Weight loss projects: getting back in the saddle

I’ve been lazy about blogging for about a week, which sort of matches how I’ve been feeling about the Project.  This is fairly normal, actually, though I wish it weren’t so.  

Some psychologists speculate that we have a sort of natural limit or quota in terms of how much “self-control” we may be able to maintain over our behavior. The idea is that if you spend a period of time resisting a temptation or sticking to a hard task, you sort of run the self-control batteries down.  So the thing you have to do is give yourself a bit of time and some outlets for not being so perfect, while your self-control battery “recharges.”  Then you may be ready to get back to whatever you’ve been working on.  

For instance, if you’ve ever known anyone going through treatment for substance abuse problems, you know two things: 1. just about everyone, it seems, in CD treatment seem to be smokers (though less now than years ago), and 2. the general rule of thumb in most treatment programs is don’t try to quit smoking while you’re busy trying to quit drinking or using drugs or whatever.  It just seems to be too hard to start controlling everything in your life at once.

This past week I’ve had actually a great week in maintaining my workouts, and their quality (and my strength on the weights, aerobic conditioning, etc.) is improving.  Fell down over the weekend on the food diary, but was partly derailed by reading some articles and suggestions dealing with changing diets to a less carb-based, more plant/protein/legume diet.  Have to look at that some more, but part of the many suggestions were to give yourself one day a week to cut loose, eat whatever.  Not sure how much I agree with that, though we sort of let ourselves do it over the weekend.  And somewhere in there (along with the weight gain last week) I think my energy for food recording and blogging flagged a bit.

But that happens.  The real key, of course, is to get back in the saddle.  You fall off the horse, get back on.  You have days you don’t want to do it, get back to it the next day.  Breaks aren’t all that bad, as long as they aren’t permanent.  I find it helps to keep the “big picture” in mind — if I imagine looking back, maybe in a year or two, after getting to my target weight goals, I’ll very probably have a bunch of lapses, periods when I cut back, vacations where there was no gym, parties and dinners out and days when everything will have gone to hell.  

But the general, overall trend should be that every time, I got back to the plan, and that most of the time, I did an adequate job of sticking to the program.

Responding to weight bounces

Today is weigh-in day, which I do on Wednesdays so as to minimize the “weekend weight gain” effects.  The news this week is mixed.

As you can hopefully tell from the picture, my weight is up a pound and a half.  This is the first real increase since I started the project (the other “rise” on the graph was merely a recovery bounce from a week of stomach flu and dehydration).  I’ve also re-grown a half-inch on my waist and hips.  Not good.

I say it’s a “mixed” week, though, because some other key indicators still look good:

1. My blood sugars are generally running well within normal ranges, even with a gradual decrease in my insulin doses
2. My blood pressures are continuing to be considerably lower than a few months ago, now running more often in the 120-something over 70-something ranges; not ideal or enough to cut out any meds, but a great improvement nevertheless
3. My body fat percentages seem to be generally running a percentage point lower than they were just a couple of weeks ago when I first got the monitor.
4. My general sense of conditioning at the gym — how hard I feel I’m working, how much weight I’m lifting comfortably, etc., are gradually improving and are the best they’ve been in a long time
5. Most important, I’m continuing to get to the gym regularly and continuing to monitor my calories/food intake daily; I’ve had NO misses on any of that in weeks or maybe even a couple of months now (except when ill with the flu.)  And I almost never eat more calories than my software recommends for a day; almost always, I come in a few hundred calories under (which I think is probably okay — the software seems to overestimate how much I need.)  Finally, I pretty much never walk around feeling deprived or hungry, even with all this exercise and diet control.   This is really excellent.

These latter are really the most critical changes — they are all indices of overall health, which is fundamentally more important than belt size.

Nevertheless, anyone who is working on weight loss will instantly realize that it’s always disappointing when the “most important measures,” your scale weight and belt sizes, don’t keep going down.  It feels even worse when they go up a bit.  (And of course, in the long run it might also be argued that the only really good way to improve my health is to really knock them pounds off.)  And in  a sense, the fact that I am actually sticking to the program might even trigger more anxiety: “Even THIS isn’t enough???”

So what do you do when things bounce up instead of going down?  I’m focusing on a couple of things.

First, keep things in perspective. Occasional rises in weight and even “bad weeks” are entirely normal.  If you assume that this is a long-term project, one that will last at a minimum 12 months and possibly twice or three times that long, a week or even several weeks of weight increases or plateauing are entirely predictable.  In that sense, things are really going “according to plan.”

That doesn’t make it easy to take.  Some of my readers have written about how discouraging it was for them to see themselves go up instead of down on the scales as they worked on their programs.  But, they pointed out, you stick with it, and things will eventually turn around.

Second, assess what you’ve been doing right — and what you need to change. I actually predicted that this week might not pan out so well, because of the Easter holiday.  I didn’t get to work out so much on the weekend (just a half-hour on the elliptical on Saturday because with all the holiday laziness I got there late, just before closing time.)  Plus, there was a big family get-together Sunday, and so after we had a late (and slightly large) lunch, we ended up being at a large dinner in the evening.  (I really maxed out my calories on Sunday — the one exception to my “I’ve been good” summary all week.)

From this I know that I basically made a few bad calls over the weekend, which I suspect is human but which I also don’t generally do.  I also have noted the other day that I’m needing to increase my vegetable servings… which will be one good way to help balance my diet and probably cut out some of the less-good calories.

So this week I have lots of reasons to feel optimistic, and a few things to work on (veggies, keeping up the workouts, which I’ve been wanting to tweak upward a bit in intensity. But just a bit.)

Let’s see what that yields next week.

The sense of time in weight loss projects

After discussing the near-impossibility of predicting your weight change even with the most careful logging of calories and exercise, a few folks wisely commented  about how hard it really is.  It seems that the general consensus of both experts and people who have had a lot of success losing much weight, is that you have to take your weekly results on the scale with a grain of salt (or maybe, salt substitute.)  The key, they agree, is taking the “long view” of the process.

This got me thinking about something that I’ve seldom if ever seen discussed in terms of weight loss projects.  In fact, other than in the field of money and investment, I don’t recall having ever seen it discussed much.  It is our psychological sense of time, and how that is related to long-term projects like this.

If there is a “theme” to this blog, it’s that weight loss takes more than just exercise and diet.  That it is a complicated, and often frustrating process, which takes all the psychological “tricks” you can dream up in order to succeed.  Whether those “psychological tricks” are ways to motivate yourself, learning to manage your frustration, or finding ways to enjoy exercise or to overcome your reluctance to give up a favorite dessert, it’s the psychology that may make the difference.

Our sense of “time” is certainly a psychological, not a physical thing.  The main challenge is that we have to both think about the present and the future.

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.

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.