Richard Simmons Project H.O.P.E.

 
I've been so busy with the funeral for hubby's aunt that I missed all the infomercials and announcement of the release of Richard's new program, Project H.O.P.E.! If anyone knows where the full-length infomercial can be found on-line (Not on YouTube as of this morning), please let me know in the comments.

Not only does it include new exercise videos on 3 DVD's but it comes with an electronic version of the Foodmover. I like how the exercises come in different fitness levels, too.

Richard Simmons New Products

I thought these new DVD's (and computer programs?) we supposed to come out in January but here it is, the 25th, and still no sign of them. That's okay, because one they do appear I'm sure they'll be advertised everywhere for a while and we'll get sick of looking at them.

Richard Simmons in Paris

He's such a silly little man! LOL

Here's Richard pointing out French hot dogs from a street vendor. After watching the video, you can go to his YouTube site and view even more Paris videos with Richard.

Why Dieting Makes You Fat - a.k.a. Setpoint Theory

The article in this link on the Big Fat Blog is one lady's opinion, one that I, and thousands of others like me, subscribe to. Dieting Makes You Fat! Period!

Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture

I'm glad I ordered the book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture by Amy Farrell yesterday. I've been putting off buying it for a few weeks but my husband told me to just go ahead and put the order in for that, and a few other books.

She did an interview with Steve Colbert a few weeks ago:

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Sure, he didn't give her much chance to talk, especially about the book itself, but at least her name and the book got out there to the general public.

And now this morning I log in and see there's a thread on the Big Fat Blog about it, too.

I'm glad the regular television season is over - I have way too many good books stacking up that need to be read!

Air New Zealand Loves Richard Simmons

57 in 2011; 500 in 52

I now have a goal of losing just a bit over a pound a week for a total of 57 (and a half) pounds by this time next year. I splurged a bit this holiday season, and was unable to exercise as much as I needed to.




I also have a goal of getting the equivalent of 10 miles per week of exercise, too. I know that some weeks I'll get in more, but I'm a realist and realize that due to circumstances I may not get in even half that on some weeks, especially if an injury occurs. My exercise will be a combination of Leslie Sansone and Richard Simmons aerobics, the treadmill, the exercise bike, and qigong.

I might continue the McDougall food plan when it comes to food choices, but, again as a realist, I know I have to calorie count if I want to lose any weight.

I might just eat a wider variety of foods, including meat and dairy, and just keep the unhealthier choices, like hamburgers and peanut butter cups, to a minimum. I might use the Richard Simmons Foodmover to keep track of it all.

I also realize that I may do all of the above and not lose another ounce, thanks to my still uncontrolled hypothyroid condition, ravages of age that contribute in injuries, and decades of dieting that have left me with the metabolism of a sea sponge.

Or a large rock. Sure, it will reduce its mass, but only after a few millenia of constant pounding on it by running water.

I don't have a few millenia, only a few decades left. In my first 24 hours of life my family was told I was too big, to cut my food in half. And for the majority of my time on this planet I was eating less than my body required for optimal health, yet my size remained about twice that the BMI charts says I should weigh. I have a list of medical problems that can be proven to be caused by these food restrictions, from the thyroid woes, through all the musculo-skeletal problems, and now various nutritional deficiencies.

The doc phoned to say my Vitamin D level is lower than any patient he ever saw, that the lab phoned him to say they ran it twice, it's not a mistake, that even they never saw a level that low. He couldn't wait until my office visit next Monday - he wanted me to start supplementation immediately. If you do a web search for Vitamin D deficiencies you'll find that everything I've complained of the past few years could have been caused by it, including my heart thing from September 2009 AND the lack of weight loss AND the inability to find the right dose of thyroid replacement meds.

When I have that vitamin level retested in a few weeks he's also going to test me for a few other vitamin and mineral deficiencies that usually go along with the Vitamin D one.

I'll find out Monday how the rest of my lab work went - liver profile, lipid levels, thyroid. He said on the phone that a few other things were not normal but they could wait until we spoke in person.

And when I see him Monday we're going to have a serious talk about my food plans. Obviously the low fat vegan one isn't working out as well as hoped. If eating this way leaves me with nutritional deficiencies and I'm still not losing weight, why continue with it? Remember Einstein's definition of insanity!

Richard Simmons's Christmas Message

My Aching Knee

Ouch! After a few weeks of doing just my Leslie Sansone videos or walking on the treadmill, this morning I had a hankering to do Richard Simmons' Sweatin' to the Oldies, the original. I dream (Really! Can you imagine hearing and seeing that fuzzy-headed guy all night long? I do!) about doing this video now and then, and did again all weekend. I just HAD to do it today!

First of all, I never did get my heart rate up into the working zone, even during the fastest songs. But one thing that did happen, before I even got up to "Great Balls of Fire" and The Twist, was a pain in my left knee, in the back, behind the knee joint. Just lifting my leg would cause it to twinge. At that point I knew I wasn't even going to attempt to Twist and just modified the movements.

Tomorrow it's back to Leslie. I may not do my treadmill time today to give my knee a rest.

I've never injured myself doing any of the Walk at Home videos, but over the decades I have injured myself doing Richard's videos. I dislocated my shoulder while doing a toning video about 15 years ago; more than once I injured one or both knees; my lower back got twisted a few times. I guess it's time to put these videos aside and go back to doing what I've been doing with them - using them just for the music while using my exercise bike.

In other news:

Go to the Kelly Olexa blog and read this post. She sums up exactly what I've been whining to my husband and doctors about for a while now. I see I'm not the only one frustrated with all the conflicting information out there.

Is Richard Simmons Spying On Me?

Richard Simmons puts out a daily Message of the Day on his web site. Right now it's about the ONLY thing that's for free over there. Anyway, today's is all about pain. Sometimes I wonder if he has hidden cameras around my apartment. Just yesterday I was complaining to my husband about how painful my joints have been lately, blaming it on the change in weather (We had minus-zero wind chills this week) and some recent dairy and sugar consumption.

I was even talking to my podiatrist about pain in my foot (my plantar fasciitis is acting up again), but in that case the pain isn't food related, it's exercise related. All the exercise I've been doing is harming my foot again. Weight loss might prevent the injury from reoccurring. I can't lose eight without exercise. But exercise causes pain. . .

Here's Richard:

OUCH!
Sunday, 18 January 2009

It seems that every other E-mail I receive is from someone who is in pain...all the time. Well, they need to know and you need to know that your body, depending on your height, is made to carry a certain amount of weight. And the body works better when its at an ideal weight. Once you start putting additional pounds onto your body, it affects the way your body works.

When you gain weight, you don't know exactly where on your body those extra pounds are going. People gain weight in different parts of their bodies. Some people gain it in their upper backs while others may gain it in their chests or on their thighs. Some people gain weight in their buns or on their legs. And where ever people gain the weight, chances are, the added weight will lead to pain.

Millions of Americans suffer from back pain. And that pain is caused by too much weight in the upper part of the body or too much weight in your tummy area. When that kind of weight-strain is put on the back, your back reacts with daily pain, no matter what you do.
Another place people may feel pain is in their chests. The heart gets overloaded and so do your lungs causing them to perform less efficiently. With those added pounds, you can end up with serious pain in your chest and around your heart because those parts of your body are forced to overwork for you.

Then there's knee pain, another one of the most common pains for many Americans. Did you know that for every pound you're overweight, you're adding four pounds of pressure to your knees? That means, if you're 30 pounds overweight, your knees feel like you're 120 pounds overweight. Hey, no wonder they hurt!

Then there's lower leg and foot pain caused by the added weight. And I have to tell you, I've had many of the kinds of pains I've just described before, myself. And they're all, well..."a pain in the neck!" The sad result of all this is that a great many people in this country are on daily doses of pain medication.
So whadda you know, pain...ouch! One more reason for you to get serious about losing weight! And when you do, your upper and lower body, in fact, all of your body will thank you for it.

Just remember, only you can make the pain go away!

Love,

Richard

Richard Simmons and Anorexia

Every now and then, in his Message of the Day, Richard Simmons reminds people how he was anorexic in his younger days and would go on fasts and even purge. Every now and again he also tells people that even though he lost his weight the unhealthy way, we shouldn't follow his example, only his current food and exercise plans. He eats 1600 calories and exercises a minimum of an hour a day of cardio, plus 3 days a week weight training and possibly his "day of rest" he walks an hour.

People who follow his food and exercise plans do lose weight, but Richard has also mentioned a number of times that he meets people a year or more later than many have regained all their weight because they no longer follow his plans. Could it be because according to his charts, an average-height woman at her goal weight should only be eating 1200 calories a day, a level about 200 calories below what the World Health Organization says people around the world should be eating for optimal health? And when a body's intake is consistently below it's needs it slows the metabolism down and retains even more of those calories put into it, so when a person who has been on a restricted food plan finally snaps and has a binge (fully explained in the Overcoming Overeating book) their body gains more weight than if they had just eaten normally all along.

Dr. McDougall, on the other hand, reminds us in his MWLP book and lectures that the body is a magnificent machine that knows what it needs. We don't over-breathe, he says, and if we only ate the foods he deems safe we can't over-eat, either, and that by eating only the allowable foods our bodies will naturally go to their correct weight. Well, many of us have proven otherwise and not lost and have even gained weight eating only MWLP-legal foods, and no, we haven's let things slip in, like oil, higher fat foods, or flour products. Not even the couscous (which was added as as editing mistake) or tortillas (which he allows at the live-in program), ONLY foods listed in the MWLP book. For some of us, we just ate too many calories; for others, once they switched jobs and were no longer active for 12 hours a day, the weight first stopped coming off then started coming back on. Dr. McDougall told us we should eat less starch and more green/yellow vegetables. Gee, then it's more Eat to Live than the starch-based McDougall program, isn't it? And for those of us who still continued to gain, he recommended the Rice Diet - the original one, as followed at the Rice House in Durham, NC to this day, that is 600 - 800 calories of only 1 serving of starch (3 ADA exchanges) and 3 fruit exchanges for all three meals a day. Anyone can lose weight for a while at that calorie level, but eventually metabolisms slow down enough that people have even gained while still eating 800 calories and exercising an hour each day - whey they had the energy to, that is.

So what's the point of this post? No idea, except to bemoan once again how fat I am and the depressing reminders that everything I've done to lose this bulk has failed, from the attempts of my first doctors who had my mom water down my formula when I was a newborn infant to my current physician who refuses to give me enough thyroid hormone replacement to keep my TSH in the normal reference range, insist I restrict myself to 1000 calories and do a minimum of 60 to 90 minutes a day of cardio exercise, then gets angry at me when I can't eat that little and can't exercise that much without making myself ill and come into his office showing a gain instead of a loss. I'm due to go back to him again now for an official weight loss check-up visit (I've seen in in-between for other problems). He already knows that I haven't lost any weight since the last official visit. He knows I still feel like crap from my hypothyroid. He already knows I've been in pain and unable to exercise as much as he wants. So what's the point of even going?

And what do I do next? Do I do again what I did before the last weight loss check-up and starve myself by eating half the amount of oatmeal at breakfast and only salad and soup for dinner for a few weeks and then make the appointment when the scale has finally shown a loss? Do I go and tell him where to shove his scale and get off the merry go round and get labeled non-compliant so no other doc will ever want to go near me in the future?

I hate living like this, but I hate to lose this doc. As much as I disagree with him on so many things, his practice is still one of the best in the city. We can get an appointment the same day, we can talk on the phone with one of the doctors without charge, we can easily get referrals and copies of our paperwork, and with 5 doctors in the practice there's always someone around.

I guess I better go change my menus for the next few weeks so there's soup for dinner every night. Either that or start reading up on the Rice Diet (home version) again.

Ouch!

I have to watch how I step, as I'm pretty sure my plantar fasciitis is coming back. Every time I step down on my left foot the pain starts up again. The first time I had it I was in pain for two years, trying all kinds of exercises and treatments. The only thing that really got rid of it was the new orthotic. I have a feeling I might be needing a new one, not just a re-lining of this old one.

Because of this foot pain I popped that new Richard Simmons DVD in, Sit Tight. It's worse than I feared. Even the exercisers, even RICHARD, had a hard time keeping up with the steps, mixed up the moves, or couldn't keep up. The camera work was shoddy, sometimes focusing on the woman with cerebral palsy as steps were changing to something completely different than what she was doing or even capable of doing, and many times when they showed a group shot you can see that many were either behind, doing the steps wrong, or completely lost and just sitting there waiting to find a place they could jump in to. I lasted a few seconds beyond the 17 minute point when my neck just gave out on me. I'm gonna pay for this today! Here it is, hours later, and I can barely lift my right arm or turn my head. Tomorrow it's back to the nice and slow Mindful Movements.



I wrote yesterday about that Quaker Oats/Walmart pumpkin spice oatmeal, and how I was going to have my first packet this morning. Yuck! A mouthful of grit and chemicals. At least my husband will enjoy the rest of them. Tomorrow I'll be back to my old fashioned oats with plain old fruit mixed in.

If I didn't Have Neck Problems Before . . .

. . . I would certainly have them after doing the Sit Tight video by Richard Simmons!

What was he thinking? More specifically, how did the choreography by Anne Czarkowski pass muster with any medical expert? Perhaps it didn't - maybe these videos aren't observed by anyone in the medical field before release? Being a video for the handicapped I assumed it would be.

Anne is one of Richard's trainers in his gym, Slimmons. She's the tall blonde front and center in the first Sweatin' to the Oldies video, and has been with Richard since the opening of the gym, I believe. The Sweatin' videos, which even Richard has admitted lately while on the publicity tours, are still the fan favorite, even at 20 years of age. Perhaps that's because the woman who choreographed them, Dorain Grusman, made sure that the moves were easy enough for everyone of every fitness level to do, that they were repeated enough times that people could do them right instead of changing steps every 4 beats, like this, and many of the other newer (past 10 years) videos of Richard's. Heck, some of the steps changed in a 2-count!

And so fast! I always watch an exercise video before doing it, and this one made my head spin. 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 and stop, video's over. Huh? I'm still trying to figure out what the heck the move was 10 steps ago!

I realize a video for people in wheelchairs has to focus on upper body work, but do with a bit more slowly and safely, okay? People's necks were whipping around so fast I thought they would get whiplash! And the arm flailing! I thought I was in a revival meeting at times! I can't do those moves with my neuritis and osteoarthritis without harming my neck and back. I need this video to be slowed down to at least half the speed. His original video for the handicapped, Reach for Fitness, not only was do-able sitting or standing by people of any fitness level, but the moves were much slower and simpler to do. If my old tape didn't break I would still be doing that one on my achy days. This one can only be done on days I feel in tip-top shape.

Another $20 tossed into the garbage in the futile pursuit of fitness, another $20 in the pocket of the weight loss industry. I wonder what the return policy is like? When I returned the BlastOff set back to QVC a few years ago I got every penny back, as they had a no questions asked return policy. I hope Richard has one, too. Nope, "damaged or defective" merchandise and replacement product given. Oh, well.

Spending Like There's No Tomorrow

Unfortunately, it's all stuff we need. Fortunately, all of what I ordered helps lower my grocery store bills.

First was my twice-yearly Mail Order Catalog spending spree, where I bought more vital wheat gluten, nutritional yeast, cHreese, and a few pieces of Primal Strips. This replaces all the meat and cheese (and boxes of mac & cheese) in our house. I know Dr. McDougall is against soy-based meat substitutes because of the isolated soy proteins and plain old protein itself, but with my hypoglycemia I need to have readily available protein foods when the shakes hit, something that can be carried in my purse or coat pocket. It's better than grabbing a Slim Jim, right?

Next was Spices, Inc., where I stocked up on dehydrated tomatoes, peppers, and a few other items. Great for tossing into pizza dough to add flavor and nutrition, and some times the only veggies I get into my boys.

Then came something for mama that would help her eat less, further reducing grocery store bills. Another exercise video from Richard Simmons, Sit Tight. On days my arthritis and sciatica act up I use that as an excuse not to do any workout, not even Mindful Movements. Now I'll have a workout specifically designed to be done from a chair for those painful days.

Lastly, my annual SAF yeast order from the King Arthur catalog. I adore this yeast and nobody in my city even sells it in those expensive little packets, much less in bulk. Our city fathers banned warehouse stores, too, so even the cheaper brands are unaccessible without an hour's drive, so each year I order 2 pounds and keep them in the freezer.

With winter rapidly approaching, not to mention another Depression, I'll feel much better once my pantry is stocked up again.