Get Fit Slowly

15 responses so far ↓

• 1 Rebecca // Jan 14, 2008 at 2:02 am

  I know it’s easy to feel like you’re not making progress, and it definitely sucks that your futon broke, but I just wanted to say that I think you’re doing just fine so far. If you want to look at it another way–you’ve lost two pounds since Jan. 1st, which means you’ve lost a pound a week. Everything I’ve read says that for healthy, sustainable weight loss, you should only lose 1-2 pounds a week, max. Which means you’re right on target and should keep going.

  Last February I was where you are now. I’d decided to try ‘little baby steps’ to try and lose weight, and this was one of the things I tried to keep in mind. If I lost more than 1-2 pounds a week, great, if I stayed the same or gained a pound, that was fine too–I just kept doing what I was doing. I hadn’t gained the weight overnight, after all–why would I lose it overnight? A year later I’m now forty pounds lighter–I have forty more to go still (roughly), but I’m still taking those itty bitty steps. So I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t forget the ‘Slowly’ part of your Getting Fit, and don’t give up!

• 2 Chris @ ComicHacks.com // Jan 14, 2008 at 3:25 am

  Ouch, J.D.!

  She didn’t have to remind you of it. It’s not like you haven’t been trying…

  Just keep up the steady weight loss, my friend. You’ll be there in no time.

• 3 Janefan // Jan 14, 2008 at 5:56 am

  I don’t know whether to be jealous that you actually watched a Jane Austen movie with your wife (my husband won’t), or thankful that my husband hasn’t broken the couch…yet.

  Your blog is very honest and inspirational. Thank you for sharing your experiences with the world.

• 4 SD // Jan 14, 2008 at 6:33 am

  Take the futon back and demand a replacement, they should account for us fatty Americans in their design and construction. With 147% of us being overweight, congress should stop worrying about silly things like global warming, terrorism, and our current slide into a recession and enact laws which require all furniture sold in the U.S. to be able to support a fully grown cow dropped from 15 feet.

  Yeah, I’ve broken furniture too… but those flimsy plastic deck chairs aren’t worth the 5$ they charge for them. And you really shouldn’t lean back in them.

• 5 brad // Jan 14, 2008 at 8:08 am

  This reminds me of the time I ate a big supper and sat down on the couch next to my girlfriend, then leaned over to reach a wine glass. When I did that, the button on my trousers popped off and landed on the floor. She was laughing so hard she had to run to the bathroom.

  Anyway, I suspect you’re like me in that the “exercise more” part of the equation is a lot easier to implement than the “eat less” bit. Gina Kolata had an interesting question-and-answer series in the New York Times over the last couple of weeks, and reading it drove home for me the fact that exercising more really does not do much of anything to reduce weight. As she points out in one of her answers, the calories you expend by running hard all the way to the top of the Empire State Building would be gained right back if you eat a small chocolate bar at the top. The problem is that exercise can be fun and even addicting, but eating less is just plain hard. And that makes it much more challenging than just increasing your exercise.

• 6 Asithi // Jan 14, 2008 at 12:03 pm

  I am also coming to the conclusion that exercising harder and more often is not the solution to loosing weight. I am trying to get more movement into my daily activities, but burning an extra 100-200 calories from all that fidgeting only burn off a cookie.

  I have a mini pedal bike that I now use when I watch TV. If I am watching TV, I am pedaling slowly. Hey, an movement is better than no movement. But one thing I am finding from this experiment is that I am not watching TV as much because I do not want to pedal on that mini bike!

• 7 greenman2001 // Jan 14, 2008 at 9:30 pm

  I’m glad Brad wrote what he did, because it reveals a huge problem with standard weight loss advice. Brad points out that exercise can be ineffecitive, and eating less is just plain hard.

  Standard weight loss advice says that to lose weight you must eat less and exercise more. For people like you and me, that’s TWO unpleasant, difficult changes you have to make, starting now. What’s the likelihood THAT plan is going to succeed?

  I suggest to you that any plan that’s going to succeed has to be as automatic as overeating and not exercising has been up until now. That’s a tricky feat, but one first step is to separate the eating part from the exercise part and build systems for addressing each into your life that don’t require that you rely on willpower to overcome impulse. It didn’t take an act of will for me to polish off the last four donuts in the box — it was the most natural thing in the world for me to satisfy my hunger with them.

  Brad, you and I have a very practical problem: we have to eat less. What’s your plan?

• 8 Asithi // Jan 14, 2008 at 11:04 pm

  Greenman, you might want to consider reading the Abs Diet by the editor of Men’s Health magazine. The diet does not emphasize limiting food. You can eat as much as you as long as you eat most of your food from the power food list.

• 9 brad // Jan 15, 2008 at 2:24 am

  Greenman, my plan is simply to think twice before I eat something. My basic diet is healthy, relatively low-fat, and varied. If I just stuck to that, I’d be fine. The problem is all the in-between snacks and desserts. They’re hard for me to resist, but I need to resist them because they are at the root of my problem. I start out every day with the best intentions, but (in part because I exercise regularly) I’m typically ravenous by 10am and go down to the kitchen to have some toast or cereal. Once I do that, it’s like I’m a shark on a feeding frenzy…I overeat, and then because I feel I’m a failure and a lost cause (this pattern has been repeating itself nearly every day for, oh, 15 years), I overeat some more, and that makes me feel still worse.

  The key for me is to truly WANT to lose weight, so I can stand up to my cravings in those situations and stop eating when I’m no longer hungry.

  I’m not into any fad diets. In the 80s I spent a couple of years in a relationship with a low-fat cooking chef, and I lost about 20 pounds without even being aware of it. The food was great, I ate more consciously, and actually lost my taste for fatty, rich foods — they disgusted me. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat ice cream. I’d like to get back to that point, and ultimately what that means is developing new habits…and sticking to them long enough that they truly become habits.

• 10 TosaJen // Jan 15, 2008 at 7:47 am

  JD — I’ve found that married people often gain and lose weight in tandem. However, it sounds like Kris is not currently experiencing weight issues — has she ever? It is very hard for a partner who has not “been there” to provide helpful support. (Sorry — tell you you need to lose weight isn’t in that category — you knew that already.) For example, DH and I work together to provide a balanced diet to the kids and ourselves and enable each other to exercise.

• 11 greenman2001 // Jan 15, 2008 at 5:18 pm

  Brad, again, thank you for writing. I know exactly what you’re up against. I’d suggest to you that trying to overpower your appetite when it’s reached the level of “ravenous” is a losing proposition. I don’t have that kind of willpower, and neither do most people. When I’m that hungry, I’m not thinking twice about anything — in fact, I’m not thinking at all. And that’s the key to all of this: you need a plan that enables you to eat right without doing any thinking — just like you did when you were dating the chef.

  As I’ve commented elsewhere, hunger is the enemy of anyone trying to maintain a calorie deficit to lose weight. Your body is designed to overcome rational thinking when it needs calories so that you can survive. This is why nutritionists recommend eating at least 5-6 meals a day — whether you’re dieting or not. By eating a meal of 350 calories every 2 hours or so, you can make automatic calorie consumption decisions without the urgency of hunger driving you. In your case, Brad, if you’re working out a lot, you may need to eat larger meals, or more frequently, to maintain a deficit of 500 calories a day (that’s a pound of weight loss a week). “Snacking” is a meal — you have to treat it as such. “Desserts” are just calories — they’re part of your plan, happily so! In this paradigm there are no “in between” meals: you’re providing your body with a steady, measured stream of calories so that you are never hungry. At the end of the day, you’ve consumed what you need to — say, 2100 calories — and burned what you’ve managed to — say, 2600 calories — to maintain a 500 calorie deficit without being hungry.

  You see what this requires, of course: knowing how many calories you’re consuming and how many you’re burning. Without this data, you are lost at sea.

  Note that this approach pays no attention to fad diets, or in fact to any aspect of the food you’re eating except for calories. If you want a healthy diet, consume healthy calories. If you want an unhealthy diet, consume unhealthy calories — only consume them 5-6 times a day in equal quantities so that you don’t get hungry.

  I would have another piece of advice for you, Brad, since it sounds like you’re working out pretty hard: consume some calories immediately before and during your workout, the way bodybuilders do. There’s an entirely different discussion to be had about optimal nutrition for athletics, but what I’ll say here is that exercise involves breaking down muscle in order to reconstitute it, and that process requires energy — if you’re not providing that energy, your body will take it from its own stores (that’s what “burning fat” is all about). This is a process you want to control, in part because the body doesn’t take all of its energy from fat in this circumstance, and in part because “taking energy from it’s own stores” manifests itself as ravenous hunger immediately following a workout, and hunger is your enemy.

• 12 greenman2001 // Jan 15, 2008 at 5:52 pm

  Asithi: Any book that tells you you can eat as much as you want of some group of foods is written by a snake oil salesman, whatever his position in life may be. There’s only one way to lose weight: to consume fewer calories than you burn. There’s only one way to maintain a healthy weight: to consume only as many calories as you burn. And the only way to get great abs is to do lots of crunches and reduce your body fat.

  Your body and mine have a built-in mechanism to keep from overconsuming calories: appetite. When you satisfy your appetite, you stop eating and stop consuming calories. The body is extremely good at maintaining this balance, as long as you allow the mechanism to work properly. How good is it? In the course of a year you’ll consume about 1,000,000 calories. Even if you gain 10 pounds — a nightmare scenario for most people — you will have over-consumed only 35,000-calories — missing the target by only about 3%. This is quite miraculous.

  If you mess with the mechanism, though, you’re in for trouble. JD’s ability to stop at a 7-Eleven on the way home from work, buy two Hostess Sno-balls and consume them in his car before you can say “Power Foods” ten times has not been accounted for in his genetic code. An entirely different approach is called for here, and while giving him a list of foods he can eat as much of as he wants may help move him off his standard self-destructive pattern, the fact is that it’s hard to make those kinds of decisions when you’re hungry, as the editors of Men’s Health know well themselves. I think a much simpler and more fundamental approach is called for: restrain your hunger. If you’re feeding your body a steady stream of calories throughout the day, in measured quantities within a larger plan that maintains a modest deficit of 500 calories, you can eat from ANY list of foods without thinking about it for a second.

  For this reason, I follow my plan and read cook books, not diet books.

  By the way, I loved your comment about avoiding TV so that you can avoid exercising. (Believe me, I’ve done much, much worse.) So much for that motivational trick, huh? There is room here for an entire discussion about the ways we organize our entire lives — every detail — to obtain the outcome we really want and avoid the outcome we really don’t want. If you’ve ever attended a weight loss camp, you know that there is time put aside every day to discuss these kinds of issues because they are so important.

• 13 brad // Jan 16, 2008 at 2:59 am

  Thanks Greenman. The only other comment I’d make is that fad diets do work — most people who try them lose weight — but they’re not sustainable. They’re the opposite of “get fit slowly” but instead are designed to help you lose weight quickly. I’m more interested in a diet I can maintain for 30 years or more.

  I had a friend in Vermont who once put herself on “the grapefruit diet,” because someone convinced her that grapefruit burned fat. I pointed out that, compared with what she had been eating before, three meals a day of grapefruit came out to a lot fewer calories so she was bound to lose weight. And of course she did. But it’s not sustainable. Staying on the grapefruit diet long-term will put you in the hospital pretty quickly.

  And yes, I agree about the need to eat more frequent (but lighter) meals and to aim for a daily calorie limit. It’s just hard to do that in practice when you cook all your own food and thus don’t have calorie counts for 90 percent of the recipes. So I don’t count calories but just aim for reasonable portions and low fat.

• 14 On Becoming a Frugal Eater // Jan 17, 2008 at 5:04 am

  [...] same principle applies to fitness. In one of his excellent comments on this site, greenman2001 recently wrote, “There’s only one way to lose weight: to consume fewer calories than you burn.” [...]

• 15 Asithi // Jan 17, 2008 at 8:30 am

  Actually, I tried a version of the grapefruit diet. Brad: I would drink 6 -8 oz of grapefruit juice before dinner. I do notice that I do not eat as much over the course of the meal. My only problem is that I do not enjoy drinking grapefruit juice on a regular basis, that never became a permanent lifestyle change for me.

  Greenman: Actually the powerfood list is very similar to the food list posted here: Almonds, beans, spinach, dairy, instant oatmeal, eggs, turkey, peanut butter, olive oil, whole wheat grain, extra protein, berries.

  The book recommends that you include at least 3 items from the list into each meal. I find that when I do, I tend to stay full much longer. But the only problem is that I find only 2 or 3 of these powerfoods part of my regular diet, so it is hard to incorporate the plan into my lifestyle. One positive is that I am now adding a little extra protein (whey protein) into my evening hot chocolate. I did not realize how important protein is until I read this book. But I am still browsing the shelves of my public library until I find something that will give me results without modifying too much of my current lifestyle.

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