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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Intro to the “Big weight loss project” blog

As I mention in the “about” page, this is a log of a project that involves my trying to lose a lot of weight.  If you’re someone who has some weight issues, particularly if you feel like you’re “chronically” overweight (meaning, it’s something that you’ve struggled with, or known about, for a long time — maybe so long that it feels like a big part of “who you are”), you’ll probably be familiar with these kinds of struggles.

There is a lot to share here, and I’m taking the liberty of not broadcasting my name and other personals so I can hopefully feel a bit freer to just share my experiences with you.  (Of course, blog identities “leak” sometimes — it’s hard to know whether you’re actually keeping things as private as you think you are — but I at least want to pretend to some privacy here.)

The plan for now: I am starting out with a latest doctor’s office weigh-in at 252 pounds.  I have a goal of getting that down considerably, and I would not mind if it dropped a full hundred pounds (though technically, even a few pounds should help, blah blah blah.  I may say “blah blah blah” a lot, by the way — my experience with being heavy is that you tend to hear the same, seldom helpful advice over and over and over and over… as most heavy people know.)  Since any loss is good, I won’t try to be grandiose in my project’s goals.  But people do manage to lose lots of weight, so let’s see what happens.