I had some salty snacks yesterday. There is very little salt in my nutrition these days. I'm noticing any bloating right away.

Turning Up the Effort

I've blogged before about how to use a treadmill to get real results instead of just wasting time. If you're not dripping with sweat when you finish with your minimum twenty minutes on the treadmill, you need to seriously reconsider what you're doing and why.

Use the machine to push you. I do my HIITs on the treadmill shooting for 400 calories burned and 3 miles run, in less than 32 mins (working toward less than 30 mins). I worn out from running, but I can still keep going at a slower rate. But I have to make that slower rate effective. Remember: no sweat, no results.

I set the treadmill for cardio. I put speed at 3.2 to 3.5 and heart rate at 140 to 145. The variance is just to compensate for how burnt I feel from the previous run. I usually shoot burn another 200 calories. (Disclaimer: I know the "calories burned" on these machines is about as bogus and overrated as a Yugo customization store, but the numbers provide goals and consistency between workouts). I run the incline down to zero and let the machine gradually increase the incline to get my heart rate up. Once I reach the target heart rate, I'll let it stay there for a couple of minutes, then run the incline back down to zero and repeat the process. I do this until I've burned the additional 200 calories.



This process keeps me from falling into a steady state cardio, and moves me from low intensity to high intensity, keeping the body adjusting and burning additional calories. The age old problem is that if effort is static and unchanging, the body finds the most efficient way possible to meet the metabolic demands placed on it, reducing the effectiveness of the exercise. Constantly changing the effort level and metabolic demand keeps the body from ever settling into that efficient state and ends up with more calories burned.

Try it. Put in the run, but at the end of the run you've got some more to give, do this intense walk on the treadmill to get rid of a few more calories.

Salt Anyone?

During the past year I've noticed the effect that salt has on me. Because I was using salt, and lots of it, I couldn't really tell what it was doing to me. It's sort of like trying to determine if a fish feels wet. I was using a sauna regularly at the time, so that helped with some of the salt in my body. Also, I couldn't tell that salt was causing me to retain a lot of fluid and bloat, because I was bloated!

With some of the developing changes in my nutrition I just naturally reduced my salt usage. Then when I did use salt I could really tell what it was doing to me. My feet, which had finally begun to show some veins and tendons instead of just being balloons on the end of my legs, would quickly lose that definition.

The bottom line is that there is plenty of salt in the foods we eat to sustain health. Part of our nutrition plans needs to be cutting out the use of the salt shaker in our food prep.