For many years I was like most people, where Christmas would surprise me by being in December and I wouldn’t have enough saved up to buy presents for people.  So I did what any other red blooded American would do.  I whipped out my credit card, blew it up and then paid it down over the next few months.  Holidays are a lot like that too but with calories rather than dollars.  Up until a couple years ago I was in the same boat as everyone else.  I’d gorge on holidays, blow up a few pounds and then go on a diet to lose the weight.  I’m now in a different mode of operating, which means that whether it’s good for me or not I actually plan my holiday feasts and save up for the occasion.

Since my mid-teens I’ve always had a steady diet of sodas, mostly diet from the college on, all of which had healthy doses of caffeine in them.  I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker, but just by the shear volume of soda, and periodically unsweetened tea, I managed to consume a good deal of caffeine each day for a period of years.  Because I like to continuously wet my whistle I may have my last sip of caffeinated soda literally minutes before bed time.  I swore it did nothing to me, while simultaneously reaching for it for my morning jolt of course.  Once you do without it for awhile however boy can I say that it was obviously doing something to my system.

From a fitness and wellness perspective, October 2013 was a bit of a mixed bag.  I did a good job keeping up with my running routine in preparation for the marathon at the end of this year.  I didn’t keep up with my cross training at all.  That is actually a pretty bad thing.  While running does wonders for the cardiovascular system and does work some muscles, there are lots of other muscles that are important for running without injury that really should be worked out by doing other things.  I did get some cycling in, but I totally skipped out on yoga, swimming and/or strength training.  As I said this time last year when I finished my first half marathon, I’ll concentrate on that after the race.  I didn’t hold to it last year, perhaps I will this.

Last month I got to experience the Disney World Food and Wine Festival for the first time in my life.  For those not familiar with the experience, Disney World has a park called EPCOT.  EPCOT’s origins are as a model of a future community structure which then morphed into a science and history educational theme park.  While much has changed on the technology side, the World Showcase, with it’s 1.2 mile long oval track of countries has remained mostly intact.  The premise of the Food and Wine festival is simple, Disney has about 30 host countries setup stations throughout the World Showcase where they can each exhibit two to three dishes, plus a handful of adult beverages.  I went there fully intending to gorge myself on food, both at the festival and at the various restaurants for dinner.  The end results aren’t exactly surprising, but I thought it would be good to put them out there to see exactly what a week of such eating looks like.

I’ve been meaning to start doing my body measurements monthly again, but I haven’t been able to get on the band wagon.  The last set of measurements I took was at the very end of August, so that would be September 2013.  It’s important to track at one month granularity since each of the diet phases is going to be only three months.  I therefore need to get cracking with being consistent at measuring at the beginning of each month.

Although I’m banging out lots of miles training for my first marathon, I also had a series of vacations with lots of indulgences.  The upshot of all that is that I packed on several pounds over the last two months.  It shows up in my percent body fat, my weight and my various measurements.  The weight is probably a little higher than it actually is since I ate a ton of sodium yesterday, but it’s not so off that it’s in the wrong direction or indicative of a trend.  I’m not interested in cutting weight, but I will say that I’m at the upper end of the scale/percent body fat where I still feel healthy.  My peak “this feels great” for me is between 14-16% body fat and about 173-180 pounds.  Too much lower than that and I am ravenous.  Too much more than that and I start feeling more sluggish.  Since I’m training for my first marathon I’m not interested in cutting calories to reach some theoretical ideal weight.  I’ll therefore address that after that is done, if I don’t just let it fall into some equilibrium status on its own during the experiment.

We’ve talked about two types of measurements so far: mood/health and performance.  Tied to that but something that is far more visible to everyone are measurements of body composition.  It’s one thing to track something as subjective as how I feel each day of the experiment and trend that.  It’s another thing to track overall performance over the experiment at regular intervals to see how my body is operating.  However it is our body’s physical characteristics that are both the most visible and at the same time one of the important things that I want to track and trend over the experiment.

Along with trending of how good I’m feeling and other more subjective measurements, I think it will also be important to track and trend something more directly tangible: physical fitness levels.  The military and government use standardized fitness testing as a means of measuring health.  It’s actually a really convenient and not difficult to measure metric that is useful in measuring overall health.  Adapting this to my own experiment will be useful in determining if a diet I am eating is hurting or helping my health.

As someone that has in one way or another been exposed to eating disorders and body dysmorphia for much of his life, I’ve always been acutely sensitive to the topic in general.  If you combine that with inheriting some of my mom’s hypochondria (albeit in what I consider to be a mild way) I’ve always been concerned about making sure I didn’t accidentally end up on the same road as so many others.  Yes, in the popular culture eating disorders are generally considered to be a female only disease.  However that is all changing, and the concept of body dysmorphic disorder strikes both sexes.  Almost everyone has some level of body image false perception about what they look like compared to others.  It goes back to the typical behavior of being harder on yourself than others.  While that’s true I think I go beyond what most people do in that regard, but still well short of an eating disorder or full blown dysmorphia.  However the road to that is gradual and self reinforcing negative mindsets can quickly spiral into a full blown problem.

While ever vigilant about avoiding those pitfalls, I didn’t realize there was a whole new classification of eating disorder called orthorexia nervosa.  Now this isn’t some DSM categorized eating disorder, it’s a newly proposed one going back a few years.  The main features of this is an extreme or excessive preoccupation with avoiding foods that are unhealthy.  It’s a bit different than other eating disorders which concentrate on quantity of calories ingested or processed.  In that way I think it is also different in that body image itself isn’t one of the drivers of the diet.  In extreme forms it can actually lead to malnutrition, starvation and long term ill health effects just like other eating disorders.

I first heard of Matt Frazier “The No Meat Athlete” on the Rich Roll Podcast last week. The guy is basically an average Joe that decided he wanted to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Along the way he became vegan and blogged the entire process. He has a new book out as well, but the recipes I posted last week (humus and the granola bars) were the things that caught my eye the most. I decided to try out a good homemade health bar recipe and I think these are it for me!