I'm not a doctor, Jim

Both the feedback and the enthusiasm I've gotten over the last blog post have been pretty amazing...

I've gotten a bunch of hits, emails, twitters, etc about my new eating plan and I wanted to say a few things.

Standard disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nurse, nutritionist, dietitian or otherwise qualified to make any medical decisions. Any advice you read here is my personal opinion, which is to say, as likely to be complete crap as anything else you read on the internet. Please use standard discretion before following advice. Consult your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program. Yaddah yaddah.

Substandard disclaimer: My friend is. Geoff (who absolutely does NOT want his contact information given out and I'm going to respect that because he is a friend and I don't want him to beat me with a stick) is a licensed dietitian and is currently about a year out from getting his PhD in kinesiology in the field of sports medicine. Before he gave me all his advice, he had me give over my food logs, had me keeping track of my workouts (including keeping a log of my heart rate - I was to measure my heart rate first thing in the morning, before even getting out of bed, randomly through the day, before, during, and after workouts, and before bed) and rather ruthlessly questioned me over the phone about my entire life (even so far as asking how often I had sex, what my sleep schedule looked like, mood tracking, headache tracking... etc).

His advice to me, which was a lot more detailed than I discussed in Tuesday's post is custom tailored FOR ME.

There's some standard advice in there that I don't think is generally bad for anyone to follow (avoid overly processed 100 calorie packs, eat all your weekly flex points, eat at least 3 hours before you sleep) and then there's some advice that's probably slanted towards my High Intensity/High Activity lifestyle.

Please keep in mind that on your average week, I'm logging between 25 and 40 activity points. (And I'm very careful to double check and triple check my activity points - I don't go with what weight watcher's site says, I'm tracking my activity by my heart rate monitor and often rounding down.)

Among Geoff's other admonitions, he was very clear on his opinion of crap-food. As far as he's concerned, food comes in a couple of varieties: lean protien, vegetable/fruit, dairy/calcium, good carbs, healthy fat and crap. I'm supposed to limit myself on the crap food. (Crap food is a 100 calorie pack, or potato chips, or white bread, or ice cream with more than 5 ingredients... he's a big fan of simple ice cream where the ingredients are like milk, sugar, cream, flavoring.) No more than 1/10th of my eating is supposed to be crap. So, if I eat 24 points in a day, no more than 2.5 of those points can be crap. He says I can spread that over the week or eat it all at once; so if I want a McCrap Burger (his name for it, not mine) then I need to eat over 120 points in the week, so I can save 12 of those for the McCrap burger.

He also laid out for me a specific healthy fat/vegetable/lean protien/dairy ratio for me, which leans a bit to the protien side because I am specifically building endurance muscle. I didn't cover it specifically in Tusday's blog post because I didn't think it was particularly important. I'm not going to cover it specifically now because, as I said, it's laid out specifically for me and what Geoff sees as my particular nutritional requirements.

Anyway, end of lecture. I just am a little whelmed by the response I've gotten to that blog entry and I want everyone to be sensible when adopting a new eating or workout plan.

Thanks!