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:

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.)

Weigh-in day and stoking your motivation

This morning it’s my weekly check-in, which as I mentioned before, I prefer to do in mid-week, just in case there were any unfortunate but temporary eating “mishaps” over the weekend.

Today the news is all good.  My weight is down a pound; my waist is down an inch and a half; chest is also down a bit.  Body fat percent is hard to be clear about because I just got my new meter this week, but it’s a half percent lower than the past few days.  And my blood pressure is holding at some good numbers.

Excellent.

And rare, to have all those numbers lining up in the “just where they should be” category.  It’s often the case that you put in a week or two and nothing much changes.  Which leads to an important discussion: maintaining your motivation for weight loss programs.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are at least seven psychological factors that one can attend to in order to make a weight loss program work.  These factors have emerged over the years, both as a result of the hard work of people who’ve tried to lose weight, and developed by psychologists who’ve researched weight loss.  (My advisor in grad school, now retired, spent most of her career researching weight loss.)  Maintaining your motivation is among the most important factors.

Motivation can often be defined as “desire,” but really it’s the sum total of your thoughts and emotions about why you want — or need — to lose weight.  Generally, the more powerful your motivation, the more likely  you’ll be to stick out your program, or to start one.  And the more likely you’ll be to tolerate the bad weeks, the weeks when you go off the wagon, when you gain instead of losing weight.

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:

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.