Your best exercise for weight loss: the happiness test

I’ve written before that perhaps the best exercise for weight loss is the one you’ll actually stick to — the one you’ll do.  I wanted to talk a bit more about that today.

One of the biggest hurdles to successful weight loss is the need to actually get up and out there and do something physical every day, or most days anyway.  Yet, many overweight people tend to get far too little exercise, which probably accounts for a great deal of weight gain.  In fact, many times, overweight people have always tended to get less exercise than they need — even back in childhood.  (And nowadays, the number of children who spend way more time with their laptops and video games than being outdoors engaged in active activities seems to be the highest in history.)

If you want to reverse this kind of pattern, you know — and have heard for years — that you need to be more active.  But how to do it?

Let’s face it, there are probably several good reasons why you don’t do as much as you should physically:

• Inertia: You are used to your more sedentary lifestyle.  It’s comfortable.  You maybe work in a sedentary job, sitting in a cubicle or at a desk; then you drive home, eat dinner, and want to mostly sit and watch TV or read or something.
• Biological programming: Our bodies are programmed to be energy hogs.  For most of pre-recorded history, survival was a matter of burning fewer calories than we consumed.  If you don’t know where the next handful of fruit or carrion is coming from, not burning off too many calories is literally a survival imperative.
• Physical discomfort: Exercise sometimes “hurts.”  Maybe not in a major, pulled tendon way.  But hard work is subtly “painful” in its own way.  Plus there are discomforts such as getting sweaty and “overheated” and huffing and puffing.  If you really focus on these sensations, many times they don’t feel all that great.
• Mental discomfort: Fat people in gyms often feel out of place.  Overweight kids feel ostracized, and may even be mocked or bullied or teased in gym class or locker rooms.  Even as adults, formerly heavy kids often carry the memories of those jeers in their heads and so tend, mostly unconsciously, to avoid “going there.”  (Even as an adult, I remember doing some jogging with my first wife across a parking lot in our neighborhood and some adult woman laughing, at us, saying “you’ll have to run faster than that if you’re gonna lose weight!”  Stupid kids grow up into stupid adults.)

So how to make yourself exercise more?  Probably the most pleasant way to do it is to look for a form of exercise that you really enjoy.  And one key to enjoyment is finding something that you can lose yourself in, that gives you pleasure, that you find interesting, that can trigger a sense of what psychologists call “flow.”

The concept of “flow” is one of the most useful ideas in psychology.  The term was coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who identified several things about an experience that help it to feel really good.  In a state of flow, we feel absorbed in an activity.  It is interesting, even mesmerizingly fascinating to us.  We get some kind of pleasure from it.  It is generally something that we find challenging, but not too challenging or overwhelming.  We feel energized and involved.

Some kinds of exercises may trigger more “flow” in you than others.  For instance, while you may find running or jogging to be painful (because maybe it is too difficult), you may find biking to be engrossing.  Or, you may find weight training to be boring, but yoga is interesting and something you enjoy.

In my own experience, I’ve enjoyed the “flow” in several kinds of exercise activities.  For instance:

• Martial arts: I used to enjoy taekwondo classes quite a bit, and I enjoyed learning and practicing new kicks and forms.  (I didn’t enjoy sparring, though — probably because I needed a more gradual introduction to it than my school provided.)
• Kayaking: Being out on the rolling waves of Lake Superior, feeling the kayak roll up and over waves that were higher than I expected, but then not tipping over, was incredibly exciting; being out on the beautiful lake in the sun added much to that feeling.
• Biking: when not in too-busy traffic, I’ve always loved the experience of biking.
• Elliptical machines: It’s not kayaking on big blue lakes, but I personally enjoy the experience of being on a good elliptical trainer.  Maybe it’s cuz I’m an introvert writer type, so I can spend 45 minutes getting my heart rate up to a comfortable but not overwhelmingly high level and get a bit lost in planning an article or blog post or rewriting the morning’s bit of my novel.  For me, ellipticals are much less painful than running can be, so I do enjoy the experience.

If you have a sense of “flow” in an exercise, it makes a huge difference.  You will actually look forward to doing the thing, even on lazy-feeling days.  That may be one key to regularly exercising that didn’t get taught to you in those awful high school gym classes, that may help reverse a long slide into laziness.

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.