cry baby cry....
travelling is always hit and miss with food. Today was travelling and big miss. I ate:
1 marzipan croissant 350
1 feta-spinach bakery snack 200
1 lamacun 1000
1 snickers 250
30 g nuts 200
1 orange 150
---------------------------------------
2150 ckal

I feel disgusting. I mustn't beat myself up about this. It is an exception. And I worked off a little bit of it off. I did my run 5 km in 30 min. I almost puked. It is crap to run with full stomach. Bjaaa.....

It started with lying to myself. I knew that I will be the whole day on the way. And somehow I convinced myself, that it would be a good idea to fast and then to run in the evening fasted. I knew that I can't travel and fast, but somehow it seemed to be a good idea in the morning. That is just not an option and I should have prepared some healthy food to take with me. I feel so freaking guilty.

Don't beat yourself up too much. Difficult situation, I could've done worse than 2,150 calories.

How often do you fast and what is the duration of the fast?

For the chin up, there are some things to try

1. slow negatives: jump/climb to the top of the chin up, then lower yourself as slowly as you can (try a slow count to 5 through the downward portion). Once you can do multiple slow reps, try pausing halfway down for a count.
2. towel hangs: hang a towel over a bar and grip it and hang on for as long as you can (builds grip strength)
3. DB rows: with a db heavy enough to row 5-7 times (on the last rep, hold on to the DB as long as you can, squeezing it hard with your grip)
4. Lat pulldown with chin up grip, again in the 5-7 rep range (build back strength)

Do you have a chin up bar at home? Just practicing a lot will help.

Lol No I don't, but I'll start practicing at the gym tomorrow to build up strength.

I do have a kettle bell at home.

Sorry for the hijack, Lapka!

I do 2, 3 and 4 a lot. 1 is completely hopeless. But I somehow have a feeling that I don't make any progress. I mean I do this exercises until I can't no more, but I don't even get sore. How can I get better if I don't get sore? My weakest point in that is grip strength. My hands fail as first...... Meehhhh..

Although .... Now that I am thinking about it.... I did get a little bit better. When I started to do all that, I couldn't even just hang on the bar for 10 sek. Now I can hang at least 1 min.

I have two big fasts a year. This year it was one week and the second time 10 days. But it is completely different environment. I usually go away on some kind of holiday and do it there. And when I am home I often have my first meal in a day in the evening. It is usually not a problem, when I am in my routine. But travelling ..... All this food places at rail stations....Everything is designed to make you eat there .... And it is there. In my routine normal day I don't have so much exposure to food around me. And the advertisements, the appearance of the food, the smell of the food just trigger me. And then the big mistake that I had no good options with me.

Well, soreness isn't necessarily a good sign of an effective workout.

Over what time scale have you been working on a chin up. I think it took my wife 6-9 months...

This

If your doorways can handle it, a door mounted chin-up bar is a pretty cost effective investment. If not, what Aidan suggested is the way I'd do it too. Slow and steady; it sounds like you've made a lot of progress already, though, based on your dead hang time.

Patience is not my strength . I am trying now for about a month to get it done.

Tx for the encouragement.

Will power.....

You can have Mega Super Huge will power, and it will still play minor role in food intake regulation compared with other factors. I don't want to say that it plays no role. It plays, but may be .... something like 5 % compared with everything else. And it is important to use it. So if you have a binge and will eat 2800 instead of 3000 ckal that is good. But.... it is more important to get good grip on other things.

And keep in mind that there are also things, that you just can't change. Example from my life is when I was depressed and took medication. There are some antidepressants on which you will gain. You will just gain. And it is important to make your peace with it. And there are few on which food just became boring. When I was taking it I just forgot to eat. It was not my will-power or success, it was just chemistry.

There is habit, there is stress regulation, there are social norms, there is physical hunger.... all things, that are stronger than any will-power in food intake regulation.

One big thing in my eating history was to find other tools than food to regulate my stress level. And the most effective tool is for me, I don't say that it is for everyone, actually to deal with things that are causing me stress.

I mean the cycle for me was often: I procrastinate XYZ, get stressed out, eat, procrastinate more + stress out about food I ate, eat. I am far from perfect, but to break this at the beginning makes a big difference in calories consumed.

Or I just feel overwhelmed, because I have to deal with 10000000000 things.
At least it feels like there are 100000000000 things. It helps to write a to do list instead of eating and have in every moment just one thing in my head, with which I deal.

Or I feel lonesome. It helps often basically to force myself to go out. Or to go to my dancing course. I mean it is often extremely uncomfortable. I am more on the introvert side. But at the same time I need certain amount of communication and people around me and to take active steps to get it, is better that to eat down this feeling of loneliness.

I try to eat normal. That means that I do eat a dessert basically every day. It cost me usually something between 100 and 200 ckal. Often it is ice cream. I have found cute packages with something between 8 and 20 servings each serving between 25 and 50 ml. If I have a good coffee with it, really sit down and enjoy every bite, such serving is enough to get this "jojojojo, that was gooooood" feeling, this endorphin rush, for really not much calories.

Am I fat?

I weigh now 61 kg (135 pounds) at the height of 170 cm. I don't feel fat. I actually feel pretty good about myself now. I slept well. I am pretty happy about how my pull-up project goes. I finally managed to do so much that I feel that in very funny muscles, where my arms are attached to my back. And I see progress, although it is still miles to go to a pull-up. It is somehow a good kind of fitness projects for me. It makes me feel good.

My feeling good however has nothing to do anything with objective reality. Given completely the same circumstances only being 5 years younger I would feel terribly fat and be thrown at the edge of eating disorder. I mean I have gained two kg in the last months and I have read that:
I have gained, so I must be fat. Right? I am so terrible that no one will ever even talk to me. Right?

Such comments, not even directed at me, are responsible for my weight during my life time going between 90 and 190 pounds.

But the question is how to deal with such comments. My POV on fat, ugly, dumb, mentally ill, poor, (insert here adjective of your choice).... You don't have to find such people attractive, you don't have to want to hang out with such people, but you owe the basic human dignity and respect to everyone, if you are older than teenager. I do cut some slack to teenagers, because they have they own set of bigger problems.

It is apparently that not everyone thinks this way. When I was younger I looked for the fault in me, i tried to change me to be sure that I won't be treated with such sneering disgust.

With age I understood that it is not on me. There is no such thin, athletic, beautiful ..... that will protect me from such comments. The problem is not in me, but in Mihkel05. So nowdays I confront people when I see that. And I really at the core level understand that not I have a problem, but the person that is so judgmental.

I'm glad you confronted him. His words are a reflection of him and no one else. I wonder if he planned to expose so much of his psyche when throwing that barb at MLYLT.

I just found it such an odd thing to say. I mean I would get it if he said "I don't **** fat women" but "I don't talk to fat women" just seems bizarre.

He didn't answer my question but I'm pretty sure he doesn't hold that same standard to conversing with overweight men. Ergo, being a "vagina haver" as Sgt would say, makes the fat person unworthy of conversation with him. Serious issues with that one.

You guys may want to know that poster used to be "thremp" who was much worse posting stuff like that and I believe for years was ban on sight. He can have very helpful advice and knowledge but he also can be very argumentative and inflammatory (and a huge dick making all sorts of personal attacks). Just as an FYI if anything he posts is upsetting in any way I'd really just ignore it or block him. Or just ban him from your log (or anyone else for that matter).

That was exactly what made me so upset. It is such a level of dehumanization of women. Just nogo!

Tx for a warning.

I am now travelling for few weeks. So my routine is off. But I am not unhappy with how things are going. I haven't eaten anything to the point of regrets, what is pretty good. And I have now on my side someone who can do many many many .... *cry* pull-ups and he is constantly making fun of me for not being able to do even one. Sooooo...... every horizontal thing suffers now me trying like an ape to hang on it and making funny body distortions.

I need a measurable goal with this pull-ups and a way to measure progress. I mean I have made some progress compared to the starting point, but it is more like "I could make 10 inverted rows at once and now I can make 30 of them". It is kind of doesn't tell me how far I am from actually a pull-up. So in the next entry I am gonna somehow to find way to have measured how far I am from an actual pull-up now.

What surprises me also is how big the difference is in pull-up and movements like push-up. I am doing yoga. And I am able to hold few positions with my weight completely on my arms. With pull-ups I am not even near to this.

I had my dinner, so why do I want a second one?

Cause my brain ..... I have actually no clue why...... If someone knows, pls share.

Instead of a second dinner I am gonna to learn few moves from this to brag, when I go tomorrow with a friend whom I haven't seen for 20 years dance.

I am now travelling. And as a consequence have no routine, neither with food nor with working-out. But surprisingly it works really well. I have lost in last two weeks 2 kg, so that I am now at 59 kg. But that is not the best thing. What I really like, is that I have basically achieved the mind state towards food that I would like to have. I am basically not thinking about it. I zero obsess about if it is gonna make me fat or if it has enough nutritional value. I eat whatever I want and it somehow works pretty well.

So what is different here ( I am in Moscow now) or when I am home.

I don't work out beyond a little bit yoga in the evening, but I walk a lot. I basically spent 10 hours a day running errands, looking at things, being in museums. When I am at home, I have an office job and so I sit on my butt majority of time.

I do eat whatever I want. It is however majorly food that has some nostalgic value for me/typical russian meals. Generally population here is thinner than in Germany. I think that it is correlated with less usage of cars and smaller servings. I went out to eat in this two weeks more than I went to out to eat in Germany in two years. And what I noticed, is that serving sizes are significantly smaller than in Germany and food is somehow different. I didn't here crave a dessert not a single time after a meal. Here is an example of a restaurant meal I ate. I put this one here, because here the food has been weighed, so I can make a better caloric estimate. The size of the plate is about like in Germany the size of an appetizer plate.


A serving of borshh - 200 ckal (you can vary the caloric content of that significantly by adding sour cream or eating a piece of bread to it)
A piece of bughenina in cherry sauce(110 g) - 400 ckal
200 g cooked buckwheat - 200 ckal
1 spoon of shredded carrots+cabbage - 50 ckal

850 ckal.

I haven't finished the buckwheat, because I was so full. And after that I tried to eat an ice cream, I threw it away after one bite, because it somehow just didn't taste. The best thing is that this meal basically blocked any cravings, any thinking of food for the reminder of the day.

Speaking of goals.....

Need to find a difference in chin-up against pull-up. And although I haven't done anything systematic in last month, just hanging on horizontal bars that came across my way and doing weird body tweaks, I do have some progress. I mean one of the preparation exercises for a pull-up is this that you start in the high position and then try to lower yourself in a controlled way. I couldn't do even near that. I was just plum and down. And now it is definitely controlled descend. That can be actually done in a cool way with my fiance. He holds me into the high position and then lets go. This way he is not bored, while I am doing that and we both have fun.

But I still need to find a way to measure how much of my weight I actually do pull-up. When I am back from Moscow, that will be the first thing in my gym to do.

I am doing better than I expected when I started this log. I felt like I have every second day a fit about eating something that I shouldn't, but I am somehow better. In this sense this log does contribute to my peace of mind.

But here a little story about me and McDo: How I won this one.

About two or three years ago, I was ending about every two months in McDo. I never liked McDo food, was always annoyed by myself afterwards and was still ending there. Thinking more on this showed, that it was basically two situations, that led me into McDo: travelling and being hungry (McDo is always there on every train station) and looking at their advertisement ( It is dumb, but I am very susceptible for a colorful picture of a hamburger, and if it comes together with some kind of offer like two for one, I am totally the audience for this.) The solution was taking enough normal food with me for travelling and writing down how I felt last time when I felt prey to McDo advertisement and then plain reread it before moving my feet to McDo. Nowdays I can't remember last time I ate there.

The key thing is to really take the food with me. I mean when I am preparing the lunch box, I am often not hungry, and thoughts are like " Naaah, I don't need it. I can fast. I will buy something healthy on the way." And still to prepare it and carry with me, is the key to not ending at McDo.

And with advertisement I had to really write it down: my thoughts, when I saw the advertisement and the offer, how good this hamburger looked on picture, and how great this offer was and then the reality: how disgusting this hamburger looks in reality, and how full I was after one, and how I couldn't neither eat the second no throw it away. And then read it before turning in to McDo.

I don't forbid myself McDo. I don't say that I will never again eat there. And if I decide after reading my last experience there still to take this route, then so be it. But for now those two measures: having normal food with me and writing down last experience there, - really prevented me from ending in such regretful situation.

What you see is what you eat. Just prepare some really simple vegetables snacks every single day (like raw carrots, cauliflower, cucumber cut in small pieces) and keep them nearby where you work or sit. When you start feeling a crave, just start munching on them as much as you want. Much more enjoyable than chewing gum since you can actually eat it.

So true for me.

in other news this guy already had appearance here. I like his vids because they have more interesting choregraphy than you usually find in zumba classes. And the dude himself apparently had some dance classes. You can see from his body tension that he knows how to move beyond usual fitness trainer. You can see that girls in the background are a lot more just like a dough without tension. It takes me about an hour to really learn the choreography from the vid. And it is good work-out.

Last day of my trip to Moscow. What is my takeaway form that for my food and work-out routines?

I am pretty happy how it went here. I lost about two kg, although I ate, whatever I wanted. I didn't obsess in any way about a food. I ate 5 times in 3 weeks something sweet (fruits don't count. I ate strawberries, until I couldn't no more. They are so much tastier here than in Europe. You can't get strawberries like here from Krasnodar, in Germany, no matter how much you are willing to pay).
From this 5 times it was 4 times ice cream, because I wanted to find the ice creamy goodness of my childhood. I did. It is vanilla plombir you can buy in GUM for 50 Rub. You can buy in other places things called vanilla plombir, but they are not even near as good as this one. This small stands when entering GUM, are the places to buy this super good ice cream.

Worst ice cream was on Arbat sold directly in the street for 70 Rub. Just don't. It is disgusting.

Fifth time it was a piece of cake with coffee. Pay attention to how small this piece is. Usual portions in Germany are about double size. It was really good and a result of this coffee was me getting engaged. So I am completely happy with this treat.


And that's it. 5 desserts in 3 weeks. And there is no will power involved in that. I somehow just didn't even think about more sweets. How comes?

I think that there are two reasons for me being so normal with food: 1. I walked here a lot outside. I mean in Germany I do work-out but most of my time is spent sitting in my job in the office in front of a PC. And for me physical activity not only burns calories, but normalizes my appetite. 2. I am convinced that the food here is a lot less processed than in Germany, no matter what you buy. If you go to a restaurant and order a soup, a probability here is a lot higher, that the broth is made from scratch, instead of using maggi or kraft. If you buy veg in a grocery shop, it is more probable that it is grown in a very bio way than it is when you buy it somewhere in Europe.

So I commit when I am back to Germany to spent at least two hours every day outside doing something cool. Not necessary working out hardcore, but hiking in the forest, or biking , or just gardening. Another commitment is to pay even more attention to the quality of what goes in my mouth. I mean I am pretty good compared with average population with cooking and so, but I still do use maggi broth for convenience, or am sometimes to lazy to bike to my bio farmer for my bread and veg. I commit to read more food labels and avoid everything that has some kind of Exxx, or words that I don't understand. I commit to buy locally and in season.

I want to keep this state with food.