comrade's Fitness Profile

comrade's Latest Activity

• 2 months ago
  comrade burned 173 Calories yesterday!
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of his personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade burned 170 Calories yesterday!
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade burned 260 Calories yesterday!
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.
• 2 months ago
  comrade did one of their personal workouts.

comrade's Health Journal

	Leptin Research I: Sweet Tooth As promised, I'm providing a journal article (URL at the bottom) relating to the hormone leptin and its effect on weight loss. This one is interesting because I didn't actually see it coming. The title of the article is "Diurnal variation of human sweet taste recognition thresholds is correlated with plasma leptin levels," which boils down to "leptin low=sugar tooth high." In other words, running at starvation-level leptin concentrations literally makes sweet foods taste less sweet, which means you're likely to go after sweeter and sweeter foods to satisfy cravings. What's more, this effect is "diurnal," meaning that it varies over the course of a day. According to the article, your ability to taste sweets is highest in the morning (low taste threshold) and lowest in the evening (high taste threshold). Cue clip of a late-night ice cream binge. Interesting stuff. URL: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18633111?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum] Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Leptin Research (intro) I've been researching a hormone called leptin, which is partly responsible for controlling appetite and metabolism. The basics: more leptin = less appetite, higher metabolism = good. No, it doesn't come in a pill (that I know of), probably because research hasn't yet shown that you can treat obesity by administering leptin. Now, what I've heard (but don't yet entirely believe) is that leptin levels decrease slowly from calorie restriction until they start to bottom out after about a week. At that point, weight loss becomes much more difficult. However, if you allow yourself to binge a little bit (particularly on carbs) for 24 hours, your leptin levels will return to normal and you can get back on the wagon and continue to lose weight effectively. Sounds good, right? Not to mention the fact that indulging occasionally has been proven to help people stick to a diet. I'm going to post a couple of real journal articles to try to sort out what's fact from myth about this mysterious hormone. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Spinning Took a cycling class at MW today. 53 minutes and the equivalent of 11.2 uphill miles (at various grades). Average RPM 90-100. It was absolutely intense. It also reminded me that March Wellness is dead serious about the science of exercise. Instead of yelling at us to pedal faster or whatever, the trainer said things like "now go to 85% of your maximum heart rate!" See, part of signing up at March Wellness is taking a fitness assessment which includes some time on a treadmill while wearing heart monitor. In the process, they straighten out for you what your heart rate ought to be while you're doing various levels of exercise, and the classes all take advantage of that information. I was at a bit of a disadvantage, neither having a heart monitoring chest-strap nor knowing exactly what my maximum heart rate should be (around 200, I'm sure). But I did what I could by listening to my muscles and trying to remember what it feels like to be at 150bpm on a treadmill, and I'm sure I did fine. The main point is that the class spectacularly kicked my butt. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Fat Loss/Muscle Gain My weight has been pretty stable for the past week or so, but my body composition has been visibly improving. Since my daily caloric intake is still around or below 1200/day and my output just from exercise is 500-600/day, I think that I'm in a sort of equilibrium between pounds of fat lost and pounds of muscle gained. Chances are that the trend in my weight will start to dip back down as the initial muscle growth cools off and the fat loss catches or even speeds up from the added muscle. Either way, as long as my body composition is improving I'm happy. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	March Wellness Joined March Wellness this morning. My employee discount makes it only marginally more expensive than 24 Hour Fitness. Not only are the equipment and facilities much better at March Wellness, but it's more-or-less on the way to work and I can keep some things in a locker there. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Scale Finally got a scale. Pretty cheap, but the measurement I got from it is within 1/10lb of the sliding weight scale at the gym, so I'm fine with it. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Biking to work Yesterday was my second day in a row biking to work (via MAX). It's about 9-10 miles cycling round trip, and the amount of difficulty changes depending on whether I get off the MAX downtown or in the Hollywood district. If I get off downtown, I have to ride uphill for about a solid mile in southeast, but it takes less time overall. If I get off in Hollywood, I spend another 20 minutes or so on the train but can coast most of the way home from there. The latter isn't a bad compromise under certain conditions, but I shouldn't be using it to cheat myself out of a perfectly good workout. Created 4 months ago by comrade
	Weird workout Whether from lack of sleep (~3hrs) or too much dinner (~450 well-balanced calories), motivation was terrible during elliptical. Not sure why, but switching between exercises every 10-20 minutes did the job. Created 4 months ago by comrade