(Or just came out to have fun and watch some chick-on-chick action. Dudes welcome as supporters and spectators too!)

I’m on a horse.

Check out all the transformations here.

Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko was hawking his latest health abomination, Eat This Not That! For Kids! And when asked by the twit show host, “What’s the best dessert for my kids,” Zinczenko replied, “Have them eat THIS Dairy Queen banana split with only 73 grams of sugar, NOT THAT Baskin Robbins Classic banana split with 125 grams of sugar.”

Do you think Zinczenko wants me to whack his head with THIS aluminum bat or THAT wooden one? Junk food swapping is just as dangerous, albeit much slower in its destruction. But essentially, that’s what he is asking parents to choose between when it comes to feeding kids dessert.

Eat This, Not That is a clever disguise for, Eat Shit, Not Crap.

Read more…

Besides having to live through loads of crap and well-meant advice during my pregnancy, I could say I’m probably a statistical anomaly where typical pregnancy ailments and age risks are concerned:

• I’m 40
• I’m (strictly speaking) overweight
• This is my first

All the above are elements that could have seriously hampered my chances of success in getting and staying pregnant. So why do I feel great?

Apart from an admitted possible genetic disposition towards easy pregnancies, I mainly blame training and good food for that.

I’m not going to yap on to you about how beneficial weight training can be, pregnant or not. Current research has already had enough to say about that, and you wouldn’t have gone on reading this far if you didn’t think there’s some truth in it anyway. Besides, you can find more on this subject elsewhere on this site.

I’m into month seven now, and still training 4-5 times a week, using mainly free weights, and experimenting with what feels right as my insides get turned inside out over the months.

How weight training’s benefited me

I try to make objective regular self-observations regarding benefits for me of weight training, actively keeping my weight training and physical condition up to scratch and observe how I feel from day to day, as there is so little research material to compare my results to.

For example, I consciously focus on my back staying strong, and I definitely find that I am not developing a typical arched sore pregnancy back as my belly grows, one of the major problems many pregnant women experience.

I double checked this and other practical points at an otherwise fun birthday party last weekend where (oh horror) 5 other pregnant ladies in the age-range of 35-40 years old and pregnancy month 4 to 8 were comparing ailments ranging from back pain, leg/knee pain, indigestion, sleeplessness, nausea, flatulence and tiredness to hormonal fluctuations with the range of Mount Everest.

None of them trained or even touched a free weight with a stick in case it might bite them.

They were very surprised I couldn’t relate to any of their woes (which made me feel like a freak, a very happy one that is), and even the hormonal fluctuations thing was discredited by my sweetheart. Admittedly, sweetheart knows what’s good for him in any case, but I tend to believe he was telling the truth, as he was visibly gloating while casually mentioning it to all the other washed out and desperate looking daddies-to-be.

What I do

Here are some of the exercises that I’ve personally found comfortable and do daily without discomfort. I would not recommend most of them for beginners, but they could be an inspiration to those who could get some help in figuring out what fits the well-trained bump.

Some articles argue that using machines instead of free weights is preferable when pregnant, and advise women not to do squats and avoid free weights. Arguments (among others) are that machines would be safer and keep you range of motion in check, and your abdominals inert. Leg extensions would keep you balanced better than squats.

I personally don’t get this point of view at all. I do use machines if useful, but prefer free weights where I can exactly because they give me the opportunity to find my best balance without being squeezed into a certain position.

I saw some real gems while doing some extra internet research. One suggested doing “hyperextensions for lower back“. Ladies, just look at the mentioned picture and imagine yourself doing this with a watermelon attached to your front. ‘Nuff said. And how about some “bent over shoulder laterals“? Why? HOW? Medicine ball prehistoric crunches? AARGH!

If you want to use some of the below exercises, but are not sure about proper execution, weight to use or are unsure if the exercises fit your actual level of physical condition, err on the wise side: ask your OB and/or PT whether you should/could do them and get somebody to spot you if you feel wobbly or unsure at first.

General rule: use lighter weights than you would in a non-pregnant state.

Some obvious do’s and don’ts (some out of the Duh! box):

• don’t start a new strenuous exercise program when pregnant and untrained
• don’t experiment with some new training wonder thingie you saw on TV
• don’t overtrain; listen to your body
• don’t go on a weight-loss diet when pregnant
• don’t let other people’s comments keep you from training

• do eat regularly and go for real food, not crap
• do consult your physician and PT
• do listen to your body
• do have fun when training
• do take the time to recover

The list below is not exhaustive. There’s so much else you can probably do, but it’s a start. I’m not getting into training schedules or how much weight to use either. Alternate, combine, in short, don’t get bored: just go for it. And above all: Have fun!

Legs

• Split squats weighted or unweighted, wide(r) stance
• Any type of squats that feel comfortable, weighted or unweighted, wide(r) stance
• Deadlift

Back:

• Lat pull-down wide grip
• Lat pull-down reverse narrow grip
• Dumbbell row
• Advanced: Pull-ups, which will probably change to assisted pullups as you gain weight (see: Mistressing the Pull-up)
• Push ups (if comfortable)

Core:

• Kettlebell pick-up
• Side bend weighed
• Farmers walk, try: one hand loaded, both hands loaded with equal or dissimilar weights (e.g. 20 pounds right hand and 30 pounds left hand).
• Plank variations

Shoulders/arms:

• Military press, seated or standing
• Dumbbell side raises, standing or seated (on medicine ball)
• Dumbbell front raises, standing or seated (on medicine ball)
• Barbell press, hands 90 degrees (like lifting a baby, something you will probably do a lot in the coming few years, so best be prepared)
• Dips
• Biceps using dumbbells

Endurance:

Walk, swim, bike, cross-train, whatever. Jogging or running I cannot honestly recommend as I find it uncomfortable (wobble, WOBBLE, burp…).

Stretching:

Do stretch if you feel like it, but be careful not to overstretch as your ligaments loosen up during pregnancy (although, to be honest, having a fairly muscular build myself, I don’t really notice it myself).

• Back stretches
• Leg stretches/hip stretches
• Calf stretches
• Shoulder/arm stretches
• Front of chest stretches

She’s lost (and maintained) a total of about 55 pounds to date (~15 more to go). She started doing athletic stuff about 5 years ago, and started lifting two years ago. She’s now handcycling, swimming and racing regularly. She did her first 10K as a wheelchair racer in May 2010 (in the Bolder Boulder, one of the biggest 10Ks on the continent — the wheelchair racing contingent was very intimidating, she says), and her first sprint triathlon in June.

Here’s her story.

Starting out

As a child and young woman, I was pretty much full of self-loathing.

I was overweight (although not as overweight as I thought I was) from my early teenage years on. I worked hard to disassociate my body, my physical self, from my essential self.

My husband, on the other hand, defined himself almost exclusively as an athlete. He ran marathons and did triathlons, he watched what he ate, and he treated his body as a valuable resource that needed to be taken care of. Out of love for me, he begged me to start doing something, anything, physical, but I wasn’t buying it.

Then, in 1994, I was diagnosed with MS.

I was 34 years old, I had 3 young children (ages 8, 6 and 4) and I was in graduate school, working on my master’s degree in Computer Science. To top it off, at just about the same time, my father-in-law had a severe stroke resulting in a move for him into a nursing home, so the entire family was focused on dealing with that change.

At the beginning, I concentrated on not letting MS get in the way of anything else: “Oh, yes, I have MS, but look! Over there! A butterfly!”

And the early years of MS can be very deceptive—between attacks you may feel fine much of the time, which can lead to all sorts of mind games about whether you really have the disease or not. When I was having symptoms, I lied about it a lot: “I twisted my ankle,” or “I fell down the stairs.” The few times I tried to talk to anyone else about it were confusing and frustrating; I was all over the map about how I felt about it, and I’m sure I telegraphed my bewilderment to everyone else.

When I was diagnosed, the prevailing medical wisdom was that exertion was bad for people with MS.

There’s some basis in fact for this—people with MS, even if they are asymptomatic, generally fatigue more quickly than people without MS. For many people with MS, fatigue is a primary and very real symptom. Many people with MS are very sensitive to small rises in core body temperature; increased body temperature can cause an alarming (although temporary) increase in symptoms. My doctor at the time told me to rest as much as possible, and as a dedicated couch potato, I had no trouble following that advice.

I think it’s different for newly diagnosed MS patients now. When I was diagnosed, there were no disease modifying drugs (DMDs) in common use. Today neurologists try to get all patients started on treatment right away, and most of the current DMDs are injected. It’s hard to forget that you have a chronic neurological illness when you’re injecting yourself every day (or every other day, or every week). That’s got its drawbacks, too, of course.

Deciding to change

After several years of “resting as much as possible” I was even more deconditioned than I had been before.

My weight had already ballooned with each pregnancy, and now I was well into “obese” territory. I can’t tell you whether my physical deterioration was due to MS, overweight, or lack of exercise, but I can’t believe that being overweight and sedentary helped.

And I was deteriorating, by fits and starts. Just after Christmas one year I was standing in the kitchen, and I turned to stir something on the stove, and I just slid to the floor. My husband and son had to pick me up and carry me to bed, and I couldn’t get up by myself for a couple of weeks. And I thought, “Someday someone is going to have to lift me in and out of bed every day, and weighing over 200 pounds isn’t going to make that any easier.”

So I lost weight. (Wow, doesn’t that sound easy?) It took two years, several nutritionists, and logging every bite I put in my mouth to lose 45 pounds. No exercise. But — with 20% of my body weight gone, I could walk around a block with a cane instead of crutches. My legs didn’t swell up by noon every day. Was it because I lost weight, or because my MS was remitting? Does it matter?

My MS progression didn’t stop, though. I was already using a wheelchair at work, and within the next couple of years I was using it almost full time. Using a wheelchair, even when I could still walk short distances, conserved my energy to do other things besides get from point A to point B.

About six years ago I bought a handcycle, which is an arm-powered tricycle with wheels. I didn’t have any training, or anyone to talk to—I just rode the handcycle a little further each time, when I could, and did the same in my wheelchair. I discovered that I was proud to push further today than I had pushed last week.

Now, even though I still can’t walk, I think of myself as an athlete, which is something I never thought I would be. I’m proud of my abilities, and I want to push to be able to do more.

Learning what I need

There’s really very little information in the way of scientific or clinical studies on the effects of exercise on people with MS. I decided to not worry about that, and go with how I felt.

When I started lifting weights, I would go home and go to bed for the rest of the day. It was months before I could both lift weights and do something else the same day (like get up for lunch). I decided that that was ok—that it was going to take me longer to adjust to lifting than it took able-bodied people, and I would just go with that.

Time and energy were both huge barriers, and I didn’t start working out effectively until I stopped working full time (I work three days a week). Even now, I don’t see how I could have done what I’m doing had I still been working full time; I just don’t have enough energy for both, thanks to MS. So switching to part time work means that I’m prioritizing my body, my health and my strength over money and the satisfaction I get from working. Not everyone can even afford to do that.

On a practical level, people with disabling chronic illnesses may need all kinds of support they may not have in order for exercise to be practical—mobility equipment, accessibility of facilities, transportation options, the acceptance and understanding of family and friends.

I wish I understood whatever switch flipped in my head to move me from all the reasons I believed I couldn’t work out to where I am now, but I don’t.

My activity now

Now, I lift weights at a city gym with a trainer. When we started, my trainer didn’t particularly know anything about MS, but he’s willing to learn, and (luckily for me) he seems to have an innate understanding of how far I should push myself. He’s good at recognizing, even before I do, when I need to scale back or take it easy. He’s creative about adapting exercises to what I can do.

I use free weights almost exclusively. I don’t know how much of a badass I am at weights – I can bench press 70 pounds 20 times. I love lifting weights, hate to miss a session, and really like having muscles I can see :-).

I handcycle. I want to be able to tour, with able-bodied cyclists (i.e., my husband and friends), but the hard reality is that I’m never going to be able to go as fast as even the slow cyclists. Mentally, that’s difficult for me to accept.

I race. This is my first season wheelchair racing, and I really enjoy it. I need to get more mileage and more hills in, and enter more races. How badass am I? Well, out of 15 wheelchair racers in my first (and so far only) 10K, I came in last. But I was really pleased with my time.

I swim. I started swimming last fall, and it’s one of the few sports where I actually can go as fast as (some) able-bodied people.

Participating in adaptive sports is interesting. There are so few of us, and our abilities and disabilities are so different, that it’s hard to figure out where you stand, badass-ness-wise. If you’re a 45 year old woman running 10Ks, you can find thousands of other people to compare yourself with. If you’re a 50 year old woman with MS doing 10Ks in a racing chair, actual competitors are few and far between.

But this same phenomenon works the other way, too — if you’re a 42 year old cyclist, you’re unlikely to find yourself in the same race (much less the same heat) as Lance Armstrong. But I’ve raced on the same track with Paralympic gold medalists (which is really daunting, by the way – talk about being dropped in a heartbeat!).

Really the only way to approach it (and stay sane) is to recognize that you’re competing with yourself, with your own previous performance.

I want to get better at racing and handcycling, and enter more races and triathlons.

Advice to others

What advice would I give to other folks learning to manage a chronic illness or disability?

Accept the fact that you may not be able to do whatever it is you want to do the same way you would have done it if you weren’t disabled, or if you didn’t have a chronic illness.

Once you’ve got the acceptance part down (and you’ll probably have to do that over and over again), find another way to do it!

Find the other people in your situation who are doing the things you want to do and learn from them.

The most pervasive myth was the one I bought into for so many years, that people with MS can’t (or shouldn’t) exercise. The dumbest things I heard, in fact, were the things I was telling myself—that there’s no way to do this, or that it’s unacceptable to compromise in order to do it. I’m still wrestling with the myth of independence and the belief that I should be able to do all this stuff without any assistance from others.

Once I started exercising, I experienced nothing but support and encouragement from the able-bodied (and otherwise) athletes around me. Sometimes this support can veer dangerously close to the “you’re so inspiring” trope, but even then, people’s hearts are in the right place.

I’m having a good time and I feel like a new person. Your website has helped validate my decisions to do this stuff.

Grapple Girl Women’s Open tournament: Sat August 21, 2010

Women’s Grappling Camp: Aug 23-27, 2010

And of course, as always, pay-what-you-can women’s classes at MECCA. By women, for women. Taught by female national-level competitors. (And, occasionally, me. Ha!)

• Women’s grappling: Fridays 6-7:30 pm; Sundays 12 pm.
• Women’s wrestling: Sundays 11 am.
• Women’s judo: Wednesdays 6-7 pm.

Whether you’re a total beginner or grizzled mat veteran; whatever your style, school, size, or skill — join us!

Large-scale study after large-scale study has shown that shotgunning single vitamins and minerals across a general population does either no good or is actively harmful. Vitamin C, E, A, folic acid, etc… and now calcium. I suspect that vitamin D supplementation may meet the same fate. Fibre additives are not the same as naturally occurring fibre, so don’t kid yourself about that high-fibre cookie with added inulin — you’re just turning yourself into a gassy balloon as your bifidobacteria population explodes, fairly literally, in your intestines.

Nature is still smarter than we are. The world — and our physiology — is still more complex than we like to think.

There are hundreds — thousands — of chemical compounds in our food that we need, and that probably work synergistically. Just because we’ve isolated a few doesn’t mean that:

• those are the ones we actually need
• we can, in fact, absorb and use them properly in supplement form
• that they should be supplemented in isolation
• that they should be supplemented in large doses
• that everyone, regardless of individual medical, nutritional, and/or physiological status, should consume them
• that we’ve gotten the molecular format right. (Remember that little whoopsie with the wrong form of vitamin E? Or the mixup between folic acid and folate? Retinol and beta-carotene? Wait, was that a righty or a lefty molecule again? Dammit I can’t keep all these tocopherols straight.)

We evolved to be outside, moving around, consuming a varied diet of other highly evolved organisms who secrete and produce thousands of their own chemical compounds — a diet looks nothing like the rubbish that most folks shovel in now and/or that food companies label as “food”. We evolved being dirty. We evolved being hungry. We evolved as scavenging omnivores who ate darn near everything we could chew or fit in our gobs. (Some of these attempts were obviously more successful than others.)

And you know what? If you’re an average person in North America (and here I use the general “you”), the garbage you consume far outweighs any tiny potential benefit that a single vitamin/mineral supplement could hope to give you.  And seriously guys, vitamin water? C’mon.

You probably eat:

• too much sugar
• too much sodium
• too much processed food
• too many artificially created and industrially processed fats
• too many industrially added chemicals
• too few fruits and vegetables — especially the chemical powerhouses like dark leafy greens and dark coloured berries
• too little of the right fats (fatphobes, I see you yanking the egg yolks out)

You also probably:

• sleep too little
• move and use your body infrequently
• have too much stress
• consume too much caffeine, booze, and/or carbonated drinks
• smoke
• rely on mass-market pharmaceuticals to hide valid symptoms of physiological distress rather than attempting to solve the underlying problem
• play, laugh, and love too little; work, worry, and grouch too much

If you are not this average person who does these things, of course, I salute you. You probably feel great. And no surprise.

So here’s my new stand: Fuck supplements.

There are a few that still seem to work and won’t give us cancer. There are some that one can take if one has a deficiency.

But really, most of the time you’re just creating expensive pee for yourself.

Remember HMB? Remember chromium? Remember ecdysterone? Those of you taking CLA, read the label — it’s probably soy derived rather than the naturally occurring CLA in animals.

Remember every magic saviour vitamin? Hey, folks with a cold virus, how are those vitamin C tablets treating you? Not doing jack shit, I’ll bet.

Fuck supplements.

BTW if you are interested in the role of calcium in heart disease in general, check this out. Can’t wait for the pharm companies to give us a calcium-lowering drug.

All McDonald’s nuggets are not created equal.

U.S. McNuggets not only contain more calories and fat than their British counterparts, but also chemicals not found across the Atlantic.

CNN investigated the differences after receiving a blog comment asking about them.

American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, “an anti-foaming agent” also used in Silly Putty.