Diet control and the measuring “cops”

A few years ago a local TV station ran an exposé on a dishonest home cleaning service. Basically, the staff were caught on camera as they stole from their clients, while they were supposedly there cleaning the clients’ homes. What was really interesting was how the process worked.

The TV crew set up the situation in advance, by putting a large bowl full of change — nickles, dimes, quarters — on the dresser in one of the bedrooms. What would happen was the cleaners would come by, glance at the bowl of change, and take some. But the interesting thing was that they never took ALL the change. At least, not at once.

Often, the same cleaner would walk by the same bowl repeatedly, and each time he or she did, would just take a little of the change. A few quarters, a little bit. A “dip of the beak,” as the Mafia guys say in the movies. Comically, by the end of their shift, they would have emptied nearly the entire bowl of its change. But they never took it all at once. Which makes absolutely no logical sense.

But of course, the process was not really logical. The cleaner would probably tell him- or herself, I’m only taking a little. Just a few coins. They won’t ever miss them. They might not even have remembered that by the end of the shift, they’d have taken “just a few coins” maybe five or six times. Apparently, stealing small amounts didn’t register the same way in their minds as taking the whole bowl full of money all at once.

And that, of course, is entirely human. Which to say, not at all logical or rational.

Which brings us to the measuring “cops.”

When I jotted down some notes for this post, I actually made a Freudian slip and typed “cops” instead of “cups.” But then it occurred to me, that’s exactly what I mean. Because when it comes to keeping track of our calorie intake, most of us probably need something like measuring “cops” to keep us honest. (And the same goes for other things, like tracking our exercise.)

Good News on BP and Suggestions for Tracking Your Results

The chart is a screen shot of my blood pressure measurements, which I try to take every morning when I sit down at my computer.  What it shows is that over the course of the time since I started monitoring it, my systolic pressure (the “top number”) has dropped significantly and more important, consistently.  This can’t be due to anything other than my exercise program.

In the long run, blood pressure will generally respond to weight loss, and also, to some extent, to diet (which is why we get all that “lower your salt” advice.)  But personal experience tells me that whenever I’ve been physically pretty active, particularly with lots of good aerobics, my BP tends to be fairly healthy (if you consider still needing a med for it “healthy,” but I take what I can get.)  On the other hand, I’ve never, over many years, stopped in to the doc’s and had it checked and look okay when I was going through one of my “not so much exercise” periods.

So I’m glad that it’s going down.  But I’m also glad that I have the data here to prove it, and in the long run, this may be more critical than my current BP, because it tends to confirm that my skills at monitoring health data are getting better.

As I’ve been mentioning, the real and often unspoken key to weight management is often contained in how well we can manage our behavior.  And very often, we sink or swim in that regard based on ridiculously little things.

A Day Off? Weekly weight loss regimens

It’s a pleasantly rainy Sunday and my wife seems to have located an endless supply of cozy TV movies involving medieval settings, dragons, and swords.  It’s tempting to loll about just watching the flash of sword and armor, or to catch up on my long-overdue reading, but then there’s the guilty conscience and the call of the gym.

Which brings up the question of “days off.”  From both a physical and a psychological perspective, I’m gonna weigh in as being all in favor.  Whether it’s Sunday or Thursday, you probably need a day off from your regular workout routines every week.

Physically, this may be partly a matter of recovery — a bit of rest for well-used muscles is important.  I’m not an expert on muscle growth but the folks I’ve read often point out that most of the improvement, say, in muscle strength and tone comes on the days between lifting — those days when you may feel a bit sore after a workout.  Other sources talk about “recovery days” (Lance Armstrong’s trainer, for one, has mentioned these); recovery days may involve a workout, but just a light one.  For instance, after a day of hard biking, working on hill climbs or whatever, you may do a day of slow riding, just to get some blood in the muscles, to get them working, since they recover faster with some activity than if you just lounge around.

Psychologically, the main issue to days off may be burnout prevention.  Part of the trick to keeping motivated is staying fresh.  If you work out so much that you start to feel it’s more burden than pleasure, your motivation may sag.

Weight Loss Psych: Tending Your Motivational Garden

I’ve mentioned before that there are a bunch of psychological attitudes and techniques that one might use to keep at a weight loss project.  I was thinking about that list yesterday, when I’d finished my morning’s work and was heading out to the gym.  (More accurately, as I sat on the couch, computer still purring warmly in my lap, and knew it was time to somehow, by whatever means necessary, pry myself out of the recliner and haul myself off to work out, instead of taking an early lunch and a nap.)

I thought it might be worthwhile to try to notice some of the mental tricks I use to motivate myself as I went through my daily “couch potato cure.”  Most of them are habits, some more effective than others, I’m sure; I’ve just accumulated them over time to get me out to the gym, or to a class or whatever I happen to do to work out.  I thought that some of you might find at least one or two of them to be helpful, or similar to ideas you’ve had yourself.  (I’ve been enjoying readers’ comments on their experiences with these things, by the way.  Keep sending ‘em! — they’re often helpful, and it helps me to make contact with some really nice readers who’ve either already succeeded or who are toiling in this same garden.)

Here’s a list of things I did, most of which I probably do every day, in order to get my workout in:

A weight-loss tool kit – food tracking

As I mentioned in an earlier post, at the highest level (what the business writers often call the “30,000 foot level”), I think it makes sense to assume that a weight loss program has to consist of three components: exercise, diet, but also a set of effective psychological strategies — attitudes and skills that help you stay on track during what is absolutely guaranteed to be a highly frustrating and slow process.  In some upcoming posts, I plan to share some of my own favorite psychological strategies, as well as some favorite guides to mastering the mental game that you might enjoy.  But I don’t want to drift off into a discussion of weight-loss psychology without also tending some other fires first. In particular, I want to talk about diet, particularly how you can track what you eat, and why it’s important to do so.

When I look back at my own earlier, often marginally successful efforts, I realize that my most common mistake was generally to assume that if I was doing vast-seeming amounts of exercise, I was guaranteed to lose weight.  The problem was that it is so easy to eat way more calories than you burn at the gym, that I generally would become a fit fat guy.  I could spar at the martial arts dojang and break boards with my hands or feet, or I could enjoy a forty mile Saturday bike ride, but then I’d stop at Dairy Queen or eat a few large meals and all the work would be for naught, weight-wise.

In short, it was ultimately important for me to find some way to track and manage my caloric “input.”

Seven Attitudes for Weight Loss

I’ve mentioned previously that one of the most important ingredients in a weight control program is more often implied than specifically mentioned: the role of psychological factors.  I know that for myself, I have learned that it takes me about four or five specific psychological “tricks” every day to stick to my program.  As I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve come to realize that I’ve never really listed them all in one place before.

I assume that it’s not just me.  It seems likely that for the vast majority of people, the psychological factors are key to sticking with and succeeding at any significant weight control program.

Psych of weigh-in day and the “cat drop metric”

Today is “weigh-in day” and so there is some need for psychology.  So just a word on how that tends to go.

Many folks working on weight loss are familiar with the basics here:

1. Your weight fluctuates — it can actually bounce around as much as five or so pounds from day to day.  So the usual advice is: don’t weigh yourself all the time and get highly reactive to the results, because it’s easy to get discouraged if, say, you weigh the same or even more today than yesterday.  (Especially if you’ve worked your buns off and missed a favorite dessert last night in hopes of a big change today.) (Also, don’t weigh yourself on Monday morning, unless you spend weekends at Camp Lejune or in a monastery living on broth.)

2. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, you’ll probably be adding muscle, and muscle weighs lots more than fat.  So while you’re actually losing fat and replacing it with muscle, which is a much more efficient tissue for weight maintenance (muscle needs more energy to live; fat is basically storage and hardly needs any), you may be disappointed by the scale’s results.

This is all state of the art science and also common sense.  Still… it’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it?  Because for those of us who are chronically tormented by our weight, we still would feel better if the scale said “LESS!!!” every day.

Three parts to a weight loss plan

Years ago, most people working to lose weight would have said there was one of two basic strategies that they would use: exercise or diet.  Indeed, “going on a diet” was probably the single most common strategy used by the majority of people. Whether the particulars of that “diet” were very effective or (more often) not, the point is that the total list of possible weight loss solutions available to most folks consisted of that either/or choice.  More often than not, people would not make a serious effort to combine approaches.

Nowadays, most people are aware that you have to combine diet with exercise in order to succeed at weight loss.  This is for many complex reasons, but the two most important are these:

1. If you only focus on diet, your body may not lose much weight; in fact, it may start to adapt to a reduced caloric intake by slowing your metabolism or doing other things to adjust to the new “famine” conditions that it senses; this may not only thwart, but it may actually reverse your desired weight loss efforts.  By eating less, you may “train” your body to hold onto fat better!  Adding exercise corrects for this effect by increasing the calories you need in order to survive — so your diet actually helps you lose.

2. If you focus only on exercise, you may lose more weight.  But if you ignore diet issues (what you eat and how much, etc.), you may plateau or even get fatter, because it’s a natural human tendency to compensate for all that extra exercise by eating more.  Not only are you likely to feel more hungry as a result of your workout, but you’ll also tend to tell yourself that you’re “in the clear now” and so can chow down on that 2000 calorie meal of fries, double triple thick burger and shake.  The result can be a somewhat more “in shape” body that ends up weighing even more than it did before you lifted a finger — and not all of it will be “muscle.”

While we now know that the most effective plans involve both diet and exercise, there’s a third, and generally neglected “essential ingredient” to a weight loss plan.  I mean the mental game.

Twerps!

Before going further, I want to clear something up.  This is not the first time I’ve had a “big weight loss” project.  It’s not a brand new discovery that this kind of goal takes a lot of time and investment and is just super hard.  In fact, I’ve generally had at least some kind of project to get or stay healthy and lose weight.  I’ve immersed myself in biking, martial arts, walking, running, and gyms before.  I’ve recorded my food intake in paper and digital diaries for extended periods of time.  Most of the time, over my whole adulthood, there has been at least some kind of “project” running.  I am not a newbie.

I say this in part because it’s important to state at the outset that of course, this is a huge, time-consuming problem, and not an easy one to solve.  If there’s a “new element” this time, it’s in my committing a vastly larger amount of time and effort to the project than I’ve done before — I’m finished with the “all you have to do is this little bit on the treadmill” philosophy. And I’d also like to think that I’ve learned a lot over the years about stuff that works and things that don’t.

But I also say it because it brings up, again, the problem of our “critics.”

If you grew up heavy, you learned a lot about your critics, and also about how thoroughly rotten people can be sometimes.  Little overweight kids are nearly always exposed to the jeers and name-calling and even downright bullying of other kids.  And of course, kids take all that name-calling inside — it informs their self-images.

The Time It Takes

Having turned fifty a few years back, what I mostly remember about the event was realizing that fifty is the age after which, if your friends hear you suddenly died of something like a heart attack, they shrug.  Before that, they would have said, “he was so young!” but once you’ve passed the big five-o, not so much.  Especially if they knew you were heavy, and especially especially if they’re thin, because, as we’ve already discussed, thin people just assume you could have lost that weight if you “really wanted to.”  “He should have been like me,” the scrawny ignorant bastards would have thought.  In the nicest, sweetest and most well-meaning way, I knew they would tell themselves that if I keeled, I had it coming.

If for no other reason than to deprive them of that misguided satisfaction and to save them from all that bad karma, I have to do this and do it now.  Of course the real reason is I love what I’m doing and experiencing in life far too much to see it wrecked by health problems.  I was feeling sluggish, blood sugar wasn’t controlling itself as well as it should, and in short, major commitment was needed.

In late January I found an article in the NY Times that inspired me, and I think that helped get things rolling again.  It was on people who make big changes in their weight or body.  The article (“Fitness isn’t an overnight sensation” by Gina Kolata) captured some of what I’ve known about big weight loss projects, mainly that these projects take time.  Time is either your friend or your enemy in this kind of project, so we might as well face that head on.  And there are three very distinct aspects to this “time” issue.