Got on the scale this morning for the second time in this journey, and it read 192. My jaw dropped. It hung down so long that a couple of flies went in, and they'll be counted as protein on today's chart.
I've lost two and a half pounds in the first week! Yes, I've become reacquainted with the treadmill in my spare room. Yes, I've eaten a lot of soup over the last seven days. But I also had a dense slab of sweet potato pie with whipped cream on top Thursday night at Dish. (The 500 calories I burned on the exercise machine that morning jumped right back onto my thighs, so I broke even.)
Some folks ask why I'm stopping at 15 pounds, when 25 would bring me closer to the desired body mass index for my height. The answer is, I've never successfully lost weight and kept it off in 56 years on this planet. I'll see how things go, but I'm happy at the moment to have made progress toward my immediate goal. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to reward myself with an inoffensive sliver of dark chocolate.
-- Lawrence Toppman
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6 comments:
So... which one of you made this post?
Lawrence Toppman is the only one who looks over 50, so it's probably him.
Congratulations - and do have that chocolate.
Okay, jackwagon (maybe I will change my name to Sarge), I am going to be blunt with you (not gentle, like before):
You said, "But I also had a dense slab of sweet potato pie with whipped cream on top" and "I've never successfully lost weight and kept it off in 56 years on this planet."
And I'm saying, YOU'RE NOT GONNA LOSE IT AND KEEP IT OFF THIS TIME, EITHER.
Just judging by your inability to get through one week without a "slab" of rich, fatty dessert.
AND, given your unserious attitude, I don't believe that you lost 2 1/2 pounds of NON-WATER weight. It takes earnest commitment to lose at a rate of 2 1/2 pounds a week, except in the first week when a lot of water weight can be lost.
And soup -- delicious though it is -- is not really that great of a diet food. Soup, if it is tasty at all, has a ton of salt. A TON. And while it might satisfy your taste buds (which is important), a thin, low-calorie soup does not really do much for your objective of getting you through the day without consuming too many calories. What I am saying is that thin soups will not, in the long run, satisfy your appetite. And, anyway, you don't need to eat special diet foods with your modest goal of fifteen pounds. You needed to eat a balanced, PORTION-CONTROLLED diet. If you were trying to lose 50 pounds, you might be justified in thinking of this as "a diet." But you don't need "a diet"; you just need a little lifestyle tweak to lower your intake and/or increase the number of calories you burn by a little bit. You could lose this weight in ten weeks or so but if you do that with a strict "diet" which then ends when the extra pounds are gone, then they are absolutely certain to come back.
And one more thing! I hope you checked to see how long you'd have to be on that treadmill to undo that pie with whipped cream. For ordinary walking, I usually see about 100 calories per mile, although these sorts of numbers are very rough and your weight would be a factor. But just so we're clear, 500 calories does not go away while shuffling along and chatting through a single episode of Jeopardy. Five hundred calories is a very substantial amount of exercise.
-IgnatiusR
And speaking of the role of exercise in a diet, I have some broader opinions in that area, although I must admit that a lot of what I am going to say is pure opinion and personal experience...your mileage may vary, as they say:
I believe that a reasonable amount of exercise is an extremely useful part of a weight control program, but -- for most people and ordinary lifestyles -- exercise is very much secondary to diet. I am speaking of people who have other priorities in their lives besides exercise; people who have families, jobs, like that. Sure, if you are a professional athlete or a serious amateur or someone who can spend hours each day walking/hiking, running, swimming, cycling, etc., you can -- theoretically -- lose a lot of weight purely on the exercise side. But it is very hard. OTOH, everyone can lose weight at a substantial rate with good diet control and only a moderate amount of exercise.
In my view, THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH. Losing weight is STRESSFUL. The body is wired to perceive weight lost as a threat to life and let you know that it is unhappy. The trick is to manage the rate of loss so as to keep the stress at a level that you can accept or ignore. Perhaps you can even enjoy a modest level of discomfort that constantly reminds you that you are commanding your own fate.
But like the stress from holding your breath, you can only accept so much. And the stress is directly proportionally to the deficit that you are achieving between caloric consumption and caloric expenditure. I find it easier to think mostly in terms of pure calories although I do not mean to deny that "effective calories" may be somewhat altered by South Beach and similar approaches. However you do it -- simple calorie reduction, reduction of "effective calories," or seriously ramped up caloric expenditure through exercise -- your body will notice that it is wasting away and will in some way communicate to you that it is unhappy (stressed).
The body is not fooled by normal eating or light dieting combined with large amounts of exercise. You will feel stress (be hungry) in proportion to the caloric deficit that you impose regardless of how you manipulate the factors of diet and exercise to get there.
I think that most casual dieters do not realize how hard it is to burn calories through exercise. There are plenty of charts around the internet that give approximate numbers for calories expended by exercise. If you have an exercise machine of some sort that shows calories expended in a digital display, I think it is wise to ask yourself if the numbers that you are seeing seem consistent with the approximations that you could make from looking at simple charts. If the calories that you are expending on a machine seem too good to be true, they probably are. I takes A LOT of exercise to wipe out "a slab" of pie with whipped cream.
IMO, the really good things about exercise are that it can induce a certain euphoria (as dieting, alone, can) that helps the dieter feel good and be more resolved, and, also, it raises the metabolic rate and keeps you burning calories at a higher rate even after you have finished your exercise. Personally, I give a lot of emphasis to this latter factor and try to spread some of my exercise throughout the day rather than doing it all in one burst. I do try to set aside an hour or so each day in which I am focused specifically on exercising. But I also try to inject little mini exercise sessions elsewhere in my day and avoid sitting for several hours. Lots of ways to do this like taking a few more trips up and down stairs than are really necessary or jumping up and doing some physically active chore for a few minutes from time to time to break up long sedentary periods. I want to keep that metabolism reved up (keep those calories burning) all day at a higher rate than would be the case if I allowed myself to be more sedentary (which is my natural inclination).
--continued--
--continuation--
Most people already have plenty of demands and stress in their lives. If I had to give up some piece of my program, it would be the hour-long exercise session. I would try to keep the little efforts that I make to maintain a higher level of physical activity throughout the day and, of course, stay with my careful, careful diet/portion control/calorie counting. The level of physical exercise needed to burn substantial amounts of calories not only feeds back into the "hunger stress" that you feel, but it can also impose its own additional stress, particularly on those who are substantially overweight. Your knees and your feet may not be up to it. And, of course, the time it takes is a big factor for most people who are already stressed by having too little time for the demands of their lives.
None of this is to discourage people who have lots of time to spend a couple of hours a day walking or cycling or whatever. It can be great to live that way if it is within the capacity of your body and your schedule. But you will be hungrier and you will probably eat more, because THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.
I love to walk and cycle outside, but I also use a stationary cycle. In bad weather, I do actual "workouts" on the indoor bike. But another way I use it is for quickie little bursts of activity (I have no stairs) interspersed within my day. AND, I also use it VERY GENTLY when watching ballgames! I do not believe that you can seriously exercise while focusing your mind on anything else. But rather than be a complete couch potato for a three-hour football game, I will often try to gently cycle through at least half of the game. It is better than pure couch time.
I have a lot of opinions about all of this so I guess I should admit that I talk the talk better than I walk the walk. I am somewhat of a yo-yo dieter and feel that I have learned a lot about how to lose weight but have not mastered the consistency and evenness of temperament to keep me on an even knell for sustained periods. To me, managing calories is fairly easy; managing mood over the long haul is very much tougher.
-IgnatiusR
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