This week, I continue with with the second part of the Desk Jockey health and fitness series with Desk Jockey Nutrition. Below, I list 3 tips to clean up your eating habits at the office.

You can listen here or subscribe to the local podcast feed or through iTunes. I would also appreciate it if you would leave a review on iTunes if you enjoy what you hear.

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Tip 1 – Force your hand

Photo courtesy of Cayusa on Flickr

I’m not going to try to stop you from snacking at the office, in fact I believe small healthy snacks are important to a healthy diet, that is of course, assuming you didn’t just scarf down a few thousand calories at the meat and three down the road.   The problem with office snacking is that it is sooo easy to over-snack.  You may even go for a healthy snack, like a jar of almonds, thinking you are doing good. But when you are at the office, it is too easy to focus on other things and forget about your left hand going back and forth between a pile of food and your mouth.

So, try limiting what you eat by forcing a little bit of portion control (I think that’s a prince song … no wait, that is about totally different):

• Instead of taking an entire box of granola bars to work with you, bring only one in at a time and leave the box in your car.
• Buy the 100 calorie snack size popcorn bags instead of the full size
• When you buy almonds or pretzels or chips, also buy a package of ziplock bags. Portion out the snack into these bags as soon as you open them. You can measure them out into exact serving sizes or just estimate.

This way, you will never lose track of how much you are eating because you get busy doing other things. You are taking away the bottomless pit of snack food.  Sure, you might have more snacks available, but you will have to stop what you are doing to get them, which gives you time to make a conscious decision about how much you eat.

Tip 2 – Bring your lunch from home or make a mini-kitchen at work

Photo courtesy of leff on Flickr

I don’t think I have to tell you how bad going out to eat is for you. Most places give you gigantic portions and load the dishes with way too much salt, fat, and EVIL! So, get rid the need to go out for lunch by bringing your lunch with you. Bring a simple, healthy sandwich or a fresh salad — whatever you like that would remove the desire to go out to eat.

It is that desire to go out to eat is the hardest thing to fight off – Why stay in and eat your bland bowl of soup when you can sample the international cuisine at the nearest food court?

So if you have a problem with food boredom, you can go one step further when brining your lunch to work, by bringing in enough food to make a mini-kitchen at your office. Bring in some some fresh deli meat and cheese, bread, peanut butter, jelly, fresh salad mix, or whatever you prefer.

Give yourself enough variety at the office that you are not tempted to go out.

Even bring your office mates in on this and start a “sandwich bar” where everyone pitches in on the food. The more people that contribute, the more variety you will have. Plus, you’ll have less people asking you to go out to lunch every day.

Like I mentioned in Episode 2, bringing your lunch also allows you to claim your normal lunch hour to do healthy activities.  Eat while you work and then go for a long walk during the time you would have spent driving somewhere or waiting in line at the cafeteria.

Tip 3 – Leave you dollar bills at home

Photo courtesy of EricGjerde on Flickr

If your break room vending machines are anything like mine, there is not a single healthy snack to choose from.  No – Honeybuns are not healthy – you know that – but they sure look tasty when you’re bleary eyed from 6 hours of hacking away at code. I would love to say I have all will power in the world, but some work tasks can break me down to believe that a plastic wrapper full of sugar and fat is just what I need to make it through the rest of the afternoon.

To fight this – I leave all change and small bills at my house or in my car. If I am at a low enough point that I am willing to dive into vending machine snacks, there is a good chance that I’m not up for the trek around the office to try to break a twenty – I’ll settle for my pre-portioned baggie of pretzels.

You might have notices that all three tips followed the same primary principle:

Deliberately put obstacles between yourself and over-sized, unhealthy food and remove obstacles to properly portioned, healthy food.

It’s that simple. Office nutrition isn’t rocket science, even if that is what you do at the office

While I don’t talk about finances much, I can’t sign off without mentioning the monetary benefits to these tips as well. The buckets of money that normally went to my dining budget drastically shrunk. I also realized that I could pay for my gym membership just buy saving all of the dollars I spent on sodas and chips during the day at work – that attacked my weight problem from two fronts from one simple, budget-neutral change. That make dollars and sense! (You see what I did there?)

This week, I cover one of my favorite topics: World of Warcraft. Oh how I love me some WoW! I could play World of Warcraft for hours. But what doesn’t love me playing WoW for hours on end – is my cholesterol. Talk about a cataclysm. It is incredible how much idle time this game has. There are so many minutes in the game in which I’m sitting and waiting for a Zeppelin, flying from the top of the continent to the bottom, or waiting for the stupid mage to drink some water. While this idle time is mostly unavoidable, that time doesn’t have to go to waste…

I took note of some of the most common periods of unaviodable inactivity in the game and I created the World of Warcraft Workout Plan to fill up the in-game down-time with real-life up-time.

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WoW Workout Plan Exercise 1: The Zeppelin Burn

Did you know that most of the Zeppelins, Boats, and Blimps you use to travel between continents are on a 4 minute cycle? They take a minute to get from one place to another, and they stay at each place for a minute. This means that you can spend anywhere from 1 minute if your lucky, up to 5 minutes waiting and traveling. Well guess what: Time is money, friend.

Use this time to do a quick bodyweight circuit and give aimed at giving you +5 to strength.

*Since you need to be at the keyboard to get on the boat when it arrives, this circuit only has exercises that keep you near the computer.

• 10 bodyweight squats
• 10 triceps extentions using a backpack or laptop bag with a couple of books in it
• 15 situps
• 10 pushups
• Rinse and repeat until you are done travelling.

This circuit works you legs, arms, abs, and chest.  Doing this a couple of times a night and will definitely get your muscles burning.

WoW Workout Plan Exercise 2: Epic Flight

The flight paths in WoW take up a lot of time – mostly with you just sitting and staring at a gryphon’s butt.  The average travel time in World of Warcraft is 2 minutes 24 seconds.  Chain a few flights together, you could be flying for 10 or more minutes.  Don’t waste that time slouched in front of the screen…

Use it to DPS your body fat % with a high intensity cardio circuit.

*Since you don’t have to be right at the computer for this, step away from the computer, give yourself plenty of room to move, and get ready to work up a sweat.

• 30 seconds of walking in place
• 30 seconds of running in place.
• 1 minute of jumping jacks (do power jacks if you want to step it up a notch)
• 30 seconds of mountain climbers
• 5 burpees
• 10 split jumps
• 30 seconds of  light jump rope (no rope needed, just go through the motions)
• 30 seconds of rest

This curcuit takes anywhere from 3 and a half to 4 minutes, but repeat the circuit as many times as you can while your character is flying. Every round should burn up to 50 calories, so if you fly four times during a night of play, and complete at least one circuit every flight – you have just burned 200+ calories! That’s definitely enough to work off that handful of funyons you downed while taking out the Lich King.

WoW Workout Plan Quick Hits

Photo courtesy of brianjmatis on Flickr

• Scanning the auction house? Activate Aspect of the Cheetah and go do some sprints up and down your street.
• Waiting for a mob to re-spawn? Send your muscles a lesser healing wave by doing some light yoga stretches.
• Waiting for a ready check? Cast Tranquility on yourself by closing your eyes and take a few deep breaths.

I’ll discuss more ways you can turn you love for WoW into a way to get fit in future episodes. But don’t let that stop you from getting creative, and coming up with a workout plan of your own. There is so much more idle time in the game that are perfect to get in some much needed physical activity. You can mix and match what you do and when you do it.

Just be aware of the time you spend in-game doing nothing — and try to change that.

You will be amazed how many calories you can burn or how many pushups you can do without giving up any play time at all.

I’d like to hear your results of following this plan. I’d also like to know what other ways you stay fit while playing WoW. Post a comment here or hit me up on twitter, @geekintoshape.

Have fun, be geeky, and get fit!

This picture will make sense in a minute... maybe.

When it comes to modifying your life to cut the flab and shape up, there are normally two main paths you can take:

1. The Balanced Approach – Incorporate fitness into you current lifestyle, maintaining a healthy balance.
2. The Fitness Grind – Stop work on your current lifestyle, and dedicate all of your time to becoming healthy.

If you have ever read my site, you probably know that I am a huge fan of the first option. I believe that you have to maintain the activities that you love to keep your mental health, even if they might not be the best for your physical health. Slowly incorporating healthy changes into you life, in a way that changes your habits and patterns, will give you the best results.  The catch: This often takes a long time.

So, what about the fitness grind?

Recently, I have made some aggressive goals that have “forced” me to go down the second path.  I have cut out video games, stopped working on web development projects (except for this blog), and let my DVR fill up with episodes of Fringe. I have put a hold on almost all of the recreational geeky things I normally do.

Well, this has worked out really well for me.

I never thought that this was a good, “healthy” approach for achieving and maintaining overall health. But my mind has been changed due to a single mind hack, which I thought I would share.

Think of the Fitness Grind like an MMO Grind

All of you MMO junkies know all about the MMO grind.  You set your goal: “I want the Epic Helm of Whoop-Ass that you get when you become exalted with the M.F. Face-Crusher faction.“  Well to get that, you do your daily quests, you wear the faction tabard and plow through dungeons, you put aside other endeavors temporarily to focus on the task at hand.

Well, why can’t you apply this to fitness?

I had never thought about applying the mindset I had for years of playing World of Warcraft to my fitness endeavors.

For a short time, switch your primary focus to fitness, and let other things go undone for a while.

This means no World of Warcraft (which is ironic), a minimized workload, blogs going unread, etc. Once you put all of your focus on fitness, be persistent. During the grind for the Epic Helm of Whoop-Ass, would you make extra time to finish the daily quests and make a few dungeon runs? You betcha!  So do the same with fitness.

Never miss a daily fitness quest.

Be vigilant – after all, the more days you do your daily quests, the faster you will meet you goal, right? Do extra workouts to get you to your goals faster.

One of the biggest ways this mind hack helped me, was how I thought about the end-game. In my previous attempts to dive head-first into fitness – my eye was on the goal, and nothing else. This caused me to be short-sighted and I often burned out if I didn’t get the results I wanted. Well in our make believe MMO, our immediate goal may be to obtain the Epic Helm of Whoop-Ass, but the real goal — the long-term goal — is possessing the helm and having the ability to equip it in all future battles – well beyond the immediate goal of current grind.  In the fitness world, you may set a goal to lose 20 pounds, but the big picture goal is the benefits you get after losing 20 pounds.

Focus on the immediate goal for the current fitness grind – but always keep your eye on the big picture!

When you meet your immediate goal, the fitness grind is over. But the fun is just beginning – you now have new tools in your inventory that you have free reign to use. Don your Epic Helm of Whoop-Ass and wave good-bye to the M.F. Face-Crusher Clan and reap the rewards of your hard work.

Enjoy the benefits and rewards of the fitness grind!

It is amazing how small changes in mindset can affect your life. This may not work for you, but it has kept me motivated to lose weight for the longest period in my life. Not because I want to weigh 200 pounds, even though that is my current goal, but because of what I will be able to do as a 200 pound person:

• Be able to keep up with the kids.
• Look good in a T-shirt
• Run a 5k

These are the rewards of meeting my goal, and they are well worth the fitness grind.

Are you in the middle of a fitness grind? What are the immediate and long term goals of your fitness grind?

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Coffee Grinder Photo courtesy of tonx

Well, it is here, the first episode of the Geek Into Shape podcast! The goal of this podcast is to give you quick tips, advice, and motivation to get you fit, GEEK STYLE! Each episode should be short, between 5 and 15 minutes. I plan on starting with some solo podcasts, and I will hopefully add in interviews and videos as I go. Like this blog, I am doing this purely for fun, experience, and to help others, so I don’t expect me to be Johnny on the spot every week, but I will try not to go more than a few weeks without a new episode.

I am brand, spanking new to this whole podcast producing thing, so the audio quality isn’t the best, but I hope to explore and learn as I go and always improve it.  Let me know if you know any good tips!

I will get the feeds submitted to iTunes soon, but until then, you can subscribe manually if you like using this feed.

UPDATE: iTunes page is now up!

Episode 1 Show Notes and Overview:

Six Steps to get started on your fitness journey:

Step 1: Know your past – Make a list of the things that led you to the unhealthy point you are today.

Step 2: Discover Your Powers – Take a fitness assessment: President’s Challenge Adult Fitness Test. Take critical measurements: Weight, height, waiste size, arm size, leg size, BMI, Body Fat %, Lean Body Mass

Step 3: Set Your Goals and Build an Attack Plan – Make a list of all goals. Start by attacking the most attainable goals first.

Step 4. Gear Up – Make a home gym or get a gym membership.

Step 5. Build your alliance – Get gym buddies, online support, etc.

Step 6: Monitor the battle – Start a fitness journal.

Image courtesy of Dashu Pagla

I was reading a post by Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits about sticking to a meal plan, and I immediately recognized the same patterns and thought processes that I follow at work everyday doing agile software development.  When I was first introduced to the agile frame of mind, it seemed to fit with the way I imagined software was supposed to be developed.  But this article helped me realize how easily agile practices can be applied to our everyday health and fitness.  Instead of building software to meet requirements, we are executing a plan to meet our health and fitness goals.  I thought I would start a series of posts related to this topic, with the first post starting with the basics: the values in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development itself.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Since the text above is primarily referring to a team of people and a customer of some sort, I will narrow the scope of the statement to be “Individual and Self-Interaction.”  What this means, is that is is much more important to be honest with yourself when it comes to your own well being.  It the world of health, you are your main customer (wife is a close second).  You have to acknowledge the fact that you are responsible for your destiny, and the more often you interact with yourself (that’s called thinking) about your requirements, goals, and progress, the better chance you will have at meeting your expectations.  This does not mean processes (workout plans and diets) and tools (exercise equipment and nutrition trackers) are not important, but they will only take you as far as you allow them to take you.  So next time your office-mate waves a box of Thin Mints in your face, make sure to do a little self-interaction and say NO!

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

Well of course we aren’t talking software here, so I will relate working software to your intermediate and end goals and I will relate comprehensive documentation to your exercise and nutrition logs you keep along the way.  I know I have preached the importance of tracking your fitness results in past articles, and I still do; however, the more important thing is making significant progress against your health goals.  If you want to lose 10 pounds, it is much more important to meet that end goal that to track every step along the way.  That being said, I believe that the end goal can be met faster by constant progress updates, which can be obtained by keeping those metrics along the way.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation &
4. Responding to change over following a plan

When applying these rules to health and fitness, it is easier to take the last two statements together.  Earlier, I mentioned that you are your main customer for your own health.  It is critical you are constantly reiterating to yourself what your goals are, what your health requirements are.  You may try to set a goal up front, a contract for your future health.  You may develop a plan to meet those goals, and that is great.  But the more important thing is to allow yourself room to modify your goals and your plan as things change.  In the world of health and fitness, the requirements (goals) don’t change as much as new requirements come in and take priority (baby, work, 6 seasons of Lost).  Always reassess what is important to you and be flexible in your plans to adjust to any changes in goals you might impose on yourself or changes in the environment you are in trying to meet those goals.  On a deeper-dive into the day-to day planning, response to change is a key to meeting the individual milestones to meet you goals.  If you are training for a 5k and mother nature decides to dump two weeks of rain on you, don’t just push off your schedule and miss your “deadlines.”  Go to the gym and hop on a treadmill, go buy some water resistant clothes and water-proof ear-buds and go running in the rain, or just change the workout to something new altogether.  Just be agile.

Final scratches

I know all of this is obvious.  But it is sometimes easy to forget the priorities to meet our goals.  Remember, the priority is to meet the goal, not to do it perfectly to a plan and have every calorie and mile mapped out. Just get out there and do it.

I plan on going into more detail on some of the 12 Principles of agile software in a future post, so stay tuned.

I am always listening to podcasts.  Driving, working, cleaning, exercising, all the time.  It drives my wife nuts, but I find so much useful information about anything and everything by flipping off the TV and putting in those little white ear buds.  One thing I am new to, though, is fitness podcasts.  And there are a bunch of them out there.  Some, I have found helpful and interesting.  Other can be boring and useless.  I have been sifting through a bunch of them recently and thought I would let you know about the ones that are climbing to the top of my “must listen to” list.  And of the ones I review each month, I will pick my favorite one so that ye with little time will always be able to trim down your playlist and only listen to the best.  So enough with this introduction rubbish. On to the reviews!

My Pick: Being Healthy for Busy People

(Review based on Episode 9)

This podcast rocked!  I had to listen at this podcast just for the title; try to find geek that isn’t busy (and I do consider playing Lord of the Rings Online “busy work”).  The funny thing was, the episode I listened to wasn’t even about being busy.  It was about the health benefits (and decrements) of tea, coffee, and Venti Carmel Mochas with extra whip cream.  This really hit close to home since I am a café junkie.   The information provided was detailed and very well researched.   Yet it remained very concise, understandable, and helpful.  But most importantly, this one little 20 minute show actually motivated me to start changing one of my habits by providing me with all the facts and options I need to know to do so.  I was so impressed by Episode 9 that I downloaded and listened to all of the episodes.  This podcast seems really seemed to hit all the high points for me and I strongly suggest it for everyone else.

Other Reviews This Month:

Motivation to Move (Review based on Episode 161)

I enjoyed this podcast.   It was light, upbeat, and knowledgeable.  They sure have been doing it for a while, seeing that they are on episode 161.  The length is good: only 30 minutes.  Long enough to have in depth topics, but short enough to listen to on the commute to work or walk to the store.  The website seems to have a big community as well.  It did, however, have some cheesy, “self-help” style music playing in the background.  That always drives me nuts.  This was a good podcast, but it wasn’t great.  If you are dedicated to fitness podcasts or have a lot of time, I say listen away because this was a good show.  I personally have plenty of other podcasts on my play list that I would listen to first, and this one would probably fall into the “Mark as not new” category.  I do plan to listen to a few more episodes, and I’ll let you know if I have a change of heart.

Nutrition Diva’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Eating Well and Feeling Fabulous (Review based on Episode 7)

I love the whole Quick and Dirty Tips line of podcasts.  I think they have the perfect format for a podcast.  They all take one topic or user question a week and provides a 5-7 minute tip.  The Nutrition Diva is one of their more recent additions to the lineup.  The host seems knowledgeable and professional.  The episode I listened to wasn’t necessarily the best podcast I have ever heard, but, hey, it only took 5 minutes out of my day (and those were just audible minutes)!  Even though this specific episode wasn’t anything special, I am biased to the overall quality of QaDT productions, so I have added this to my subscriptions.  Hopefully I’ll have better things to say in the future.

And that’s it for Septembers reviews.  If you have agree or disagree with anything I have said, please leave some comments.  Also tell me if you have any other podcasts that you enjoy.  Next month, I plan to look at podcasts featuring workout music, which should be fun since I really don’t like electronica, and that is what all fitness music podcasts play.  Have a great week and remember to stay active!