sarahneedsmotivation:

Tried to do my Insanity today and my knee wasn’t having it. I’m going to go lift chest and shoulders and hop in the pool, maybe I will be able to do my workout later. 

My knee makes me feel so lazy. I constantly worry that people will think I’m not dedicated or weak willed or even faking it because I have to quit on a regular basis. I also know this is absolutely ridiculous. 

It took me so long to be able to stop myself when my knee started to hurt. Pain has never been a motivator for me. I would barely be able to walk and play a full soccer game. It took a long time before I had the maturity to say I was unable to do something because it would aggravate my knee and I still have to catch myself sometimes. For instance I kept making ridiculous gains on my back squats and even though my knees would swell and ache, I just now convinced myself to give it up. 

Being able to push through soreness and being tired is admirable and fantastic, but pushing through pain is not a sign of mental toughness. It is a sign of immaturity. There is a significant difference between pain and soreness and for most people it takes a real injury to learn it. Being hungry to accomplish your goals is the best thing in the world, but is no excuse to do something stupid whether that be go on a vlcd, increase your exercise 500% or (in my case) play recklessly.

I guess this post is more directed at myself and maybe the few athletes on here. There is a difference between pushing your limits and ignoring them. If you want advice on how to push without furthering an injury, I know every modification in the book :)

I stumbled across this article last night, “The Surprising Reason You Should Eat at Chain Restaurants” on some health/fitness section of a website. Indeed, what surprised me more was that the article solely dictates your decision to go to certain restaurants based on which meals have fewer calories. 

Instead of eating at Olive Garden which packs 1755 calories per meal, go to Applebees where the average meal only packs 1494 calories! See, chain restaurants aren’t that bad, you just have to find the one with fewer calories and you’re good to go!

This is utterly ridiculous. When has our health ever been dictated by a meaningless number? A number that doesn’t tell us how much nutrition is in a meal, a number that does not tell us how much weight we’ll gain, but rather only tells us how much heat it takes to burn the food in a bomb calorimeter. 

Does that look like your body? No. So why treat the values it measures as if your body works the same way. Your body doesn’t burn off food. Your body digests the food you eat, during digestion the nutrients of the food are absorbed and energy is stored either as glycogen or fat. The energy that gets stored is then utilized to fuel your organs, every activity and thought process—not food!

The energy stored is NOT equivalent to the food energy consumed. Nor is the energy extracted from your storage equivalent to the amount of calories you think you’re “burning off”.  You can’t burn off 3500 and expect that to be equivalent to losing 1lb of body fat. The body doesn’t work that way. Though it takes 3500 units of energy to burn a 1lb chunk of body fat in a bomb calorimeter—you body is not a bomb calorimeter so the energy conversion factor is entirely different. 

Doesn’t it anger you that food is no longer labeled with how nutritionally dense it is. Because it should! It angers me! Instead of calories, “this food contains 532 calories and required 46 minutes of walking to burn off” (because we know that’s not how the body works), why can’t it say, “this food has a fullness factor of x with a caloric ratio carbs/fat/protein as x, its glycemic load is x, its nutrient balance is x, and its protein quality is x. Nothing is more nutrient dense that whole, naturally grown food.

Every individual would make better food choices knowing exactly what nutrients they’re consuming, and which ones they’re lacking, rather than allowing a useless number that has nothing to do with their own body dictate their lifestyle choices.

Join me this summer and challenge yourself to 2 months of absolutely NO CALORIE COUNTING! Track the tag #caloriefree2013

Breaking away from counting calories was the best thing that I ever did in my weight loss journey. And although starting off calorie counting really helped me establish fundamental attributes for what I was putting into my body, it just turns into an obsessive black hole that is a really hard mentality to get out of. Calories have no nutrition value, but food does!

So I’ve decided to dedicate a small portion of my summer (and a section of my blog which is linked in my sidebar under “popular topics”) to helping you  learn/understand that you don’t need to count calories in order to lose weight, and help you break free free from counting if it’s something you still struggle with. 

To participate just reblog this post and mark your progress posts with the tag #caloriefree2013. Though not requited, you can also message me saying you’re participating and I’ll add you to my personal Participation List just so I can keep tabs on you and comment on your posts. :) 

This official challenge starts June 1, 2013 and ends July 31, 2013. Good luck!

Please reblog this to get the word out.