Nutrition Overhaul Week 3: I smell ammonia.

Diet and Progress on the Scale

This week, I felt hungry a lot. I call it "snacky." You know that feeling that you're already full, but you just can't quit eating for some reason? Like that. I tried SO hard not to eat everything under the sun, but I just couldn't do it.

I was a food failure this week. Mucho food. I used every bit of willpower that I had to limit my (popcorn) habit. I can easily finish one packet of popcorn in a sitting, but this time, I only ate half, saving the rest for later. Small victories, you guys! Small victories! I made a healthy swap for popcorn on the leaner-lighter side now by using popcorn seasoning on plain popcorn. Try it - Kernel Seasons White Cheddar is my favorite, but Target makes a generic that's just as good. I'm drooling just thinking about stuffing my face with some more white cheddar popcorn...

In other randomness, we started noticing our grocery bills were on track to DOUBLE from $300/month to almost $600. Previously, we might've made one trip to the grocery store every 2 weeks. Now, we're there at least once, usually twice, each week. The cart looks so much different too! It's filled with produce - salad greens, peppers, sprouts, mushrooms, carrots, and tons of fruit. I have also been cooking more with the healthy and slimmed-down recipes I've found on Pinterest. Next week, I'll try break down our typical grocery list. If you have ideas on how to eat better and save money, please share!!

On the scale, I put back on the weight I'd dropped in the last few weeks, plus some - making 113.4 my lowest of the week but hovering closer to a 114.5-ish average. Duh - I need to start actually recording these numbers rather than guessing/trying to remember poorly.

Outlook: disappointed (in my lack of willpower). Not surprised at the results. Mostly bummed. Next week is a new week, and despite not seeing the numbers I wanted to, I'm really excited to be out of my food rut.

On the Running Front

Meanwhile, I've been smelling ammonia in the back of my nose when I take a deep breath, after every run. For a while, I thought it was partially because I was going cuckoo and partially because it was just my nose playing tricks on me in the cold. After weeks of this happening, I finally Googled it for a completely scientific explanation. :)

It's NH3, yo! Chem 121 = second.worst*.college.class.ever.

*Electrical Engineering 300 wins the award for worst college class ever. 

Ammonia ranks as a 3 on the NFPA hazard diamond. High number (out of 4) = more dangerous. This is why there's cause for concern.

Quiz question: what's the name on the document on which
you can find all the relevant info about a chemical?

It's kind of crazy. Some people reported similar symptoms so severe that their sweat smelled like ammonia. Have you heard of this before? I finally found an official explanation on the Runner's World UK website(as opposed to randoms posting stuff on internet message boards). A few excerpts that help explain the madness:

• Ammonia comes from the breakdown of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) within the body.
• The nitrogen is a waste product that needs to be excreted by the body....If there is too much nitrogen for your kidneys to deal with, it will be excreted as ammonia in your sweat.
• Many people mistakenly believe ammonia sweat means that their protein intake is not high enough.
• If your sweat smells of ammonia don’t compensate by adding more protein (amino acids) to your diet
• Instead fuel your muscles and brain with what it prefers as an energy supply: carbohydrates.
• Try having a low glycemic index carbohydrate, such as an apple, before your run and during prolonged exercise drink sports drinks to fuel your body and prevent amino acids being burned as energy.
• The body needs carbohydrate to burn fat so don’t think that providing some carbs before running is going to eliminate the fat burning process.

—Jane Newman, Sports Physiotherapist and Ultra Runner

According to this same article, the ammonia smell is a "common" issue with runners, so if this has happened to you, I want to know! You can read the full text here. Basically, it sounds like I need to take in more carbs, a message consistent with almost every professional and non-professional response I've seen to this problem. Some message board peeps wrote that this might or might not mean that the ammonia-smelling perp is burning muscle, but I can't find any reliable sources that can verify or refute that part.

This week, I was running tired. Like, really tired. Being an eager beaver, I decided that I'd handled a couple of 50-mile weeks well, with no unusual injuries or aches and pains, so I chose to keep on pushing. I aimed for 60 miles, starting off the week on Monday with a completely stuipd 14-mile "easy" day. Problem with that? It felt easy at the time, but I paid for it ALLWEEK LONG. Have you ever woken up and felt like you did a track workout the day before? I started every morning that week with my legs feeling exactly that, regardless of what I ran.... all because I started off too high on the week. Despite that, most of my runs felt pretty strong, and my running pace and times were good.

I started using a heart rate monitor for the first time on a late-week 9-mile run. I have yet to learn more about it, but in talking with Ben, an ideal easy/recovery pace is around 70-75% of max, which was killer to maintain on that day. I question it, though, because I've been having issues with the HR monitor in general. I have a brand spankin' new Garmin 610 with heart rate, and on every run, it shows my heart rate well above 90% for the first 6 minutes of the run. I tried moistening the sensors with water before putting it on, but it never fails -- I don't get any accurate readings until about 6.5 minutes into every run. At first, I thought, "That makes sense. I have always needed to warm up at a pace WAY slower than everyone else, and this heart rate data just supports that because I have to work so hard when I start!" I was secretly disappointed to learn that Garmin says this is a recognized problem and that they're working on a software fix for this.

Toward the end of the week, I checked my training log and realized that, just by running mostly by my normal routine, I was easily on target for 65 miles. But you know me: push, push, push... I dragged doing it, but I did it! The most notable day was the last day, a 9-mile run from home + 5k loop at the IUXC course and back, which was total hell. I finished. It wasn't pretty, but I finished. I wouldn't have done 9 miles that day if I hadn't known or been trying to hit a mileage milestone, either. My previous high was probably something like 55 miles. That week, I sprinkled in a track workout and a set of 8 (?) x 800m repeats in addition to the other easy and group runs. Guess what? After all that time and work, it became THE 70 MILE WEEK!

Oooooh fame -- I made the top 20 list!!

So there you have it.... a summary of week 3. I'm hoping to persuade Ben to write his own post, because he has so many good and exciting diet revelations to share with you.

And don't forget the Pinterest Challenge.... find a good healthy recipe and make it/share it!

Join me: Pinterest Food Challenge

Wow - Week 3 of the nutrition overhaul was a big week!

I spent a good amount of the week seeking out new recipes. Just as I (re)discovered my "Eat This, Not That!" books last time, duh! I know there are recipes for low-calorie, wholesome, and (most important of all) delicious food out there. Ones that don't make you feel like you're eating diet food.

Enter the Pinterest {Food} Challenge!!!

Food Inspiration
I discovered Pinterest a little over a year ago, and have been pinning hundreds of images from the internet and from my daily blog reading.
Follow my boards! ...Especially if you like home decor. :)

 

I have two pinboards dedicated to:  Food (the good, bad, and delicious) and Clean Food. Clean eating - in my book - is a relatively low calorie meal and snacks.

You can follow my food pinboards specifically.

If you're not familiar, Pinterest is:
a) an online "scrap book" where you can save all of your favorite images and inspiration from anywhere on the internet
b) a better place to waste time than Facebook (in fact, it's where I found this awesome picture of a giant bunny I wanted to save - not Photoshopped. Boy has his own calendar!)
 c) a huge time suck. "Go to bed!"
d) annoyingly unending source of ideas
e) more addicting than hard drugs  - you've been warned.

But c'mon, eating these treats is so much better than drooling over digital images of them. And so... I bring you the Pinterest Challenge!! (cue dramatic echo)

Please join me. It's a challenge that's all about less pinning and more doing!

Get a piece of the action:


1) Get on Pinterest. (If you need an invite, send me your email address.)


2) Start pinning. Seek out healthy- or clean-food recipes.


3) Critical step: Turn your pin (recipe) into reality. Go make it!


4) Leave comment below with a link to the original pin and/or your own blog post about your challenge (or send me your photos). Tell me how it went!

So, can Pinterest really help you lose weight and eat healthy new foods?  Let's all get back together in a week and find out! I've already started with a few, and of the food I pinned and actually made (some with modifications), here are my reviews:

1. Centsational Girl's Southwest White Bean & Chicken Chili.

Pinned here.

One word: amazing. Take one look at the ingredient list and you'll see that it's a super-clean recipe, providing lots of belly-filling fiber and tasty chicken. I used red peppers and scallions for a little bit of color. It was really good. Not bad for a recipe she made up with random stuff she had laying around her house! You must make this.

2. Sweet Potato skins - a healthy take on your fats-o-plenty tater skins

Pinned here.

I didn't have all of the ingredients on hand (like bacon bits?), so I had to make do with what I had. That, and I cut the sweet potatoes WAY too thin, so this did not turn out well. In fact, I ended up taking the leftovers and blending them up into sweet potato pancakes. Although they didn't taste nearly as great as they look in this picture, I'm still willing to try it again - the bacon bits, in hindsight, were probably a critical ingredient, giving it that sweet-and-savory flavor.

3. Roasted Edamame

Pinned here.

Edamame is the perfect powerfood! Packed with protein and fiber, what could you possibly hate about edamame? You can even buy it pre-shelled, for you people who hate working for your food! Once again, I tweaked the recipe and it bombed. For some reason, I thought that this would be more of a snack food - more of a dried edamame. It wasn't. Also, I got a little too excited about the curry powder I just bought and sprinkled some on. Not recommended. Don't think I'll be trying this recipe again, even if I do follow it exactly.

Want to see what's at the top of my want-to-make list? It's these mini ham and quinoa cups by Iowa Girl Eats. Pinned here.

I can't wait to try this recipe! You could fill these little quinoa cups with anything- The possibilities are endless! [little happy dance]

So, get pinning, cooking, and commenting! The Pinterest {food} Challenge starts now!

Nutrition Overhaul Week 2: Out of the food rut

Week 2 was a test of wills!

On Saturday night (since the week starts on an odd day), we met with some friends for soup night, graciously hosted by the James & Erin Clark. Diet-wise, soup night turned out to be our cheat day, which was a good little break from the diet madness. Soup night was the first real test of willpower in a situation where we couldn't control - and didn't know - what was in the food. With his metabolism and having run that day, Ben was still able to maintain a reasonable number of calories, but I really didn't pay attention to what I ate besides quantity. We chose to bring a smaller-sized bowls, which helped limit portion sizes.

What is soup night? It's a small gathering where everyone brings a crock pot full of soup and a side or dessert. Spread it all out, and you have a wonderful variety of food in front of you. The soups & sides/desserts everyone brought were amazing!

Moroccan chickpea soup via Food Network

Here are a couple of my favorites from the night:

• sauerkraut soup from Rick
• chocolate dessert soup by James
• blueberry bars from Leslie
• de-licious fresh guacamole and vegan chickpea-spinach soup made by Shiva and Jenny
• Carman & Oscar brought a super good roasted red pepper soup
• Betsy made this I-might-have-to-park-myself-here-all-night good beer bread.
• there was a white chicken chili and broccoli cheddar soup , but I have no idea who made them! Jon/Jaylyn?

Want to see what else everyone brought to soup night? Here's the collection of recipes.

Verdict:
Soup night is FUN.

I half expected your typical run-of-the-mill soups to show up, but never did I imagine I would have my first experience eating beets (borscht) and had no idea that you could make a soup out of walnuts. The chickpea and spinach soup was so good, I thought about it every single day for over a week until I got the recipe and made it myself.

You'll enjoy soup night too... I promise, we will hold a Bartley a soup night this year!

-------------------------------------------
But wait, there's more:

We ate out at Bub's Burgers at the end of the week. But no Big Ugly burger challenge for us! If Ben's doing his calculations right, you can have an post-cooked 1/4-pound elk burger for under 200 calories if you nix the cheese and ketchup. Add about 150 calories for the bun and you're still out the door for <400 calories.

For those of you who know Ben, he likes to enjoy some burger with his ketchup, so while that's hard, Bub's seasons their burgers SO well that you really don't want to smother it with ketchup - it'll hide the taste! Elk tastes no different than beef, except it's much leaner -- and even leaner than bison. Now, you can't go to Bub's and not order the sweet potato waffle fries, so we split a large order in half between the two of us. I also cut my burger in half and take the other half home for a yummy snack later in the week. But we did good: for two people who also always order a gigantic (their only size) milkshake at Bub's, we've been foregoing... I usually leave in a state of hurt when I put down all of that food, so it's really not a loss. :)

Week 2 - Ben:
Having lost a few pounds now, Ben started adding more calories to his daily intake and being less stringent and restrictive on his foods. Since he got through the first week by eating virtually the same meal every day, it was a welcome change.

During the second week, also, Ben got sick and stayed sick all through the week. Better nutrition, vitamin C, and getting enough sleep were a big part of the focus during week 2.

His overall weight loss was roughly 4 pounds with each day averaging about 1100 calories in the negative.

[More on Ben soon, I need to get the full story from him]


Week 2 - Steph:
In general, my outlook was much better. You know the four (corny) stages of team development? Forming, storming, norming, performing? Week 1 was forming: getting onto the diet (forming), followed by frustration (storming). Week 2 was a week of Norming - some acceptance and the slow beginnings to a change in my habits. Performing is that future state where everything's just clicking along.... we're not quite there yet.
[Sidenote: is the fact that I'm making this connection a sign that I've been in the corporate world too long?]

I started measuring things (serving sizes) by eyeballing. I'm not so nuts that I keep a set of measuring cups and spoons in my purse, but I'm finding that eyeballing and estimating is a good way to keep from mindlessly eating lots of food.

Yep, still drinking a ton of water. I've been trying to keep a glass or bottle of water near me at all times. If I drink a bunch of water with my meal (because I usually don't need a beverage with my food), it helps me keep hydrated but also stay fuller throughout the day. Kind of obvious there, but it's good to get back to basics.

For me, because of the frustration of tracking every morsel during week 1, I mostly quit taking pictures of food and quit tracking every bite. Just as I'd feared, it was starting to become another thing to worry about; eating well/healthy can extend your lifespan, but the added stress can still kill ya! It's all about cost-benefit. :)

I started researching low-calorie recipes, too. The Women's Health Abs Diet includes a meal plan for 3 weeks worth of low-calorie meals and days totaling around 1,500 calories. The plan also walks through some exercises and workouts, so it's a complete package. Free to check out! I like the fact that the plan emphasizes that it doesn't have to take a long time to plan and cook to be healthy, so all of the meals/recipes it gives can be assembled and prepared in less than 10 minutes. However, some of the recipes on there are a little strange. For the extra 3 minutes that it might take to cook an egg in a skillet (over the microwave), I'll take my chances so I don't end up using that time to clean up splattered egg from inside the microwave.

Speaking of low-calorie recipes... as I've mentioned before, my curiosity and interest in diet & nutrition isn't really a new trend. As I was going through the kitchen, I remembered that my mom had given me a number of "Eat This, Not That" books the last few Christmases. You need to read these books!! Unlike the WH Abs Diet, the foods on here taste good and won't get you funny looks when you pull one of these meals out for lunch. I also have a version of this series of books that covers eating out -- the restaurant survival guide. Since so many restaurant and fast-food meals seem to be stealth calorie bombs, it's good to have the book as a reference in the center console in my car in case I'm going somewhere new and need to choose a meal that's less than 1.58 billion calories. Only $10 or $11 at Costco = worth the investment!

Cook This, Not That!  Yummy and GENIUS meal ideas.
Check out the page on all the quick things you can make with a $5 Kroger rotisserie chicken!

(Above) - I made this chicken salad sandwich with a couple of tweaks. It's Chicken Salad Sandwich with Curry & Raisins, except I don't like curry and I don't like raisins. I switched it out for grapes and a little bit of cumin. The Boston Market version is 800+ calories and mine, if I had made it according to this book, would have been 400. The thing was, it was really good. I had to stop myself from eating loads more, but not because I was restricting. It was because it felt full! Very suspicious: this stuff didn't have the feel of "diet food" in a good way.

I'm now itching to buy the latest book, "Eat This, Not That - Supermarket Survival Guide," which helps identify some foods that, although they look the same, are very nutritionally different.

Having a copy would be like having a Rachel (RD) in a book! A few weeks ago, she was telling me about how she was teaching her roommate to shop for healthy foods and read ingredient labels. Two examples she gave were 1) Peanuts and 2) Ice cream. For peanuts, even though they may be plain non-salted dry-roasted peanuts, some manufacturers will roast them in salt, needlessly adding to their sodium content. So, lesson learned: look for as few ingredients as possible! The same applies for ice cream: there are so many fillers and artificial ingredients in some ice cream brands, it can't possibly be good for you. But, read the ingredient list on a carton of Breyers and you'll see three ingredients: milk, cream, sugar. Much better. If you can't pronounce it, walk away.

On the running front, unfortunately, nothing spectacular all week. I just felt tired and pulled a 55-mile week, a big achievement, since I typically get injured as I break the 50-mile plane. A 10-mile pace run was scheduled for Saturday. Ben's advice for pace runs is to eat your typical pre-race meal on the night prior to a pace run because you treat the pace run like a race. We ate some whole wheat pasta with ground turkey meat sauce that night, the first real carbs I felt like I'd had in a while (breaking the salad-for-dinner routine). The run went BETTER than expected! (link works if you're logged into R2W) I felt great! So great that I was completely and utterly wiped out for the rest of the day. The run was definitely something to be proud of.

Meanwhile, I read some McMillan articles about refueling & recovery, some tips which stuck with me. Maybe the info here will help you, too! Greg McMillan writes about the proper mix and timing of nutrition and eating for best recovery. It turns out that Endurox R4 is that perfect 4:1 ratio of carbs to protein, best within 30 minutes of a workout. On days where I'm feeling especially pooped I'll down a scoop of Endurox and water right after I'm done running. Bonus: it doesn't taste bad if you're using the fruit punch flavor. Dare I say I enjoy it?

Outcome: I lost 2 pounds, bringing me to 111.4 lbs, and I think I lost some chub! The most important and notable result is that I'm slowly shifting my mindset. I'm not saying that my views of food are completely and 100% fixed and that I'm not tempted to eat all the Oreos in our pantry in one sitting. I'm just keeping calories in the back of my mind when I eat. Not obsessively, but it never used to get a second thought -- that's how I would be led to overeat.

All in all, good changes after only 2 weeks. Onward and upward!