and start being the fuel that drives the positive sensations of gambling. The more you do it, the better you get at finding the reward. Once you acquire that level of skill you can are free to use the food to evoke that emotional state for the reward or escape. I was about 25 now and this is about 3 years after Natalie died.

Things get foggy here and I’m a little disappointed about that because I don’t have a lot of memories from this period of my life but I didn’t do anything worth remembering. I was basically spinning my wheels until I learned some computer skills and got a job working for an IT company. I was living with my folks at the time to save money to pay off some student loans, so my eating habits had returned to normal. There were still times when I would over eat but they were on special occasions or when I would stay at my girl friends, so it didn’t impact my life at all. My body was changing though and my once iron stomach was starting to have difficulty digesting some of the meals I was eating. In hindsight, I think it was the quantity of food that I was eating in these meals because I am still able to eat smaller amounts of these food now without any difficulty. The IT boom was in full swing and when I got a promotion to manager I moved out. This was a few months after I got my first mountain bike and started riding.

I moved in with Tony and Beth again (2nd time) and we shared a 3 bedroom townhouse in Burlington. This was a fun time because I was making a lot of money and I was very good at my job. I felt like I was on my way again, that life had returned to normal after the death curve ball from 6 years ago.

But things weren’t back to normal. My relationship with food was deteriorating as I was starting to over eat more frequently and suffering indigestion more often. There were a couple of meals a week that didn’t get processed. To me it was normal to get sick when you are feeling sick. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t normal to feel sick so often. I figured it would pass on its own and I didn’t alter my eating habits.

It wasn’t the stereotypical binging and purging that you see on “The Intervention”. The purging wasn’t a conscious “hey, I need to get rid of this meal” thought, it was a “I will feel better if I throw this up” thought. And it was true, I always did feel better. I viewed the over eating as me just having a big appetite. Since I wasn’t gaining any weight, I was healthy. No one said anything to me for a long time, they didn’t have any reason to. It wasn’t as if I was sick or had a problem. 8 chocolate bars here, an extra large pizza there, 65 doughnut bites on the couch while playing Madden on the PS2, whatever. It was just food and I was hungry, and sometimes I ate too much.

Tony was the first to ask me about it. I remember him saying “do you think it’s normal to get sick as much as you do?” I said “yeah, I guess. It must be because causes it’s happening.” Then it was my girl friend’s roommate. Her comment about “getting that checked out because it ISN’T normal for someone who is healthy to get sick very often” didn’t immediately change anything and of course, I didn’t bother getting it checked out.

It began to change though, I started being more aware of what and how I was eating. I started to notice that once I began eating sugary high fat foods, a sensation gripped me that wasn’t there before. It was a drive or compulsion to keep eating. The only things I can compare it to are the drive to have sex or the drive to have a cigarette. Eating was the only thing I could do to make the thoughts go away so I kept eating. Maybe Tony was right, maybe there was something wrong with what I was doing.

Tony and Beth bought there first house and I moved out. I lived between my folks and my girl friends place. This meant that I wasn’t feeding myself anymore, so my diet improved. I was back to the gorging occasionally and didn’t get sick nearly as often. I also worked a lot and didn’t have the chance to lose myself in food.

A few months later I moved in with my friend Deb to be closer to work. My eating habits remained fairly good, but I was starting to gain some weight because I had been spending more time working and less time riding my bike. I decided to try the Atkins low carb diet because I had friends who had lost a lot of weight with it. It was fairly successful with a drop of about 12 pounds in 3 weeks. But the biggest thing I noticed was that my desire to eat sugar disappeared after about a week – I knew I was going without something, the diet wasn’t completely effortless but I wasn’t hungry. Again, the feeling was something like day 7 of quitting smoking – you physically don’t need anything but you are going without something that you find rewarding. The switch had been thrown and the light had gone on, I had drawn a connection between eating sugar and my drive to keep eating sugar. I did what most people do in a situation like this, I went over board. I developed a fear of carbohydrates and took deliberate steps to eat less of them.

Another stint living with Tony and Beth and then back to my folks place to regroup and figure out what I was going to do next. My IT management job had come to an end so I got a job with GoodLife Fitness Clubs and my issues with eating just seemed to disappear. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I still like to over eat occasionally but I work out a lot so I have a lot of opportunity to burn off the excess. I consider the whole thing history because I don’t get sick very often anymore.
Looking back, my disordered relationship with food was a behaviour learned in the time following Natalie’s death. It seems almost too simple to say it, but I was trying to find something to control. The predictable satisfaction of binging and my ability to prevent weight gain gave me these things. Over time, experience provided me with more information and I’ve modified my understanding. As I’ve grown past it I now try to control my eating habits and my fitness, not my mood and my weight.

And I’m really happy that it is behind me now.

Five Factors for Fat Loss Training

The Hierarchy of Fat Loss by Alwyn Cosgrove from T-Nation outlines the steps you need to follow to maximize your time when trying to get ride of fat. Visit the link for the complete article. It lists the exercise intensities that you should be working out at along with the amount of time you should be spending on each.

1. Metabolic Resistance Training – The first 3 hours of training in a week. Basically we’re using resistance training as the cornerstone of our fat loss programming. Our goal is to work every muscle group hard, frequently, and with an intensity that creates a massive “metabolic disturbance” or “after burn” that leaves the metabolism elevated for several hours post-workout. (Increase EPOC).

2. High Intensity Anaerobic Interval Training – Hours 4 and 5 in training week. The second key “ingredient” in fat loss programming is high intensity interval training (HIIT). I think readers of T-Nation will be well aware of the benefits of interval work. It burns more calories than steady state and elevates metabolism significantly more than other forms of cardio. The downside is that it flat-out sucks to do it!

3. High Intensity Aerobic Interval Training – Hours 5 and 6 in training week. The next tool we’ll pull out is essentially a lower intensity interval method where we use aerobic intervals.

4. Steady State High Intensity Aerobic Training – Hours 6 to 8 in training week. Tool number four is just hard cardio work. This time we’re burning calories — we aren’t working hard enough to increase EPOC significantly or to do anything beyond the session itself. But calories do count. Burning another 300 or so calories per day will add up.

5. Steady State Low Intensity Aerobic Training – Anything above 8 hours
This is just activity, going for a walk in the park, etc. It won’t burn a lot of calories; it won’t increase muscle or EPOC. There isn’t very much research showing that low intensity aerobic training actually results in very much additional fat loss, but you’re going to have to really work to convince me that moving more is going to hurt you when you’re in fat attack mode.