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.

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.

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.

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.

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.