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Every day for Get Rich Slowly, I read dozens of personal finance articles and blog posts. I highlight my favorites whenever I’ve collected enough to share (usually this means three or four links to other places). I’d like to do the same here.
To kick things off, here’s a little bit of recursion. Last week at GRS I posted some techniques for coping with gadget envy. Sassy Sexy Shapely looked at my suggestions and saw instead five strategies for weight loss success. If you want to lose weight, she says:
- Avoid advertising
- Avoid temptation
- Remember it’s not a competition
- Make the most of what you have
- Remember your larger goals
I continue to believe that wellness is systemic — mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and financial health are all related. This means you can look forward to more than just posts on food and exercise. Sometimes I’ll share stories about mental health, as well. For example, The Washington Post recently featured an article the ephemeral nature of happiness. This piece does a fine job of summarizing the ideas of Daniel Gilbert, whose Stumbling on Happiness explores the subject in greater detail.
Finally, in “Secrets of Weight Loss Revealed!”, Reason Magazine looks at two books about the “science” of weight loss. This review is thoughtful and engaging, and touches on how much (and how little) scientists know about the subject.
That’s it for the first Get Fit Slowly link roundup!
Mac
4 responses so far ↓
1 TosaJen // Jan 19, 2008 at 11:20 am
Thanks for the links!
I think we’ll be able to draw direct links from GRS to GFS for every single entry. Maybe that could be an easy ongoing challenge for the GFS folks.
For example, the discussion of deciding DIY taxes vs. paying the CPA is like figuring your own path to good health vs. going to a doctor, dietician, personal trainer, etc. Different folks need different levels of help and expertise for health reasons, are more or less comfortable with the topic, and are more or less willing/able to pay for support and expertise.
2 greenman2001 // Jan 19, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Thanks for the Reason magazine link, JD. A few thoughts.
When you start digging deeply into the plethora of studies on obesity, it turns out not only that there is an extraordinary amount of contradictory evidence, but that most of these studies (even the vaunted Nurses Study) are based on data on food intake recalled and recorded by the test subjects themselves — data that is so consistently wrong that nutrition scientists automatically “correct” it. But NIH data has shown pretty conclusively that there is little correlation between mild overweight and higher mortality rates AND that there is a demonstrable correlation between higher mortality and lower-than-healthy BMI. In other words, you have a higher chance of dying sooner if you’re slightly underweight than if you’re slightly overweight. The correlation between various diseases and obesity is all over the map. Anyone who says fat people are more likely to get cancer, for instance, is cherry-picking his data.
The physiological issues are complicated, but one thing’s for sure: it’s enormously more difficult to lose weight after you’ve become obese than it is to maintain healthy weight once you get there.
And finally, being overweight may or may not be bad for you, however you determine “bad,” but it’s unequivocally true that a lack of exercise is bad for you. Studies have shown beyond question that being overweight and active is much better by every measure than being healthy weight and sedentary. I advocate losing weight without exercise, but I don’t advocate living that way.
As you can imagine, I’m firmly in Wansink’s camp: he says, “deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against then; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.” He identifies hunger as the mechanism that undermines diets and recommends a deficit of no more than 100-200 calories a day for this reason, because it is the threshold above which metabolic changes automatically kick in to force you to eat more.
My own opinion is that the target deficit should be 500 calories, because the 1 pound a week weight reduction that results creates a powerful positive feedback loop, and my experience is that with a careful eating plan you don’t experience hunger at this level of deficit. Another advantage is that the ways people generally fall off their diets — a restaurant meal, a night of drinking, a birthday party — result only in 2,000-3,000 calories of overconsumption that you can recover from in a week, so you don’t get drawn too far off course.
I haven’t read Wansink, but his idea of mindfulness is crucial. The problem most people face is that they no longer realize when they’re hungry and when they’re full anymore, and the shift away from manual labor in our society — a trend that is only 50-60 years old — has placed most of us within easy reach of calories and eliminated the natural mechanism of burning calories, namely hard physical work that’s an integral part of earning your living. Half of healthy eating is simply paying attention to when you feel full. I believe that starting the process of weight loss by counting calories is the only way people learn — in a visceral way — how much food they “need” to “satisfy” their appetites.
I know that many “Candid Camera” studies about how environment affects appetite and consumption are conducted in restaurants. I’ve been meaning to go back to JD’s post about eating out with his wife to comment on this, but it’s my belief that restaurants are about the worst place a dieter can go, equivalent to a recovering alcoholic going to a bar. Every single aspect of the experience works against your controlling calorie intake; it’s a sheer battle of willpower that you are almost certain to lose. Of course, it’s relatively easy to combat these problems with a careful plan.
Kolata’s argument that we all have a genetic predisposition to a certain weight, healthy or not, is one I have a problem with. Physiological constraints aside, the fundamental mechanism is very simple: calories in must equal calories out to maintain your weight. If you move off that balance point, you’ll gain or lose weight, regardless of the nature of your fat cells or the speed of your metabolism.
JD, from previous posts of yours I get the sense that you’re in Wansink’s camp here, and I wonder what practical tools you’re using to manage the link between appetite and overconsumption.
3 elisabeth // Jan 19, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I think mindful eating can begin with mindful cooking — I’m often torn between the idea of “planned leftovers” and cooking “just enough,” but I think that controlling what’s available for any given meal helps a lot. It was pretty amazing when I started taking the time to, for instance, divide boxes of pasta into two-serving amounts, at first we didn’t believe that was a serving, now it’s fine. We make up the plates in the kitchen, too, and when we sit down to eat, that’s it, the foods all there. We also try to make sure we have enough time to eat, and that at the most there’s some instrumental music in the background, no tv… so that we can really enjoy what we’re eating and each other’s company, and again, eat more mindfully.
4 Sally Parrott Ashbrook // Jan 19, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I think those five strategies are good ones. Not having a tv definitely has helped me lose weight.
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