Avoid this Dangerous Health Hazard!

Nah, I'm not talking about swine flu. I'm not a doctor or an epidemiologist and I know nothing about swine flu. Well, I do know that despite its name, it will probably not turn you into an actual swine.


Which is good! Because suddenly finding yourself with pig-brains instead of human-brains and hooves instead of hands? That might cause some pretty major lifestyle adjustments. Your boss might disapprove. And you wouldn't be able to visit your favorite blogs anymore. And your sex life? Well, let's hope your partner is very understanding and flexible.

So no, the health hazard I'm referring to is not swine flu. It's a common but insidious disorder that you've probably never heard of.

In the comments to Friday's post, reader Tina mentioned a scary bout with it. Fortunately she recovered.

So have you ever come down with a case of EVS?

That's short for Escalating Virtue Syndrome. And yeah, it's something I just made up.

It's just a subtype of perfectionism, a known motivation-killer that I've already blogged about many times. But it's such a sneaky type of perfectionism! It's so easy to get infected with it, and it's contagious, so I thought I'd do a brief public service announcement to warn you of its dangers.

What is Escalating Virtue Syndrome?

Basically, it's doing too much of a good thing until it backfires and forces you to be bad again. But here's a more technical definition:

EVS is the phenomenon that occurs after you discover that some sort of virtuous behavior is not nearly as bad as you thought it would be. Say you take up running, or you try to eat more whole foods. You hang in there for a few weeks; accomplish more than you thought; and you find out that the smug feeling you get is totally exhilarating!

But you're not content to leave it at that. You want more smugness! The next step, "escalation," involves incremental increases in the amount of virtue. You run longer and harder and more often, or you eat more and more healthy whole foods until they make up your entire diet.

If you pump up the virtue slowly and carefully, paying attention to your physical and psychological reactions and adjusting accordingly? No worries. You don't have EVS, you have Motivation and Determination and that's great!

But if all you're paying attention to is the lovely smugness, you're at serious risk for EVS. Because one day, you may suddenly wake up and realize that your virtuous behavior doesn't feel wonderful and rewarding and effortless like before. In fact, the whole routine kinda sucks!

Running 2 or 3 miles a couple of times a week was fun. Running 10 miles five times a week? Not nearly as much fun. Learning to eat 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day? Not so bad! Eating 18 servings a day? Aaack!

Of course there's an easy cure for the problem of taking a smart behavior and doing to much of it. That would be: dial it back a few notches until it's not so burdensome anymore.

But what's the typical response? Quit completely because it's all too hard.

I have to confess: I struggle with EVS infections all the time.

For example, I've blogged before about adding vegetables to my fruit smoothies. And if I keep it to 2/3 of a cup or less of chopped cauliflower, or 2 cups or less of raw spinach leaves, the smoothie tastes great, and I get vegetable credit. Hooray!

But damned if the vegetable-induced smugness rush hasn't tempted me into adding more and more vegetables. What happens if I go overboard? The smoothie goes from a milkshake-like indulgence to a funky composty tasting medicine. And who looks forward to medicine for breakfast?

The other place where I'm struggling with a creeping case of EVS is when it comes to High Intensity Interval Training. I know from previous experience that if I try to do as often and as intensely as many experts recommend, I will stop entirely. That's the whole reason I frequently suggest that readers try the less hardcore SHIIT workout instead. And yet I read the blogs of people who are fitter than I am, and I feel like a slothful slacker, and I start trying to do more and more sprints, more often, like the fit people do.

I know better, damn it!

Because this escalation will work great and give me huge burst of delicious smugness at first... until one day I'll realize that I just don't want to drink smoothies or do intervals at all anymore.

So, I am going to actually pay attention to the little warning signs this time, and I am going to consciously STOP ESCALATING for now. In order to do so, I need to give myself lots of credit for what I already do, and savor the existing smugness I can get from that. Later, if I get a new burst of motivation and don't feel any tell-tale foot-dragging, I can always drink compost every morning for breakfast and sprint my ass off all week.

So here is your Cranky Fitness public service message for today: If anyone else has been ignoring signs of EVS, and you realize you're getting very tempted to skip your workouts or blow off your healthy eating plan because it's so miserable, then DIAL IT BACK, but DON'T QUIT ENTIRELY!

See if you can remember what you were doing before it all got to be too much, and ease off to that level. There's likely still plenty of smugness to be had if you compare yourself to where you started, and not to some hypothetical superhuman version of yourself. It's way more important to feel like you are still "on track," even if it means adjusting your goals downward a notch. Because what good are lofty goals if you are hiding from them instead of chasing them?


Ever come down with EVS yourself, or have any good tips for avoiding it?

Revenge of the Green Smoothie

Photo: Wootang01

Warning: this post contains mostly smoothie-related whining. However, if you hang in there, there is a bit of Actual Health Research at the end.

So I've written before about one of my favorite healthy beverages, the smoothie. And the way I used to make them, they were so pretty! They were either a mellow orangey-yellow (mango or peach); or a perky pink (strawberry or raspberry); or quite frequently, a jaunty purple (blueberry).

Then, like the rest of the health blog world, I discovered the Green Smoothie.

Oh joy! Full vegetable credit in a fruity, tasty drink! And it was still very pretty. My favorite recipe: a couple of cups of raw spinach, a cup of nonfat milk, a little yogurt, some sweetener, some frozen banana, the juice of a lime (which tastes "green" but in a good way), and voila! Tasty, lovely to look at, and it has a vegetable in it, hooray! I quickly became addicted.

But then one day I peeked into my freezer and saw the lonely bags of forgotten blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries staring up at me. They looked so sad and abandoned!

Oh dear.

I think of myself as someone who eats a lot of berries, blueberries in particular. They're so damn healthy, right? But I realized that it had been ages since I'd gotten around to having blueberries. I was no longer an actual healthy blueberry eater, just a blueberry poseur. How could I write blog posts exhorting others to eat blueberries to fight cancer and improve memory and fight belly fat, but not bother to do it very often myself?

Intending to remedy this terrible lapse, I threw some blueberries in my next smoothie, along with all the other ingredients. And sure enough, it tasted great!

The problem: it looked like some sort of toxic industrial sludge. Certainly not like a fruity beverage someone would drink on purpose. The hideous brownish gray color just screamed: "Don't drink this, it's gonna make you barf!"

Whoops. I'd forgotten those kindergarten lessons about primary colors: mix them all together and you get a big mess. It slipped my mind that Green=Blue + Yellow, and that Purple (the actual color of blueberries, despite the name) contains Red as well as Blue. Thus if you mix Purple and Green, you are combining Blue + Red + Yellow and that equals: Yecchhh.

So here's the dilemma: I now feel like it's a "waste" of a smoothie if I don't get vegetable credit, since I can so easily add spinach and not really taste it. But if I want to return to blueberries, strawberries, or raspberries, I'm gonna have to learn to like a grayish brown beverage that scares the bejeesus out of me in the morning. What to do?

And yes, I fully understand that this is a ridiculous problem, especially in a world where people are starving and dying of awful diseases etc. I swear I will not be trying to set up a Save the Pretty Smoothie Foundation to fund research into this distressing aesthetic problem and asking you to contribute. But I did wonder, since the Green Smoothie movement seems to be sweeping the health blog world, what other folks are doing about red and purple produce problem. Is there some secret that allows Green and Purple to live together in harmony in a smoothie glass? Or is always gonna get ugly when they show up in a blender together?

"My antioxidants are way better than yours!"
"Says who? You suck!"
Pascal Vuylsteker

In Other Beverage News Oh, and I did promise some health research, didn't I? And it's even kind of related, at least if you are like me and use milk in your smoothies.

(Although I realize most people don't use milk in green smoothies, at least if you google "green smoothie recipes." Perhaps because raw food vegans are the source of a lot of collections of green smoothie recipes?)

Anyway, so a study just came out linking milk-drinking and longevity. And the summary is short on details, but it doesn't look as though they were looking at nonfat or lowfat milk in particular. Which seems kinda weird, given all the stuff we hear about saturated fats. (I go for nonfat myself). The only risk milk seemed to increase was prostate cancer, while it lowered the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

And then that milk study led me to another one listed nearby from a couple years ago that said drinking milk helps you gain muscle and lose fat. Which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

I know lots of folks steer clear of milk because of digestive issues or because of a vegan diet or whatever. But being lazy, I find milk to be a quick easy source of calcium and protein, and I drink a lot of it. So I have to confess I didn't have a lot of incentive to go chase down the particulars of the research and argue with them. But other actual scientists with access to the full study might have more helpful things to say about it.

So does anyone else struggle with foods that are good for you but look funny? Or have any magic solutions to my Green + Red = Brown problem?

Mission: Vegetables before Six P.M.

We all know we're supposed to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, right? Depending on where you get your dietary advice from, that can range from 5 servings a day to 9-11 servings a day. (And that doesn't mean strawberry flavored pop-tart filling or french fries, either. That generally means real nutritious fruits and vegetables).

For me, the "fruit" part is easier than the "vegetable" part. Fruit goes great with breakfast and lunch, as a snack, or even with dinner. Fruit is easy.

But vegetables? I do really well at dinner--we pretty much always have a big-ass salad, and there are additional vegetables either in or sitting aside the main course. I seem, however, to struggle with getting vegetables during daylight hours. Not getting vegetables before dinner puts a lot of pressure on dinner! It would be nice to have more of them out of the way before the sun sets.

My problem: I'm not a big fan of salads at lunch. Why not? Hell if I know. I'm just not. And as to raw vegetables like carrots or bell pepper slices or cauliflower florets? I start to tire of them after a few bites, and then start to resent them for not being gone already. Go away, raw vegetables! But they take forever to chew up and swallow and they are, frankly, not very tasty. I rarely subject myself to them anymore. For the most part, I'd much rather grab a piece of fruit than a vegetable.


While I do have a few methods for tricking myself into eating vegetables before dinner, (and have just discovered a new one that I'll share), I could really use some helpful advice!

Lunch Time Vegetables:

Pretty much my only trick here is: Reheat leftovers from last night's dinner. Soups, pasta with vegetables in it, chili, stir fries, takeout Thai or Indian... If there's a tasty sauce of some sort, particularly if it contains oil and garlic, then I'm willing to get vegetables at lunch. Otherwise? Not so much.

Breakfast Vegetables:

A long time ago, when the blog was very very young (it was on Day 2, I believe, and I was still writing in the third person) I wrote a post about a way to sneak in a morning vegetable: I mixed canned pumpkin with yogurt, pumpkin pie spices, and a boatload of my sweetener of choice. (Let's just pretend that sweetener was honey or agave nectar or something natural you'd all approve of, shall we? ) But pumpkin is a very particular flavor, and I only like it every now and then.

And, well, there are scrambled eggs with onion and pepper and tomatoes and maybe spinach in there. But that doesn't happen very often either, because it requires chopping things and washing out a pan and I'm lazy in the mornings.

So what's the newest breakfast vegetable trick I discovered?

Putting spinach in smoothies!

Green Smoothie photo: nic221

Note: And by "discovered" I mean: "read about in many of your blogs and thought no way in hell! Yeccch! You people are nuts! Until then I finally tried it myself and realized you all were actually onto something." That kind of "discovered."

Yep, I put a cup of spinach in the blender with my normal smoothie recipe, and I couldn't even taste the spinach in there! (The spinach was uncooked; I believe this is probably crucial if you want to avoid barfing). Then, feeling even more adventurous the next day, I put an additional cup of raw spinach in. With two cups, I could taste it a little. But it was just a slightly green, grassy taste, not at all disgustingly vile and loathsome as one might assume!

So I confess, it did look weird. Because I used blueberries, the whole thing wasn't green--it was a rather unattractive purplish-gray. But the smugness I felt from drinking spinach in the morning made it totally worth consuming an ugly beverage.

Now I'm curious about other vegetables. Carrots? Bell peppers? Has anyone experimented with what they can get away with in their smoothies? I'm thinking broccoli is kinda unlikely.

But I need more help! Does anyone else struggle with getting enough vegetables in before dinner? Any suggestions that don't involve carrot sticks?

Starbucks, Smoothies, and Perfection

Image: bbaunach

I really envy people with the ability to 'just do it,' as the Nike phrase goes. When I try it, I find myself placing obstacles in my path.
- I can't go exercise until I find my shoes is a simple one, but there's also
- Wait a minute, I need to hit the bathroom first or
- I really should pay that bill before they cut off the electricity instead of after or ... the list goes on and on.

Sometimes, my subconscious gets sneaky about the obstacles.

For example, when Starbucks said "hey, take this smoothie coupon and review this product," I thought it was a good idea. There's a big S on the route to the light rail. I saw this as a step forward in the quest to walk more, drive the car less. Didn't see it as an obstacle, but it was.

Since I had firmly tied the Starbucks trip with walking to the light rail, I refused to go check out the smoothies unless I went car-less. And then of course the boss staged several early morning meetings that I had to get to on time, and then I had to pick up a package that was heavy, and then... are you bored yet? I sure am. Yet this went on for over... well, longer than I care to remember. It got to the point where I gave up even trying to Be Good and just drove the damn car every day.


Thankfully, I remembered something Crabby once wrote....

It was a post about the Worst Exercise Mistake.

I quote:

This is something you already know, but perhaps you need reminding:

In order to succeed at any worthwhile long-term health goal (exercise, diet, stress reduction, whatever) you have to Give up on Being Perfect.

So I did. Instead of stopping into Starbucks for some caffeine on my way to work, I (radical concept) dropped into one near my work.

Yeah, yeah, I can see you yawning over there, but this is a Big Deal. I did three things I usually avoid:

1 - Went out and got food for lunch

2 - Took a damn lunch break in the first place

3 - Went for a walk at lunch. Haven't done that in months, and it's the last of the incredible fall weather right now.

Moral: It's really stupid to put work first all the time.

Not your mother's Starbucks

Gotta tell you, even if they did give me a coupon, I was impressed with Starbucks.

I always associated Starbucks with coffee and pastries. Nice, but really both are on my To Be Avoided list. So when I ventured into this House of Caffeine, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they have food that is on my To Eat list. I mean healthy stuff. Incidentally, the Orange Mango Banana smoothie? Quite tasty, though perhaps not something to drink while you're walking back to work on a chilly day.

But wait! There's more...

When did Starbucks change? Now they've got really healthy food.
- For lunch, I picked up fresh fruit and bread-with-fruit-in-it.
- The breakfast menu has oatmeal. Whole grain. It looks good. I've heard it tastes good too. (Starbucks New "Perfect Oatmeal" Loved By Cat.) I'm going to check it out.
- The breakfast muffins are also whole grain, with fruit.
- They also offer a "Power Protein Plate: an on-the-go snack of Cheddar cheese, fresh fruit, hard-boiled cage-free egg, whole-wheat bagel and peanut butter" which sounds good for days when I really want that protein fix.

Fast food that's actually healthy?

I don't want to sound like I've been blindly drinking the Starbucks kool-aid, but I think this is really cool. Yes, these are items that I could make myself, but on days when I am rushing out the door and it's a choice between Starbucks and McD's... that's not a choice. If this were an election issue, I would be one of those standing up on the podium cheering. 'Fast Food' that's actually healthy, without preservatives? additives? trans fats? Woo hoo!

On the down side, this also means one more excuse to eat 'bad' just went out the door. Damn.

Simplest Smoothie Recipe Ever

Want a better post about Smoothie Recipes? This one is a bit old and incomplete; I've got a new, bigger, better Smoothie Recipe post right here: Healthy Smoothie Recipes! (And sorry, googlers, for the extra click).

This post is not just a cynical attempt to discover if "Smoothie Recipe" is something people might google someday and suddenly find themselves at Cranky Fitness.

Well, OK, partly it is. As Merry mentioned in a previous post about squash, we find ourselves forever indebted to our reader Susan for her stuffed bell pepper recipe. It brings us almost as much traffic as some of our most popular search terms: "big fat ass," "flat belly diet," and "big bouncy breasts!" We don't know if it's something particular about stuffed peppers, or if it's just having "recipe" in the title. Whatever it is, we'd certainly like to encourage it.

But really, that's not the main reason for suddenly posting about smoothies.

It's just that lately I've rediscovered drinking smoothies for breakfast. Sometimes I go through smoothie phases, where nothing sounds better. Healthy and easy, but tasty too--it's like getting to drink a milkshake at 8 a.m., but with no guilt!

But then all of a sudden, for no particular reason I'm all: meh, no thanks. Done with smoothies. Buh bye. Catch ya' again in another 6 months or so.

As Easy as Pie! Wait, pie isn't easy...

Now there are different schools of thought on smoothies, and lots of people like complicated smoothies with all kinds of exotic and nutritious ingredients in them. You folks: sorry, this recipe will seem pathetic. There is nothing green or fermented or powdered or specially imported.

(I'm hoping you'll all share your smoothie tips with us in the comments, because smoothies are a personal thing--so the more options, the better.)

No, this recipe is probably better designed for people who end up buying the overpriced kind at the mall food court every now and then, hoping it's a relatively healthy choice. (Alas, not always. Unless, for example, a 560 calorie pina colada smoothie from Smoothie Factory with 105 grams of sugar sounds like a nutritional bargain). This super-simple recipe is to encourage you non-smoothie making folks to buy a blender, or if you have an old relic in the basement, to find it and resurrect it.

(Note: If it still smells like Cuervo, lime juice
and triple sec, you probably need to wash it).

If Crabby can do it, you certainly can. There's only one tricky part, which we'll get to in a moment.

Finally, The Recipe:

Ready? Here we go:


Easy Smoothie Recipe:

1 cup milk (I use nonfat)
1/2 cup frozen banana slices
1/2 cup Some Other Tasty Frozen Fruit
A small splash of vanilla (optional)
And maybe a little bit of sugar, honey or other sweetener to taste (also optional).

I usually pour the milk in first, since the lines on the blender measure it for me, then I dump in the frozen fruit, vanilla, and (gasp) a tiny bit of splenda. Next, I hit the "Frappe the hell out of it, baby," button.

Voila!

It's basically just nonfat milk and fruit, but the frozen bananas magically transform it into something that tastes like it should be evil.

The tricky part I mentioned? It's having the damn sliced frozen bananas and some other kind of frozen fruit on hand. It just doesn't taste as good with ice and room temperature fruit.

So when you buy bananas and they start to go bad, you gotta cut 'em and freeze 'em. This is one of those annoying "think ahead" things. I usually use frozen blueberries for the other fruit, which is why I have such an awesome memory, but mango is also pretty tasty.

Do any of you drink smoothies? What do you like in 'em?