If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
J.D.’s weight over the past two weeks
Number of hours playing World of Warcraft over the past two weeks: 40
Gym memberships lapsed: 1
Weight on July 30th: 186.0
Weight on September 7th: 193.5
On Friday, Mac explained why he is fat. For him, it’s because it’s easier to be fat than it is to be a healthy weight. For me, it’s because of two things: I lack innate self-discipline and I have a fear of success.
Earlier this year, I managed to override my normal self-defeating behaviors by focusing on a couple of goals. Goals work for me. They point me in a direction and keep me motivated. They’re not as good as external structure imposed by some sort of authority (think class schedules in high school), but they do the job.
Then things began to fall apart. As has probably been apparent from my posts at Get Fit Slowly, it’s been a rocky two months for me. First I was injured, then my mother was in the hospital for three weeks, and lately I’ve had an inability to work on what’s important. In fact, I’ve been actively choosing things that hurt my health rather than help it.
Last night, I finally confessed to my wife all of the little things I’ve been doing to self-sabotage my life. (And now I’m confessing them to you.) I haven’t been exercising. I’ve been eating too much (yes, including Sno-Balls). I’ve been drinking too much alcohol. I’ve been playing too many computer games.
Kris wasn’t happy (which is understandable), but she agreed to help me get back on track. While she watched, I trashed World of Warcraft from my hard drive. I pulled out Body for Life and made a schedule for the morning. I woke at 6:30 to, got dressed, and went to the gym.
I tried to recreate those successful workouts from March and April. I turned on my iPod and cranked up the high-intensity dance music. I lifted light weights slowly. I focused on form. I worked efficiently, and when I was done I felt great.
On the way home, I made a decision. Rather than scatter my attention right now, trying to pursue several goals at once, I’m going to concentrate on just one. I’m going to do the Body for Life plan from start-to-finish, 12 full weeks, without trying anything else. While I was doing this earlier in the year, I lost ten pounds and felt good about myself. I want to capture that again.
Cost to renew my gym membership for three months: $87
Time spent exercising this morning: 62 minutes
Current state of mind: Happy and content, at last
Mac
23 responses so far ↓
1 suzanne // Sep 8, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Sometimes it’s better to just focus on one thing at a time!! Good luck with your new plan of action
2 Eden // Sep 8, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Oh, the evils of WoW…I know them all too well!
If I wanted to, I could pretty easily chart progress/declines of my weight directly in opposition to my time spent playing World of Warcraft. How sad that my greatest addiction struggle is with a video game. I’ve stopped playing again since 2 weeks ago and I’m remembering what it’s like to be productive and active again.
I agree with focusing on one exercise goal too. I’m trying to simplify my routine right now, focusing only on regular walks and the 100 pushups routine.
3 Ryan // Sep 8, 2008 at 3:10 pm
JD, just started the body for life about 2 weeks ago, and the eating part was about a month ago.
I’m feeling great, not lost much weight, but I feel stronger already and my bodyfat has dropped about 1%. My goal is 12% bodyfat, I’m at 26% right now.
Let’s Get Ripped! Stick with it.
4 Greenman2001 // Sep 8, 2008 at 4:22 pm
We’ve come a long way from post topics like, “Is Exercise Addictive?” haven’t we, gentlemen? Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
5 Andrew is getting fit // Sep 8, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Man, it seems that so many people are having trouble lately. I think the key is owning up.
Well done to you to getting out there and fixing the problem.
6 Alexia // Sep 8, 2008 at 7:13 pm
I find I get scattered when I do a bunch of things — I’m just working on one right now, too — exercise.
Good for you!
7 Emily // Sep 9, 2008 at 12:45 am
I think it is great that you are being honest with yourself. I think it’s great you’re sticking to BFL, too. I gotta say, when you were checking out running I was worried, especially as you started getting injured. Running is a high-impact, injury-prone activity that gets MORE high-impact and injury-prone the more you weigh. Why it is recommended to overweight people over statistically safer activities we will never know.
I have the exact same problems with fear of success and lack of self-discipline. I am working on the deep reasons, but for now, something that is helping me is re-envisioning what kind of person I am. I pretend I am someone else, somebody who does not have a fear of success and poor self-discipline, and I ask myself what that person would do in any given situation. Then I do it. It sounds crazy, but it works for me. It helps stave off the self-defeat.
8 brad // Sep 9, 2008 at 4:27 am
I do think focusing on one program at a time makes sense, and is more in line with the idea of getting fit slowly. We all need to aim for sustainability: we should avoid getting fit quickly, because that usually entails exceptional efforts that can’t be maintained in the long term because our schedules can’t allow it.
You jumped into all this with an obsessive enthusiasm, what with Body for Life, running, cycling, and then pushups. But it wasn’t sustainable, it felt like a binge, and the problem is that once you stop doing one of these things there’s a feeling of failure that dampens your enthusiasm for the rest of them and then gradually everything falls apart. I know this feeling well; friends of mine have called it the “all or nothing” mentality.
With exercise, I think the key is to gradually fit exercise into one’s life, to make room for it and to sustain it for at least six months so it becomes as much a habit as eating breakfast in the morning. You have to get to the point where it feels weird NOT to exercise. It’s hard to get there, because exercise is hard, but it’s also rewarding, and if you persist long enough you can get over the hump.
With eating, those of us who lack self-discipline have a much harder time walking the line. Eating less is a lot harder for most of us than exercising more.
My brother deals with it by having no food in the house at all. He has a few bottles of water in the fridge and that’s it. I don’t think that’s sustainable, but it works for him (he goes out for breakfast and eats a big salad; the rest of the day he eats a few apples). My approach is to eat a healthy balanced diet and to simply reduce my portion sizes, eat smaller but more often, and cut out the sweet snacks that are addictive. As with exercise, you have to stick to this long enough so it becomes habit, a sustainable habit, and not succumbing to the “failure” mentality when you slip. For me this has been by far the biggest challenge, one I still haven’t succeded in overcoming.
9 Drew // Sep 9, 2008 at 6:18 am
I can’t look at weight loss as a slow process. It just doesn’t work for me like that. When I try to lose weight slowly, I start making excuses and soon enough I’m back into the old habits that got me where I don’t want to be. Telling myself that it’s a stepwise process makes it easier to cheat because I convince myself that I’ve got time to work off those brownies or burn off the beer. Hey, it’s not like I have an immediate goal, right? My goal is down the road, so pulling off the highway and hitting the rest stop won’t kill me. I can still make up for it by driving faster. (Pfffft!)
What works for me is hitting a restricted diet hard and fast, but only for short periods. I can’t maintain a months-long focus. My attention simply drifts away. So I focus all my energy on one month. I lose what I can in that month and just fight with everything I have to get through that month.
In fact, I break it down even smaller than that. I just take each day as its own. The end of the month is still there in the back of my mind. But what stops me from going to the fridge or skipping the weights is the knowledge that, “Hey, it’s just one day. You can do this for one more day. Then see how you like it tomorrow.” I continually make that promise to myself. And you know what? Tomorrow comes, and I find I’ve got more willpower than I did the night before.
It takes me around 3 weeks to develop new habits, so a one month restricted diet is perfect for me. At the end of the month, I’m actually used to the diet, so easing off over the period of a couple weeks works rather well. I find I’m no longer craving bad things. Besides, when you have a 6-month or 12-month period of sustained effort ahead of you, it’s hard to keep motivated. It seems sooooo long that even the day-by-day approach can’t keep my motivation up.
So far I’ve been putting everything I have into dropping fat for the past two and a half weeks. I’m down 7 pounds (a couple pounds of which is water, I’m sure), and 2 pounds per week is my goal. I could handle being 8 pounds lighter at the end of the month. Those are 8 pounds that aren’t going to come back readily, if at all. Then, in another month or so when I’m mentally rested again, I’ll hit the diet hard again.
10 brad // Sep 9, 2008 at 7:44 am
Drew, maybe that works for you but it sounds like the classic “yo-yo” style of crash dieting that everyone warns against precisely because it’s not sustainable over the long term. The “go slow” approach can still be taken one day at a time and compartmentalized in steps so it doesn’t seem like such a long slog, but my feeling is that if you’re losing more than a couple of pounds a month you’re probably losing weight too fast to keep it off. Study after study has shown that people who lose weight quickly tend to gain it back, whereas people who lose it slowly are more likely to keep it off. Easy go, easy come.
But everyone’s different, and if the crash diet approach works for you, that’s great.
11 Margot // Sep 9, 2008 at 8:08 am
It’s impressive how honest you are with yourself sometimes. Here’s a pattern that’s rather obvious from reading this blog from the beginning — you hurl yourself into things and then don’t finish them. You make huge plans to run a marathon, do a bike race, eat healthy, do the push challenge, etc. And then you don’t complete any of them. Why not try to implement sensible, small, boring changes that you can truly maintain over the course of your life? And not to be harsh, but some of those will involve not acting like a boy anymore — no more hours poured into video games, no more eating completely processed Hostess crap, you need to be a grown up and eat vegetables without Kris making you do it, etc.
12 pbj // Sep 9, 2008 at 8:11 am
I guess that means the marathon is out.
13 Brooklynchick // Sep 9, 2008 at 8:34 am
Great job getting back on track. If we are going to make lifelong changes, they won’t happen overnight, and we will backslide - that’s human nature!
But you’ve re-focused, hope you can also forgive yourself (beating yourself up does not burn calories). Keep it up, you’ll lose that weight again!
14 J.D. // Sep 9, 2008 at 9:19 am
You’ve basically summarized the last week of my internal dialogue.
15 mhb // Sep 9, 2008 at 9:58 am
I think I’m not the only reader who is seeing this and thinking, “maybe now JD is really going to work on getting fit SLOWLY.”
Don’t get me wrong, your enthusiasm earlier this year spurred me to start running and thinking about what I’m eating, and I’m very grateful for that. But I think a lot of us who read this (like Greenman above, perhaps) are seeking a long-term lifestyle change that regular people can make. I want to be one of those fit people I see who just jog in the morning because it feels good and it’s a part of their routine, not because they’re desperately working toward some goal (like me) or completely freaked out about being fat (yep, still me). I have had a few moments when running has been enjoyable alone time, a way to get charged up for the day ahead of me. From reading this, it seems like you’ve had plenty of those moments, too. I can see how it could be a nice routine. But it’s not routine for me (or you) yet. I think if it was, I wouldn’t read this blog… and you wouldn’t write it.
Stick with the BFL program, JD… but maybe think of it as creating a new routine for yourself, rather than following a program with an end date. As the weather gets cooler I think we all need to evaluate how we’re going to get and stay fit over the fall/winter, and I would love to hear what your plan is for that.
Most of all - good luck. We’re all pulling for you!
16 mrs darling // Sep 9, 2008 at 10:58 am
How come everyone says exercise is easier than eating right? I dont get that. The reverse is true for me! I have never in my life found exercise to be easy!
17 brad // Sep 9, 2008 at 11:41 am
mrs darling, exercise isn’t easy. But compared with eating less, it’s a piece of cake! At least that’s true for many people (including me).
18 Eden // Sep 9, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@mrs darling and brad-
I can definitely improve my diet much more easily than I can add exercise. At least at this point in my life. Exercise has just become so foreign to me that it’s really hard to make it happen. My diet has never been too horrible, basically for me I tend to eat too much food, but rarely junk food.
19 Greg // Sep 9, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Congragulations on hitting the reset button! I think we often sabotage ourselves in little ways without even realizing it. I’e never purchased WoW for the exact reason you just stated. Of course, I’m sitting in front of the computer right now, so what does that say? Time to go do some pushups…
20 Greenman2001 // Sep 9, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Great post, great comments. This is such a rich topic, and, as always, JD, your fearlessness in talking about this stuff is inspiring. You leave other fitness blogs in the dust.
I’m struck by how completely your program fell apart. Once running was taken off the table, it seems like a combination of lack of enthusiasm about alternate forms of exercise, combined with depression, really cut your legs out from under you, so to speak. My own theory, as you know, is that running is much, much more than exercise for you: it provides a kind of public affirmation that’s been an important component in the other self-improvement projects you’ve undertaken so successfully in your life. Moving up from the 15 lb dumbbell to the 20 lb dumbell in your inclined flye set just doesn’t bring the crowd to its feet in your mind the way advancing toward a marathon does.
Brad raises the question of sustainability. On the face of it, I don’t see what it is that’s inherently unsustainable about any of your efforts. Clearly, your program hasn’t been sustainable, but I think it would be valuable for YOU to establish what about it isn’t sustainable. At a certain point you said, “nope, not gonna do it this morning.” That’s the point of non-sustainability. It would be useful to go back to that moment and sort out what was happening, and how to work around that kind of obstacle. Personally, I think there’s a problem with “interruptibility.” True, goals motivate you, but if you’re interrupted enough times, you stop pursuing the goal.
Margot’s opinion — “some of those will involve not acting like a boy anymore” — I think gets at something very, very important about how fitness is viewed in the larger culture: it is associated with deprivation. Brad’s brother — a fridge full of water and eating nothing but apples — is everyone’s nightmare about dieting. A life without World of Warcraft: that’s fitness. I think these are self-defeating ways of conceiving of fitness. If you can’t enjoy yourself, what’s the point?
I’ve also been a reader of this blog from the beginning, and one thing is clear to me: you love exercising. You may have “failed” to reach all of your lofty goals, but there has been no mistaking the joy, pride, and satisfaction you’ve taken in the work. That better go down in the “plus” column as you evaluate this.
In the “minus” column? You encountered some extraordinary obstacles. Mom in the hospital, excruciating ITB pain — these are not willpower failures. And they were not part of your plan. One of your goals was not, “keep exercising while Mom is in the hospital for 3 weeks.” Your plan took advantage of something that works for you — goal setting — but there were no tools in your toolbox for dealing with major interruptions. There still aren’t. Your plan strikes me as being somewhat inflexible.
When a plan goes wrong in the Army, the brass debriefs the participants, calls in some outside experts (that’s me), and produces a “Lessons Learned” report, which informs the next plan. What does your “Lessons Learned” report say, JD?
21 brad // Sep 10, 2008 at 4:26 am
In deference to my brother, he’s doing the water-and-apples thing because nothing else he’s tried for the past 30+ years has worked. He rides his bike 36 miles a day in the hills, so he gets plenty of exercise, but despite that he hasn’t lost much weight. So he keeps food out of the house, has one enormous meal a day (a huge salad for breakfast) and snacks on apples the rest of the day. That seems to be working and he doesn’t feel deprived. I’m not sure a man can live on salad and apples alone, especially if he’s riding a bike 36 miles a day, seven days a week. But we’ll see….
22 Drew // Sep 11, 2008 at 6:19 am
Brad,
I’ve tried both methods: dropping the fat slowly and dropping the fat quickly. And I can say that over the long term, I’m much better off dropping it quickly.
This doesn’t mean I haven’t gained some of it back. Oh, believe me. I have. But my problem is, like JD in this instance, maintaining my motivation. If it’s a months long process, I simply can’t do it.
My interests shift, and I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be focused on something else in another month or two. This has the deleterious effect of depressing me when trying to lose weight slowly because I’m constantly reminded by myself that I couldn’t do it. But if I have short goals, and I know that my goals are short, then I actually feel good about myself for having accomplished them.
And more importantly, even if I gain a little weight back, I know that I’m more likely to return to a motivated fat loss cycle sooner. I know that sounds weird, but I’ve noticed that’s what happens with me. The longer and slower my fat loss periods are, the less frequent they are.
The second prong of my approach, and the one that has prevented me from repeating my “yo-yo” mistakes of the past, is weight training. A couple weeks ago I actually weighed more than at any point in my life (225). But I would estimate that I have an additional 10-20 pounds of muscle that wasn’t there three years ago when I weighed 210. That’s probably why the pants that fit snugly three years ago were a little loose a couple weeks ago. As of right now, at 220, they’re about to slide off my hips.
I guess I have two take home points from this.
(1) I’m better off now than I was three years ago when I started trying to improve myself. I’m not at my peak. I’ve slipped a little off the peak I was at a year and a half ago. But I’m still ahead of where I was and am moving forward. Reversing bad habits is not a linear process. Sometimes you take one step back for every two forward. Sometimes you take three steps back for every step forward! Nobody said falling down is wrong. What’s wrong is never picking yourself back up.
(2) Understand yourself, your limitations, and your strengths, and don’t be afraid to use them all to your advantage. I know through three years of trial and error what works for me and what doesn’t. And I can tell you that trying to shed the pounds slowly only gets me in more trouble. I have my most difficult times when I try it that way. I’m sure that others will find dropping pounds quickly to be destructive. But the point is I conclusively know how best to achieve my goals. That’s something I didn’t know three years ago.
23 Five Lessons Learned During My Adventures in Fitness // Sep 11, 2008 at 7:00 am
[...] On Monday, as I talked about correcting my course, Greenman had an interesting comment: When a plan goes wrong in the Army, the brass debriefs the participants, calls in some outside experts (that’s me), and produces a “Lessons Learned” report, which informs the next plan. What does your “Lessons Learned” report say, JD? [...]
Leave a Comment