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.

Shaping your food preferences for weight loss

Recently, more experts seem to be saying that exercise alone is seldom effective in helping a person to lose a lot of weight.  Rather, exercise has to work along with attention to one’s diet.  Whether you believe in the high-protein/fat/veggie and low carb diets (like Adkins), or some more traditional “food pyramid” with more grains and less fat, the main thing in weight loss is to take in a reasonably nutritious diet that is not too high in calories or unhealthy things like saturated fats or cyanide.

If you track your eating on a daily basis and are pretty accurate about doing so, you can actually be fairly clear day-to-day about how many calories you are ingesting.  Many food guides and both online and computer-based software (such as CalorieKing, the software I use) will make this process even easier than the old fashioned methods involving looking up what you’ve eaten in a paperback guide and then writing it down and guesstimating your portion size (“hmm… and then I added some butter… was it a teaspoonful or…?”)  In fact, a simple combination of a well-stocked collection of measuring cups and spoons, software that is easy and fast to use and that gives you all the nutritional info you need on what you’ve eaten, and the religious habit of measuring and recording everything that goes into your mouth, can give you considerable control over your caloric intake.

At which point, you start to learn some necessary, but painful lessons.  The main one is that many of your favorite foods may pack quite a caloric wallop.  For instance, even though you did a 30 minute treadmill, that pint of Ben & Jerry’s totally overwhelmed your day’s allotment of both calories and fat.  Even perfectly “innocent” and “healthy” foods (like that pint of Chinese take-out) may give you six-, seven- or even nine-hundred calories — a huge amount when your software helpfully informs you that “an average woman of your height can expect to lose a pound a week if you consume no more than 1200 calories a day…”

This is another of those dilemmas that are hard to solve if you rely only on the diet-exercise combo. The “diet” approach traditionally relied on a sort of half-imaginary superpower called “willpower,” which thin people seem to have and you don’t.  And as we’ve discussed, exercise alone never works because it is so easy to eat double whatever number of calories you’ve run off in the gym.  (A handful of Oreos can compensate for any length treadmill workout.)

What you may need to do is to retrain your psychological food regulation system.  This can be done several ways:

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.)

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.”