Analyzing Weight Loss Reversals

Today is my weekly weigh-in day, and I have mixed news to report.  My scale says I’ve gained back five of the 12 pounds I’d lost since beginning the project.  Rats.

Of course, this is a fairly common situation in any weight loss project.  Since we generally place a lot of stock in our scale weight, a bounce up can feel like a total failure and even a disaster.  At this point, many people just stop trying to lose weight.  That isn’t always done as a “big decision,” but rather you just “kind of start to forget” to keep track.  Motivation sags and pretty soon a year has gone by since you’ve been back to the gym or written down what you’ve eaten.

Clearly, the mental game of weight loss is key at times like this.  So I am thinking, what to do?  And I realize, the real key is to analyze the gain as best I can.

First of all, not to panic.  Five pound variations in weight are actually within the normal range for anyone.  I’ve had readers tell me that normal monthly hormonal shifts could account for even more weight gain than that — one person commented that she had a regular seven pound gain once a month.

So my five pounds might be partly just random fluctuation.

Second, I should look at other measures.  For instance, my blood pressure is slowly dropping again, after a brief tendency to rise a few weeks back (never to the pre-program level).  And my resting pulse is generally running ten beats per minute lower, and is steadily improving.  This says something important about my overall conditioning — that it is improving significantly, and continuing to improve. Likewise, my blood sugars are generally or always in a good range.

Then there is the tape measure.  While my pounds are up a bit, my waist and hips have shrunk about an inch this week.  Chest is the same, but therein may be part of the explanation for some new weight.

About 2 weeks ago I decided that my legs don’t need much more by way of weight training.  Partly due to genetics and partly due to hauling a lot of weight around, I have always had strong legs.  My calf muscles are huge and bulging and it’s pretty much all muscle down there.  The recent program gave me a leaner, less puffy lower leg look, and so I felt all I needed was maintenance.

But my upper body has never been super strong.  I lift a laptop and books most days, not tools and lumber and cinder blocks.  So I decided to add 10 minutes to my upper body workouts, which amounts to 20 more minutes a week of upper body strength building (a full additional weight workout a week), along with pushing myself a bit more to increase my strength.

I doubt I’ve actually added five pounds of muscle all of a sudden, but I probably added some.  I know I’m stronger, more able to do more in the gym with less sense of effort.  Muscle is heavy.  The fact that my weight is up but my body is slightly thinner does suggest some new muscle.

In terms of diet, I’ve been under my calorie limits most days, but was away on the weekend at relatives’.  So it’s restaurants, both on the visit and during the trips to and from.  Plus generally I’ve felt I’ve been a bit slack a couple of days, and did have two or three days of being over my calorie allowance (like last night,  when all the extra working out and the fact that it was “free cone day” at Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont, led me to a bit of overindulgence.  Guilty as charged.)

In general, then, I can break this extra poundage into a couple of causes: some is probably new muscle, some is last night’s heavy meal (I’ll verify that tomorrow), and some is a need to tweak the diet a bit.  I need more veggies anyway.

The main thing is: if you keep records, you can make sense of seemingly “random” weight fluctuations.  This is never 100% — our faith in having total control over nature is never completely justified.  But some of it is.  And the more sense things make, the less likely we are to just give up in despair.

Because we just can’t.  Ever.

Walking the hills for weight loss

I’m visiting out-of-town relatives over the weekend, in some hilly, sidewalk-deprived suburb of Connecticut.  This means having to find some other way to maintain my exercise program, and having to adapt to different food choices and routines.   Getting away and seeing folks I like is nice, but if I don’t want to have a traumatic “weigh-in day” experience on Wednesday, it’s important to not undo in a long weekend visit all the things I’ve been working for all week.

Since I generally take one rest day a week, I took yesterday off from any kind of workout.  But that meant that today was exercise day.  Being a few hundreds of miles from my gym, I had to improvise.  I decided to go out and walk the hills.

I’ve always loved walking — being outside in the fresh air, seeing the rolling hills or the woods or the ocean or the sights of a different city have always given me a lot of joy.  And walking generally feels good to do — I find running hard on my knees.

My concern has been that walking is sometimes a rather “lite” exercise in terms of the calories one burns.  While a runner can burn as many as thirty or more calories a minute, the burn rate for walking may be much slower — as little as five calories a minute, according to my reference information.  Meaning that I may get much less bang for my buck, calorie wise, strolling around than I do back home on the elliptical.

The key seems to be pace.  Faster means more calories expended.

I put on the monitor and a pair of too-worn running shoes (they work fine in the gym, where my feet are fairly still in the treads of my elliptical machine), and hit the hills.  After a couple of minutes of slower, warm-up walking, I did jog for about a minute, until my heart rate was in the top of my so-called training zone (somewhere from the mid-120s to the low 140s.)  Then I just adapted my walking pace as best I could to keep it mostly there.  It went sometimes much higher on hills (into the 150s or a bit more), but that’s still a reasonably comfortable pace for me for brief periods and from my own calculations is a good zone for me to go into for briefer periods of higher-intensity work.

It was a great walk.  I got blistered a bit on one heel, but otherwise no harm done.  Got a great cardiac workout and my legs appreciated a nice rest with a novel after 55 minutes up and down the hills.  Perfect day for it.

Being outdoors puts you in a less predictable exercise situation than working out in a gym.  It’s kind of like switching from weight training machines to free weights — it may be better for you, but you also have much more variability in terrain, conditions, and even safety issues to cope with.  While many days, and in cold or snowy weather, I prefer the comfort of an indoor workout, there is still a part of me that seems to call me out of doors, even if it’s wet or cold or nobody in Connecticut seems to have considered the possibility that someday, someone might appreciate the chance to get out of their car and take a walk on a sidewalk.

Your best exercise for weight loss: the happiness test

I’ve written before that perhaps the best exercise for weight loss is the one you’ll actually stick to — the one you’ll do.  I wanted to talk a bit more about that today.

One of the biggest hurdles to successful weight loss is the need to actually get up and out there and do something physical every day, or most days anyway.  Yet, many overweight people tend to get far too little exercise, which probably accounts for a great deal of weight gain.  In fact, many times, overweight people have always tended to get less exercise than they need — even back in childhood.  (And nowadays, the number of children who spend way more time with their laptops and video games than being outdoors engaged in active activities seems to be the highest in history.)

If you want to reverse this kind of pattern, you know — and have heard for years — that you need to be more active.  But how to do it?

Let’s face it, there are probably several good reasons why you don’t do as much as you should physically:

• Inertia: You are used to your more sedentary lifestyle.  It’s comfortable.  You maybe work in a sedentary job, sitting in a cubicle or at a desk; then you drive home, eat dinner, and want to mostly sit and watch TV or read or something.
• Biological programming: Our bodies are programmed to be energy hogs.  For most of pre-recorded history, survival was a matter of burning fewer calories than we consumed.  If you don’t know where the next handful of fruit or carrion is coming from, not burning off too many calories is literally a survival imperative.
• Physical discomfort: Exercise sometimes “hurts.”  Maybe not in a major, pulled tendon way.  But hard work is subtly “painful” in its own way.  Plus there are discomforts such as getting sweaty and “overheated” and huffing and puffing.  If you really focus on these sensations, many times they don’t feel all that great.
• Mental discomfort: Fat people in gyms often feel out of place.  Overweight kids feel ostracized, and may even be mocked or bullied or teased in gym class or locker rooms.  Even as adults, formerly heavy kids often carry the memories of those jeers in their heads and so tend, mostly unconsciously, to avoid “going there.”  (Even as an adult, I remember doing some jogging with my first wife across a parking lot in our neighborhood and some adult woman laughing, at us, saying “you’ll have to run faster than that if you’re gonna lose weight!”  Stupid kids grow up into stupid adults.)

So how to make yourself exercise more?  Probably the most pleasant way to do it is to look for a form of exercise that you really enjoy.  And one key to enjoyment is finding something that you can lose yourself in, that gives you pleasure, that you find interesting, that can trigger a sense of what psychologists call “flow.”

The concept of “flow” is one of the most useful ideas in psychology.  The term was coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who identified several things about an experience that help it to feel really good.  In a state of flow, we feel absorbed in an activity.  It is interesting, even mesmerizingly fascinating to us.  We get some kind of pleasure from it.  It is generally something that we find challenging, but not too challenging or overwhelming.  We feel energized and involved.

Some kinds of exercises may trigger more “flow” in you than others.  For instance, while you may find running or jogging to be painful (because maybe it is too difficult), you may find biking to be engrossing.  Or, you may find weight training to be boring, but yoga is interesting and something you enjoy.

In my own experience, I’ve enjoyed the “flow” in several kinds of exercise activities.  For instance:

• Martial arts: I used to enjoy taekwondo classes quite a bit, and I enjoyed learning and practicing new kicks and forms.  (I didn’t enjoy sparring, though — probably because I needed a more gradual introduction to it than my school provided.)
• Kayaking: Being out on the rolling waves of Lake Superior, feeling the kayak roll up and over waves that were higher than I expected, but then not tipping over, was incredibly exciting; being out on the beautiful lake in the sun added much to that feeling.
• Biking: when not in too-busy traffic, I’ve always loved the experience of biking.
• Elliptical machines: It’s not kayaking on big blue lakes, but I personally enjoy the experience of being on a good elliptical trainer.  Maybe it’s cuz I’m an introvert writer type, so I can spend 45 minutes getting my heart rate up to a comfortable but not overwhelmingly high level and get a bit lost in planning an article or blog post or rewriting the morning’s bit of my novel.  For me, ellipticals are much less painful than running can be, so I do enjoy the experience.

If you have a sense of “flow” in an exercise, it makes a huge difference.  You will actually look forward to doing the thing, even on lazy-feeling days.  That may be one key to regularly exercising that didn’t get taught to you in those awful high school gym classes, that may help reverse a long slide into laziness.

Moving targets: predicting weight loss by calories burned

As I mentioned the other day, last week I lost three pounds.  Since I’ve been obsessionally faithful in logging nearly every morsel into my CalorieKing software, I can report that I ate an average of 250 calories a day LESS than the software recommended.  Here’s the way that worked (warning: math follows):

• On a day when I would have no exercise, the software recommends that I should eat about 1850 calories in order to lose about a pound a week.  What I actually at on average, then, would have been about 1600 calories a day (assuming no exercise).
• On days when I did exercise (which happened to be every day last week, though the Sunday workout was just a half-hour stroll through the woods), I entered the exercise done and the time I spent on it, and the software provided an estimated amount of calories burned in the workout. (I average about 650 calories per workout, combining weights and elliptical.)  In those cases, the software ADDS those calories back to my 1850 cal allowance for the day.  So instead of an 1850 cal limit, I actually am able to eat an additional 650 calories on days I work out, for a total of 2500 calories.

In short, last week I averaged 2500-250, or 2250 calories eaten per day.  Which, given my exercise, was enough to lose three pounds.

Now, here’s the problem with this data:  It doesn’t really account for the amount of weight lost very well. Why?  Well, let’s do the math (okay, more math):

Pros and Cons: Weight loss and personal trainers

I talked yesterday about the “no pain, no gain” versus the “do exercise you enjoy” theories of exercise programs.  A couple of readers left some good comments about the issue of whether working out too hard might strain or injure you, and of course there is always that risk.  That’s why it might be useful to stop a moment and discuss doing things cautiously, reasonably, making fairly careful, gradual increases in your workouts. I haven’t addressed this explicitly yet, so I will say it here: there is a lot you can learn about exercising that isn’t always self-evident.  Getting some help from a trainer or coach may be very important.

We tend to assume that we know how to do everything in a gym, know how to run because we ran around a lot as kids, know how to lift weights because, well, we all lift things, right?  (It’s a lot like how people tend to assume they know what therapists do despite having had years of no training whatsoever in it.)  In fact, a good weight loss program requires a fair amount of skill, knowledge of your body and its limits, and an understanding of the mechanics of lifting weight, of running and aerobics, of psychological self-management, and nutrition.  You don’t just know that stuff at birth.

Over the years I’ve had at least four personal trainers at various gyms and health clubs, along with nearly four years of class and individual training by some really excellent martial arts instructors.  Overall, I’d have to rate the help I got from the trainers as quite valuable, and in some cases excellent.  Not that there haven’t been a few things I’ve disliked.

No Pain = Weight Gain??

In thinking about exercise programs for weight loss, I’ve realized that there is a possible clash between two important ideas.  On the one hand, as I wrote yesterday, the best exercise program is likely to be one that you love to do.  On the other hand, there’s the whole “no pain, no gain” mentality — and there is some truth to it.

Weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint.  If there’s one thing that most researchers and virtually all medical authorities agree on, it’s that you get the best, and safest, results by losing weight gradually.  While there is a vast, billion dollar industry promising overnight weight loss miracles, it’s safe to say that every last one of them are fraudulent.  Instant weight loss just doesn’t happen, except during shark attacks.

What this means is that in order to lose, and assuming that “losing” means you have to both stick to a nutrition plan and to an exercise regimen long-term, it’s important to try to enjoy the process.  Both short-term, unappealing “diets” and painful exercise programs are less likely to succeed, because we are naturally inclined to avoid things that feel bad.  Sooner or later, you’ll drift away from the plan.  (Sound familiar?)  So an exercise plan that is easy to follow and that you enjoy is much more likely to pay off for you in the long run.

What about the pain?

On the other hand, there is also some agreement that the most effective exercise is generally exercise that makes you sweat.  And successful big-time weight losers are generally big believers in the value of “exertion.”

Again, studies are sort of varied here — people are now finding that we can lose substantial weight over time if we spend our days walking 1 mph at a “treadmill desk,” and we often see studies that show people benefitting from lite exercise programs (the “just walk 20 minutes a day” kind).  One recent study even found that hotel maids that were simply told that doing their jobs involved “exercise” – but who didn’t work any harder as a result! — lost more weight than maids who worked the same amount, but who weren’t tipped off that they were getting a workout on the mattresses every day.

Weight loss motivator: Pick exercises you love

I have a confession that may not surprise you: I hated high school gym classes.  Since I was already a fat kid, I was of course seldom able to compete with other kids in most of the team-type sports that were the favorite gym activities back then.  We were a pretty “successful” football, basketball and baseball school (nobody who spoke only English played soccer back then, or even knew what it was).  So if you were the kind of kid who was always “picked last” on anybody’s team (or worse, if you were the “sympathy pick), sports, and so gym, weren’t gonna be your cup of tea.

On the other hand, I loved Phys. Ed. in college.  Instead of catering to the twenty or so boys (and never girls — they were supposed to be either cheerleaders or librarians back in 1970, remember?) who were football team material, in college the assumption was that only a rare few of us would have even a short-lived career as a college athlete.  Rather, the focus was on introducing us to physical activities that we might actually  enjoy, that we might actually keep on doing throughout our lives.  So archery, golf, volleyball, badminton, racquetball, handball, and other such sports were the curriculum.  And I had a lot of fun.

One of the complications of being in the weight loss game is the fact that you are always getting a ton of contradictory advice on what you should be doing. (And recall, this is mostly from thin people, who may lack some important perspectives on the usefulness of their advice.)  In the area of exercise, the current “consensus” seems to be that you should do aerobics, but not too much.  Some people say 20 minutes’ worth.  Or else 40.  Or else intervals (a minute of heart-splitting intensity followed by a minute of nursing-home drool stroll, and repeat…)  I’ve read experts who say that you can not absolutely can not lose weight if you “overdo” aerobics — that anything over 40 minutes’ worth a day will actually interfere with your progress.  Then there are those who say you need to plan to spend serious time — an hour or more a day — exercising.  (One of my best friends lost about sixty pounds and went from being a rather large woman to a virtual supermodel by getting a state of the art treadmill then using it for about 75 minutes of intense work a day.  She’s now an intensive cross country cyclist and doing great with that.)

Others now say it’s weights that do it.  Not aerobics, weights.  Meanwhile, my doc recently volunteered that “of course, the trick is aerobics.”

From a psychological point of view, there are two problems with these contradictory newsfeeds.  First, they bat your head all over creation.  What exactly are you supposed to do, really?  It’s then that you realize that basically, nobody knows for sure.  Experts are at war, and everybody else is trying to market something to you.  (“Buy my book and also my high protein drink…” etc.)

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.

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.”

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.