I Have Found My New Training Regimen

Memories, in the corner of my mind.

You better believe that little nine-year old Paulie was training, taking his vitamins, and saying his prayers.

Somewhere in my mother's house there is still a pair of blue, 3-pound barbells.

Say It Isn't So

I am shocked - SHOCKED! - that the results of a new study have challenged a long held health-related assumption. That so very rarely happens nowadays. At any rate, the latest news is that saturated fat may not be so bad for you after all.

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

The new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.

Naturally this should be taken with a grain of salt (which, incidentally, has also been found to not be so deleterious to your health). Nor is the green light being given to eat cheesebugers morning, noon, and night. 

But Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the findings should not be taken as “a green light” to eat more steak, butter and other foods rich in saturated fat. He said that looking at individual fats and other nutrient groups in isolation could be misleading, because when people cut down on fats they tend to eat more bread, cold cereal and other refined carbohydrates that can also be bad for cardiovascular health.

“The single macronutrient approach is outdated,” said Dr. Hu, who was not involved in the study. “I think future dietary guidelines will put more and more emphasis on real food rather than giving an absolute upper limit or cutoff point for certain macronutrients.”

He said people should try to eat foods that are typical of the Mediterranean diet, like nuts, fish, avocado, high-fiber grains and olive oil. A large clinical trial last year,which was not included in the current analysis, found that a Mediterranean diet with more nuts and extra virgin olive oil reduced heart attacks and strokes when compared with a lower fat diet with more starches.

Here's an idea: Eat what you want, but don't eat too much of any single thing. That works pretty well for most people.

Breakfast of Champions

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On Sunday I finally hit my goal weight. No, this was not my ultimate goal weight, but rather the weight at which it was now okay to once again eat donuts. So I grabbed my very excited five year old daughter* and headed to Dunkin' Donuts.

*If you want to get a child to get dressed and otherwise behave, promising donuts is the way to go. At least with my child.

So after four months I finally bit into a donut - a Vanilla Cream, followed by a Boston Cream. Hey, after four months, I was going to get my money's worth.

And I gotta sey: eh. Maybe I've lost the taste, but it now seems to me that there are better ways to spend 800 calories.

As for the John Belushi skit above, I indeed did run off all donut calories later that morning. So, at least for one day, donuts were on my training table.