RoadSkater.Net - Comments for "health"

Serenity Now!

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

And if the Monday peace fails, you can always start again on Tuesday!

I appreciate all your hard work at keeping the Russian Chemisty Majors off the website.

Thanks for the comment! It is personal, and maybe embarrassing to some if they know me, but for those who don't, maybe it'll help.

And by the way, whatever system works for people is fine of course, but if there's agonizing and internal conflict surrounding food, I'd suggest maybe that system isn't working.

When you are hungry, eat.

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

When you are hungry, eat. When you are finished, wash your bowl.

I wish my teenaged son would get the hang of that one. He's got the eating part covered.

What I have found with not being on any kind of dietary restrictions (other than the allergy kind) is that I know now what being hungry feels like, much like I did as a child. I know now what full feels like - and it's not stuffed to the point of paralysis. And the really cool thing is that if I'm miserable now, I just sit there being miserable: I don't sit there with a bowl of ice cream being miserable :-)

My favorite zen koan (and

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

My favorite zen koan (and one of the very few I actually have memorized) is:

When you are hungry, eat. When you are finished, wash your bowl.

I think the problem for many (myself included) is knowing when we are truly hungry, rather than merely unfulfilled in some way that has nothing to do with needing nutrients.

My Inner Peace Starts Monday

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

Nothing is better than inner peace. In the long run, that is, at least. I have to say I am very impressed at your finding a place of peace with food and with your sharing your struggles here.

It's a bummer that people need to log in to comment because I think you would get more comments if not (but we'd have spam comments galore too). We want comments from non-skaters, non-cyclists too.

The point you make about not thinking you'll diet next week helps with better eating this week (if I got that right) is a good one. How often have I said, "Oh I'll eat it this weekend, because my diet starts on Monday." Perhaps for some of us at least, the way to go is not to have any prohibitions, and just relax and never go on another diet.

Of course, there's no denying that others need another path to inner peace with food, and I may be one, I'm not sure. I seem to do better when I have certain things I do not do in general (no cheese, no deep fried, but with the exception of 1/2 of a pizza 1x per week, which is a significant exception i admit).

Winter is tough as I'm less likely to exercise, and exercise is the regulator of sleep and appetite for many. I am still making my way to it all.

But I'm really glad you are feeling so great right now about your relationship with food and exercise! Thanks again for posting something personal! It will help more people than we ever will know.

Lost more weight not dieting!

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

Happy to report I lost another 4lbs somehow. So that's down a total of 10lbs since Christmas/New Year. This isn't to brag, but to celebrate my freedom from diets and disordered eating. It's also absolutely fascinating to read and interpret my body's signals on the days I don't skate, vs. the days I do skate. I now expect elevated carb cravings during the 12 hours after a long skate. I used to panic whenever I got hungry in the following 12 hours after any skate over 1 hour. I'd eat more than I needed. Now I can actually tell how much food I need and I don't overeat any more, and neither do I feel like eating fatty junk. I do still eat fatty junk, however, just not as much.

I'd say one of the biggest triumphs is the inner peace that is finally mine in the evenings. I no longer go through the mental tug-of-war over the contents of my fridge. I no longer walk into the kitchen twenty times a night, to stand there and have philosophical fights with myself as to whether willpower is all it's cracked up to be. I just go to the kitchen if I'm hungry, and eat something. That's it.

Legalizing Crack

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

Wow, I hope that rest isn't what heals you, but I guess if it is, you probably should! How does the shoulder issue factor into skating? Does it hurt to swing your arm or will you still be able to skate when the time comes?

I guess my approach to reaching my healthy weight is a bit more global, in that it's like the idealism of legalizing drugs. It's not banned so all of a sudden I'm not attracted to it :-).

It's an interesting point to me, that you head straight for the Ben & Jerrys, pizza, etc., and I'd like to ask if you think you're doing that because you do put yourself on diets or restricted regimens at other times of the year and you know in the back of your mind you're going to do so again in a matter of time? I'm sort of asking everybody who may have said the same thing you did (not picking on you, in other words!). But yes, we all had different upbringings, and if our cash-strapped parents felt like they had to get the most calories for their bucks, we probably all grew up thinking beef pot pie was a wholesome meal. So then, cue the diets. Probably one of the biggest favors any otherwise loving parent could do for a child (other than hammering home the importance of saving and investing early on) is to put a 'healthy' dinner on the table every day and treat it as the most normal thing in the world, reserving things like french fries, chips and cake to the odd Birthday.

non diets & my shoulder

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

That's great that you've found something that works... :-) Everyone is a little different and what works for some doesn't work for others... I don't really stick too well with the "no carbs in the evening" thing, but I do try to be mindful of them at least.

For a long time, I was keeping a food journal that I'd turn in to my trainer each week. THAT really made me think about everything I was eating, since it would be written down and I'd be "held accountable" for it. Now, I could have lied about what I ate, but that would have defeated the purpose of the journal. (I did bend the truth a bit at times though... lol)

For me, if I wasn't thinking about what I was eating, I'd probably go back to my diet of pizza, cheese fries, and buffalo wings... :-) I think I have a bona-fide addiction to that stuff... Oh, and Ben & Jerry's Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream... THAT stuff is like crack... Sweet, sugary, pumpkiny crack... :-)

As for the shoulder, it's been a minor nuissance for some time now. It started late last spring and would normally just bother me when I was in the gym. In particular, if I was doing some work with dumbbells where each side is independent and you have to rely on the little stabilizer muscles a lot more.

I kept thinking it would get better on its own, but it never did. Recently, it got a LOT worse. (It's marginally better now that I've been not going to the gym or doing anything to aggravate it.) A few weeks ago, I painted two rooms in my house, including the ceilings, and that REALLY made it bad. Bad enough I had trouble finding a comfortable position to fall asleep, etc. I finally scheduled a doctor appointment and he thinks I did something to my rotator cuff.

So tomorrow I have my first physical therapy appointment, and we'll see what the PT guy says. My goal of the PT appt is to find out what exercises I can & can't do at the gym and, of course, what exercises I need to be doing to help my shoulder get back to normal.

I was a little worried that the "treatment" would be to just rest the shoulder, which would eliminate any upper-body work at the gym. But if this really is "rotator cuff impingement" then rest actually makes it worse (supposedly). RCI arises when one of the shoulder muscles is too weak. Which doesn't seem possible, with as much upper-body work my trainer had me doing. But maybe we weren't hitting that muscle effectively.

Anyway, I'm sure the PT guy will do his own assessment to determine what's wrong. So it could end up being something else.

It has been nice sleeping late instead of dragging my butt out of bed early to hit the gym... :-) But I'll get back into my routine again soon.

- SM -

That's great news.

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

I'm so glad you've found something that helps you. Unfortunately, if I said to myself (or worse - had someone else tell me) I couldn't eat carbs in the evening, I would be back to dieting hell rebellion square one. To me, that is a diet! Same thing if I or somebody else instructs me to 'eat healthily' - I'm doomed to the downward spiral. I understand this is not the case for those unaffected by disordered eating or those with a healthy relationship to food.

Perhaps my original post wasn't strong enough. And I'm sure I've built up a reputation of posting diets and yet more diets over the past few years! As I said before, they worked in educating and exposing me to beneficial foods and combinations. However, any diet in general ultimately fails me, and the main reasons for that are control and my own lack of self-respect.

This is no diet. Not counting anything. Not trying to eat either healthily or unhealthily. But guess what? The result is that I eat healthily in normal quantities. It just happens because my quiet, shy subconscious can now be heard in the absence of diet mumbo-jumbo din. The sane, whispering voice in my head has been telling me all along that eating to the point of stuffed-ness is gonna hurt real soon, that cabbage lightens my mood and sugar enrages it. It all makes sense. Food is moseying on back into its rightful corner in my life, and exists to sustain me, not fight with me. I cannot achieve that through any kind of diet.

What you've detailed in your post, Skatey-Mark, is indeed sound nutritional advice for many people. But to those of us for whom eating has become an endless power struggle, it's like a red rag to a bull.

For my non-diet to continue to bring me back to center, I have to constantly remind myself I'm not on any kind of diet at all, period: not cutting back on anything, not excluding anything, not 'trying to eat more' of something, not banning eating at a time of day.

If it weren't for the certain friends and relatives in my life, in whom I have witnessed such self-destruction and nonsensical beliefs about food, I probably wouldn't have posted at all. However, I feel that there are many of us out there stuck in the same holding pattern. Geneen Roth's articles are the best place to start to achieve freedom from diet prison.

But now you've gone and said it, Skatey-Mark: give us all the juicy details about the shoulder injury!! (I hope it heals up soon).

the sad reality of lifestyle changes

In reply to Peace and Slimness Without Diets:

Well, a year has gone by since I decided to make some drastic (to me) changes to get back in shape after gaining over 50 lbs in an 18-month period...

I'm happy to report that, right now, I am back around my 'low weight' of the fall despite not going to the gym for a couple weeks. (Shoulder injury - that's another story.)

Anyway, getting to the point about dieting... Last year when I first started working with a trainer, the first thing we looked at was my diet. He had some pretty drastic changes:

1) Change from 2 meals (lunch & dinner) to 5 meals each day

2) Never let myself get hungry

3) Eat healthy foods

4) He even went as far as to have me eat certain types of food at certain times of the day. For example, no carbs in the evening. But carbs were okay at other times of the day.

I was watching my total caloric intake as well, and the pounds dropped off rapidly. I hit a couple plateaus in there too, but they didn't last long. The weight training I was doing had a big impact too -- I don't think the dietary changes alone would have gotten the same results.

Anyway, so when I started nearing my target weight, I started playing with my diet a bit and the weight loss came to a screeching halt. It was a bit surprising since I went from losing 2 pounds/week to nothing and all I did was add *maybe* 1000-1500 calories PER WEEK back into my diet.

I eventually lost a few more pounds, very slowly... Which was fine. I may have been building muscle too, so it's hard to gauge the process. I readjusted my goals from a target weight to a target body fat percentage.

So this year my goal is to drop an inch off my waist and get my body fat below 10%... Which should be realistic once I get motivated (and healthy) enough to hit the gym on a regular basis again.

But after all this time, I'm still following the same basic guidelines my trainer started me on. I throw in some potato chips every now and then... And hit the bar maybe one night a week at most (and only have 3 beers instead of 5-6...)

It's been a hard fact to take that I won't be able to return to my old hedonistic ways again. (Unless I want to regain all the weight.) Gone are the days of beer & cheese fries, ice cream, buffalo wings, general tso chicken, and many other foods I used to enjoy several times a week... Even pizza is off the list.

Of course, I do let myself have some of those foods occasionally as a treat. But they're no longer part of my normal diet. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss them. I love that food... :-)

A benefit of the new diet is that eating out is much cheaper now, since I'm not having a beer or two, or dessert... May times my girlfriend & I will split an entree rather than take leftovers home. So in these uncertain economic times, it's nice to save a little money when eating out.

Of course, it's still cheaper to eat at home... And eating healthy is more expensive than eating unhealthy. (In general.) Before, I'd usually just make some prepackaged or frozen meal (hot pockets, pizza, etc). Now, we're actually cooking real food which costs more and is a hassle, but I guess you can't put a price on your health...

So for me, I guess diets have always been a short-term solution and then I'd fall back into the normal trappings that would put the weight right back on. Now I'm much more conscious of everything I'm eating, which is its own hassle in a way, but I'm hoping I'll finally break the vicious cycle I've been in for the last 10 years or so.

- SM -

I'm not terribly fond of

In reply to A Banana A Day Keeps the Dr. Away!!:

I'm not terribly fond of bananas, but I can eat them. And eat them I do, every time I put my skates on. For a shorter skate I'll eat it as soon as I roll out the door, and on a longer skate I'll wait till I hit the halfway mark or at the first sign of hunger. I know it could be placebo, but I am convinced that I skate better and go longer without losing my form if I eat a banana. Also, carrying a banana for an hour and trying not to crush it while wearing wristguards is a fun challenge.

Nature's perfect snack

In reply to A Banana A Day Keeps the Dr. Away!!:

And the best thing of all ---- bananas are fully self contained and wrapped to be waterproof and airtight by mother nature.

No 5 second rule with bananas......5 day rule?? maybe.

Bananarama

In reply to A Banana A Day Keeps the Dr. Away!!:

I've largely stayed away from 'nanas cause they're so hard to get down, but you're article has convinced me to at least add them to my diet for a couple of weeks to see what happens. Certainly couldn't be bad!

Thanks,

Jack

Banana Board

In reply to A Banana A Day Keeps the Dr. Away!!:

While much of it or all of it may be true, it does read like promotional material written by someone in love with bananas or making money off of them. It doesn't show up on the snopes.com hoax list I don't think.

However, it is moderately successful, with 95 mentions to date on a google search for "CCNY for a physiological phych class told his class about bananas":

http://www.google.com/search?q=CCNY+for+a+physiological+psych+class+told...

Loosening the search produces much greater results (734) for:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=%22PMS%3A+Forget+the+pills+...

I am guessing this is a very effective piece of viral marketing. By the way, I read some interesting thoughts on keeping bananas in the refrigerator (once ripe a good idea, they said, though the outside turns black) and on speeding the ripening of bananas by putting an apple or tomato in a paper bag with the bananas:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=apple+tomato+ripen+banana+b...

OK. Interesting stuff. Who knows?!

Bananas are Great

In reply to A Banana A Day Keeps the Dr. Away!!:

I agree! Bananas are wonderful, although probably not if you're diabetic. I have decided that if I'm going to eat starchy carbs during this training season, it'll be fruits & veg first, then bread/pasta if I'm still hungry. Bananas do indeed get me through a 1 hour skate.

However, the comment about the er...women's issues...and morning sickness leads me to believe this guy doesn't live in a household full of women! Hmm...the bananas might help if we could THROW them at him :-). And for morning sickness, pretty much anything I could keep down for any length of time made all the difference. Maybe he's on the Chiquita banana board? In any case I'm gonna go potassium-load now, in preparation for the training ride tomorrow - I have 4 almost black bananas contaminating everything else in my cooler, and I am going to force myself to eat them so I don't have to throw them away.

Getting the word out

In reply to Skate for LIfe Fundraiser for Josh Zalunardo, Brain Stem Glioma:

Good job in getting the word out there for this event and this condition. This event will probably show up for a while in Google at least.

Honey Crunch Recipe

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

If you ever formalize that method, please do list it here. I think lots of us would like more recipes for sportsworthy food, or, maybe, just sweet food!

the honey crunch sounds great!

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

Thanks for joining and repying to my venture into the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, conleeuw! That honeycomb recipe sounds like fun. I hope to try it out sometime.

My self-diagnosed need for the SCD crashed headlong into my ultra-marathon skate training about 18 months ago, and although I believe wholeheartedly that the SCD created a suitable rehab environment for my traumatized digestive system, I was not able to eat near enough carbs for safe 30+ mile roadskates. Bananas, dates and honey might just get you through 30-60 minutes sport-training, but for our 3 to 7 hour roadskate training it's drastically inadequate and frankly, a hospital trip in the making. I studied typical carb requirements per 40 mins of hard training and even carried chunks of cantelope, raisins and dates in pre-measured ziploks. And despite eating a proportionately higher fat diet than ever before, I lost a lot of weight: much of it muscle :-(. Since then I have been able to go back to normal (pretty unhealthy) eating, only needing the SCD about every 6 months or so for a week or two.

The weightloss, on the other hand, certainly helped me scramble up hills faster than ever, but after about an hour I'd be close to passing out and my heart rate would be maxed out because I was gasping for carbohydrate replenishment. I found dates to be the highest carb allowable on the SCD that I could eat mid-training-skate, but I couldn't assimilate them fast enough to avoid bonking. Fruit juice was out of the question too, because although providing plentiful carbs, the fruit sugars practically morphed into volcanic lava within about 5 minutes!

A lot of fat the day before a race or long skate? Yes! All the time. I made 'cookies' and 'bread' from almond flour, cheese, heaps of butter and peanut butter. However, after my body realized it had been tricked and there were virtually no carbs in these creations, it didn't want the faux cookies any more!

Luckily my condition wasn't so bad that I couldn't handle the odd bottle of gatorade or packet of powergel. This saved me passing out on the side of the road, causing an accident or inconveniencing my skate buddies via a hospital trip, and a day or two back on the SCD minimized any collywobbles I may have had from the refined sugar.

As with the South Beach Diet, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet backs up its promises. However, I don't advise anybody try 2+ hours speed or fitness skating on so few carbs.

What sport or training do you do?

Recipes you can try....

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

recipes you can try.... make some crunchy take along stuff...

honey nougat, you can choose which nuts you incorporate. I have made it bom full of nuts and seeds.

http://www.scdrecipe.com/recipes-candy/honey-nougat/

and something like the toffee?

http://www.scdrecipe.com/recipes-candy/julias-incredible-caramel-toffee/

I make a kind of honey crunch...I don't have a specific recipe, fly by the seat of my pants when making it... honey, heat, and boil till the soft ball state (you know, take some out and dump it in cold water, it should make a soft ball, not too soft mind.

Add some bicarb of soda... it fizzes up like mad.. pour onto a greased baking tray, let it cool. It becomes a crunchy honey comb kind of sweet thing, easy to take along.

That's about it for my tricks.

I was wondering, how much fat do you use, especially the day before you have to perform? Would consuming more fat not help?

I find that eating dates

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

I find that eating dates works well to get the blood sugar up in a hurry.

Dates are quite high in the GI (glycemic index) of the things SC Dieters can/may eat. GI is the scale which measures how rapidly your blood sugar will go up after consuming a product.

Pure Capilano honey 25 grams = GI 58
Dates sundried (55 gram) = GI 45
Banana, over ripe (i.e black spots on skin, 120 gram) = GI 48

As you can see, dates are (pound for pound) more effective in getting blood sugar up than a banana, though, eating a banana along the way is a good idea. Perhaps incorporating a date or two will have its benefits. Obviously honey is even better, but personally I cannot get pure honey down the hatch when sporting, and diluting it in a drink will reduce the effect as you wont get as much honey in at a time, so dates do it for me...

That's my trick!!

Competition and Burnout

In reply to Benefits of Inline Skating (Rollerblading), Roller Skating, Biking Over Organized Sports and Other Forms of Adolescent Exercise:

I just wrote and thanked her!

Trying for a personal best in an event is constructive, but if there's the added anxiety of 'letting the team down', or a vicarious parent breathing down his or her neck, a supernova sports kid can burn out pretty spectacularly. I can see how all-or-nothing applies here: why not throw the baby out with the bathwater and ditch your 'sports' when you ditch your parents?

Not sure about elsewhere in the country, but where I live in suburban Atlanta, woe betide anybody who dares to use the park fields for an impromtu game of soccer - even more so now with the drought and watering bans. You will get arrested for that now. So knock-about games don't really exist where I live.

Great article. I can't wait until this hits all the main 'news' sites!

Quick Welcome and Suggestion

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Hi and welcome, AziBlue, and thanks for thanking eebee and the rest of us. We look forward to meeting you soon. I am not around just now and have been heads down working on a project so I could not answer sooner.

One suggestion is a simple one, to enter Country Park from the northernmost Lawndale entrance, via Orman. Go to the end of that and turn left and veer left into the lot there. It's a flatter, gentler way to get started on loops at Country Park.

Here's a link to the Orman Street lot map.

You may want to go back and forth on the saddle to the left as you face the lake. Generally, traffic on wheels is supposed to go to the right (counterclockwise as viewed from above), but when starting out it's OK to go back and forth in that area, and even further to the left up to the flagpole or so. This will give you a chance to view the downhill there that descends from the parking lot where you practiced the other day.

Also there are some nice parking lots available for something a bit more flat. I've always wondered how the pavement would be on the north side of Target between the store and the huge former Sears warehouse...looks nice and I think the old through street is blocked back there. I also thought that the street behind Target might work too if they didn't kick you out. But Country Park is the best place we know for now, and we stay out of Battleground Park (unless taken through there on a charity ride) as they'll kick you out and there's no need for the negative vibes.

OK I must go but please do post as you go and comment on anything. Thanks a ton for joining. Sometimes we think we might be typing into the vacuum, but we have to believe and express anyway. So far we met Andy because of the site and you'll enjoy meeting him too. We hope you'll start dreaming of 2 days of 45 miles each by September! (No pressure, ha!)

Good Folks at Bicycle Toy & Hobby

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

That shop was the host of a training ride for the Tour to Tanglewood last August, the last one before the tour itself. You can read my report on skating it here. They did a great job hosting and have always been extremely friendly and welcoming to us skaters. I'm glad that you had a positive experience there.

Dunno about visors. I've never taken one off but I've never had a helmet that had one to take off!

Sadly the weather forecast looks pretty grim for the near term. Maybe things will turn around toward the end of the month, but over the next ten days or so it looks like we'll be lucky to see 50 degrees. And that's no fun except maybe for an impromptu New Year's Eve midnight skate, and we won't be having another one of those for a while.

But hang tight and we'll find a time to get out there. I'm looking forward to having a new member of the local skating crew.

Hey Tim! Thanks for the

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Hey Tim! Thanks for the warm welcome. Gee, everyone's so nice, especially to someone just getting interested!

Let me know when you all go to the park and I'll try my best to show up. Sometimes I work late, sometimes I don't, so it's all depending on the day. I would LOVE to see what some experianced skaters look like in person, and take as much advice as possible. As for the parking lot up there.... my wheels just LOVED all those rocks! :) They need to be rotated anyways, so I figure not too much damage. :) But I probably will park by the natural science center, so I won't be afraid of the big hill next time. I get over 10 to 15mph, and all I can think is.. "Oh no, what do I do... and how do I not look like an idiot doing it."

Also, I helped a woman who owns the Bicycle Toy and Hobby shop in High Point with some labels at work, so I decided to stop in and see her about helmets. She was so wonderful, fitted me correctly with a helmet, and apparently skaters get a 10% discount. She told me not to mess with my helmet and readjust it, and if it became readjusted, to just come back and she'd help me fit it again. She was really wonderful to talk with, and... I did leave with a helmet of my very own. It's a Trek Vapor something or other. She said most skaters took off the visor. Any reason why? I think it looks awesome... but then again, I'm kind of a dork. :) Anyways, for a $35 (after discount!) helmet, it's not bad looking at all, though, I looked at it in the mirror, andI admit it's a bit goofy to see. I will go back for pads this weekend before I try anything crazy like... skating out of my driveway.

Enough rambling, thank you again for the invitation and I would love to go. My only request is that you laugh with me lots while I fall and trip and look stupid! Any help or advice you all want to give will definately be helpful. Thanks again for the warm welcome and everyone's help!

Welcome

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Hi Mike, and thanks for joining us here. I'm one of those Country Park skaters that Elizabeth mentioned and it would be great if you'd join us.

The big parking lot at the tennis courts (Jaycee Park) unfortunately hasn't been paved in a while so it's fairly rough asphalt with a lot of stones poking through--especially bad if you're going slowly and feeling every little bump. The pavement on the 1.6-mile loop around the lakes is much better, but also more challenging with hills and turns and dogs and children on trikes. But it's not an insurmountable challenge if you have a bit of experience as you seem to. With some time and persistance and maybe an oopsie or two...

Regarding teachers/coaches: None of us gives lessons on a formal basis, but as Eebee says, it's hard to get us to shut up about technique. We've been doing this and talking about it for quite a while and have a number of formal clinics behind us with some very good teachers (Blake has most of those actually) and we'll be glad to help you along best we can. Practice and experience are the main components anyway IMHO.

I've heard very good things about skatey-mark's clinic and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

We don't have much of a schedule these days with the short daylight and cold temps, but I've been trying to get out on reasonably wam afternoons for an hour or so. I was out last Monday (1/7) and had a nice 10-mile skate. Give me a shout next time we have a forecast of 60s or higher and sunny and we can try to arrange something. From spring onward, we'll have one or two evenings per week when we plan to meet up, and other days when we just do.

Regarding helmets: I've crashed and smacked my head hard in a $100 Giro and in a $10 Bell from Wal-Mart. They both broke but they both worked. I wear the $10 ones now because I'll never think twice about replacing one if I even suspect that it might have gotten damaged. (No cycling/skating helmet is designed to take more than one impact.) They look a little shabby if you're a helmet snob, but I do this as a service to the kids who won't have to worry about having the dorkiest helmet at the park as long as I'm around. :-)

South Beach Diet Rocks!

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

That's so funny. I dropped my last stubborn 10lbs last year in September alone thanks to trying the South Beach Diet for the first time. Although I'll have to say, with the training we were doing, such as 30+ miler bike events (on skates), going without any power gels, gatorade or other starchy carbs would've been a hospital trip waiting to happen. I tried to eat bananas though instead of wheaty stuff on phase I if I had done over an hour of skating. Right now I'm reading Chris Carmichael's Food for Fitness, hoping for a free pass to eat more toast :-)

You could knock out two birds with one stone regarding top-notch quality instruction in the Eddy Matzger Roadshow, if you wanted to do that. Otherwise, I don't believe there is an abundance of inline skate instructors in the Greensboro area. I'd like to be proven wrong on that one. There are several local skaters, however, who have attended the Matzger workshop enough times to pass on tidbits of info to you at the park for free. If you ask, I think you will be inundated with useful gems. I will let others reply as to their Country Park schedules. Otherwise, a good thing to check in an instructor (someone you'd pay) would be whether they have either the old IISA certification, or the newer one from United Skate Schools Group . As far as I'm concerned, those are both good credentials.

Also obviously it makes sense to be taught by an Inline skate instructor, as opposed to a roller skater or somebody who skates on Landrollers, or even ice.

You should be able to get plenty of good pointers from some of the skaters on this site who skate at Country Park and that'll help you make huge progress, confidence-wise. Which parking lot were you at - did you mean the Tennis Center parking lot or the one in front of the Nature-Science Center? There's another T2T cyclist veteran in GSO who wanted to learn to skate, and I had this dream of helping him out to where he was ready to skate T2T instead of biking it, but he just got married so we probably won't see him again for a few years!

Now that I think about it, Skatey-Mark offers a T2T fundraiser speedskating workshop in the Summer. I hope he does that again this year! I feel very good recommending Mark.

As far as helmets go, Cycles de Oro has plenty. The owner, Dale Brown, has been good to us roadskaters! I think I used a plain old Bell helmet from WalMart, though, for many years. Main thing is it fits well and it cracks when you hit the pavement instead of your skull!

Good for you, getting a bonus, and spending it on skate stuff :-). I can't find any pics of your present skates, but if they got you rolling again, that's excellent!

There are probably things I've forgotten to mention. But posting is free so I'm sure I'll drone on some more soon. I'm honored to have been part of you reconnecting with your deep-rooted inner skater!

Welcome and Congrats!

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Congratulations on losing 50lbs! Welcome to roadskater.net, thanks for signing up, and thanks for posting! Sounds like you're a skate-addict, so you've come to the right place :-)

I had completely forgotten about that post you commented on, which I wrote all of 6 months ago! It's great to hear about inspiring someone to skate more.

Before I say anything else...we are helmet-advocates here, so if you don't have one yet, get one for yourself so you can, as Blake says, 'protect your moneymaking asset'.

Nagging done.

There's a whole network out there of outdoor rec and speed skaters in various parts of the country. In New York, and Atlanta (where I am) there's some sort of group skate almost daily with email groups to give everyone a heads-up. We have skaters registered on this website from Greensboro, Raleigh, Asheboro, as well as other states like Michigan, Texas and Pennsylvania. There are other skating websites/forums, both nationally and worldwide.

There are indoor and outdoor speed teams to join and practice with, plus races to sign up for and scare yourself into a training deadline (which works for me each year!). If you'd prefer something more low-key there are several weekend skate festivals around, the bigger ones being the Great EsSkate in Miami (soon! Feb 8-10), the Philly Free Skate, the Athens-to-Atlanta Roadskate, the SkateBoston weekend, and the Big Apple Roll in New York. Depending on the location, you may need downhill skills including speed control and braking.

I don't know of any professional instructors in NC, but perhaps somebody else here does. I was a certified beginning inline skate instructor under the now defunct IISA. However, I am always happy to help beginners with braking, turning, basic stroke. If you're in Atlanta sometime it's well worth getting some instruction from Paul or Cindy of Bohemian Skate School. They were my first coaches, thank God! Skating behind others who didn't really get any instruction when they started skating, I see many bad habits I never had to unlearn because Paul and Cindy started us all off on the right footing in the first place. Well that sounds way too much like I'm bragging - I meant it as a compliment to Paul and Cindy! There's also the Eddy Matzger Roadshow, which is coming to Greensboro in April. This is an absolute blast, with more instruction than most can handle in one weekend.

If you're in NC, you may be interested to know that thanks to the hard work of Blake L and Craig M., inline and roller skaters are more than welcome to take part on skates in the local cycling Tour to Tanglewood Multiple Sclerosis fundraiser. This is a hilly, fun excuse to get out there every Saturday morning in July and August and get your rear in shape on the Training Rides (which are free).

Generally the outdoor speed and rec skaters love ridiculously long mileage. Many of us train for the 90 miles in 2 days Tour to Tanglewood, 87 miles in one day Athens to Atlanta, and Skatey-Mark did 274.3 miles over 24 hours at the Roller Montreal 24 hour race. With that many hours on skates, you can eat as many carbs as you want.

It's so great you posted! Welcome again. What diet did you follow? What type of skates do you have? Do you skate at your local park?

Thanks so much for the warm

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Thanks so much for the warm welcome!

A new helmet and pads are already in my budget for next week. (For now I have an old clunky borrowed one.) Any recommendations for helmets or great places to get them? I was gonna check out local bike places. As for my diet, I lost all the weight on the South Beach Diet. Or as I call it, "Mike's Struggle to Like Veggies." Now I'm proud to say I don't flinch at trying new stuff and I do tolerate veggies VERY well. Some could even say I prefer them. I'm happier with where I spend my money on food, the choices I've been making for the last part of last year, and I can't see myself ever being who I was again. (Fast food addict with 2 million excuses.) I hope getting involved in some professional lessons and maybe a group will help me to continue this new lifestyle I've started.

You gotta promise not to laugh at my skates, because they are very old. In March I get a big bonus at work and plan to get new skates, and I'm already looking and excited. The ones I have now are called Bladerunners, and it's Pro 4700. I have no idea what level they are, or if they are any good For rekindling my interest and getting me outside, they are doing a good job. As far as skating at my local park goes, I've went to Country Park since I live close and thought that I would skate in the big parking lot there to get myself familiar with the process again. I was too nervous to go into the park. Those little voices saying how silly I look were talking to me. I was only out there for maybe 30 minutes today and retreated back to the safety of my neighborhood streets. I have to work on being comfortable on my skates in public around people and looking like a lunatic. Haha, hopefully once I find lessons I'll be better about that. Maybe tomorrow I'll actually go INTO the park. Wish me luck!

I plan to post and ask the group about lessons in the area, but when I find possible coaches, what are some good questions to ask to determine if they are any good? Thanks again for the wonderful warm welcome. I know the only way to get involved is to jump in and discuss it with people who know what they are doing, so it's nice to have a group like this, where I won't feel too dumb asking noob stuff. Haha

Hey Eebee, I'm new here

In reply to The Secret to Weight Loss and Maintaining Your Target Weight:

Hey Eebee, I'm new here and just catching up on different topics that seem interesting. I was reading about some other beginners and I have to let you know you inspire me to really get involved with my skating. Especially with this post. I did the same thing you were just talking about. I've been on a diet and lost about 50lbs, and when the time came to really add a habitual workout to my life, I decided that the gym is GREAT.... for rainy days when I want to sit and listen to music. But for normal everyday keeping myself fit, it needs to be fun and actually involve me. As a kid I would skate and feel so natural. It was like flying. My own personal freedom from everyone else. So, I broke out my old skates from high school. (Which still fit... incredibly!) Now I'm looking for good places to skate, and I promise myself each day.. to strap them on, and skate... even if it's just for 20 minutes. I'm in the process now of looking for a professional instructor! Anyways, I wanted to let you know that you and the entire Roadskater team here, so far have really inspired me to relive what I felt when I was younger. Thanks!

My Findings Whilst Training on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

Hi Allison, welcome to Roadskater.net, and thanks for asking! In my original post I was hoping to get some suggestions from people who had been up against this same dilemma for whatever reason, be it Celiac's or IBS or UC or Crohn's, etc., because I couldn't find anything out about it elsewhere online, regarding extreme athletic events in particular.

First off...I'm not a doctor, so be sure to go to yours to keep everything in check, and my findings are based purely on my own reactions to the SC diet.

Second, when I finally got an official diagnosis from my doctor, I told him about the SC diet and he said "Well that sounds like a healthy way to eat, anyway!". By the time I got the diagnosis, my symptoms and UC troubles were on the way out.

I found that training for an event, and actually doing the event, whilst on the SC diet, were two very different things. That is, during training it was easier for me to plan on not bonking because

a) Most of my training workouts only lasted an hour, and were at the end of the day after I'd had the chance to food-load (can't really call it carbo-loading, as you say, because all the carbs you're allowed on the SCD are so compatible with the human body, they're used up pretty quickly and don't hang around long!).

b) After a training skate I could rush home and eat a plate of chicken and broccoli or carrots or something that might remotely stick to my ribs before I got too woozy or calorie-deprived.

However, I did a dummy-run training skate that was to be 35 + miles, and 3+ hours long, in 90 degree heat, and ended up with not near enough energy and bonked something rotten. Instead of gatorade I was using Welch's grape juice + electrolyte water ("Elete" water), plus some salt. This not only was not enough calories, but it upset my system just as much as Gatorade, and was too sweet for me to even want to drink!! Luckily my training partner was at hand and I chugged a bunch of his Gatorade, deciding to pay the consequences later, rather than end up in the ER from hyponatremia, or hypokalemia, or something like that. My philosophy became "It's better to eat something now that'll upset your system later than to eat nothing and end up in an ambulance or coma!".

What I ended up having to carry with me in my Camelbak for carbs during an event, were bananas, dates, chopped up cantaloupe, and honey. However, what I found was that this was disastrously inadequate. On the 87 mile event I had been training for (and my training did reduce in quantity after I started the SCD about 6 weeks before the event), I tried to carbo-load the day before, and that morning, but there are only so many bananas and dates a person can eat! I lasted about 69 miles, and pretty much just curled up in a ball on a grassy bank on the side of the road, convinced I was done. My training partner said the magic words "Would a raspberry Gu work?", and I perked up, grabbed it from him and practically inhaled it. It did the trick and I got up and skated the remaining 18 miles in relative sanity. To heck with the refined sugar!

I'd like to add that I became a baking fool and lived off almond-flour nut breads, cheese breads and banana breads (more bananas! Arrgh!) during that time and found I could no longer stand the sight of them by the time the event rolled around, so my choices for calories were severely limited. There are some things in the SCD book that I never got around to doing, however, such as the home made yogurts and cheeses. Maybe those would've given me more options, baking and event-calorie wise.

Shortly after this event in October 2006, my symptoms calmed down and never came back full force, so the UC has been manageable. I have not needed to stick to the SCD at all. So I never had a reason to fine-tune my training/event calories in relation to the SCD. I think there are probably lots more things I could have tried, but just never got around to it, or didn't have the time to prepare them.

I lost a ton of weight whilst on the diet, and some of it was probably muscle. However, this probably offset the power-to-weight ratio, because I wasn't really 'slower' as long as I had ample calories. Here's how a typical hunger pang went:

Oh! I'm hungry
Well, what can I eat?
Uhh, that's right, NOTHING!
Oh well I'll just ignore it until the next pang comes along

I wish I had more hopeful results to give you, and with hindsight I think it would have been better to ditch the training and the event I had already signed up for, until I had the UC under control. But I didn't know it was ever going to be under control at the time, and honestly, I don't think I COULD have given up the physical activity, even if it would've been the smart thing to do. I guess the good news is that I did get better, in the meantime at least.

I hope some of this is helpful to you! Definitely keep a close eye on everything with your Doctor, though. And let me know what you discover with your training.

Racing Food: Honey, Lemon, Lime, Lite Salt, Coca-Cola Syrup?

In reply to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) and Marathon Training:

Hi Allison, and welcome. Thanks for contributing such a thoughtful, specific question.

You can find most of what's written here about the SCD with this search:

http://roadskater.net/index.php?q=search/node/%22specific+carbohydrate+diet%22

None of us are experts, of course, but we are learning as we go and sharing our individual, unscientific experience. But that's what is great about it to me, as we can all share what we think, feel, or "know." Consult your doctor and healer before doing anything anywhere ever in all space and time forevermore and all that.

Please share with us your experiences with running, cycling, swimming, triathloning, diet, charity exercise and (almost) everything else. We'd love to follow your story and I know others out there would too...ones we haven't met but who will find us via GooYahMSNAsk.

Whatever we are going through is what someone else is silently going through as well, and while we all should see experts when we need them, we can encourage and inform each other here.

One thing eebee says often is that we need to find the solutions that work for us, not others. Maybe I say that too? I don't know.

[I say play your songs or the ones you like and wait to see who listens because if you play stuff you don't like, you get an audience that likes only what you don't, and the ones that might like what you do won't hang around because you're too busy playing stuff you don't. This goes for dating as an analogy, too.]

More importantly, I hope we can get some people to try exercise and diet alternatives that work for them. And getting off the couch for one lap is still getting off the couch.

Honey, Lemon, Lime, Coca-Cola Syrup?

In response to your comment about honey, we've been using honey for some time when training, sometimes carrying a last-minute-purchased "honey bear" dispenser in our waterpacks out on the Silver Comet Trail and elsewhere. Lately I purchased a Hammer Gel dispenser and liked that, and also bought an empty "travel" shampoo bottle at WallofChina-Mart which is working well.

I never thought to use lemon with the honey, but have put a teaspoon or two of Morton's Lite Salt (potassium, sodium) in my goo and skaterade (to cut the sweetness and replace electrolytes).

Yum, I wonder if lime might be good with the honey? Hmm, what if I added vanilla flavoring. I think I'm getting closer to the Coke recipe here, ha. One of our pals, skart, I think, was looking into buying Coca-Cola syrup for some concoction. Has there been an internet posting of how to make a Coca-Cola? Seems like with all the other how-to info out there, we could get that! Coca-Cola is a secret weapon, along with glitter of course. I just love how the lemon smell comes out when you unscrew the cap on a Coke on a hot day. Maybe it's a lime smell, I don't know!

And upon further research, of course there's much about the Coca-Cola recipe on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula

Interesting tidbits from that article:

To this day, Coca-Cola uses as an ingredient a coca leaf extract....Because the cocaine predecessors are naturally present in coca leaves, some argue that today's Coca-Cola uses "spent", or treated, coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage.
The current original "classic" formula was changed in the United States at an unknown point to replace cane sugar with corn syrup, although Coca-Cola is currently sweetened with regular sugar in the rest of the world.
The closest formula to the original that can be purchased is the 1935 kosher formula which is still produced though it may be difficult to find outside of Passover, where it is sold in 2-Litre bottles with a yellow cap marked with a circle around the letter U followed by a P, indicating that the Orthodox Union certifies the soda as Kosher for Passover.
While the current American Coke formula is kosher, during Passover most observant Jews do not consume corn products or their derivatives....

The recipes seem a bit difficult, especially the third one, including...

Extract the cocaine from 1.1 grams of coca leaf (Truxillo growth of coca preferred) with toluol;dry the cocaine extract.

That's one recipe I won't be trying at home. There's a sidekick to this topic that's interesting, on OpenCola:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola

This also leads to a thorough and thoroughly humorous and interesting different recipe page...

http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html

OK back to my vanilla soy milk breakfast lunch for today. Thanks for visiting and we hope you'll be back to share the struggle!

Skateylove, Blake