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.

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.)

Psych of weigh-in day and the “cat drop metric”

Today is “weigh-in day” and so there is some need for psychology.  So just a word on how that tends to go.

Many folks working on weight loss are familiar with the basics here:

1. Your weight fluctuates — it can actually bounce around as much as five or so pounds from day to day.  So the usual advice is: don’t weigh yourself all the time and get highly reactive to the results, because it’s easy to get discouraged if, say, you weigh the same or even more today than yesterday.  (Especially if you’ve worked your buns off and missed a favorite dessert last night in hopes of a big change today.) (Also, don’t weigh yourself on Monday morning, unless you spend weekends at Camp Lejune or in a monastery living on broth.)

2. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, you’ll probably be adding muscle, and muscle weighs lots more than fat.  So while you’re actually losing fat and replacing it with muscle, which is a much more efficient tissue for weight maintenance (muscle needs more energy to live; fat is basically storage and hardly needs any), you may be disappointed by the scale’s results.

This is all state of the art science and also common sense.  Still… it’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it?  Because for those of us who are chronically tormented by our weight, we still would feel better if the scale said “LESS!!!” every day.