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This is a guest post from Tim Clark, who writes about prosperity and fulfillment at Soul Shelter.
When you reach a certain age, you start to resemble what you eat — and that’s bad news for people like me, who crave creampuffs, beer, donuts, and croissants.
A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays, I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my health would slowly deteriorate.
Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” I came up with four simple steps to getting fit — they’re not easy, but they’re simple.
Step 1: Stop eating while you’re still hungry
Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy — it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.
Step 2: Weigh yourself at least twice a day
Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight — writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it consistently and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.
Step 3: Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily
Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (or Metamucil, which is simply psyllium fiber with sucrose added). The fiber will fill you up, and — to put it rather indelicately — make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.
Step 4: Start an exercise routine
This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine — just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating — strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem — poor posture — and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.
Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.
Mac
7 responses so far ↓
1 metroknow // Jan 14, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Thanks for the post - I love the fiber suggestion, as well as the hara-hachibun concept. I’m actually trying step one currently (this weekend’s margaritas not included, because if you’ve reached 80% on tequila, might as well bump it on up to completion, where the good lord intended), and although its difficult to switch my brain over to *liking* that feeling, its working - down 6 lbs or so in the first week.
2 Brigid // Jan 14, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I have to agree with Tim on a couple points - weight loss is simple, but not easy. Some people think simple and easy are the same, but they really are two totally different animals.
On one hand - “simple” means you don’t have to follow some kind of weird food plan, pop expensive pills and/or workout in a gym 3 hours a day. On the other hand, the simple rules aren’t “easy” because it’s an everyday fight to stop eating when you know you should - especially when you’re eating pizza, had a rough day, etc.
While I won’t dispute that these things helped him down the path to overall health and fitness, I have to disagree with him on a couple points.
I don’t believe that weighing yourself twice a day has any benefit. Your weight will fluctuate widely throughout the day based on the weight of the food you eat, the water you are retaining, glucose levels, etc. Most people weigh-in once a day - that can even be too much especially if you like to beat yourself up if the scale doesn’t seem to be moving in the right direction. Most ladies will tell you - weight gain is a given during “that time of the month”. Guys may enjoy a bit more stability in this respect. More power to you.
There’s a yoga video that I do a couple times a week and the instructor says “It’s not what it looks like, I’ts what it feels like”. He’s talking about the poses, but I think its relevant in this case as well. It’s not what the scales looks like, it’s what you feel like. My scale can go up 5 pounds, but if my clothes fit better, I’m doing something right. Whether you agree with me or not isn’t important, just remember that the act of weighing yourself twice a day is not going to make you lose weight - it’s purely psychological. It may give you a boost - it may not.
I also believe exercise is ALL important. When you start eating less, your metabolism slows down. Exercise is a way to keep it going strong. If you start weight-training, and I’m not even talking the musclehead, bench-press-a-Buick kind of training, you are going to gain muscle which weighs more than fat, but takes up less space and of course looks good. On top of all that, muscle is an active tissue whereas fat is inert. When you gain muscle, your body burns more calories to keep it.
I read somewhere that it’s about an extra 9 calories per pound of muscle . Your body only burns 2 calories per pound of fat.
The key is to lose fat, not necessarily weight. You could easily lose weight by losing muscle and that’s not good.
That all being said, the fiber and 80% rule are both excellent pieces of advice. Bear in mind everyone is different. What works for someone, won’t always work for everyone. Finding your keys to success is a personal and unique journey. You’ll spend your days tweaking the system until you fin what works for you. If you remember nothing else - remember this: If you keep doing what you are doing, you are going to keep getting what you got.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Brigid
3 TosaJen // Jan 14, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I totally agree with Brigid’s comments, especially about the “everyone is different part”. I’ve seen too many people try someone else’s “magic steps”, and get discouraged when they can’t follow them 100%. No diet/weight loss/exercise plan comes with a personality transplant. Everyone needs to find their own system. Trial and error, baby!
And regarding the fiber — I am a huge fan of fiber. It’s the first nutrient I read when I pick up food with a label. (No fiber == junk food!) I just read an article in October 2007 Prevention magazine that suggests that it’s better to get fiber from food (30g/day!) than from a supplement.
4 greenman2001 // Jan 14, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I’ll repeat here something I said in an earlier comment: the lag time between consuming calories and feeling sated — about 20 minutes — is more than enough time for people like us to consume all of the calories we need for the day, let alone the meal. There’s a great article about the mechanism at work here in a recent Scientific American, but suffice to say that once you feel hungry, you have a lot less control than you think you do about the number of calories you put in your mouth.
This is all by way of saying that “stop eating while you’re still hungry” is another way of saying “wait for your appetite to catch up with your body.” The problem with this advice — the problem, in fact with all of the advice in this post — is that it requires an act of willpower to interrupt and overcome your habit. If your willpower — or my willpower — were up to this task, we wouldn’t be overweight to begin with. For weight loss to be effective, your eating and exercise habits have to be as automatic and unthinking as fishing the last Dorito out of the bag has been all your life.
J.D. and Mac have decided to “start an exercise routine” all of their lives. They’ve failed to stick with it. They glued it into their lives in a way that it wasn’t automatic and unthinking, the way overeating and not exercising was automatic and unthinking. There are lots of good reasons to exercise, but losing weight doesn’t require exercise, and if you can’t do it in a way that’s automatic and unthinking, you’re going to fail.
Drinking water, eating fiber supplements, and weighing yourself twice a day are not weight loss behaviors. They’re hacks designed to move you closer toward weight loss behavior, which is very simple: eat fewer calories than you consume. Specifically, they’re hacks that are designed to improve your willpower, because Tim understands weight loss to be a contest between willpower and impulse. Trying to out-muscle one’s impulses is an extremely difficult task, though. You didn’t have to outmaneuver your impulses with willpower in order to gain 40 pounds: that was something you accomplished without trying or giving it a second’s thought: effective weight loss and healthy living must be as automatic and thoughtless as overeating and not exercising was.
A note about fiber. Studies have shown that a dieter consuming 2000 calories a day of a high-fiber diet will lose more weight that a dieter consuming 2000 calories a day of a low-fiber diet. It’s one of only two freebies that’s available to you (the other is building muscle mass: because muscle burns more calories than fat, a dieter with 5% body fat consuming 2000 calories a day will lose more weight than a dieter with 30% body fat consuming 2000 calories a day, if both perform NO exercise). But having to remember to take a fiber pill every day is a lifestyle change that requires thought and willpower — the very enemies who got you into this mess in the first place.
Last, not to beat a dead horse, but how exactly do you know when you’re “80% full?” This kind of willpower hack is fun to talk about, but applying it every meal for the next 40 years is not something that people with 35 years of practice overeating are going to be able to manage. As soon as you stop forcing yourself to do something that doesn’t come naturally, you have failed completely. Ask J.D. and Mac.
I’d love to hear some specifics from Tim about how he consumed fewer calories than he burned, and how he’s maintaining his new healthy eating and lifestyle habits.
5 English Major // Jan 15, 2008 at 8:34 am
Maybe it’s different for the menfolk, but for pretty much all the women I know, weighing yourself twice daily is a solid step towards losing your MIND, not excess weight.
As to the “stop eating before you’re full” idea, I might suggest a sort of paraphrase: slow down your eating pace. If you’re eating more slowly, you can attend to the physical fullness cue (and attending to your body’s cues is always a good policy when trying to take care of it) without having long since overshot the mark.
6 Tim // Jan 15, 2008 at 11:52 am
Wow—good points all. I love the point about the lag between satiation and appetite–that’s the first empirical rationale for hara-hachibun I’ve heard.
As per the post, I’ve already shot my entire wad in terms of knowledge about weight loss, and don’t claim my so-called program will work for everyone, but since you were good enough to ask for additional thoughts, here are a few.
First, what I did was driven by fear of being out of shape and a desire to get fit rather than lose weight per se. Hobbling around and being unable to bend properly for a week was scary—a huge wake-up call. For me, this was primarily about getting healthy, not about trying to look better (though looking better and feeling better are somewhat related).
Second, I recognize that losing weight is far more difficult for some people than it is for me. I think my body type would be classified as an endomorph (?), and I haven’t had wild weight swings over my life, just a long, slow, steady increase since graduating college. So I can never truly understand how hard it is for many people to lose weight (I believe there’s an inherited, physiological component to being overweight that I haven’t had to deal with).
Finally, as to willpower. Yes—these things require willpower. My view is that if you can’t muster willpower, you’re out of luck, whether you want to lose weight, make more money, or achieve any other goal. If you want to change anything about your life, you have to break (usually) long-standing habits (as Brigid so aptly wrote, if you keep doing what you are doing, you are going to keep getting what you got).
I don’t regard exercising regularly, eating less, regularly recording one’s weight, drinking lots of water, and taking psyllium fiber regularly as “hacks.” I regard them as new, positive habits to replace old, negative habits.
As I wrote in a recent post, I’m a firm believer—along with a self-help guru whose name I can’t remember and would probably misquote—that it’s easier to behave yourself into a different way of feeling than feel yourself into different way of behaving. So if it’s helpful to think of my four steps ( I should call them habits) as “hacks” for tricking yourself into a different way of behaving, more power to you!
Anyway, I’ve already said more than I know about weight loss, so I’ll sign off with the Clark Method for Consuming Fewer Calories Than Burned (CMCFCTB): Get used to feeling hungry.
7 greenman2001 // Jan 15, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Tim, thanks for elaborating, and I really appreciate your being so honest. “Get used to feeling hungry” sums up a whole unspoken school of thought about dieting. You’ve done a real service here by calling it by its proper name.
I think it’s a recipe for failure for most people. Hunger is a primal need, and your body will do whatever it has to in order to consume calories in the face of it. Not healthy calories, not just enough calories to balance those being burned, not 80% of the calories it needs: any calories it can get its mouth around. Making calorie consumption decisions while hungry is like trying to slow down a freight train when a cow suddenly appears on the tracks. Smart, disciplined, experienced, and highly skilled conductors might be able to do it, sometimes, but that ain’t me. I’d rather put in place an automatic procedure for avoiding the collision in the first place. Wouldn’t you?
When you’re dieting, hunger is your enemy. 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. Without this pressure, and with a plan in place, you can concentrate on decisions that don’t require willpower — like, what can I prepare ahead of time that will taste great, and how am I going to make sure I have healthy food immediately at hand every 2 hours? Now, THAT’s behaving yourself into a different feeling (I love that quote — let’s find out who it is (sounds like Wayne Dyer)).
You may be right that without willpower, you’re out of luck, but I’m not willing to write off willpower-challenged people like like me, Mac, and JD — or the millions of people every year who fail at their diets — that quickly. I’d suggest that you have to step completely outside the willpower vs. impulse paradigm and find a way of systematizing and automating healthy behavior using your strongest rather than your weakest qualities. This blog — so fearlessly honest — is full of stories where Mac and JD summoned up their willpower once again, and it wasn’t up to the task. This ritual of humiliation, despair, the gathering up of resolve, the new undertaking, the brief success, the rapid failure, the retreat back into comfortable old habits, repeated over and over again, is the epitome of “keep doing what you’ve done and you’ll keep getting what you’ve gotten” — in this case, excess calories. In a post in December, Mac described this routine very clearly, how repeatedly throughout his life he has resolved to eat healthier, eat less, and start exercising, and after brief success he has gone back to his old ways, over and over and over again. You’re saying essentially, don’t give up, try it again, here are some tricks; I’m saying, stop doing what hasn’t ever worked for you.
I LOVE hearing about the accomplishments of disciplined, insightful people — truly inspirational. I’m going to check out your blog, and I bet I’m going to love it.
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