FatBloggers.net

Cross posted at Antimattr

In this recent article by Time “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” they state, in part:

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

But, like some others like the LA Times and ABC News, I disagree with the article and their findings.

While the study published in Time does provide evidence from a clinical point of view that exercise may not help to make you thin, I think they’re really missing the point. Among other things, the study, like so many scientific studies about weight loss, completely ignores the emotional component of weight loss in favor of simplifying the calories in/calories out equation. While there may be a factor of increased hunger from exercise, the point is that exercise does increase the calories a person burns during the day. The problem is not the exercise, but the distorted thinking people engage in when it comes to losing weight and the misinformation in our society. What I would have like to see in that study is an additional group who not only exercised, but received nutritional/dietary counseling and possibly even therapy to help them deal with the emotional issues so many of us who are overweight face.

In addition, the math just doesn’t add up. According to several online calculators, my 60 minutes on the elliptical each morning burns an average of about 700 calories. If I exercise an average of 5 times per week, that adds up to one pound per week, or approximately 50 lbs per year! Now, it’s true that if I feel that exercising justifies eating a muffin every day on top of what I’m already eating, I may cancel out the calories, but by understanding nutrition, staying on WeightWatchers and using cognitive therapy methods like The Beck Diet Solution, I can stay on track eating and learn to eat properly for the rest of my life.

In addition to creating a 50 lb deficit for each year, here are some other benefits that I think are crucial, at least for me:

Symbolic

The fact that I get up in the morning and exercise symbolizes my effort towards becoming healthier, and changes my mindset for the rest of the day.

Emotional

Exercising helps emotional eaters like me tremendously. By reducing stress and anxiety, I’m less likely to experience depression which I often self-medicate through food. Exercise boosts endorphins, making me feel better and feel better about myself.

Increase in Energy

Unlike the people referenced in the study, when I exercise, I actually feel an increase in energy for the rest of the day. Rather than moving less throughout the day, I’m more likely to be active and engage in those low-level activities that the study also found to be beneficial.

Clerical

I don’t know if “clerical” is quite the right word, but I respond well to being able to check things off or put something down as an accomplishment for the day. The fact that I get to add exercise to my WeightWatchers tracker means that I’m more likely to also track food for the day.

So, in a very narrow perspective, I think the study and article are technically correct, but I think they’re missing the point and need to study it more in depth. I did like the point that they made about “exercise” being less important than increasing total activity over the course of a day, but for those of us who are chair-bound during the day, I think exercise is a vital component to weight loss, weight maintenance and cardiovascular health. I was also a bit surprised that they didn’t talk about the benefits in terms of maintaining blood sugar levels.

Cross posted at Antimattr.net

Seth Godin is a well known author, entrepreneur and agent of change, and often speaks and writes on marketing, messaging and brand. His recent post Bear shaving brings up a terrific point on emotional eating:

Example: You have emotional issues associated with eating. You shave the bear by getting bariatric surgery instead of dealing with the issue that caused the problem in the first place.

The bear shaving reference is not only amusing, but points out how we often go to ridiculous lengths to justify and rationalize our behavior to avoid dealing with core issues. I, for one, struggle with many emotional issues, and often end up trying to eat my way through those emotions. The struggle is to learn strategies to deal with those core issues rather than avoiding them by eating or using other avoidance mechanisms.

Ugh. I’ve been utterly overwhelmed and have turned to food, as I have most of my life, for comfort. No, it doesn’t actually work, but it does work just enough that my broken brain goes back for more. I need, need need to get back on track and get this weight off, and I need to develop a healthy relationship with food.

Have you ever had a simple little comment throw you off, get you going, or rile you up in some manner? It happened to me recently and I am hoping I can use it for motivation. My blog friend Tony Posnanski called me out recently for a weight loss blog contest I decided to throw this month.

Basically I’ve just been in a major rut and haven’t been able to get anything going on my weight loss so I am falling back on things that are easier than writing about gaining weight – like giving away money. It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to learn I am working on a redesign of my blog too. I’m a classic procrastinator looking to focus on the less important things while my weight balloons.

Anyway, I thought Tony’s comments were dead on the mark and I didn’t have any problem with them at all. He liked the way I used to write and was simply calling me out for not writing like I used to.

So what was the comment that set me off?

The first comment posted on his post, from rottie69: “My hat is off to you Tony. It sounds like you and John are 2 of a kind.”

Now I don’t know for sure if this is what she meant, but I took it to be the opposite of a standard saying which would be “you two are one of a kind” – in this case I would love to be one of a kind with Tony because the guy has lost 200 pounds, is a prolific writer and and all around nice guy. And he cooks, and I love to cook.

But saying we are two of a kind? Well to me that means I’m the opposite – I’m the yang to Tony’s ying. And let’s face it – the truth hurts. I’m not losing 2 pounds let alone 200.

So rottie69 – here’s to you, thanks for the wakeup call.

Like many others my weight loss efforts have been going in the wrong direction of late. Of late? Who am I kidding – for the last year really. I haven’t been able to put together any coherent thoughts as to why and what I am going to do about it but what I know I won’t be doing is any fad diets or pills. Maybe I haven’t learned much over the last couple of years but I have learned one thing – losing weight is all about motivation, diligence, will-power and hard work. There are no shortcuts.

The commercials on TV and other media outlets would have you believe otherwise. Hydroxycut is one product I’ve recently seen advertised but I doubt I’ll be seeing it anymore as the FDA has warned the public to stop using the product and the makers of Hydroxycut have voluntarily recalled it from stores.

Over 9 million packages of the product were sold last year and there have been 23 reported cases of liver problems associated with it including one death. While that might not seem like a lot you have to remember that most people wouldn’t actually report problems. Either they wouldn’t put two and two together (who knows what else they are taking?) or they simply don’t want to believe their miracle product would do that to them.

This quote from the article is partiuclary instructive:

“You really have to be careful about dietary supplements, especially weight-loss pills,” said Lobb. “People believe that the FDA has verified that these products are at least safe and effective, and that’s really not the case. When you see fantastic claims — that’s generally what they are.”

There are a couple of key points here – first, that the FDA does not verify these products. It’s rather appalling that a company can sell so much of a product without it being verified but that’s how it goes – people need to be educated on that. The second salient point is that there are no miracle solutions – if you see a claim that isn’t related to eating less and exercising more than you probably have something that isn’t rooted in reality.

Pills are not the answer people. I wish they were because that sure would make this easier, but they are not. Eat less and exercise more. Simple as that.

Cross posted at antimattr.net

nana korobi ya oki is a Japanese proverb that translates roughly as “fall down 7 times, get up 8”. Well, I fell yesterday, and fell hard. I’m feeling a ton of stress personally, professionally and financially, and yesterday I made some sad choices in a very misguided attempt to deal with my feelings using food. Of course, those problems are still there, and I only caused myself guilt and regret. I’m still struggling today, but I have made a conscious choice to do whatever it takes today to resist eating or acting out any other way to deal with those feelings. They are just feelings, and I refuse to let them own me. I will call my diet coaches, do an exercise out of The Beck Diet Solution, and anything else I have to in order to stay on program. My life, my health and my sanity are worth more than any food.

The lesson that I’m learning is that I need to focus on the process. I’m struggling in part because I’ve already skipped two days of exercise this week, I haven’t been posting on the Weight Watchers boards much, I haven’t been doing the exercises from The Beck Diet Solution, and I haven’t been making daily phone calls to the guys in my support group. Losing 130 lbs is a huge task, and I cannot do it alone. Heck, I can’t even really control whether the weight comes off, but I can control what I eat today, whether I exercise or not, and whether I use the tools I have available to assist me. I need to surrender to the process and stick to my program.

Today, I get up again. And if I fall, I will get up yet again. I will persevere-the stakes are too high to give up.

I did it. It was a real victory for me to do the speed work. What is speed work? It is a running work out where you go to the track, run 1 or 2 times around at a particular pace. Usually your 5k or 10k race pace. You do it like weight lifting, with reps. I did 6 reps at my 5k pace which was waaay faster than I imagined I could run. My new program calls for more of this type of training because I don’t want to spend all my time running. It is a more specific running program to take advantage of the limited time that I have. Many call these work outs, “quality runs”. In between each 5k pace lap I did push-ups, crunches, and lunges (oh lunges are evil but they are so good for you). It was a very taxing time.

You may be asking yourself, “So what does that picture have to do with this post?” Let me tell you. The track is a little over a mile away from my work. I ran there so when I was done I had a cool down run going back. After my run; I get to my office, gather my stuff, feel around in my pockets and, “Arrgghh, my keys, where I are my keys. I can’t find my keys.” Thus, I put this picture up. I lost my dang keys during my runs. It was 6 pm at this point, fog had rolled in really heavy and it was also dark now. I had to go back track my route with very tired legs to try and find my keys. I walked and walked and walked in dense fog with a flashlight keeping my eyes peeled for the keys. They turned up at the track where I was doing the crunches. Wow, so happy I found them.

As a side note, it was a personal victory for me also that I did not get angry and all pissed off that I had lost my keys. I stayed calm and collected and figured I just needed to back track to find them. This is huge for me. Normally I would have gotten really mad and maybe made an excuse to go eat bad bad yummies. In my mind though I thought I would go out to eat somewhere. My lovely and wonderful wife drove 20 minutes from home just to help me find the keys. I found them by the time she got there so she just drove me back to my work. She had already eaten so I put away the idea of going out to eat. Ended up eating 1 cup of egg beaters, 2 extra thin corn tortillas, 2 pieces of toast, 1 piece of light string cheese, and veggies. Very tasty I must say.

Cross posted at antimattr.net

I had another good week, although there were a few struggles. I was down 3 lbs, bringing my weight to 244.5, down a total of 42.5 lbs since January, 2007. I exercised 7 out of 7 days, and did not go off my eating plan at all last week.

There may be an aspect of the weight loss journey that you forgot about. Food to many of us, if not all of us, is so much more than just simple intake of nutrition. We are all attached to food. For me, Doritos chips conjure up feelings and memories of my childhood sitting on the couch watching Revenge of the Nerds. Oh what fond memories. Yeah, it made me fat, but the memories are pleasant. Why? Because the food made me feel better. We all have these special memories.

We often think that when we get to the starting line of our weight loss journey, we just need to eat good and exercise. Only we find out very soon that we have emotions attached to our eating. What and the heck do we do when we can’t or don’t want to take our medication (food) anymore. We need new medication.

What kind of new medication can we use to replace our old medication. I think it is important to replace the old with something new. If we don’t, we are in danger of not keeping the weight off. This journey is more than just losing fat, it is about changing our lives and moving towards total health. Here are a couple of my little suggestions with links to a couple of relevant articles.

Talking with others about our emotional journey. This is weird for many, but not talking about it isolates us. If you never talk about how you feel about food and your journey, you are likely to feel like you are the only one. Just knowing that so many others feel like you is healing.
Exercise is a great emotional outlet. It is a proven way to help depression. It is also a good new medication in moderation.
Accountability will help us work through the baggage of our eating. When you want to eat the whole pie, talk to someone, they will help you through it. Just like you guys helped me through it.
Counseling and groups. Many many people resist counseling, but it is not so bad. It gives you an outlet to talk about your junk to someone who can see it for what it really is from the outside. If this doesn’t work for you, try a group setting. Run4change is a group setting. Weight watchers is a group setting. Blogging in general is like a group counseling session. You catch my drift. Gathering around like minded people on the same journey is healing.
Hopefully these couple of little ideas can help us work through the inside journey while we are working on the outside. Here are a couple of articles that may also help us:

Weight loss via emotional healing. Don’t listen to the “DETOX” part of this article. Detox is usually a fad perspective that is short lived, but this article has some insight though it is not perfect.

Emotional eating. This is a better article than the previously mentioned one and should be pretty helpful.

I hate running! I can’t breathe when I run! Running hurts! Running is just too boring! Running is just too darn hard! I can’t run fast nor far enough to start running!

Do these thoughts sound familiar? They sure do to me. These thoughts and more filled my mind as a fat guy who was just starting to get more activity into his life. So many people believe these things. It took me some time, but I was able to conquer all of these pessimistic thoughts.

I just started out slow and put no pressure on myself to go fast or far. My first run was for about 20 minutes. During that 20 minutes, I walked every 4 minutes for 60 seconds. That seemed to make it more manageable. As time passed and my physical and mental fitness improved, I was able to go further although not much faster. Running became a wonderful outlet for me to relieve stress and figure out my thoughts. It was a creative time for me.

I learned that I did not have to run fast to lose fat. I did not have to huff and puff my way through my run. I learned that running was only as boring as I made it out to be. I could run with my wife, or go to a trail, or even go house shopping while running; all of which made running more fun and enjoyable. Adding goals like races or special runs with my wife created an optimistic momentum for my running. That momentum ended up carrying me 50 miles at the White River 50 Mile Trail Run. I finished. Not once during that race did any of those previously mentioned pessimistic thoughts prevail.

Running (any vigorous activity actually) can really help you lose weight, feel better, live longer, be more creative, and take control of negative thinking. When you run, you have to learn to persevere when you feel tired. When this happens, you start to believe that YOU CAN PERSEVERE.

If you want to start running, run/walking, jogging (whatever name you want to give it), take a look at these valuable resources. These resources will also help those who already run.

Get started running with Run4Change
Jeff Galloway Conditioning Program